Comment by vegadw
11 hours ago
I think to an extent Microsoft is the guilty party here. For may cracks Windows Defender will trip saying "Win32/Keygen" even if there's no actual malware
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclo...
This trains people that do a lot of piracy to be used to turning off their antivirus to let something through, which is fine until it's not. It's like drugs, if we know a subset of the population will do them no matter what, we should make it safe for them to the extent we can. False positives, causing people to ignore actual positives, creates a market for these things.
Many years ago, even a "Hello World" binary that wasn't compiled by MSVC but by a GNU toolchain was detected as "suspicious" or "potentially unwanted", and in some cases automatically deleted. MS clearly has a different definition of "malware" than many people, and while it may overlap with a majority opinion (e.g. viruses and worms), where its opinion differs is used to push an agenda.
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.
I mean this is by design? It makes pirates more likely to get malware, and thus normal people more likely to pay for MS products rather than pirate? You may think its immoral but the incentives line up.