What a fucking nostalgia bomb. Haven’t been a part of the scene for a very long time, so seeing RAZOR 1911 in the hex triggered a flashback. They were huge back when I was running a “warez” BBS as a kid in the 90s.
When you view or edit a text (.txt) file in a text editor like Notepad, you’re most often opening a file in ASCII encoding that uses the ASCII binary values for common letters, numbers and punctuation. The only values allowed in that kind of file are lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation.
You can also view or edit binary files, like executables (.exe), but you typically need a hex editor. If you tried to open a binary file in a plain text editor it wouldn’t know how to handle all the binary values that are not part of the standard ASCII set of letters, numbers and punctuation.
Hex editors show the data in hexadecimal format. They convert the binary data to numbers from 0 to 15 where the numbers 10 to 15 are replaced by the letters A to F. Often to make it clear people are talking about the hex number they add “0x” in front of the number. So, 0 becomes 0x0, 9 becomes 0x9, 15 becomes 0xF, 16 becomes 0x10, and 255 becomes 0xFF. This is an efficient way for people to work with binary data because 16 is 2^4^ or 222*2.
Within binary files, there will still be a lot of sections that are in ASCII. For example, any error messages that have to be printed out for the user to see, like “this program cannot be operated in DOS mode”.
Razor 1911 is an infamous cracker group that has been around for decades. They often “sign” the programs they crack by putting “Razor 1911” inside the files, in a way where you can see it if you open it with a hex editor, but so it doesn’t affect the program.
So, what this is suggesting is that a program that Rockstar has released on Steam is not something they built themselves, but they’re actually distributing a cracked version that was released by Razor 1911.
Which sucks, because Arkane was one of my favorite developers before the quality of their output fell off over the past five years. I loved the Dishonored games, and Prey is the single best immersive sim ever made. I was looking forward to DeathLoop, but it ended up being kinda meh, and Redfall has been so universally panned that I haven't even bothered to try it.
Unless I’m mistaken, Denuvo constantly encrypts and decrypts everything in the process’ memory, including executable code, in order to conceal it. There is no way to do that without massive performance overhead.
There are uncracked Denuvo games to this day that don’t have performance issues. Not everyone is incompetent in implementing it. That doesn’t mean I’m defending it (but Reddit/Lemmy will like to take any sort of non-attack as defense sooooo), I’m just saying that there are Denuvo games that don’t suffer performance issues.
Bethesda Game Studios games don’t have DRM like Denuvo. BGS and Bethesda Softworks are two different entities. ID, MachineGames and other Zenimax studios tend to have DRM, not BGS.
On the other hand, didn’t Denuvo come out after Fallout 4 launched? So what would they even protect, 76?
PolyMC (with one L) is the launcher that had the controversy. Prism Launcher was forked from PolyMC, and PollyMC (with 2 Ls) is a new project forked from Prism Launcher.
The PolyMC controversy is that one of the devs went rogue and kicked everyone else off the project, so they didn’t really have a choice but to fork. They explain what happened on the FAQ of their website.
Personally, I think that the Denuvo protection on Switch games would probably be a simpler system than the full-fat PC DRM. It would probably be too intense for the Switch’s meagre processing power, and customers are definitely going to be annoyed when their game takes a minute or two to load up.
Could it pave the way for that crap on other consoles as well?
At this moment, the only current-gen console to be jailbroken is the Nintendo Switch. There’s no need for external DRM on the PS5 and Xbox because publishers can trust that users will only be able to play legit copies of games. Switch games, on the other hand, don’t have that guarantee, because dumping games on a jailbroken switch is very easy to do. Hence why Irdeto is planning to offer DRM for the Switch only.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time that third-party DRM was used on a Nintendo console. Some DS and Wii games were protected by an anti-piracy system called MetaFortress, which aimed to protect against flashcarts and pirated copies. Here’s a video from the Dolphin emulator team about its use in the all-time classic, “The Smurfs: Dance Party”
Denuvo phones home constantly. Unless denuvo is removed from the game, the game won’t be playable unless it was legitimately purchased and can be verified on denuvo’s servers.
Furthermore denuvo encrypts the game files and the denuvo files and scrambles them all together, like mixing two jars of sand from different beaches, but the denuvo sand pieces know where everything is, so the game and copy protections still work.
I wonder if an emulator that breaks DRM could be considered illegal. I would imagine that emu teams would tread carefully around this sort of thing to avoid litigation.
If you want 90% of the stuff indexed on pirate sites is dead or with only 1 seed, I haven’t found tools that take it automatically.
But there is this initiatives for books, books or paid courses are more subject to copyright strikes than entertainment material, therefore more difficult for students or workers to find.
while i think that two years of prison for this is completely ridiculous, a “let’s play” video of a visual novel, it’s essentially the same of “playing” a visual novel
Yes, but for those who don't watch anime or play anime games, it can be great to get summaries so you have context for some conversations. Like, if a friend of mine watches a TV show or plays a game when I don't, if I have no interest in watching or playing, I have no context. Maybe I want to support my friends interest without putting in the same hours so it's nice to be able to get a summary or just the important parts so I know what my friend is talking about and can at least converse with them on the basics. (Though I do believe such videos should have giant spoiler warnings)
Just a tip for those of you that do cave to pressure and go with the paid premium option. or already have one but dont want to pay for more accounts or a family account.
You can set up channels or brand accounts as sub-accounts on a premium subscription and they will act like separate accounts with the advantages of premium, so if you have a large family and don’t want to pay for the full family subscription (which only has 5 slots anyway) you can set up a few sub-accounts that each get their own subscriptions, recommendations, settings and all have the premium features.
So if you want to make a premium account for a parent or child, you can do that with one single subscription if you can take the caveat of them being brand accounts rather than fully their own thing.
This works on things like Android TV or Google TV, but you need to log into the main account then switch to a sub account in the app, however, there is no authentication to switch between channel accounts this way, so it’s really only useable for families only. I use this at home to run 4 separate nvidia shield youtube apps with their own subscriptions and recommendations on one single premium payment.
I expect they will change how that works in the future to remove the loophole, probably by charging for channel accounts or having it locked behind some kind of overpriced professional usage tier, but for now, it might be a good option for some.
Many people have also said if you set your location to for example India when signing up for premium you’ll get it basically for free compared to what it’ll cost in europe and it’ll keep working even if your location is elsewhere from there on.
I’ve been considering moving to Jellyfin for a while, but I’m worried they will do the same thing in future.
Currently would not be possible. Jellyfin does not have the sort of centralized accounts/logins that Plex does e.g. you’re not asking Jellyfin devs for permission to log into your own server. That’s just a Plex thing.
If you’re asking could they add that “feature” in the future? Highly unlikely but I guess anything is possible. Were that to happen most likely the code would get forked into a new project.
PS - Jellyfin itself is a fork from Emby back when those devs decided to close their source. Myself & tons of other people dropped Emby at that point & migrated to Jellyfin. jellyfin.org/docs/general/about/
I haven’t had a chance to do the research yet, so pardon a dumb question that might have an easy answer. With the setup I’ve described, would JellyFin just be a drop in replacement or would I need to drastically change things to get the same basic work flow?
Offhand it sounds like it could be a drop in replacement for you. But there are a lot of other variables you’d need to consider e.g. if you require specific app/TV support & don’t like the current Jellyfin offerings.
Maybe others can clarify or you can post with any specific requirements/questions in the Jellyfin forums or the lemmy communities !jellyfin / !jellyfin
That aside you could always just try it out & see how you like it.
Ultimately, I think that is what I am doing, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask someone with experience with the software already just in case there was an obviouls big red stop sign I was missing. Looks like I have other plans this weekend then playing more Stanfield or Baluder’s Gate 3. Thanks for the help and info.
Plex is so bizarre. I consider myself a tech-savvy person, but I can’t wrap my head around the concept of “I host Example App on my servers. I host, maintain, and pay for the instance of Example App and servers myself. I also pay for a license for Example App. But Example Company controls my instance.” It’s so foreign to everything you can host yourself. It’s such an unfair commercial practice that I can’t for the life of me explain how such a model can survive. Self-hosting is about regaining control in my books. Yet Plex over here thinks they can not only shove down the maintenance burden and costs of everything down my throat, but also control access to my data. The solution to Plex’s retarded ToS violation situation is for Plex to say shit happens, how about we stop controlling everything you do with Plex to such an excessive degree that the media mafia can accuse us of empowering piracy instead of… the person who hosts pirated media on their server? Plex’s biggest business liability is Plex’s own business practices. They’re practically begging the media mafia to sue them.
I thought the phone home was to make it easy to have different devices talk to each other. It’s similar for a lot of IoT products. If properly set up, they don’t need to phone home and can find each other with the setting ayku input. However, many users are less technical and automating this through a central service makes it easier. Most companies also use this to scoop up personal info too, unfortunately.
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