In olden days of W2K I would just assume malware is everywhere, and while trying to be as clean as possible, I always have some malware and shouldn’t do anything personal with computers that I can’t accept being possibly compromised.

I was a kid, too.

Then that idea that you can be safe has gotten to me, both through switching to Linux and through stupidity.

OK, a bit before that porn and historical military music became too interesting.

So. Malware is everywhere. Some guy from India’s malware is in a browser extension and a Google Play v2ray client, some guy from China’s malware is in an ebook reader, and some government’s malware is in the operating system you use, and some government’s deep state’s malware is in algorithms and protocols, as a backdoor hidden in the open.

Perhaps the Internet is one big compute cluster operated via such, providing free computation for US deep state, who the hell knows.

But even without conspiracy theories - IRL crooks hide traps in far simpler things.

The whole trust that most of what you use doesn’t have backdoors stealing everything possible, that trust is reminiscent of Soviet people literate in the first generation, who blindly trusted everything printed in a typography. Well, the generation having such has naturally left us. I think that will also happen for attitude to working with computers in some 60 years or so.