Not sure if this fits here…

An OPSEC community would probably say no, so I probably don’t need to ask in those communities. But I’m curious about a (digital) pirate’s perspective on this issue…

I mean, the sources listed here are supposedly “safe” right? But honestly, how much would you trust these “safe” sources?

When doing sensitive tasks like banking or filing taxes, do you:

  • Use a different OS on the same machine? (Dualboot)
  • Or put the pirated content inside a virtual machine?
  • Or just use a completely separate computer?

And since PC is much different than a Smartphone:

  • Would the extra sandboxing on Smartphones make pirating games on a Smartphone much safer compared to on a PC? (Not that there are much mobile games worth playing, just curious)

(PC in this context referring to all personal computers, regardless of OS)

And last question:

  • Non-installed/non-executable files such as .mp4 .mkv .mp3 .pdf .epub, are mostly safe right? I mean, you are using another program to opening it, not executing a file, there aren’t much attack vectors as long as the video player / ebook viewer is up to date right? (Or am I understanding it wrong?)
  • dirtycrow@programming.devEnglish
    351·
    4 days ago

    Publisher matters. Some random website advertising a disk cleaning utility could be malware while a Fitgirl repack most definitely isn’t. Installing something from an official Ubuntu software repository is also pretty safe, while something from a 3rd party repository or community development library could be malware. I also generally trust PDFs from Anna’s Archive and Libgen or Internet Archive, because of the reputation loss to them if it were. You can minimize your risk to a tolerable level this way.