if you want to get shit like "fangames made in the 2000s that come exclusively as a single windows exe" you have to get them from the kind of sites you'd vitriolically instruct your grandmother never to visit. anyone who was there for the early days, when we launched cave story with doukutsu.exe, is like a fucking bomb sniffing dog now. we can wander through minefields and miraculously exit unscathed. our noses tell us which pages install ransomware. our tails twitch when we look at the fake download button; our mouths water when we look at the real one.
it still absolutely obliterates me psychologically that a few years ago someone started sharing around a single file just called mario.exe, claiming it was mario fucking 64 but for the PC, and thousands of us just uncritically clicked on it and nothing bad happened.
we knew it was safe. our tails knew.
an older family member was a victim of online banking fraud recently, and for about a day I was convinced that I had fucked up and potentially cost her thousands of dollars because I'd installed the z-library browser on her machine. z-library has no fixed URL and the page is filled with warnings about avoiding dangerous fake sites. somehow my instincts had failed me, I'd run an installer from a questionable website to do questionable things, given it full admin access to a poor unsuspecting woman's family PC, and a loved one had paid the price for my hubris.
but I was wrong. in the end, z-library was completely trustworthy, and it turned out to be microsoft's fault for selling search ads to a phishing site for the keywords "[NAME OF BANK] login" and putting them at the top of the results. it was the default search engine in the default browser of the most popular desktop operating system in the world that couldn't be trusted. a $2.7 trillion company let this abuse happen - an abuse that should have been trivially flagged by their ad-selling system with a regex - and profited from it.
for over 15 years I have hosted a game-making community where anyone can sign up and upload arbitrary .EXEs, and the folks who hang out there will download and run them. Gigabytes upon gigabytes of games made by random internet strangers. We've had bad actors show up from time to time - the struggle against spambots and bigots never ends - but we have never, to my knowledge, had a single malware problem, intentional or otherwise. programs written by random weirdos for the purposes of sharing, of self-expression, are pretty much universally safe. when someone's trying to make money... that's when you gotta watch out.
