81–90 of 231 posts
My childhood hero. Sad to read what he went through in prison. The warez scene is still active and there's no slowing down so this bust doesn't really mean shit. Shoutout to the OGs RELOADED, SKIDROW, RAZOR, PARADOX,CODEX.
Ah, PARADOX. Nostalgia when hearing the Photoshop CS2 Keygen music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYvjFOKOP7c
The nostalgia hits hard. Thank you.
I'm pretty sure that I'd have stopped with just probation, yes. Having the feds raid your house, confiscate all your gear, and put you through the hell of their investigations for a year was enough of a wake up call for me. The gap between a sufficient punishment and what he actually got is the harshest reality in all this. It's very similar to what people have gone through for small marijuana related offenses.
This is why I never understand people who get mad at ‘lenient’ sentences for crimes. There are no crimes I would commit where, say, 1 year in prison wouldn’t be a deterrent but 5 years would be. If the point of prison is to deter crime, then adding longer sentences isn’t going to change anything.
I was a member of Razor back in the day. I noticed that he mentioned he wouldn't say how he got Quake released before release date. I can share how I participated in an early release: I had befriended the manager of Electronics Boutique because I bought frequently there for many years prior to getting into pirating games. He would give me games that arrived but weren't on the shelf yet. From there, it was uploaded to…
I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair. Eager to hear opinions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He ruined the lives of many hard-working software developers who relied on selling their code to feed their families. This was back when programming was a highly skilled and difficult job that only a few could do, so cracking was even more harshly targeting people.
Can you really point to a single other person whose life was ruined other than the guy who went to prison?
This guy is a hero. What he did should not be a crime. It's time for a Freedom to Publish Amendment: Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed. Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish or implement ideas.
If they can't legally stop people from republishing IP, then they'll make it hard. Denuvo, other DRM, or just go to fully streaming-only for the first year or two after launch. Want to play Battlefield 6, subscribe to PS Now. And this will likely hit PCs harder than consoles since de facto there have been near-zero hypervisor breaks of any relevance in consoles since the PS4/XB1 era, everything is signed and encrypted and TPM'd to death.
AMD's SVP for datacenter and embedded has talked about how their Secure Encrypted Virtualization and other security features are actually coming from work on consoles, to the datacenter market these days. And now there's Pluton coming up too (although apparently there have been some serious breaches in TPM 2.0 very recently that may ruin a lot of the pluton work as well, we can look forward to windows 12 I guess!).
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-sev-xbox-cryptographic...
So far, the EU hasn't been willing to apply their rulemaking on iphones to video game consoles yet, and tbh that is a far more noxious case of "you don't own the hardware". And that's what PCs might turn into if IP law vanishes, the practical security measures would ramp up to compensate. And no, consoles aren't being sold at a significant loss in the way people think they are. PS5 is sold at a profit, Xbox Series consoles might be sold at break even or a small loss, or it could just be hollywood accounting for the purposes of making a legal argument at the trial to get apple's ecosystem broken open. They had a financial interest in being able to argue that the ruling shouldn't apply to them and that their equally-locked-down app stores shouldn't be subject to competition or user freedom in general.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns...
Why do people like him think copyright laws are bad and made by rich people, but also support open source software, which relies on the same copyright laws to exist. If hes an anarchist then fine, but it looks like he wants laws that benefit him and not people that actually write software. I read the whole thing and I still don't know why he did it. He says there was no money incentive and his work had no impact on p…
They did it for the thrill and because they could. It was a different time.
But sometimes I still try to do things I can't - I currently have a broken wrist.
I was a member of Razor back in the day. I noticed that he mentioned he wouldn't say how he got Quake released before release date. I can share how I participated in an early release: I had befriended the manager of Electronics Boutique because I bought frequently there for many years prior to getting into pirating games. He would give me games that arrived but weren't on the shelf yet. From there, it was uploaded to…
"...adults got sent to jail and had their lives ruined." I'm sure it is a polemic terrain, but I really wonder if this is fair. Eager to hear opinions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it serves corporations that governments work for. and it's ironic that we pay for it while big corporations can avoid paying taxes as they please.
I'm the last person to defend corporations. That said, US corporations definitely don't avoid "paying taxes." The corporate income tax rate imposed by the federal government is 21%. Employees pay income and social security taxes on top of those earnings after. From the moment a company earns income until it lands in the hands of employees the government can take as much as HALF of it. This includes everyone on salary…