Long story short.

1. Be prepared for disaster.
2. Scan it. Sandbox it if concerned.
3. Firewall inspect/block/allow every outbound comm.
4. Get it from a trusted source.

Basically the same stuff you should be doing with all software.

Edit for firewall clarification.

The prices are going up for every provider. It’s across the board. Porkbun.com too.

God bless the hackers, crackers, reverse engineers, and disrupters. Pray they help keep you free of too much pain.

Totally agree.

I think we should all strive to do better. Unit tests, mock-ups, UX design, 2 week sprints with actual working deliverables, well documented use cases, every thing neatly stacked in Jira, dev,test,staging,prod environments, continuous integration and every thing else we are told to do.

Then reality sets in……

With all that said, 25 years as a dev, this utopian environment is almost impossible to find unless forced by regulatory compliance. Medical devices, life critical systems, etc. or if you have big piles of money.

I don’t.

But I take many precautions.

I’ve been pirating software since the C64. About 40 years. Never stopped. Never will.

I buy the good software I encounter. As a developer, i know it’s important to keep funding further development. Unfortunately most is overpriced garbage.

This is very true.

Unfortunately most product managers SUCK at designing or making software.

Agile tries to fix this be supporting frequent iteration.

Unfortunately most programmers SUCK at writing good code.

TDD tries to fix this by forcing the consideration of end results (testing) at the beginning. It forces programmers and product teams to actually think and work. Make clear design decisions earlier on, but not to the point of waterfall.

It’s just a giant cesspool of failure due to human laziness that usually falls on the shoulders of QA.

Bottom line, making good software is hard. It takes time. But the market won’t support slow development. The business and sales teams remind me of Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka.

Hi bilb, this is blab. I just wanted to say thank you for your approach. You run a wonderful server.

Paragraph 3. They did, just not in the last 6 years.

Can you provide some examples of what you are looking for? There are a handful of private edu trackers that may have the content you desire.

Fuck off already.

Exactly.

Not everyone is on twitter for the political bullshit. Using banned words it’s easy to filter any political garbage. Twitter is quite useful. But I’m not there to convince or push my ideology on a bunch of polarized people. What a waste of energy.

Ohhh. My day is done. GitHub’s list of Awesome. So much great stuff. Thanks for the topic and sharing.

I don't really use Windows except for playing games, so someone else may have a better answer.

For me, I want 3 types of protection, priority order.

1. Rootkit and ransomware protection. Lock down and protect system files.

2. Firewall. Stop software from calling home (and possibly invalidating my forged license) and to stop malware from reaching out to command and control systems.

3. Malware scanning and suspect execution detection. Most antivirus software detections will be in only one of a couple categories: keygen, generic trojan, or obfuscated executable. If I encounter this, I go to VirusTotal.com and drop the offending file(s) for it to scan. If I'm still concerned I will use an online sandbox execution recorder that tells you what the exe does such as outbound comms, file modifications, registry read/writes, etc.

Windows Defender accomplishes these requirements. Although it is a bit clunky and other mainstream antivirus (paid or free) accomplish the same in a much cleaner interface.

I cannot stress enough the importance of downloading pirated software from a trusted source.

Hahaha. Copper top.

I think that what AI may do, for a long time, is enhance our hobbies.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, AI.

Just like early cryptocurrency, there will be value in work done. Seeing an artist create will be just as valuable as the resulting artwork.

And there needs to be a WFH policy that states reasonable responsiveness. If on a break, set you chat status as such.

Of course there are workarounds, like just carrying you phone with chat app.

Then it really does boil down to people management.

Thanks for doing the work.

Consideration for readers. Remember not everyone lives where you do and has the same access and infrastructure that you do.

Some US states are pushing for EV but do not have the power production needed to support it at scale. Maybe another 10 or 20 years when everyone has a nuclear reactor in their backyard.

I’m all for EV for those that it makes sense. For many, especially the impoverished, it’s just another barrier to overcome.

Yep. I’ve been there.

I sorta agree with @darcy. The quality of FOSS (nowadays) is pretty damn good. If I need something I look at FOSS first, dig in github, and then finally look around for a paid program.

Edit to say "paid" program.

This is one of the single most important pieces of advice. Unless you have access to topsites, then this is about as close to the source as you are going to get, except for FitGirl repacks that can be DDLd from her site.

Does France go easy on pedos?