181–190 of 259 posts
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Sounds like Razor could sue Rockstar for copyright infringement. That would be hilarious.
Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.
Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge?
I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
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> I expect reproducible binaries produced by a controlled toolchain from a responsible developer. I would estimate the number of videogames published for Windows PCs matching all of these critera to be roughly 0.
It's not like windows game developers are universally incompetent. They have their source so they can reproduce their binaries at will. They understand the risks of malware and how embarrassing it would be to unwittingly ship some, so they should know better than to be shipping releases built using their personal machine they also browse the web with. For Rockstar to be shipping pirated cracked binaries as their own…
Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legiti…
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This is a great example of how today's "piracy" is tomorrow's "only working copy left". I wish there were a more formal way to explicitly allow this, though I'm probably just pining for shorter copyright terms. This game was released 20 years ago, longer than the original U.S. copyright term of 14 years.
Disney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.
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This seems like a weird hill to die on? yes it's obvious that rockstar (apparently) uploaded a cracked version of their game to steam. It's not obvious why they chose to do that (ie "what is going on")
I'm not dying on any hill, I think that's a weird comment to make, let alone to make an issue out of my original comment at all. The way the comment was phrased read as though they didn't understand what had happened, not that they didn't understand why. Especially since no one has an answer to that, so no one can offer an explanation.
Maybe Rockstar has former, maybe even current members of Razor 1911 among their staff. I mean, the scene is not a reliable way to pay the bills. You need to find a "real job" at some point, and the skills you get by cracking software and making demos could find good use in the video game industry.
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Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.
Question for you from the 17 year old me. Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge? I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
Fame: Non-existent, since you don't tell people.
Money: Non-existent, you don't get paid.
In retrospect, I think a major drivers for teenagers for a lot of activities is a sense of identity. You feel like one of the role models in [name your favorite hacker movie]. It's the same reason why punks wore spikes and mohawks, goths wore black, and people might pick a genre of music (even if privately). I'd guess a lot of more negative things, like vandalism, are similar too.
You become part of a community too.
And ultimately, you contribute to it. As much as it might be illegal, cracking software helps other kids who can't afford that software. Few real engineers will use a hacked copy of AutoCAD, and literally everyone I know began to pay for music once they could afford it. On the other end of the bell curve are kids who can't afford those. Providing them with access is a community service. And it's going up against The Man. It's illegal, but by the code of ethics we followed at the time, it was very ethical.
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That was the scariest term they could come up with? The romantic swashbuckling seafarer, antagonising empires and declaring his own rules? Surely they could have done better. 'software fraud', 'software theft', 'forgery'... hmm well there's a reason I don't work in marketing obviously.
They did those as well, and they also paid for extensive marketing material to make it seem like buying a cracked game was directly contributing to a mafia that was planning on killing your granny. Do you not remember the ads? The "you wouldn't steal a car"? Piracy is just what they were able to get. Should have hired the bank's PR managers, who turned "failing to do due diligence on a customer's identity" into the c…
Which ended up being quite funny, because I very much would download a car
Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legiti…
It would be kind of sad/funny if one of the games had a bad crack and the game itself was broken and not caught by QA. For example, Earthbound has one final check that would cause the game to freeze and delete your save at the final boss.
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Both the original game and the no-cd crack are copyrighted works.
Who owns the no-cd copyright?