8 ms·

A reminder that you never have to worry about ANY of this bullshit if you pirate the software

by rangibaby 6y ago

nsomaru 6y ago
Except the peace of mind and running arbitrary code part
- quantummkv 6y ago
  I don't know about software, but pirated games are generally more secure, stable and performant with less spyware than the official games with all the DRM.
  - nsomaru 6y ago
    Citation needed. I guess you’re probably right but companies are way more accountable than random internet person who modified the dll/binary to work without copy protection.
    - morsch 6y ago
      Now you have customer support to complain to when they lose your photos.
    - quantummkv 6y ago
      https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/evidence-continues-to-mount-about-how-bad-denuvo-is-for-pc-gaming-performance/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/evidence-continues-to... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-drm-caused-slowdown-on-rime/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-d... That's the point. Companies have proved themselves not accountable to their customers.
    - hosteur 6y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
    - owl57 6y ago
      What's "accountable"? Any old releaser on a big tracker has way better track record of not screwing users than the average corporation.
    - xmprt 6y ago
      I remember hearing about at least one game that was significantly more performant when pirated (I think it was by Ubisoft). They had so much code for DRM and network tracking that it was faster to just stop that code from executing by hacking the game.
      - fuzxi 6y ago
        This happened with Monster Hunter World's Iceborne expansion. It updated the included version of Denuvo and added many, many threads that constantly scanned the game executable for modifications as an anti-cheat mechanic. A modder distributed a tool to bypass the anti-cheat and restore performance the same day the expansion released. It took over two weeks for Capcom to get the game playable again, and many more before they improved performance back to roughly pre-update levels. For reference, I'd been using Steam Proton to play the base game on Linux and was getting 60fps at nearly max settings. After the update, I got 1. One frame per second. I saw a number of similar reports from native Windows players.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      You don't follow games recently (meaning 10 years at least). There are few publishers that put pretty nasty DRM protections inside that run constantly, take few % of the CPU and do constant full memory checks (among other things). Performance drop is visible unless you have obscurely expensive hardware. This is kind of expected for online gaming due to many folks fucked up mentality of using cheats and playing with rest of the crowd (some psychologists could probably go quite deep on breaking this down to mostly childhood issues). If you play on your own, its just a pain in the a. Many people buy the game and then play pirated version, just to avoid this kind of punishment of the lawful citizens.
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
      No, for companies anything goes because copyright. They are in god mode, farming users.
    - krageon 6y ago
      > companies are way more accountable Probably over half the popular multiplayer products on Steam have rootkits in them that send a lot of data about you straight to the publisher. Companies are not accountable for the things you want them to be accountable for, so for normal people it just looks like they're not accountable at all.
  - laumars 6y ago
    There are other options out there that don’t include DRM but also don’t advocate piracy. For example GOG.com
    - lecarore 6y ago
      I tend to buy (indie, Linux) games on gog/humble bundle/itch.io, or on the official developer website. When I have to use steam it really pains me, their client, drm, marketing forced accounts, pricing policy .. are a pita.
  - powersnail 6y ago
    Haven't played video games for some time, but at least when I was still pirating, malware and spyware was pretty common. Bugs and incompatibilities caused by pirating were also not unheard of. Playing pirated game is putting trust into the hands of some anonymous hackers. And that begs the question, what do they gain from giving out the game for free? They could be doing it just for fun, for coolness, or out of altruism. And that's true for probably many case. But to say none of them wanted to earn expedient money would not persuade me.
    - syshum 6y ago
      >>malware and spyware was pretty common. Malware and Spyware is pretty common with purchased games, of course they call it "DRM" but it has the same goal and purpose
- wruza 6y ago
  It's true only if you find torrents "in the wild". You can lurk/participate in an established torrent forum which gives you user reports, discussions, seeder score and a community mindset instead of a c00l w4r3z download mindset in general. Idk of english or international ones, but only because I never looked for one. TPB and KAT are not good examples, cause these look(-ed) like boards rather than forums, although I never had any issues with using them either. In addition to gp's point: After settling my income I began buying software (games mostly) on steam/etc to support studios I like, but it is still much easier to torrent it afterwards and to not deal with bs that stores represent. I never realized before how much hassle it is to own a legal version of everything. You pay your money and they don't even bother of your convenience or digital rights, only theirs. Recently I bought starcrart remastered (without torrenting) and that battle.net downloads over 200mb over my adsl line every flipping time I try to run it. As a result, I just watch falcon pal match reviews at youtube and never run it. Blizzard deserved that money for sure, but man isn't that stupid.
Iolaum 6y ago
You don't have to worry about that BS if you use free software alternatives either. Plus you get to contribute to an alternative ecosystem that is also a lawful and moral alternative (Because piracy is both illegal and immoral in many circles.)
- kwanbix 6y ago
  How do you contribute by using free software? You contribute if you give something, mainly coding or money.
  - biztos 6y ago
    You contribute to its popularity. People want their software to be used.
  - est31 6y ago
    You already contribute by growing the community. Software benefits from network effects. E.g. a large hurdle for Libreoffice adoption is the fact that many documents are in the MS proprietary formats. Messengers like Signal or Telegram are in the same boat. As the community grows, the chance increases for someone to contribute by coding or money, or hiring the lead devs for support contracts. It doesn't have to be you, but if you (and others) hadn't used the software before them, that person might not have used it in the first place. Yes, you can increase your value to the project thousandfold with more direct contributions like coding, bugfixes, donations, community work, etc, but already being part of the community is of help.
    - berdario 6y ago
      Those effects are vastly overstated. https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/ https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/ If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions). If you want your open source developers to eat, they need cold hard cash. From the lwn link above: > Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling Desktop LibreOffice. > Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc. > We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office customer since 2018 - zero. (for context: the former LibreOffice development team of SUSE joined Collabora in 2013, so they're not a scrappy new startup completely disjointed from Libreoffice)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

A reminder that you never have to worry about ANY of this bullshit if you pirate the software

nsomaru 6y ago

Except the peace of mind and running arbitrary code part

quantummkv 6y ago
I don't know about software, but pirated games are generally more secure, stable and performant with less spyware than the official games with all the DRM.
- nsomaru 6y ago
  Citation needed. I guess you’re probably right but companies are way more accountable than random internet person who modified the dll/binary to work without copy protection.
  - morsch 6y ago
    Now you have customer support to complain to when they lose your photos.
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/evidence-continues-to-mount-about-how-bad-denuvo-is-for-pc-gaming-performance/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/12/evidence-continues-to... https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-drm-caused-slowdown-on-rime/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/crackers-say-denuvo-d... That's the point. Companies have proved themselves not accountable to their customers.
  - hosteur 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
  - owl57 6y ago
    What's "accountable"? Any old releaser on a big tracker has way better track record of not screwing users than the average corporation.
  - xmprt 6y ago
    I remember hearing about at least one game that was significantly more performant when pirated (I think it was by Ubisoft). They had so much code for DRM and network tracking that it was faster to just stop that code from executing by hacking the game.
    - fuzxi 6y ago
      This happened with Monster Hunter World's Iceborne expansion. It updated the included version of Denuvo and added many, many threads that constantly scanned the game executable for modifications as an anti-cheat mechanic. A modder distributed a tool to bypass the anti-cheat and restore performance the same day the expansion released. It took over two weeks for Capcom to get the game playable again, and many more before they improved performance back to roughly pre-update levels. For reference, I'd been using Steam Proton to play the base game on Linux and was getting 60fps at nearly max settings. After the update, I got 1. One frame per second. I saw a number of similar reports from native Windows players.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    You don't follow games recently (meaning 10 years at least). There are few publishers that put pretty nasty DRM protections inside that run constantly, take few % of the CPU and do constant full memory checks (among other things). Performance drop is visible unless you have obscurely expensive hardware. This is kind of expected for online gaming due to many folks fucked up mentality of using cheats and playing with rest of the crowd (some psychologists could probably go quite deep on breaking this down to mostly childhood issues). If you play on your own, its just a pain in the a. Many people buy the game and then play pirated version, just to avoid this kind of punishment of the lawful citizens.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    No, for companies anything goes because copyright. They are in god mode, farming users.
  - krageon 6y ago
    > companies are way more accountable Probably over half the popular multiplayer products on Steam have rootkits in them that send a lot of data about you straight to the publisher. Companies are not accountable for the things you want them to be accountable for, so for normal people it just looks like they're not accountable at all.
- laumars 6y ago
  There are other options out there that don’t include DRM but also don’t advocate piracy. For example GOG.com
  - lecarore 6y ago
    I tend to buy (indie, Linux) games on gog/humble bundle/itch.io, or on the official developer website. When I have to use steam it really pains me, their client, drm, marketing forced accounts, pricing policy .. are a pita.
- powersnail 6y ago
  Haven't played video games for some time, but at least when I was still pirating, malware and spyware was pretty common. Bugs and incompatibilities caused by pirating were also not unheard of. Playing pirated game is putting trust into the hands of some anonymous hackers. And that begs the question, what do they gain from giving out the game for free? They could be doing it just for fun, for coolness, or out of altruism. And that's true for probably many case. But to say none of them wanted to earn expedient money would not persuade me.
  - syshum 6y ago
    >>malware and spyware was pretty common. Malware and Spyware is pretty common with purchased games, of course they call it "DRM" but it has the same goal and purpose
wruza 6y ago
It's true only if you find torrents "in the wild". You can lurk/participate in an established torrent forum which gives you user reports, discussions, seeder score and a community mindset instead of a c00l w4r3z download mindset in general. Idk of english or international ones, but only because I never looked for one. TPB and KAT are not good examples, cause these look(-ed) like boards rather than forums, although I never had any issues with using them either. In addition to gp's point: After settling my income I began buying software (games mostly) on steam/etc to support studios I like, but it is still much easier to torrent it afterwards and to not deal with bs that stores represent. I never realized before how much hassle it is to own a legal version of everything. You pay your money and they don't even bother of your convenience or digital rights, only theirs. Recently I bought starcrart remastered (without torrenting) and that battle.net downloads over 200mb over my adsl line every flipping time I try to run it. As a result, I just watch falcon pal match reviews at youtube and never run it. Blizzard deserved that money for sure, but man isn't that stupid.

Iolaum 6y ago

You don't have to worry about that BS if you use free software alternatives either. Plus you get to contribute to an alternative ecosystem that is also a lawful and moral alternative (Because piracy is both illegal and immoral in many circles.)

kwanbix 6y ago
How do you contribute by using free software? You contribute if you give something, mainly coding or money.
- biztos 6y ago
  You contribute to its popularity. People want their software to be used.
- est31 6y ago
  You already contribute by growing the community. Software benefits from network effects. E.g. a large hurdle for Libreoffice adoption is the fact that many documents are in the MS proprietary formats. Messengers like Signal or Telegram are in the same boat. As the community grows, the chance increases for someone to contribute by coding or money, or hiring the lead devs for support contracts. It doesn't have to be you, but if you (and others) hadn't used the software before them, that person might not have used it in the first place. Yes, you can increase your value to the project thousandfold with more direct contributions like coding, bugfixes, donations, community work, etc, but already being part of the community is of help.
  - berdario 6y ago
    Those effects are vastly overstated. https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/ https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/ If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions). If you want your open source developers to eat, they need cold hard cash. From the lwn link above: > Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling Desktop LibreOffice. > Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc. > We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office customer since 2018 - zero. (for context: the former LibreOffice development team of SUSE joined Collabora in 2013, so they're not a scrappy new startup completely disjointed from Libreoffice)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]