[Gigachad]

Software is the one thing I won't pirate since the risk of installing malware is extremely high. For media files, unless you are incredibly unlucky and someone is exploiting a bug in the media player, you are entirely safe. But for software you have no way of knowing how the software has been tampered with, and often there actually is malware in it.

[ziml77]

Same. I used to pirate software but even way back I kept it limited to very popular software and established downloads (where if they were malware they were almost certain to be in a signature database by that point). And I absolutely never pirated an OS. I thought anyone doing that was out of their freaking mind because any malware there had ultimate access to block its own detection and do whatever else it pleased.

Now I don't do it at all. It's not worth the risk when I have the money to pay for the proprietary software that I like and when the ecosystem of open source software is very good.

[vegadw]

Until recently the exception for me was music software/VSTs. I definitely did get a few infections over the years doing so, but after finding some safe sources it went pretty well. To some extent, I still see advise it, actually, just with purchasing first but never using the key, just because DRM in the music software world is so aggressively bad. iLok is a cancer on that industry.

[ranger_danger]

There's always sandboxing/containers/VMs though. Even on Windows you have Sandboxie which is extremely powerful.