I’ve been pretty liberal with trying software from the internet my whole life.
Today I was browsing the forum looking for a external text editor to use. Somebody suggested Notepad++ so I went to the download page and saw that they’d updated it recently, fixing vulnerabilities exposed in a recent WikiLeak.
I don’t do much, they already know everything about me!
But I a) always keep computer fully updated b) always use an encrypted VPN
I never navigate to un-trusted website on a Windows system, I go to my mac for that for whatever reason. Back in the XP days I remember many a complete Windows reinstall because of some web malware so it is probably more a habit from the past than a real difference nowadays.
Sometimes with show systems in the past, straight through build-install-delivery we have kept them off the internet except for one early firewalled connection to do Windows Updates. Then they are offline after that. That’s only necessary for those take-no-chances mission critical jobs, certainly not easy to work with.