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How does it differ from running any proprietary software other than that you can read the script before running it?

You can usually checksum anything you download to ensure it's legit. A script that you curl is unlikely to have such a thing I guess.

Isn’t that just the nature of installing software period?

I suppose perhaps you could read all code you use before installing it, but I expect the number of people who do that rounds down to zero.

If it's open source and in a certain language I always peek. Not necessarily for security but to see how they structured things.

You can always read it first. It isn’t much different than pip or apt.

Easy to change the content depending on user agent.

So curl it but don’t pipe it into shell.