this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Everybody talks about torrenting, but recently when searched for some software I stumbled on regular sites with extensive collection of cracked programs. There's many of them, but what I looked at closely was filecr . com and what I've seen puzzled me. They have many, many releases. Old, recent what you need. All neatly organized, just like regular legit software store. I've tried one of files and it was clean and worked flawlessly.

How they operate so openly? What's the catch?

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[–] PeachMan@lemmy.one 21 points 1 year ago

If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. It's possible that this site you found is perfectly safe, but it's also very possible that it's a honeypot or they're serving up their cracks with a side of malware. I would recommend known torrent websites and reputable crack builders. Running a custom, unsigned .exe is already a risky activity, don't make it more dangerous.

[–] Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some possible issues are:

It could be a honeypot. While this likely won't be the case, if you connect to a website and download directly from there, depending on your browser and os, general privavy and anonymity, they might be able to fingerprint you. Check against some other databases from sites that you visited today that have your real name and you're bust. Unlikely, but possible.

If the website gets shut down because of suspicion of malicious activity and they intentified visitors, again, through a fingerprint or similar, it's beasically the same as a honeypot.

So basically, the complexity of modern web browsing is the general issue. How do you circumvent this? Ideally you don't. Just use a torrent with a p2p VPN in a secure and anonymous manner and you don't even have to worry about your Javascript canvas.

[–] Kissaki@feddit.de -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You lay out a highly sophisticated attack when it's simple to adjust the downloaded software to call home. Why would anyone invest that much into something like that (you left out where "some other databases" would be and how reliable they would be) when there are much simpler and more reliable approaches?

[–] Devjavu@lemmy.dbzer0.com -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

Look for monetization. Bandwidth costs money which makes torrents great since ideally everyone shares the burden.

Ads alone probably won't cover the burden, so they either have a subscription or have another agenda. Some might be legit for a while to sell out to the highest bidder at some point.

That said, there're some examples of someone just loving to distribute e.g. Wii or older games. They usually have really slow download speed though.