Pirating!
"Pirating? Crim, you're telling me you sail the high seas and shoot down ships for plunder?!?!." Well, if by "high seas" you mean the world wide web, and by "shoot down ships for plunder" you mean
download copies of bundles of 1's and 0's that may or may not have legal protection, then yes! Growing up a poor computer nerd, I've been pirating various tools and data throughout my whole life
(okay it was mostly videogames...), I remember getting my first taste for it using limewire to get all the music I could ever fit into a tiny mp3 player much like this,
and I've been addicted ever since! Now all you
computer virus nerds might have reflexivly gagged in disgust of the mention of limewire and yes, much like real piracy,
it's not all glitz and glamour you know.
I've seen my fair share of trojan-ridden software and sketchy malware deployment sites. I even had to recover
my very first personal laptop running windows 7 from a randsom attack. Sure it was easy, I simply booted in safe mode and used the windows recovery tool to revert back to a previous save (I suppose ransomware
was not so sophisticated back then), but still it was very scary! They made it look like an fbi notice asking for money and everything! So that's what this guide is meant to prevent, back then there was little
knowledge about these sorts of things (or maybe I simply failed to look for them)
My favorite pirating links/megathreads