Trying to find something TTRPG-related has also been quite a pain. My main sources for that today is a couple of DC++ and IRC rooms - and, as you understand, this is as removed from the average user, as possible. For an average user, TTRPG rules and supplements are scattered all over the web, if they are even there in the first place. I know there are some Mega repositories (one of the huge ones has recently been taken down by Games Workshop, by the way), but you gotta search for them and ask for the access - search engines do not pick them up, plus some of them are password protected.
Books... I'm not sure. It is pretty much the same situation as with music here with me: I dig for the very, very obscure things. Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are rather good sources for my literature, but, unfortunately, not everything is there. I upload to Library Genesis on ocassion, but I feel like quite a number of things is missing. However, when I'm trying to find something well-known, it is usually two clicks away - so, as it has been stated in the very start, mainstream stuff is all there and easy to find, but trying to find something obscure is hard.
Yeah, it's tricky because you have to depend on people doing scans for a lot of books, which means somebody is sitting there flipping through all a book's pages, ensuring it's all correct, and getting no money from that.
What we saw go down with z-library was sad as well. Not so much the clearnet domain going down but the two men who are now in prison. But it also sucks that there is no dependable domain because it's harder to recommend it to other people, the link may change soon, and while it's easy to circumvent for me, these people have no clue what a 'Tor Browser' is at all and you can't explain it to them either!
It really does astound me how piracy was just something everyone did. Whenever I was staying in Belarus, I was amazed how not a single computer I saw lacked torrenting software, even my grandfather had mutorrent. And those stalls that would sell CDs, how I wish I could have a business selling cracked installers! It's sort of sad to hear that things changed since I was young.
I'd much rather support the artist than the corpos. I'm not sure how much I can share but I can tell you that many digital streaming platforms the music labels do rather shady things to get as much money out of people as they can.
I'm actually in there. One guy I know from DC++ TTRPG room recommended it to me. I cannot connect to quite a number of people though, unfortunately. I think I need to find some time to try and re-route Soulseek via proxy eventually, but for now I'm asking that guy who recommended it to me to check it for me in case I fail to find something, and he fished out some monstrously rare music out of it for me.
Frankly though, I think he has everything TTRPG-related he has ever found on Soulseek in DC++, so I'm somewhat set on that side.
Yeah, it's tricky because you have to depend on people doing scans for a lot of books, which means somebody is sitting there flipping through all a book's pages, ensuring it's all correct, and getting no money from that.
The only upside is that it is kind of cool, meditative experience. Listening to 80's metal while looking at fantasy artwork is cool. Or listening to some folk music while looking slowly going through historical books.
You definitely gotta be in the mood for that though. And I really have to find some, these books won't scan themselves...
ZLib getting pwned like that was a really, really sad day in the history of the web for everyone who knows what the thing was about. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I think it shows that they went through all the trouble to get people who tried to spread knowledge from another country and give'em jail time.
And those stalls that would sell CDs, how I wish I could have a business selling cracked installers! It's sort of sad to hear that things changed since I was young.
Yeah. Good times, eh. Kind of wish I ran something like that as well. But, hey, I've finally managed to sell a custom DLC crack once in the previous year, so, I think I'm on my way. Kind of.
So, in two words: the old guard either died out or moved on, and the new games are... way away from geek culture? Just suck? Do not need cracks at all? I dunno, but whatever the reason is, the only people to replace the previous gen of crackers are ocassional autists and political cookies, it seems. Go figure.
My personal thoughts are that there's a shift in the culture, people nowadays rarely do stuff if they don't feel like there is a tangible change or if money isn't involved. Empress, one of the rare remaining Denuvo hackers charges 500$ per crack, which back in the day would have gotten you laughed out of the scene. Now not only are they not laughed out of the scene people have crowdfunded their cracks multiple times. That's why I think it's all about the money or some political brownie points, the current sentiment with programming and IT all together isn't "make your dream game/program/etc" but "make shit tones of money" or to larp being some hacker man breaking in government shit making the world just in their programming socks and of course people like that aren't going to bother trying to crack games for free and to get arrested. It also explains why only P2P players still crack stuff since if they don't much of the times games aren't even sold to RU or CN so they have to crack it.
Most new games do suck tho, there's no denying that.
I think I've finally stumbled upon the previous "piracy general" thread: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/3905/
That one is specifically about gaming though, and I kind of hoped to be more broad in this one. Still, that is an interesting read. I will bring one point here though.
The store knowingly sold you potatoes which have the ability to regrow, and you put the resources and effort in to regrow them. You are entitled to the fruits of that labour. You owe the store nothing. The reason they continue to sell potatoes is because the average person would rather buy them than put in the effort to grow them. That position does not go against my original point on the matter, and you haven't made some sort of "gotcha" argument.
Piracy does not work that way. When you pirate a game, you are not paying for the fair value of the original product (in your analogy the potato) and expanding on it. You are not putting in effort to expand the product on your own. You're just taking it in it's original form and contributing nothing because you don't feel obliged to pay for it.
But you do take an effort.
In case of video games, you have to make a crack, apply a SteamEmu or something... Back in the days you've also usually had to buy and burn a CD or two. Or three. Or even more. Granted, you can just throw raw files in the internet, like cs.rin.ru does, but then every person who downloads the files have to apply bypasses and cracks himself. You have to edit the original form of the product - rip the DRM out of it and all that stuff.
Movies - those you have to rip right. Sometimes bypassing regional restrictions and whatnot. Once again, probably doesn't hold in the age of digital distribution. Same with music, though I still rip CDs rather often.
And books? Yes, you have to scan those. If you're nice guy, you will also pretty it up and make a nice PDF before throwing it into the web. You definitely do edit the original form of the product in the case of books, and you edit it heavily. In fact, you're pretty much do the whole job of digitalizing the book.
Overall, make no mistake, pirating stuff does take an effort, as perfectly illustrated by all those points that say "Steam is more comfortable". And it is definitely not my problem they've invented potatoes that take no soil, no water and overall just grow out of thin air. And even then it still takes an effort, especially with video games.
Not for a moment I don't. As long as we are not talking about the end user who just downloads everything that is already cracked and packed, pirating (and distributing) is quite a work. But then, it is the same in case of potatoes: the end user won't grow anything, he'll just eat the potato.
In case of video games, it involves a little bit of reverse engineering, which makes removing DRM exponentially harder than installing it, because you have no access to the source code. There's a reason Denuvo games ain't been cracked for months, you know.
LibGen accepted my latest book scan.
Small torrent share is still going strong.
And somebody just finished leeching my whole "80's beat" folder in DC++. 711 music tracks sent to another PC. I only regret not having more in my share.
This post made me want to provide some points on it, though what I've wanted to write is definitely bigger than 1000-something chars, and I didn't find a proper thread about piracy, so here we go...
I've been pirating all things possible since the very appearance of the internet, and I feel as if the golden days of piracy are actually already behind us. Sure, the mainstream stuff is all there and easy to find, but trying to find something obscure? It sucks. Besides, corps on ocassion have some very successful crackdowns which complicate things immensely. Since the original post talks about video games, I will provide an example that relates to those especially: Google entered a requirement to request manual access to pretty much every major account that was sharing games on cs.rin.ru thus effectively locking out most of the content and, as far as I've understood, not crossing any lines legally. Last time I've tried to download Syder Arcade, I couldn't find it anywhere, but, luckily, someone on cs.rin.ru answered to my re-upload request.
GOG fares much better, though there was a dark moment when both GOG Games moved to Tor and Torrminatorr went down. Luckily, today Torrminatorr is back online and GOG Games are back in the clear again. Any kind of console and emulator ROMs are not that easy to find - console ROM sites suffered a lot back in the days because of Nintendo, who still goes after 90's games like it is their bread and butter, and arcade ROMs can be hit or miss when you download them. You can end up with a ROM that misses some files or an old non-functional dump. The best bet would be to find the big all-encompassing official MAME/FBNeo collection and download them all - they are somewhat hidden from the public eye though.
Games aside, comic books are in a bad position. As far as I understand, most of them are hosted on just several big websites. Which seem convinient, and you are pretty much bound to find them easily via any search engine given their size, but if one of them will go down - a lot of content would be likely lost. And, as an avid movie fan, I can say that finding movies in good quality has been quite a pain lately. A lot of public torrents are dead. Frankly, for whatever reason, it is probably the worst situation for the movies at the moment. You have to rely on closed trackers - and I have an access to a number of them - but public repositories are quite desolated.
Trying to find something TTRPG-related has also been quite a pain. My main sources for that today is a couple of DC++ and IRC rooms - and, as you understand, this is as removed from the average user, as possible. For an average user, TTRPG rules and supplements are scattered all over the web, if they are even there in the first place. I know there are some Mega repositories (one of the huge ones has recently been taken down by Games Workshop, by the way), but you gotta search for them and ask for the access - search engines do not pick them up, plus some of them are password protected.
Software seems in rather good position on torrents I use, but I cannot help the feeling that the amount of cracks went down. I guess that software never had as much talented crackers as video games had, plus the modern protection likely relies on online checks way harder, so it is somewhat understandable. Still, software is in kind of an odd position: I need the cracked stuff rather rarely, as it seems most of the actually useful software (for me, at least) is a free open-source stuff. It is... very encouraging. You can somewhat say that people won this one, as corps are pushed to develop rather niche stuff. Most important software in said niches is very likely hacked, but as you dig deeper, you might encounter the need to pay cash.
I cannot provide much info on music, since at this point I'm pretty much digging through the music that has never been digitalized in the first place. This means I have to buy my own discs and make them digital. I've been uploading them on the torrents and on the YouTube for what it takes, and at this point the stuff I've made digital is there. Though as for myself, my own source of obscure music has primarily been in various - you probably won't believe it - blogs from Blogger. A lot of links there are dead, and a number of bloggers are just trying to raise some cash, but there are still some big and very useful blogs. When, on ocassion, something mainstream catches my ear, it is usually very easy to download - either via one of the websites, torrents or through the bots that rip audio from Deezer, Spotify, Apple Music or whatever. Apple Music, actually, on ocassion holds digital versions of some rather obscure and local albums - for example, I've once found Pronadi Me U Zvijezdama there, a 1986 album by croatian Grupa 777.
Books... I'm not sure. It is pretty much the same situation as with music here with me: I dig for the very, very obscure things. Library Genesis and Sci-Hub are rather good sources for my literature, but, unfortunately, not everything is there. I upload to Library Genesis on ocassion, but I feel like quite a number of things is missing. However, when I'm trying to find something well-known, it is usually two clicks away - so, as it has been stated in the very start, mainstream stuff is all there and easy to find, but trying to find something obscure is hard.
Oh, and... various secondary materials? A lot of those never went digital in the first place. Trying to find some deleted scenes, video game manuals, interviews... This can be hard. Those are really all over the place. I know some people try to make a central for video game manuals, and it kinda works, I guess, since I can see tons of manuals listed there, but every time I try to get one I need, it turns into a little adventure. Last time I've had to settle for photos from 4chan's /vr/ anon.
Now, I have to say that situation was quite better back in late 2000's. In early-steam times video games had several huge centralised sites. Emulation was not as good as it is today, but various ROMs were much easier to find. Movies and TTRPGs were definitely much more well organised online as well. And then it all came down: most of the big sites were broken. Some of them moved to another domain, but a lot of them still lost a number of content in the process. In fact, I think only two sites from those times exist to this day, and only one is still as useful. I cannot help but feel that finding things is harder for me every time I go online, though it might be just because every second time I'm trying to find something more and more obscure. Still, having big, centralised sites back in 2000's helped a lot, since there were a lot of people there and when you were asking for help, someone would've very likely replied. Though, I gotta say, I'm not sure how hard it is nowadays, but I'm coming from the fact that I'm simply on the scene, proficient with searching for obscure things, and therefore have contacts or can locate contacts somewhat easily. I can imagine an average user would be lost in the web.
And, frankly, "average user" is a guy who concerns me a lot. I'm sure many people noticed this phenomena, that despite the fact that people grow up in the age of technology, they are not becoming more proficient with it. In fact, I feel like people are starting to develop some supernatural fear towards it. There have been multiple times I've been refused a file - like, a savegame, for example - and as a reason, people voiced concerns that I might somehow steal their account. Via a fucking savegame. Then, on one ocassion, I've been called a "tech wizard", so... it all comes together, kind of. If it is a witchery in the minds of people - then of course from that point of view I can do voodoo and control accounts via the savegame as if it is controlling a person with a tuft of hair and a doll.
I also cannot help but think that many americans, and, perhaps, europeans are simply afraid of engaging the piracy. I know that unlike my country, whose ISPs don't give the tiniest of fucks about me pirating things, ISPs in US are actually sending their users legal notices and whatnot. One of my acquaintances also surprised me by descibing that his iPhone doesn't let him open music files I've sent him in Discord - it transfers him to iTunes to listen to those instead. And some other stuff has been related to iPhone, which I do not quite remember, but I believe he had troubles with rar archives... and something else, very, very basic, which left me under impression that he browses web from a jail. A digital one, I mean. Or... maybe not. I don't know. Anyway, sharing files with him has been quite a frustrating experience. What kind of "awareness among people regarding piracy" can you talk about when a man can't even open a simple rar or an mp3 file? Talk about smartphones being evil and dumbing people down...
Anyway, to wrap it up... I can be my pessimistic self - and I have an urge to - by proceeding to say that corporations taking down major piracy centers have been a huge blow. Now everything is decentralized and corps are still pressing on, and it feels like finding things is harder every time, so it is all slowly crumbling down, save all you can while you can, et cetera. On the other hand though, I have a feeling that things probably have a chance to change and become better. You see, our strongest winds come, as usual, from United States. So it really depends on whether or not its capitalistic policies will continue to dominate the landscape. Or, rather, the webscape. US had a kickstart by being the country who invented the web, and therefore it has the most prominent websites, but as the time goes on, said websites might, after all, come down and make way for sites and servers from other domain zones. Since the internet has no borders, in the WWW it is truly possible to turn tides around.
I would love to hear about your experience with pirating various things in the year 2023 and onwards, as well as your predictions about if it will change for the better or for the worse. You might say a word or two about "average user" as well, I guess, though I feel like the overall stupidity of people nowadays is a bit off the topic, even though whether or not things will change for the better definitely depends on whether or not people will get some tech-wits and soon.
To respond to the image in question, i absolutely refuse to educate the masses on "piracy education". I'd rather per se share how to torrent or how to share files (that those individuals own). The reason im against it is the very reason why the current state of piracy is the way it is. When you introduce too many people to a method, corpos will corrupt and destroy/remove any semblance of the original intention thus preventing the public from gaining further knowledge or ability/know how. Look at the fate of the biggest torrent software at the time utorrent and bittorrent and see where they ended up. Look at all the websites that literally disapated because some dumb fuck decided to share how to download books illegally. Games cracking has been even more difficult with Denuvo being prevalent (which btw i believe is still being cracked by one person).
Overall, we need to educate the masses on torrenting and such but not on "piracy methods". Maybe word of mouth or how we all found out about piracy through bits and pieces found on websites is enough overall. Like i'll educate you on how to download mp3s and flacs and whats the difference between the two in terms of quality or even how to convert flac files and put them on an ipod but im not going to tell where i get my albums.
The reason why normies are so scared of piracy in the first place is all the marketing and illegality mumbo jumbo which HONESTLY is fair. There's no denying that piracy in of itself is a crime no matter how nonsensical it is. The more the normies become unafraid, the more the market responds. Remember Limewire is what led to creation of the future streaming services and devaluation of music in general. Nobody even listens or wants to download and save their music anymore. No reason to if it's all convenient. If a normie wants to learn how to, they're not a normie at all and if they really want to figure out, its quite easy to find the right path through even the most popular of sites.
Now I'm not disagreeing with OPs point about finding obscure content. Especially if you're looking for an older game, good luck finding the crack for it.
I will say though, piracy is not dying or losing its golden age. Corpos just know how to squish the scene and spread out the crowd.
I personally think the larger issue is that unless you know what sources are trustworthy, you risk either getting faulty cracks and bad files at best and malware, ransomware, etc at worst. Do you have access to a wiki-like resource that lists reliable sources? Do you know someone who frequently pirates what you're looking for and can be trusted to give good advice? If not you're gonna have to look around and hope you can find trustworthy information about a source.
I personally think the larger issue is that unless you know what sources are trustworthy, you risk either getting faulty cracks and bad files at best and malware, ransomware, etc at worst.
First: so what? Cleaning any of those out is not a problem.
Second: just where do you get this outlook? I can't stop wondering. Getting a virus or anything else is incredibly hard nowadays. Just how often do you need a standalone crack anyway, if you are not doing things like I do, trying to launch first House Of The Dead on Windows 7? All the scene releases nowadays are pre-packed and checked. It is really hard to encounter a bad scene release - scene itself fights against those because releasers need to protect their names. With the cryptocurrency craze there was an unpleasant instance of some site or scene releaser trying to hide miners in their cracked games, and that ended real quick. Fuck, piracy is at its safest nowadays, whether it hurts it or not.
And if you are not downloading games - just do not click any .exe files. Ever. This is it.
Well, these are solid points. I can't say I agree with them all, especially with the notion that piracy is a crime... I mean, it is, like, legally, but those laws suck. Corporations are a crime.
Anyway, yea, soild points. Maybe I'll read it again and try to find some kind of a counterpoint a bit later, but it overall boils down to the fact that we cannot have free things, because rich people will do their best to stop us if they will feel they are losing too much money. Which is true, but do we really need to stop and... dunno, just accept it? Just accept that corporations will be there and will take people's money?
I dunno, maybe it's just me, but I'm pretty much ready to bang my head against the wall to the best of my abilities. Doesn't matter if I won't win - I will stick to my principles.
I mean, corpos win because they do not stop pushing normies into their fold. We shouldn't stop pushing normies into our fold either. Maybe. It's a sword with two edges, honestly. I cannot say I do not enjoy being underground.
In fact on my own statement, i even added how nonsensical it is. I'm only clarifying at the actual laws themselves rather than my own perspective on it. Which is practically the same as yours.
Thats what i meant overall honestly. Its stupid thats even clarified as "stealing" when its a mere duplication of files. Legal system is typically out of date of course especially in the US (prolly knowingly)
Yeah pretty much. I know I sound like a debbie downer cynic but yeah. Piracy at its most basic form is the response of corporatism and bad services. Any businessman who's smart enough will realize rather than treating piracy websites as criminals they would rather treat them as competition/pioneers. That you have to ponder what's wrong with the industry at the moment that people prefer pirating content over generally buying that content. That realization is the VERY basis behind things such steam and even modern day digital streaming era. The creation of Steam at it's heart is a response to piracy and it does a damn good job at it. If you want an obscure game and can't find it on any public trackers, its then much easier to buy that product overall (and yes safer even if you may disagree with me on that front but it doesn't stop some seeders from spreading malware, thats kinda why we don't prefer piratebay anymore but thats a different point). The invention of iTunes, Spotify, etc are literal responses to the LimeWire era. Hell, due to netflix/all other movie streaming services being shit tier, people have going back to piracy. That leads kinda to my next point:
I don't think anyone should be pushing normies away from the fold but we shouldn't be so I would say "blatant" to the general public. The early 2000s taught us alot about how the general public responds to these things. Lawsuits, thousands and millions of people practically pirating content and being taught various fundamentals. It's a lost art now but shits gone for a reason. How many of those popular piracy sites are still up/trustworthy now? Other than the pirate bay (which is practically a symbol now rather than a legitimate option), most of these services are dead and in the water or banking on nostalgia lmao.
Though a little off topic but my biggest pet peeve is when people moralize themselves against piracy. Like I remember a nier automata mod that couldn't function at all if you had pirated the game. Hell some modders maliciously add code in order to embarrass you if you pirated. How cucked do you have to be to fight for a corporation like fucking Square Enix lel. Also this guy on tiktok makes me wanna jump out of a cliff:
I mean, for real... It's been dead since 2010 or so. I'm not sure if it is worth mentioning it, especially as often as it does get mentioned in this thread - if anything, I feel like for the most people it can be applied as a rule: if that dude mentions PirateBay in 2024, he doesn't know anything about actual piracy. What was the western option for the past decade? I'm not quite sure. I've used RARBG, but it closed in 2023 as well, so I moved to yet another place.
Anyway, really, PirateBay is quite, quite done by this point.
Really? It's the one place I've gone to for games, I could count on one hand the times it failed me in that department in the many many years I've used it.
Really? It's the one place I've gone to for games, I could count on one hand the times it failed me in that department in the many many years I've used it.
Uh, well... yeah. I haven't visited PB in ages. For GOG games there's site that is literally named GOG Games, plus Torrminatorr forums. For Steam games, there's cs.rin.ru, albeit it has been in jeopardy as of late since Google sabotaged pretty much all the links - I think I've mentioned it somewhere in this thread.
And for scene releases - FitGirl's personal site? Really, using PB today is like using necromancy. But, hey, necromants were OP in HOMM V for what it takes.
Piratebay has more viruses nowadays then Bosnia has landmines, it's almost never worth going on there unless you're looking for something very specific.
But it can still be used if you're careful.
Ashamed of piracy? Pfff, one must have a very cushy life to be ashamed of something like that. Ridiculous. And besides most people end up buying the thing afterwards if it's really worth the money.
Though a little off topic but my biggest pet peeve is when people moralize themselves against piracy. Like I remember a nier automata mod that couldn't function at all if you had pirated the game. Hell some modders maliciously add code in order to embarrass you if you pirated. How cucked do you have to be to fight for a corporation like fucking Square Enix lel.
To be honest, it's really despicable how normalised it has become nowadays to refer to piracy as something "immoral". Like, every YT videoessay normie barely touching this topic just has to throw a thousand disclaimers in your face now: "Remember kids, piracy is REALLY REALLY BAD and is certainly NOT THE THING YOU SHOULD DO, because its ILLEGAL and AGAINST THE LAW, and it is also an INCORRECT BEHAVIOUR from your side, as poor content creators won't get their salaries because of YOUR CRIMINAL ASS STEALING things they made!" They're all obviously scared beyond reason to somehow accidentally advocate for piracy, as it'll mean YouTube corporate goons coming after them and fucking them up. But I bet 500 rubles that the majority of youtubers genuinely believe in this bullcrap agenda pushed by the big tech, and their audiences are successfully buying the idea of piracy as a kind of thing to be ashamed of. I believe the main reason is that people eventually stopped viewing the Internet as "their" place, free from the rules of the real world, where they can produce and distribute any content they want, and started considering themselves more as a guests in a place that is now owned by corporations, hence feeling the nessesity to constantly apologise for any fart that doesn't meet the corporate guidelines. The amount of self-policing, self-censorship and self-humiliation around modern Internet is disturbing.
"Remember kids, piracy is REALLY REALLY BAD and is certainly NOT THE THING YOU SHOULD DO, because its ILLEGAL and AGAINST THE LAW, and it is also an INCORRECT BEHAVIOUR from your side, as poor content creators won't get their salaries because of YOUR CRIMINAL ASS STEALING things they made!"
Honestly, I remember hearing rumors that Sony also had plans to implement the same xbox one always on DRM features but waited to see what happened Microsoft when implemented. I'd even say that there are left overs of that philosophy when your PS4's CMOS dies. When that dies, the PS4 has no way to communicate with Sony's trophy servers, thus locking you out of the game lmao.
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