Would installing an OS on an external ssd and booting into that to run pirated software while blocking access to other drives in your system or physically unplugging them be one way?
Or are there better ways to isolate the software you run and use as much as possible?
A virtual machine would be relatively safe most of the time.
How is the performance impact these days for games compared to running natively?
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KVM would be a safe way to test your pirated software. But it downgrades the performance.
How about sandboxie ?
I would love to know the answer to that. It’s an interesting solution to be sure, but it surely has some kind of holes.
Also, it doesn’t work with electron apps. Found that out the hard way.
I just block apps in firewall. Never had problems with pirate software, only some I couldnt get working.
What are you trying to protect from?
You can also run another OS in VM, but performance is questionable.
If you are afraid of losing data, you need backup anyway
Just didn’t seem like a good idea to run pirated software of games on your primary system even if the stuff is from a “trusted” source.
Which was why I was wondering what steps people take to play games for those that try to lower the risks.
If you want to play games in VM you will probably need qemu/kvm and sepparate GPU for passthrough. Otherwise your VM will struggle to load anything serious. But I think others use that mostly to run windows apps on linux machine or simmilar. Maybe you can just dualboot from 2nd drive, it should be 100% safe if you unplug your main drive, but thats probably overkill. Im no expert, just putting it here so you can google
Not a Pirate, but I often upload stuff to virustotal.
Vitustotal uploader is the best!
Depends on your threat model.
A air gap system is the gold standard.
A virtual machine is a reasonable middle ground, and of course you cut the network access.
Qubes lets you do both but it sacrifices some performance.
A word of caution about dual booting systems: if something is running on the computer, it in theory has full access to everything attached to that computer, including unmounted drives, encrypted drives, even BIOS. There are Trojans that install themselves in the boot partition, and it’s possible an infected operating system could infect the non-infected operating system next time you boot.
I haven’t seen your stance on VMs, but a lighter approach might be confining the software to an AppArmor profile or such. The kernel will enforce the restrictions on what it can and can’t do.
It won’t have the overhead of virtual machines, and you can keep using a single video card, but setting this up is quite tedious, though.Dual boot
