Personally I sort of wish absolutely everything was saved, with private things only being revealed after everyone involved is dead. It’d be a shame for anything to be lost forever. But doing that while preserving piracy for people who are still alive is hard.

Yeah but only for minor crimes like assault and murder. This is more serious!

Microsoft has always had a strange relationship with piracy. They’d obviously prefer everyone pay for their software, and will crack down on stuff that seriously threatens this - but at the same time, their real power and profit comes from their monopoly (well, came from their monopoly; things are weird now due to their failure to win the browser wars and mobile device markets.)

If the alternative is you using a competitor’s software, they’d prefer that you pirate windows.

There is no way to be absolutely, 100% certain. Do not run pirated software on a machine that you absolutely could not afford to lose (ie. work machines). Back up important files.

That said, there’s a lot you can do to reduce your risk:

1. Only download from trusted sources; this is the real value of repackers. The megathread can help with this.

2. GOG games have their executables signed by GOG (and don’t need to be cracked, of course, because they’re DRM free.) As long as you make sure they’re legitimately signed they’re 100% safe. Note: You are almost certainly not bothering to do this.

3. If you’re even slightly unsure about a file, you can upload it to a site like virustotal: https://www.virustotal.com/ - these sites are not magic. They run it through a bunch of antivirus software, which often relies on AI that will have false positives, and of course they can only recognize stuff that either fits the patterns in their AIs or has been seen before, so some stuff could slip through. Still, it’s a good basic precaution. If only a few results come back positive, it could be a false positive; if a bunch of results do, or if any of the results are specific about what they think is wrong with it rather than vague machine learning results, then you probably shouldn’t run your file.

4. Sandboxes and virtual machines are the 99.99% safe way to run stuff if you’re unsure. Remember that a virus or trojan won’t necessarily be obvious when run, so to be really safe you’d have to run things there all the time. In truth, Sandboxie is lightweight enough that you could probably do it all the time without losing much beyond some mild annoyance.

5. Running things on the Steam deck might help a little bit because most viruses aren’t designed to operate on that environment and because, even if they are, there is less there for you to lose than on your desktop PC (except your Steam account, of course.) Proton, which it uses to run Windows games, is absolutely not designed for security or anything like that - it does give them access to your entire file system, not just the box it creates - but a normal windows virus designed without the Steam Deck or proton in mind would just fuck up the environment Proton created for it, accomplishing nothing. And, of course, as mentioned, you have the advantage that you have less important stuff on the Steam Deck to lose in the first place. So it is somewhat safer to run pirated windows games on the Steam Deck than it is elsewhere.

All of that said, if you’re really worried, another solution is to emulate console games instead. That is pretty much 100% safe (absent some weird exploit in the emulator, which AFAIK has never happened.) A game running in an emulator can only do what the emulator lets it do, inside the box the emulator creates for it. Most PC games have Switch versions and Switch emulation is very very good, even if Nintendo has forced them to halt development - we’ll see if that continues into the new Switch 2, but for now it’s a very good option that is basically 100% secure.

Honestly I disagree with the need for bittorrent and a VPN when downloading games, for several reasons:

1. Very few game companies pursue the MPAA / RIAA strategy of monitoring torrents and sending letters to ISPs. It’s not cost-efficient for most of them individually, and there isn’t a centralized organization with that level of reach and power. Those things are something you have to worry about if you’re downloading videos or music, less so games.

2. For software specifically, you generally want to download them from trusted sites, and those use file sharing sites anyway. You don’t need a VPN for them - the reason you need a VPN on BitTorrent is because anyone can slide into a torrent and see who’s downloading there (or their IP address, anyway); this isn’t true for a file sharing site. The effort it would take for an attacker to get information on who’s downloading from a file sharing site isn’t worth it, especially since most such sites would resist as much as possible (knowing that pirates are a big part of their audience and that becoming known for exposing them would destroy their reputation.)

3. While some of those sites offer torrents, those tend to be small and, again, not generally worth the time of the few videogame companies who do focus on them.

That said if you’re downloading really big-name AAA titles over bittorrent, your experience might be different.

But the main thing I would focus on in a guide is how to avoid viruses and trojans and the like. Those are the big risk for game piracy that isn’t present when downloading videos and music (unless you really screw it up and download and run MOVIE.AVI.EXE or something.)

Nintendo’s real intent is doubtless to try and ensure that nobody ever makes a functional emulator for the upcoming Switch 2.

Yeah. What I mean is that the Steam Deck itself doesn’t add anything special in that regard to fight piracy.

(Plus, I mean, Steam’s base DRM is like a screen door or a “please do not pirate” sign, lol. If Steam dies one day, Steam DRM won’t be a problem because you can basically crack it by breathing on it too hard. I assume that is purpose is to ensure that you have to violate the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions to pirate their games, not to actually slow down pirates at this point.)

They can be, but at least some of the stuff the Steam Deck does (automated updates, cloud saves, specific tweaks to get it running on its hardware) would be hard to make quite as convenient for pirates for one reason or another.

I mentioned the pirate equivalent to cloud saves, Syncthing - it is absolutely great, not that hard to set up considering what it does, and I absolutely love it and it feels like magic most of the time. But it’s still not quite as easy and reliable as buying the game on Steam and relying on Steam’s servers for cloud saves.

(The fact that it’s hard to make pirated versions reliably update automatically also means that rapid updates are one of the best ways a dev can deter pirates, at least for as long as the game remains supported. I’ve absolutely pirated games that are in early access and then bought them, partially because I liked the game and wanted to support the devs, but mostly because I wanted to get updates immediately and automatically rather than having to wait for it to appear somewhere and then install it myself.)

Most likely a bunch of them were copy-pastes of the same site.

I know when I set it up I had to add them manually, but that was years ago. Maybe this is a new thing, or maybe your specific Ubuntu instillation was a custom fork of QB that included a bunch from the start.

(I really think it’s unlikely that base QB would include them, since it would make it more obvious that they intend it to be used for piracy - something they’d want to avoid for legal reasons. Yeah, I know, but I’d rather they not get shut down.)

It’s mostly been fine-ish for anything that can’t be infected with viruses (music, video, roms, etc - usually.) There are way better options today but as long as you’re not going there for software it’s still usable.

If I recall correctly, CODEX’s Denuvo cracker was Empress anyway, so it has been just her for a long while now. There have been one or two cracks by other people for games using ancient versions of Denuvo that nobody bothered to crack before, but she’s the only one doing anything with Denuvo’s current version.

Yeah, it says that they’re all “well we would have rather do it the other way for your sakes” but the fact is that if they thought they could reliably obtain money this way they’d be doing it already. A ton of legal fees are going to be wasted pursuing people they can’t catch for one reason or another, meaning that their desire to make the pirates pay their costs isn’t going to work as reliably as they’d want.

Mastodon account just posted saying they found the issue and it will be fixed later.

I think that it’s because now we’re starting to get judges who have an actual understanding of the internet and its issues. In the past, lawyers for copyright holders could make up whatever theories of it they wanted and frame things in whatever way benefits them the most; that’s no longer the case - these judges (including the original trial judge, the appeals judges, and the Canadian Supreme Court, who handed down the original decision at stake here) plainly understand in at least a basic way how the internet is used, what an IP address is, and the complexities of assigning responsibility related to one.

Whereas ten or twenty years ago you would have had judges who mostly depended on the plaintiff’s lawyers for their understanding and who would therefore basically give them anything they asked for.

The only reason people will continue using Unity is because they’ve already made )or are in the process of making) a game using it and switching to something else would waste massive amounts of time and effort. Unity is depending on this - this is basically them squeezing everything out of existing customers without regard for long term growth.

Remember, the whole idea here is that Unity is demanding payments for already existing games. They clearly don’t care about whether people keep using Unity for new games in the future; the executives who made this decision will have cashed out and will be long gone by the time all the existing Unity games in the pipeline are done and things dry up.

The most hilarious thing about this is that, assuming crackers prevent Unity games from phoning home, the best way to support game developers would be to buy their game and then only play the cracked version, never installing the version you purchased.

The easiest way to figure out where a game is writing its saves is to load it up in Sandboxie and save your game, then check sandboxie’s box content to see what got updated or saved and where.

Also, Cyberpunk is on GOG (because it’s made by the people who run GOG), there’s no need to get it through DODI unless you have a severely restricted internet connection and therefore desperately need the smaller size of a repack - you can get the clean gog installer from gog-games. You should just be able to install the latest GOG version over the old version with no difficulty.

Why was the post on this removed from the Reddit Piracy sub? I find that slightly alarming.