I’ve always bought my games on steam or OFFICIAL key resellers (GMG) since I was an adult, but sometimes it has got really expensive.
Do you consider ‘cracked games’ safe for your PC, your data, and finally your privacy?
You should always support developers, but it’s not always possible.
Search for this keyword : “Fmhy”. It the acronym of free media heck yeah and It’s a curated list of safe sites. Fitgirl repack are the safest you can get.
how do you know they are safe? who is auditing the binaries?
The users themselves. Everyone that use cracked software know the binaries could potentially contain malware, so the people that share these cracked software need to build trust from the community before being called “safe” and get recommended. If ten if not hundred of thousands people use the binaries from a specific “site” or “repacker” without ever getting a virus, then it’s most certainly safe to use/download. Fitgirl is the safest and most known repacker ever (as long as you download from the official site and not some shady copycat, that is)
Considered safe only because people haven’t noticed anything malicious happening? Yeah, that’s still a no go for me; just because people haven’t noticed, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
If You can afford to pay, then cool. Most people that pirate can’t afford the games/apps anyway, so it’s not really a matter of asking if it is safe to pirate but what site are safe to pirate from. Also, Pirates tend to be tech savvy from getting screwed a few times when they were younger (Ex: me), so a good chunk most certainly know how to detect viruses.
You think you know how to detect a virus, but you only know how to detect a virus that doesn’t hide it’s actions.
It’s not about paying for software or pirating it. It’s about if you pirate software, should you run it on bare metal, a VM, or on a machine with nothing else on it.
I think pirating software is perfectly fine, but I’d never run it on bare metal on a machine with other stuff on it.
I hope you compile all your own software from verified sources then rather than downloading a ready-built Linux distro with binary packages.