Using an old laptop for piracy

ninakuup21@lemmy.world to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 19 points –

Hello people I recently acquired an old(er) laptop through my workplace. I was initially planning on running a Pi-hole on it but after installing it I noticed that my router is causing issues with the Pi-hole so I gave up on that idea.

Now if I were to decide on dedicating it for piracy, would I be able to do anything that isn't viable on a general use PC that would make it less likely for these piracy activities to have legal and/or financial ramifications on me? Or would it be no different than using the PC I use for my everyday stuff?

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I was wondering about something similar, like setting up a VM for it. Doesn't really fulfill the "always on" thingy, but regarding malware etc. this should be safe, no?

Yeah. As long as you don't make any alterations to the VM like sharing drives for example. If you had enough storage you could also make snapshots on occasion so you have a back up in the event of malware but you wouldn't likely get malware unless you are opening the files on that VM

Yes, a VM is good for sandboxing too. It's still not perfectly safe as an airgapped separate machine, things can leak out of memory/network adapters, and depending on the specs of your main PC it could lead to some performance issues. But it's a literally free first step and a great improvement.