[SpaceL10n]

It's weird reading about my life as if it's history.

Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the world was starving for cool applications. Computers were starting to live up to their promises and software was just like recipe cards.

[KronisLV]

> It's weird reading about my life as if it's history. Everyone was doing it.

Here in Latvia that's still somewhat the case, at least according to statistics like these: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-in...

I've personally seen people who choose to pirate everything from movies, to OSes and IDEs, and have no problem with doing that whatsoever. That said, I can kind of understand it, due to many not exactly having lots of money to throw around.

Personally, I live a bit more ethically, but it kind of sucks: I'm not sure what I'd do without JetBrains offering student licenses, followed by a graduation discount and recurring discounts. I've also not bought a AAA game on release in years, it's always sometime later on sale etc. The same goes for server hosting, most PaaS solutions are too expensive and vendors like AWS and GCP are outside of my price point.

But hey, OSes like Linux and software like LibreOffice are a godsend. As are free IDEs and text editors as well, sometimes.

[wkat4242]

I used to copy like crazy but now that I have a good job I pay for most of my software. Mainly because I like to keep my computer clean from malware. If I ever need to run something pirated because it's ridiculously expensive (like Adobe stuff or IDA pro) I run it in a VM or an isolated machine.

It's less out of an ethical sense though. Video I still pirate by the terabyte. Most of that comes from large media concerns that I don't really have much care for. The small games industry I support as much as I can on GOG.

Latvia and Bulgaria are great for torrent sites indeed, there seems to be nobody even trying to take them down unlike in western europe.

[harha]

It’s funny how regular software now seems fishy now that everyone is calling home. I’m close to getting a VM or a raspberry pi to run Citrix and zoom because they have all this junk that runs at startup and removing it causes strange error messages.

[isatty]

Yeah the world has changed. Sure, limewire had tons of trustmebro.mp4.exes but these days I don’t trust cracked software to not be mining coins or exfiling my personal data.

I suppose it was still the case back in the day (more for botnets than coins?) but I just simply cared less. Had to get my hands on the AAA games.

[namaria]

Hell I don't trust most legit software with my data. I still remember people being in awe of how I made Teams work on my Linux notebook (the previous guy couldn't make it right for some reason) by just running it in Chromium. The more sandboxed these 'apps' can be the better.

[ElectricalUnion]

I myself run it in Edge, specifically because I believe Microsoft is less capable of exfiltrating and collecting my data effectively that Google.

That and the "official" "Linux" app is basically unsupported.

[ornornor]

MS dropped support for the “Linux” “client”.

That client was basically an electron app.

How lazy is it to drop support for it? Especially as they’re pretending to be nice now, not hate Linux anymore, rolling it into windows etc.

MS will always be the greedy MS. Embrace extend extinguish.

Fwiw, teams runs well enough in chromium. I don’t use chromium for anything else so chromium has basically become my MS teams “Linux” “client” since they dropped support for it.

I’d run it in its own Firefox container but it would seem like MS purposefully cripples teams in Firefox as I can’t get background blurring or live captioning/translation to work there.

Just like google that requires you to use chrome AND be logged in to unlock background blurring… same evil, but story for another time.

[arsome]

If you're pirating IDA Pro, you're probably the type of person who can figure out which cracks are real and which aren't pretty quick.

[wkat4242]

True yes but a lot of cracks are real and still include malware. And it can even be introduced remotely. A malware downloader is a few lines of code hidden among millions.

Also analyzing malware tends to make one more paranoid. This is definitely a thing too.

And the most powerful features of it like hexrays require cloud cooperation so they don't work :(

I really wish it was affordable for individuals because I would pay for it if I could.

[arsome]

IDA's decompiler is only cloud dependent if you have the crappy version, if you have the full Pro version with the add on its entirely local.

While it's true that malware could hide well theoretically, I'll also add that in my experience investigating malware infections from friends and family and occasionally hunting for malware myself, samples attached to cracked software tend to be things like miners, iStealer, script kiddie RATs, etc using simple "binders" - which are usually incredibly obvious, like extract the real executable into %temp% or the usual RunPE gimmick. People posting malware on torrent sites are not exactly APTs using spear phishing attacks.

[nicolas_t]

Yes, if only IDA pro had a hobbyist license :(

[rft]

For what it's worth, IDA now comes in an IDA Home version [1, 2]. It is a one year subscription for 365 USD (single arch) and is cloud tethered for at least the decompilers. I no longer have access to IDA Pro via my university, so I am now using Ghidra. I can recommend newcomers to take a look at it or other tools (e.g. binary ninja), if you are not locked into your IDA workflow.

For me IDA Home seems to lack at least one key feature we needed back then: customizable CPU plugins. We had to extend one with a newer version of the instruction set. On top of that, that CPU type is not even available via Home. Also no RISC-V support (yet?).

On another note: the whole cloud based concept for a disassembler/decompiler with debug support sounds like a recipe for disaster. One wrong key press and you might run malware on an internet connected system. Even when only disassembling, I am tempted to run everything in an offline VM to defend against bugs in the disassembler.

[1] https://hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi/products [2] https://hex-rays.com/ida-home/

[seanp2k2]

luckily, Ghidra exists now

[FastEatSlow]

There is IDA Home https://hex-rays.com/ida-home/

[TaylorAlexander]

Yeah I just run Linux and I’ve not needed to pirate or pay for software in years. Doesn’t work for everyone but as a robotics engineer it all works out for me. It took me some time to switch from windows ten years ago but I’ve never looked back.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I too am Linux only 99% of the time. I keep some Windows VMs around for tools I rarely need to run. Some are 10+ year old legitimate commercial software with online activation that now accuses me of piracy. Even when you try to do the right thing you get screwed.

[TaylorAlexander]

Yep I’ve got a crusty old Windows 7 VM, though I’ve not needed to use it for my work in many years. Certainly handy to have now and then. It is remarkable however how much I’m able to do with Wine these days! When something says it’s windows only I go straight to the EXE and run it and most of the time it works! Always makes me happy.

[glandium]

It was so common that "something cd key" was a common search term. And people would put that in the wrong input box/window such that they would end up typing that in chat rooms. In some of those, people would reply with the same "something cd key" followed with "to you too", as if it were some form of greetings. Later on, people would show up saying "something random cd key" as an actual form of greeting, not a mistake.

[Zircom]

Reminds how typing an album name into Google used to autocomplete to add MediaFire right after it.

[nunez]

or site:blogspot.com. (So many legit downloads on blogspot, even today, though most of those links are dead now :( )

[xtracto]

I remember serials.ws with its frame based we site... had all the keys you'd need. Also there was a windows program that was basically a database of keys and serials.

[ornornor]

Those were the days.

There was also that site with all the trainers and cracks for every game ever, with a little landing page that would dynamically show online and offline mirrors before it was cool. I forget its name but as a 10–14 years old I loved it.

[ornornor]

gamecopyworld.com it was called. I just remembered.

[nunez]

"______ serial" was my go-to on Google.

[13of40]

When I was a kid it was an actual thing to know how to lift postage stamps off of envelopes with rubbing alcohol so they could be reused to mail pirate floppy disks to your friends. Try explaining that to a kid today and they'll think you had a stroke.

[tonymillion]

We used to just cover the entire envelope in Sellotape and put an address label over the top so we could just wipe off the postage mark - a dated ink stamp over the postage stamp (Royal Mail employees circa 1990 didn’t get paid enough to care) and use it again.

If you regularly swapped disks with someone you’d just mail the envelope along with the disk

[hattmall]

Now you can just buy bootleg stamps on Amazon. Search "Forever Stamps". Amazon catches them frequently but then they just liquidate the stamps. My local Amazon returns store has them upfront 100 for $10.00 and they have tons of them.

[ilyt]

Uh, here since forever post office put rubber stamp mark on stamps to prevent that, I'm surprised there is country that doesn't

[13of40]

IIRC, there were two kinds of cancellation ink - black and red. The black just dissolved in isopropyl alcohol, but red was permanent. Probably the result of some cost / benefit analysis.

[dopidopHN]

Yeah exactly. How do you go around the ink on the stamps? Ours ( French ) don’t go away with alcool. At least it was not the case in the 90´s.

[vidanay]

I remember the days of cracked software on Apple II systems. The crackers would add custom splash screens advertising themselves.

http://artscene.textfiles.com/intros/APPLEII/

[LocalH]

The related C64 cracking scene also begat the demo scene. The flashy crack intros with sprites, scrollers, and raster bars became the flashy demo intros, and from there they learned about a wonderful thing called "design".

[nonethewiser]

Keygen music is another similar relic. They are chiptunes included in cracked software. Their names were often just whatever software they were cracking. I like Adobe Create Suite 4 here https://youtube.com/watch?v=FVX6t-ivMfE&feature=share

[can16358p]

I sometimes just opened keygens after I was done cracking, just to listen to it more.

[kdtsh]

The revelation for me was when a school friend of mine in the early 2000s told me about a site called crack.cd which had serials or keygens for practically any software I wanted. It was a whole new world, I loved it. Only had to nuke my computer once after a keygen turned out to be a virus! (The other occasion on which I lost everything was when I was installing Ubuntu 5.10 ‘Breezy Badger’ for dual booting with Windows on the family computer and accidentally wiped the entire disk instead of just the old Linux partition - that was a bit more awkward because it had all our family photos on it ever since digital cameras started coming out, but luckily I found a CD backup of them all and also tried my hand at downloading and using a cracked file restoration program. Definitely took some time to rebuild trust and explain that I know what I did wrong and wouldn’t do something like that again.)

I had lots of learning experiences with this kind of stuff that I’m very glad I could have in my little years of first being online, when it wasn’t tied to anything really important, it was all just for fun. Everything would be different for me today if I didn’t have the opportunity to play with non-zero but relatively little risk.

[NDizzle]

I used those sites to find new software to check out. The popular stuff had to be good, right?

[ilyt]

My friend from school basically got his entire PC upgrades for good 5-6 years paid because he "invested" in CD burner (then-expensive devices requiring SCSI card to even work) and profited off copying business. Think it was around age of 10.

[dopidopHN]

I started a « business » sending burned games to tunisia from rural France. At the time Tunisia had a thriving game cafe scene. But shitty broadband.

It was cheaper to find someone on a phpbb forum to send you physically something than dealing with ISP and shitty local internet laws.

It lasted for a year or so. I send hundreds of disks. Was getting pay thought bank wire on my older brother account.

I think I drink all of it in cheap pastis drink.

[ptsneves]

Keep in mind that here in Poland it is said cdprojekt of Witcher and cyberpunk fame started by selling bootlegged western games. I do not have a source for this.

[srfvtgb]

The founders got their start selling pirated software, but CD Projekt itself started as a legit importer and localiser. Their initial success was due to knowing that they needed to compete with pirates on quality and convenience because piracy was so prevalent in Poland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt#Founding

[ilyt]

I remember! Baldur's Gate was a first "legit" game I bought for my pocket money that wasn't just "a game attached to a magazine".

And the localization was epic. It would be basically equivalent to all movie/TV star localization on the west. I still like the translated narrator better than the original.

[rasz]

CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwiński aka 'S.S. Captain' (SS came from Star Ship)

https://spidersweb.pl/plus/2021/04/cdprojekt-niekoloryzowane...

translated, but broken images: https://spidersweb-pl.translate.goog/plus/2021/04/cdprojekt-...

[buffington]

Between my freshman and sophomore years in high school I: a) convinced the reluctant phone company to install a dedicated phone line in my bedroom (apparently a very uncommon setup) of my parent's house. b) hooked up a 9600 baud modem I'd found in a dumpster to it and my 386-33mhz computer c) ran a BBS for the sole purpose of having people upload pirated software.

That said, when I do recall that period of time I do feel a bit guilty about the piracy angle. But I'm also reminded of how the original premise (having people give me software) was eclipsed by all of the other things the BBS provided. Within about a month of getting it up and running I'd joined a network of other BBSes that'd automatically call up other BBSes to distribute "packets" (I don't recall the terms used) that'd contain emails, forum posts, and more, of all the other BBSes in the network. It was like having a (very slow) internet connection in my bedroom in 1991, which was not a thing a typical high school skater kid with, at best, a 2.0 GPA, would have, let alone even know existed at the time.

Suggesting that what I learned from that experience was the foundation of my career is a massive understatement. It got me my first tech job, gave me confidence in starting a dot-com (which survived the dot-com-bubble-burst), and built relationships that have lasted over 30 years.

[hulahoof]

As a kid my main source of new games was to hire it from the video store overnight, install it and then download a no-cd crack. I dont recall ever running into issues finding one.

[giobox]

Your local video store rented PC games? Where I grew up, console games for sure were available in video rental places but there was never a business in renting PC games. I wish there had been!

[dopidopHN]

the public library in my 20k rural town was lending game for 1 euros / week. The console itself for 3/week.

That was ...amazing.

[technion]

I remember buying games that would come with a huge "don't copy that floppy" booklet. I remember it even argued selling the game when I was done with it was unethical and would likely lead to jail.

[treeman79]

Linus from Tech Tips still pirates windows. He even has a whole video on why.

https://youtu.be/M3bezYerYxQ

[tripdout]

Is it even piracy when Windows allows you to use it unactivated?

[mise_en_place]

It’s nagware, like WinRAR.

[anticensor]

Oh, you mean the never ending forty days.

[Dalewyn]

Technically yes.

[seanp2k2]

MassGrave exists these days but almost all laptops come with a Win10/11 license anyway now, probably enough legal grey area to CYA for personal use but I wouldn’t risk it for anything for-profit, even a startup.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Until recently he's run his corporate infrastructure on Windows servers. Not quite the same league as reinstalling on hardware with an existing license.

[washadjeffmad]

In many cases, disassembling and modding was often necessary to get software working on your system. We all shared executables that patched bugs, added features, and improved performance back in the 90s and 00s.

[Borg3]

Haha :) I still do so for some old legacy games. The biggest patching project was AI War: Fleet Command. Great game, but quite a bit of bugs and missing features. Spend weeks in CIL decompiler, understanding code and then making patches.

[nunez]

pirated software is everywhere in the third world still (hell, even in the first world)