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Comment by Bubble_Pop_22 | Hacker News Reader

All Microsoft products are free of charge if you know where to look for them.

Basically you have the big Fortune 500 companies subsidizing pirates who download from TPBay...and of course the pirate CD copies being sold in street markets all over Sub-Saharan Africa.

Microsoft with Windows, Azure, Office, Outlook and PowerPoint is the backbone of the economy. Come noon you have already used half a dozen of different flavors of Microsoft and again if you know where to look you tasted them all for free.

Analyzing things post-facto the bad reputation that Microsoft had was unwarrented given that we ended up under a much tighter stranghold of Apple in the mobile environment. At least the developing world is saving themselves using Android.

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>All Microsoft products are free of charge if you know where to look for them.

God no. I draw a hard line at pirating executable code. I forget where I read it but a not insignificant percentage of pirated software contains malware, and I don't know about you, but having my bank or brokerage account compromised would cost exponential orders of magnitude more than any software licence.

Hell, I'm concerned enough about malware that even window's larger attack surface gives me pause even though I know things have gotten better since I left it. I still feel much more secure on linux.

>I forget where I read it but a not insignificant percentage of pirated software contains malware,

That just means you don't know where to look.

>having my bank or brokerage account compromised would cost exponential orders of magnitude more than any software licence.

I agree. For anything that's important, especially if it's mission-critical or commercial in nature, go the legit way. Handing Microsoft some cash means you're buying legal assurance that something will work safely (FSVO safely) in a way where the chain of liability hopefully doesn't stop at you.

You're missing his point.

Downloading any illegal software can compromise your email and bank accounts and basically ruin your life. It only takes one.

Illegal software in and of themselves are not dangerous.

What is dangerous is software sourced from dubious origins, regardless legality.

What is life-ruining is using illegal software in situations where you absolutely do not want to be on the hook for liability.

Are you still wearing a mask and scared of COVID I assume?

The best security measure one can have is being an absolute nobody.

if anything pirated software is an indicator of low wealth and thus should make you more secure not less

What does mask and COVID have to do with the current discussion? Leave your politics out of this.

Unwarrented fear of an extremely low-probability bad outcome.

COVID killed more than 6 million people.

That number would have been much higher if there were more people like you, going against medicine and scientific recommendations.

We won this battle despite people like you, so please, leave your bad science, conspiracy theories out of this technical forum.

> COVID killed more than 6 million people.

COVID trimmed weeks or months off the lives of people who were already on their way to the end of their lives in a matter of 12/48 months.

I forget where I read it but a not insignificant percentage of pirated software contains malware

Probably one of the strong antipiracy groups' propaganda. They conspired with AV vendors to make cracks detected as malware (with a vague name/description) despite there being no actual "malice" against the user.

The truth is, they might be the ones trying to seed malware in warez releases to further their narrative.

...and of course Windows is basically ad-supported at this point.

You're not getting my point. At $200 or even $2000 it's a steal compared to the 'expected value' (really, loss) of having my computer compromised. Yes, I'm more paranoid than most, but I have more to lose than most, and unlike others, I can't claim I don't understand the risks.

The stuff in other people's houses is free if you're good at picking locks.

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