this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] MashingBundle@lemmy.fmhy.ml 367 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (27 children)

I saw this tweet a while ago that was like "Piracy lore is crazy, there's only like 2 people who know how to crack Denuvo. One of them is a psychotic transphobe who speaks like a JRPG villain, and the other only cracks football games"

I'm paraphrasing, but honestly it's so accurate...

Edit: For anyone confused, here is a great writeup on the history of Denuvo cracking, and Empresses lunacy

[–] Gatsby@lemm.ee 116 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Only two people willing to crack denuvo games. And publicise their cracks.

Usually talent like that leads to well paying jobs, well paying jobs usually lead to wanting to not go to prison.

That doesn't mean people don't have the skill, it means they're not willing to use it, when someone else is already taking the heat

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[–] Blamemeta@lemmy.world 77 points 1 year ago

You have to be crazy to crack denuvo, and Empress fits the bill

[–] DrJenkem@lemmy.blugatch.tube 47 points 1 year ago

Football manager uses a really old version of Denuvo too.

[–] BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Aside from balking at the audacity of using a platform for piracy as her own personal blog, the community was quick to knock her down a peg.

So I guess you read them all? The great thinkers? To verify how you are above and beyond their thinking? Do you understand how utterly arrogant this post makes you? I will tell you why. To put yourself above thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Adam Smith, John Locke, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Francisco de Vitoria, Friedrich Nietzsche and so many others. Human beings who have helped shape the foundation of the world we live in today. I am talking about the most basic of basic stuff we now take for granted like property, human rights, democratic governance and rule of law. Without these ideas and those who dedicated their lives to refine them, our world could not be like it is today.

This was a strong argument, but as someone else jokingly pointed out:

removed shut up, they pirated rdr2

Which, to be fair, Hobbes and Kant never did.

I'm fucking dead 😂

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[–] JelloBrains@kbin.social 130 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I miss mostly anonymous people cracking games without running around screaming from the rafters about gremlins in their modems stealing their breakfast bars. I can't believe most if not all Denuvo releases are now only cracked by this person.

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[–] SilentStorms@lemmy.fmhy.ml 111 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is why I don't trust her releases. God knows what she'll put in them to try and get at her "enemies" during some psychotic episode.

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[–] sarvo99@lemmy.dbzer0.com 111 points 1 year ago (14 children)

you know whats sad - there are no denuvo crackers right now other than this psychopath bitch

[–] NoTime@lemmy.one 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is this what cracking Denuvo does to people?

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[–] IverCoder@lemmy.world 57 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I heard there was this other one who's in a healthy mental state but only agrees to crack football games

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 134 points 1 year ago

The first part of your comment contradicts the second.

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[–] JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works 39 points 1 year ago

I'm just going to assume if she disappears, at any point, that she is in rehab for meth. Lots of meth.

[–] Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Wait, so crackers don't publish any documentation on cracking Denuvo? They just keep all the knowledge to themselves? Or is it just that nobody else wants to do it?

[–] minnieo@kbin.social 50 points 1 year ago (9 children)

they keep it to themselves to remain on top. empress also accepts donations, even going so far as to refuse to crack a game unless she receives a certain amount of money like $500.

she doesn’t release info because then she won’t be needed, and therefore won’t receive money for something that many crackers can do

[–] Freesoftwareenjoyer@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's crazy. Those people are no better than the companies that put DRM in their products then.

I wonder if we could do crowdfunding to pay someone to write and release the documentation? This way Denuvo cracking would be easy for any experienced cracker to learn.

[–] McJonalds@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

isn't that sort of what's happening? she wants money for her work, and she won't be able to live off of doing this if there is enough competition. this lady, insane as she is, isn't the problem. it's that finding something rewarding to do, and live off, isn't easy. in fact, it is incredibly artificially, hard

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[–] Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com 100 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was kind of funny the first few times, now I just kind of cringe at her whenever she has one of these meltdowns.

[–] FinalFallacy@kbin.social 45 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Genius and insanity are close bedfellows.

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[–] Melody@lemmy.one 85 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Empress is a neurotic narcissist who needs to be NUKED at every release and HARD MUTED, IGNORED, AND DEPLATFORMED by every sociopathic rant she makes.

We should not be giving her attention by talking about her; she needs to be SHUNNED into OBSCURITY. Let her fucking philosophize in her own damn isolation. Her behavior is unacceptable by most social standards and her contributions to society are not so significant we can't do without them.

[–] icogniito@lemmy.zip 82 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I would agree except for the fact that the only person out there who cracks denuvo is a delirious psycopath. The denuvo piracy lore is so fucking hillarious

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[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 74 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me, five minutes ago: "who's this Empress?"

Me, now: "I need to follow her, it's free popcorn!"

[–] totallynotfbi@lemmy.fmhy.ml 73 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Man, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole writeup about Empress, and she used to be 10x as psychotic

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[–] massive_bereavement@kbin.social 64 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I may or may not have done some cracking since the early 90s.
Back then three things were true for me to start that hobby:

  1. Had a computer and lots of free time.
  2. Had 0 money but friends that would lend me a game for a week or two.
  3. Had access to burnable media.

This was mostly me trying to keep playing games after giving the disk (or disks) back.
However, once I might have cracked GTA (the original), the rush of finally understanding how a debugger worked and figuring it out, made actually playing less apealing than the whole figuring it out.

It made me rent games then just try figuring out how to crack them, but that was financially killing me as again I had nothing to begin with and I was now at minus some.

Granted that none of the early protections were anything similar to Denuvo.
In most cases, it was just a case of blocking a cd check here and there. Some had hilarious protections where the game would screw the player if detected: RA2 would be probably the most famous I remember. Often than not it made me paranoid if I had triped a trap and the game was being unfair or bugged.

Somehow I kept going until I shifted towards the Hackintosh scene.

Then when the first humble bundle appeared and people pirated it, it disgusted me to no avail and finally left this part of my life.

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[–] totallynotfbi@lemmy.fmhy.ml 60 points 1 year ago

Lol, this sounds like a grandma complaining that Facebook is deleting her posts

[–] 001100010010@lemmy.dbzer0.com 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (21 children)

This reminds me of the conflict between Graphene OS's Dev and Louis Rossmann, and now Rossmann had to uninstall Graphene OS because he fears of the Dev injecting malware.

Edit: Video link, same one as the one in the replies below:

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0

Mirror: https://onion.tube/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0

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[–] Coeus@coeus.sbs 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I remember when everyone was simping over her when she was cracking Hogwarts Legacy but no one cared once the crack was released.

[–] foxfell@lemmy.ml 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Words not a lady but a Pirate!🦜

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[–] IYeetKids@reddthat.com 32 points 1 year ago

I miss CPY :'(

[–] MetalHead77@lemmy.ml 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

With CPY and Codex gone the PC cracking scene is dead and gone as far as AAA games are concerned. Denuvo is too difficult and time consuming to crack. The scene lost.

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[–] jormaig@programming.dev 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm out of the loop. What happened this time?

[–] IverCoder@lemmy.world 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A theory, but probably Empress wants to defame 1337x for "bundling cryptominers with torrents" so she can distract the community to not noticing that she will actually be the one to do such thing

[–] Steeve@lemmy.ca 54 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Any evidence to this or just speculation? Empress is absolutely batshit fucking insane for sure, but so far we've got no reason to believe she's planning bundle cryptominers with cracked denuvo games as far as I can tell.

[–] IverCoder@lemmy.world 42 points 1 year ago

Just speculation, but Empress just generally gives me that tinfoil-hats-are-strongly-recommended vibes

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