I'm not sure what it is that you claim you "got over". The risk of having your system back-doored by a program of unknown reliability? Nope. The legal risk of having that system used as, say, a botnet director or a spam mail server? No. I could go on, but I assume you get the point.

As to 'ping' - I know where mine comes from (my Linux distro), and I trust it with good reason. You, on the other hand, are giving root access to a program for which you have no chain of trust whatsoever - and that, in fact, specifically implies (via that ASCII graphic) that its author violates other people's systems and is gleeful about it. Good luck "getting over" that.

> I imagine that if there was anything fishy going on, we would have heard about it by now.

A pious wish, backed by absolutely nothing. Imagine having to rebuild your system from scratch because you installed this thing. Would you report it here, especially after having been told that it's not the smartest thing you could do? I seriously doubt it.

-- 
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- HG Wells