Indeed, wanker’s cramp is expensive to treat

Excuse me, did you just blatantly ignore the possibility of ‘Steamware’??

Very much this. See UK’s legislation for terrorism and activism and how it’s being used to squash peaceful protests for a current example.

What you should want instead is widespread independent journalism along with a transparent government, national broadcasting and a well educated, critically thinking society. If you try to control information by omission and restriction, you only make it more appealing as it seems like a cover-up. Example: how many times have you heard of the Epstein files in recent months and years? It could’ve been a grocery shopping list and the effect would’ve been the same because of how it’s been handled.

If you find torrenting and running a VM too technical, I’m sorry to say you’re better off not trying to identify and remove any malicious code.

Don’t put yourself down and waste your money, you can get over the learning curve for this, it’s not that steep.

To elaborate, as the previous reply stated, running the cracked programs inside a virtual machine allows you to isolate an environment specifically for this usage. Configured properly (another reply went into more detail here), even if the cracked software has something malicious, it can’t harm you. So you can safely ignore wether there’s a virus or not.

Run it inside a VM? If you’re suspicious or just worried, this would resolve most if not all of possible worries you may have.

Way to throw that big dick energy on OP’s face…

How do you go about finding and joining such a venture