I first had internet access in 1998 as a 12 year old without any money. It became a habit to find anything for free: mp3's on metager's "index of" searches, cra

I first had internet access in 1998 as a 12 year old without any money. It became a habit to find anything for free: mp3's on metager's "index of" searches, cracks on astalavista.box.sk, movies on IRC bots, 0 day software and games from scene FTPs, later on the whole P2P stuff like gnutella, DC++, torrent etc. and in the mid 00's the move to shared hosters. The fact that I was 12 and didn't get pocket money made me find all my stuff for free and it sticked to this day, except it's either waaaaaaay more convenient to pay a few bucks, or impossible to get otherwise. So over the years I stopped with my 500GB MP3/AAC/FLAC music collection and moved to Spotify (Which I still hate, because there's always indie stuff that isn't available PLUS stuff they remove, without informing me!). I also stopped pirating movies for some time because of Netflix, but after the democratization of streaming services and the return to walled off exclusives on multiple platforms, I simply went back to torrent streaming. Software is another thing I ALWAYS pirate, the only exception if I use it professionally or make money in any other form by using it. I am not proud of this, but saving a few bucks seems to be more important to me when I can. This is probably, because it has been ingrained into my brain for years as a child. I worked in the Digital Marketing business for 10 years (AdTech and MarTech) especially working in Analytics and Data Collection and I never saw ads. Used modified youtube clients for years, uBLock Origin on Desktop AND mobile. Seeing the unfiltered web on friend's devices makes me wonder how they can even brows the web...