Piracy and Star Trek communities had a lot more success migrating their communities over to lemmy compared to other communities. Not 100% success as many opposed to the migration (I remember seeing big drama on r/piracy back then, and lesser drama on r/startrek), but a good chuck of them was successfully migrating to lemmy.
Edit: wait, I didn’t realized it’s @db0 himself that made this post. Man, I don’t know how you’re able keep going with encouraging redditors to migrate to lemmy with how redditors that stay on r/piracy was treating you. I say good riddance! Your hard work paid off!
Bro, this community rocks, I didn’t ditch Reddit completely but god all the time I head to /r/piracy are the same repeated memes all over again, here we have actual discussion.
As /r/piracy was one of my favorite subreddits, if not the favorite I always was scared Reddit would vanish it… Well not anymore, I am glad Lemmy happened so we have this awesome community, possibly forever.
BTW my lemm.ee account was created due to my prior lemmy.world blocking this community, I know they backtracked that decision, but I am so comfortable here that I didn’t even bother to go back.
Lol, for me it was similar, I had a few things I didn’t like about lemm.ee so I ditched my account there and went here by accident (well just by searchimg and it fulfilling all my needs and a ton more things), ended up liking this instance a ton so it became my daily driver
Well first they support file uploads, second I feel like everyone I ever met from this instance was nice to everyone (sure that can be because it’s smaller but it also has less controversies (i.e. what the dude I was replying to, the lemmy.world blocking us) due to the overall nature of this instance)
Went here for the file uploads, stayed for the community, that’s what I can personally say
My memory is hazy, but during the subreddit protest, he was somehow removed from moderator list (did the admins got involved?), and the sub reopened shortly after. From then on, any thread about migration to Lemmy is full of people roasting each other. It was awful. No idea why those who remains were so vehemently opposed to migration of a piracy community. It’s not like you can openly discuss piracy stuff on Reddit without risking removal by the admins.
Not to sound too tinfoil-hatty, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of that was sock puppet accounts. When you don’t want people to unify and leave, just start a flame war!
How did redditors treat him? I was subscribed to the sub and I have no idea who db0 is. I recently learned that db0 owns the lemmy.dbzer0.com instance but I don’t know anything beyond that.
It’s unprecedented at the time because he was the top mod so the only one that can remove him was Reddit admins, and they did. r/piracy fell into a complete chaos shortly after that, lots of awful stuff so I didn’t stay long to see how it went.
I miss the days where you didn’t have to spend anything to pirate, of course you don’t have to now but it’s much tougher to get large files from file hosts. And the video quality on most streaming sites is mostly 720p and if a website does have higher quality there’s just a lot of buffering
Don’t use raw torrents with Stremio - it ties up slots on seeders, and doesn’t seed for itself. That’s why they recommend RealDebrid. If you want to rawdog torrents, go rawdog torrents and please without Stremio.
I’ve avoided Sony products as best I can since then. I’m probably not aware of the full suite of Sony-owned brands and companies, but rootkit made it so I haven’t had a piece of Sony branded merchandise in almost 20 years.
My wf-xm4 earphones have battery problems and sony won’t do any about it. it’s a known problem, so I went out and got a sony es receiver, that has a known hissing problem and they won’t do anything about it. Maybe ill learn someday.
That’s 2Password2Remember, they sign off every comment that way. It’s surprisingly relevant a lot of the time, though: America has had an almost unrivaled hand in shaping the economic landscape of Japan, from the San Francisco Treaty to the Plaza Accords
Hilariously enough, even at the theater, you’d get a better experience pirating the movie. Y’know, cause you’d ACTUALLY GET TO WATCH THE MOVIE AT ALL. Proving yet again piracy is a service problem.
“\ “ and [tab] and * are your friends. I’ve been using spaces in Unix filesystems since the early 90s with no issues. Also, using terminal fonts that•put•a•faint•dot•in•each•space•character helps.
This is fine for the most basic of use cases but once you start looping through file names or what have you, you have to start writing robust correct bash and nobody does that
Yeah but at least with periods in the title tab complete will just complete the file name all the way while with a filename with spaces I have to escape the damn space with “\ ” like you said. Why do more work when I don’t have to?
I work on a Web app and we recently decided that we’re just not gonna support double quotes in free text fields because oh holy balls what a thing it is to try to deal with those in a way that doesn’t open you up to multiple encoding vulnerabilities.
The issue is the filter that we’re using to avoid multiple encoding attacks de-escapes everything via multiple rounds, then tries to pass it to the next layer of filtering with the de-escaped request body as a json string. Your absolutely right that this is a silly way of doing it, but sometimes we have to live with decisions that were made before we were onboarded to a project. In this particular case, I pushed to improve the filters but all our PO heard was “spend development time weakening security” and at the end of the day they decide what to do and we do it.
This method is a band-aid patch when your downstream code is all messed up and you can’t fix it. Instead of treating the input string correctly, it just removes anything that might possibly trigger some vulnerability in wrong code.
It’s a way bigger pain in the ass than people think it is. I remember having to parse output from a tool for work that had tons of output in tabular format, mixed with normal sentence like strings. JSON, YAML, or XML outputs weren’t available so I had to do a nasty mess of grep, awk, cut, and head/tail, to get what I wanted. My first attempt was literally counting the characters so I could cut out exactly what I needed, but as we all know, hardcoding values is a recipe for headaches later on.
Here’s a horror story from literally yesterday. We have been fighting a system for a client for weeks and it has been a nightmare. Our clients just told us that they outsourced some of their work to an Indian outfit but that outfit is unfamiliar with Linux and doesn’t know how to edit text files so they have been downloading the files to their Windows machines, editing them in Windows, then uploading the contaminated text files back into Linux. None of them, not our client nor the outfit they hired, understood why this was a problem. We have no idea what files are affected and we won’t know until they fail because they obviously did not keep track of what they touched.
I will never forgive excel for automatically converting all of my dates to some weird ass format, or stripping single quotes randomly, or something other BS that they do for no reason
My absolute favourite is stripping leading zeroes from any text that looks like a number, then displaying it in scientific notation. But we get Copilot, so it balances out, right?
Does windows add an extra character at the end that gets converted to new line on linux? Because the other day I were copying a script and after pasting it an extra line was added after every single line, even the empty lines.
I had Radarr pointed to the “Movie” folder, then I changed it to the “Media” folder thinking that that would somehow be “better”.
Whoosh It was all gone the next time I looked, because it couldn’t find entries for whatever it came across, I guess. I ended up having to re-design the whole environment from pretty much scratch. The good news was that since I had “imported” my library initially, I had references to most of the stuff I lost.
You’ll be fine. Stop seeding the thing they don’t like and increase your security—VPN, seedbox, private trackers, etc. If anybody asks, you had an asshole neighbor kid who guessed your WiFi password.
Edit: just realized that you were using a server with Hetzner—Germany is one of the worst places for torrenting. Get a server in a friendlier country for that.
If you have money to spend (and THAT much), you can still pirate, but if you pirate without trying to fund the source of your art and tools, you’re a mega asshole. Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have. You can find the creators of your games online, find their ko-fis, their patreons. Where there’s a will there’s a way
Depending which country we’re talking about. Top 5% in Malawi is probably still a person who needs to pirate, although I could be wrong about that with 3rd world wealth inequality.
Edit: Based on the top 10% figure, guesses and napkin math, that’s an income of about 5000USD annually, so yeah pirate away.
Are you free to learn or consume as necessary for your survival from the society you’re expected to grow to support? No? Then you have a need to pirate.
I think the point was that despite him being top 5% of earners in his country, he’s still poor and thus still pirates.
For me it’s always been different, I’ve always pirated from a data archival perspective, which is why I’m also a maintainer/contributor of several open-source data archival projects.
this. pirate all you want, netflix/disney/etc. will be fine. but find and support the artist. this is why i’m now stuck with the crap news around bandcamp. there are less and less ways to support creators instead of the leeches every day :(
bandcamp was sold to epic games in 2022 and again to songtradr this year, and half its staff got laid off recently. CEO said that it was not profitable enough - though it was already very profitable. So it’s likely to start squeezing every penny out of users and artists in the next few years
Why the downvotes, he’s got a point. Big mega corps that release $70 games while abandoning the old games are the most moral argument you can make for piracy.
Is that relevant to my comment? I said support the creators directly, not the corporations and explained with examples. That reply was suspicious and arrogant asf if you ask me. I never said spend 60$ for the game, I said support the creators directly, even through smaller amounts. Even a euro from a person who can is enough. You cracked the game, you liked it, why not do that bare minimum if you legit have that money + a lot more?
I think that funding creators is great if you have the money and the inclination. I just don’t think that it makes you an asshole if you don’t.
There are creators whom I fund because they give me exclusive extra content on their Patreons or sometimes if I just think that their work is important enough and I want to see it continue. If I decide that I need that money for something else, that’s up to me.
Especially if you have as much money as this dude claims to have.
I mean, this is on 4chan. Regardless of whether this is true or not, the post is blatantly narcissistic. I don’t know why it should be here and what’s there to discuss.
For some people, it’s the convenience with pirating. It’s easier to pirate a movie from a go-to piracy website that you use than to find in which of the 50 different streaming sites the movie is available.
I mean, Apple movies, Steam and Spotify or whatever your storefront of choice is will 95% of the time have what you’re looking for. The only tricky medium to find stuff is TV.
Absolutely, this guy doesn’t care one bit about anything but the cash and status.
I pirate as much as the next bloke, but also buy multiple copies of some games because I enjoy them so much, or to get friends to play. I’m looking at you terraria…
It’s for the same reasons I would rather support a YouTuber I like directly through Patreon etc. than by disabling my adblocker.
Also I’m top 4-5% in my country, but compared to developed countries in not even at top 50% and so many of these digital products are not necessarily priced lower for my region specially the big houses like EA and Ubisoft, so I understand the original comment. And i also agree on the second part that where there is a will there is a way.
But i remeber donating about 10$ for a small dev that was livestreaming and i had pirated the game because game costed 40$. And I thought 10$ was a decent enough donation to cover my sins. Dev in a couple of days was crying over stream about how donating 10$ is doing nothing and he just would buy a beer (10$ buys about 14 beers in my country) and was just being an ass over the stream.
I’m not saying all devs are like that, but for a lot of third world country pirating is a lifestyle not because they just want to keep stealing, they just see it as a movement against wealth inequality. I’m not saying it’s right or not, I’m just explaining how the thought process works.
I never said it wasn’t, but that was an extreme anecdote first of all, and second, I have re-iterated that this doesn’t apply to people who don’t have such disposable income. Relative to their cost of living, always. Pirating is a lifestyle, stealing from poor creators when you make a substantial amount of money is not. What you sent was enough, more than enough. The dev in question sounds like a jackass and unfortunately he wouldn’t be the first with how many indie and major game devs turn out to be horrible people.
They have considered how much the gains from being evil assholes offset the cost of alienating some people, and found that they make more by being evil, it’s not stupid.
There’s also the fact that remote start, while shorter range, has existed on key fobs for like 20 years. My ex wife’s 2022 Hyundai has remote start, but only through the app, while my 2013 Focus has it on the key fob.
That’s honestly the only feature that’s bundled in those subscriptions that I really want, though the alarm notification is a nice to have.
Ok, enough. At this point it’s too evident that you’re a troll paid for by Hyundai. You’ll be out of a job soon, since this will no longer be effective.
It’s a stupid image, how can you give this much of a shit about something so inconsequential? You’re all over this thread sucking hyundai subscription dong, what gives?
You’ve changed my mind. I am now also so concerned that this post in a piracy community could bankrupt hyundai and poison the minds of an entire generation that I will spend hours arguing about it on some obscure social media platform. Thank you for your service.
I have a 22 kia with remote start. I also have the app (that costs the same as this post so I don’t pay either). The remote start sets the car to 72 with nothing else on. No way to change it via settings. Paying for the app remote start is the only way to do the defroster, heated seats, steering wheel, etc. It’s so fucking lame.
The issue is that with ongoing service across time, the longer the service is being used the more it costs Kia. The larger the time boxes Kia uses the bigger the number is and the more you’re going to scare off customers.
Using Kias online build and price, looks like the most expensive Telluride you can get right now is $60k MSRP, cheapest at 30k
Let’s assume Kia estimates average lifetime of a Telluride to be 20 years so they create an option to purchase this service one time for the “lifetime” of the vehicle. Taking in good faith the pricing Kia has listed, using that $150 annual package, and assuming that price goes up every year at a rate of 10% (what Netflix, YouTube, etc have been doing) across those twenty years you’re looking at around $8.5k option. At the top trim thats still 14% extra that is going to make some buyers hesitant, at the base model that’s 28% more expensive.
Enough buyers will scoff at that so Kia can either ditch the idea entirely as they’ll lose money on having to pay for the initial development and never make their money back, or they find some way to repackage that cost and make it look like something that buyers are willing to deal with.
To me the bigger issue is the cost of the service vs what you’re getting. Server time + dev team + mobile data link cannot be costing Kia more than a few million annually, mid to upper hundred K is more likely so they must not be expecting that many people to actually be paying for any of this
Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.
Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…
Finally someone who gets it
Glad to see you here my fellow comrades
Honestly the people who defended subscription models for something that you already paid & own are dumb (or maybe just trolling around) like people who defend adobe for subscription models
This reminds me of the video game industry. Make a complete game, then choose to remove pieces to sell later as add-on content. Lol. The only thing I see costing them money is if they have to pay for an LTE subscription to maintain that internet connectivity so you can start your car from an app.
You keep mentioning “official video by (insert manufacturer name here)”. Are you even thinking when you say that? It’s the manufacturer, what the hell were you expecting them to promote? “were fucking you over, so here’s why you have to give us more money for a car that you think is yours but actually will never be”?
The video shows the fob starting the car. It also states that you can pay for the app to be able to do it anywhere.
It’s not a promo video, it’s a “how to” for car owners.
Are we not to believe that it really does that?
What is this internet thing for if I can’t find information? Do I have to drive to a car dealership and ask to find out if this is true? Do I need to see it in action? When I do, can you even trust my answer?
Not 1 person here has mentioned that it doesn’t work. Not 1 person here has said that the “feature” is useless or anything remotely similar.
What is in question here is the fucking pushing of companies to tie as many idiots as humanly possible to their subscriptions to keep on draining funds from them.
Give me the car for free, and maybe I’ll subscribe. Otherwise, I buy stuff with ALL it’s capabilities enabled or not at all.
My car is worth US$85,000 in my country. Everything works, app and all, and I don’t have to pay anything other than my loan, insurance, maintenance and charge (yes, it’s an electric vehicle).
I own a 2023 BYD Han, I have an account for the app, and I can do whatever it’s able to do from it without ever having to open my wallet again.
If and when they decide to make this a paid subscription, then I’ll sell that one, and move on.
So, yeah, follow a bullshit advertisement that you call a “tutorial” and believe what you want. They are just like drug pushers, only for tech.
Now who is the one making fucking noise without looking a things from a common sense perspective?
Not only that, but if you have no choice but to buy a car with internet connectivity, these are supposed to be the kind of bells and whistles they give to at least make it SEEM like you’re not being completely taken advantage of. It’s like a double-dip. “We’re giving your car connectivity so we can sell your telemetry, AND we get to charge you for all the useful features, too!”
If it costs SO much to maintain these services, cool. I’d be happy to save the poor little car manufacturers money by buying a model that uses no connectivity whatsoever. But, for some reason, they don’t seem to want to offer that. Gee, I wonder why.
Demand more out of them, because they’ll always be looking to get more out of you.
I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.
I played it as part of Xbox live, paid $20 for 2 months. Ended up playing a lot more of Senua Sacrifice than I did Starfield.
That price is very acceptable, almost a convenience fee that I gladly pay so I don’t have to look for torrents and stuff.
I would never pay the hyperinflated prices that are being asked for AAA nowadays, especially for digital copies that, as PlayStation is keen to teach us, are worthless.
I'm thinking that I might buy it once we have creation kit access and mods that add story and flesh out the game a la Fusion City Rising and companion mods for Fallout 4
Not entirely or at least in a different way. Steam still has free weekends occasionally on games. Or more likely some publishers still offer them sometimes probably
Devolver Digital published a demo for Heave Ho!. Worked fine, demo was fun, decided to buy the full version. It didn’t work, none of the UI elements except the back button worked on the character selection screen. Fortunately Valve is good with refunds.
Imo “vote with your wallet” is more about companies/brands that have proven to do shitty games, as in “don’t buy any more games/dlcs/microtransactions from them”.
Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they’re doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say ‘thank you’.
You’re the first person in this community that gets it. The people here that bloviate about their moral justifications are so tiresome. It’s really as simple as “if you want more of something, you have to pay for it”.
Yes, but as you said, you can’t know if you’ll like the game or not until you try it. It works with standalone games as well if you pirate before buying, but it’s usually not aimed at pirates: no one sane will pirate a game, find out they dislike it, and buy it anyway. It goes without saying.
It’s more the people who already bought games that need to hear that “so you bought the last two mainline Pokémon games and they both sucked ass? Don’t fall for it again, vote with your wallet and stay away from the next one”.
Old enough to remember the Ambrosia Software game, Escape Velocity? That game had a shareware setup involving a really powerful ship that would message you several times in a game and eventually get so annoying it was almost impossible to play. If you accidentally shot him, he’s ruin you. Oh, gone are the days of true “try before you buy.”
Usually, not intentionally. More, I was defending myself and he was buzzing around me like a moth on a summer porch light when a stray laser beam hit his ship. :(
lol, EV was special. It was also pretty easy to mod with plug-ins using macos resource fork hackery, even to a kid, and all of the original game data was replaceable just by creating something with the same ID in a plug-in. Cap’n Hector became an angry invincible shuttlecraft with a single laser cannon. now that I’m old enough to afford a license, the company is gone and there’s no way, so I guess I’m stuck with him like this forever.
I make no claim to this info, nor do I understand it, nor do I take responsibility for its use. As linked, I got this from a reddit post about the company and copy/pasted it into Obsidian so I’d have it. The code blocks are as close to the original as I cared to fiddle with. This is all greek to me but there are Python scripts linked, which may help you generate a key that works to register EV. Good luck!
Note: I had to split this into multiple posts cause it was not wanting to post the entire thing in one reply.
Now that Ambrosia is gone, new registrations are no longer possible, and due to their expiring codes, using legitimate license keys has become difficult. We may hope to see a few of their games revived in the future but at present, only the original releases are available. Perhaps this case study on Ambrosia’s registration algorithms will be useful to some.
The Old System
In their earliest days, ASW didn’t require registration, but they eventually began locking core features away behind codes. All of their classic titles use the original algorithm by Andrew Welch.
Given a licensee name, number of copies, and game name, the code generator runs through two loops. The first loop iterates over each letter of the capitalized licensee name, adding the ASCII representation of that letter with the number of copies and then rotating the resulting bits. The second loop repeats that operation, only using the game’s name instead of the license holder’s name.
Beginning with Mars Rising, later games added a step to these loops: XOR the current code with the common hex string $DEADBEEF. However, the rest of the algorithm remained essentially unchanged.
The resulting 32 bits are converted into a text registration code by adding the ASCII offset of $41 to each hex digit. This maps the 32-bit string into 8 characters, but due to the limit of a hex digit to only encode 16 values, codes only contain letters from the first 16 of the alphabet.
The following chart shows an example using a well-known hacked code for Slithereens.
Here is a Python implementation of the v1 system: aswreg_v1.py
Once you have the bit-string module installed via sudo pip install bitstring, you can test the output yourself with python aswreg_v1.py “Anonymous” 100 “Slithereens”.
As Ambrosia’s Matt Slot explains, the old system continued to allow a lot of piracy, so in the early 2000’s they decided to switch to a more challenging registration system. This new method was based on polynomial hashing and included a timestamp so that codes could be expired and renewed. Ambrosia now had better control over code distribution, but they assumed their renewal server would never be shut down…
They also took more aggressive steps to reduce key sharing. The registration app checks against a list of blacklisted codes, and if found to be using one, the number of licenses is internally perturbed so that subsequent calculations fail. To combat tampering, your own information can get locally blacklisted in a similar manner if too many failed attempts occur, at least until the license file is deleted. Furthermore, the app attempts to verify the system time via a remote time server to minimize registration by changing the computer’s clock.
You can disable the internet connection, set the clock back, and enter codes. There’s also a renewal bot for EV: Nova. But let us look at the algorithm more closely.
64-bit Codes
The first noticeable difference is that registration codes in v2 are now 12 digits, containing both letters and numbers. This is due to a move from a 32-bit internal code to a 64-bit one. Rather than add an ASCII offset to hex digits, every letter or number in a new registration code has a direct mapping to a chunk of 5 bits. Using 5 bits per digit supports up to 32 values, or almost all letters of the alphabet and digits up to 9 (O, I, 0, and 1 were excluded given their visual similarities).
The resulting 64 bits (really only 60 because the upper 4 are unused: 12 digits * 5 bits each = 60) are a combination of two other hashes XOR’d together. This is a notable change from v1 because it only used the registration code to verify against the hashing algorithm. Only the licensee name, number of copies, and game name were really used. In v2, the registration code is itself a hash which contains important information like a code’s timestamp.
Two Hashes
To extract such information from the registration code, we must reverse the XOR operation and split out the two hashes which were combined. Fortunately, XOR is reversible, and we can compute one of the hashes. The first hash, which I’ll call the userkey, is actually quite similar to v1’s algorithm. It loops through the licensee name, adding the ASCII value, number of copies, and shifting bits. This is repeated with the game name. An important change is including multiplication by a factor based on the string size.
The second hash, which I’ll call the basekey, is the secret sauce of v2; it’s what you pay Ambrosia to generate when registering a product. It is not computed by the registration app, but there are several properties by which it must be validated.
The chart below visualizes the relationships among the various hashes, using the well-known “Barbara Kloeppel” code for EV: Nova.
Timestamp are encoded as a single byte comprised of bits indexed at b56,51,42,37,28,23,14,9 from the basekey. In this example, the timestamp is 01100010 or 0x62 or 98.
The timestamp represents the number of fortnights that have passed since Christmas Day, 2000 Eastern time, modulo 256 to fit in one byte. For example, 98 fortnights places the code at approximately October 2004.
Stored as a single byte, there are 256 unique timestamps. This is 512 weeks or about 10 years. Yes, this means that a code’s validity rotates approximately once every decade.
After the code’s timestamp is read, it is subtracted from the current timestamp (generated from the system clock or network time server if available). The difference must be less than 2, so codes are valid for 4 weeks or about a month at a time.
Of note, Pillars of Garendall has a bug in which the modulo is not taken correctly, so the timestamp corresponding to 0xFF is valid without expiry.
Validity Check
The last three bits, b60-63, contain the sum of all other 3-bit chunks in the basekey, modulo 7. Without the correct number in these bits, the result will be considered invalid.
To this point, we have covered sufficient material to renew licenses. The timestamp can be changed, the last three bits updated, the result XOR’d with the userkey, and finally, the code converted from binary to text.
Factors for Basekey Generation
I was next curious about code generation. For the purposes of this write-up, I have not fully reverse engineered the basekey, only duplicated the aspects which are used for validation. This yields functional keys, just not genuine ones. If the authors of the EV: Nova renewal bot have fully reversed the algorithm, perhaps they will one day share the steps to genuine basekey creation.
One aspect validated by the registration app is that the licensee name, number, and game name can be modified to yield a set of base factors. These are then multiplied by some number and written into the basekey. We do not need the whole algorithm; we simply must check that the corresponding regions in the basekey are multiples of the appropriate factors.
The regions of note in the basekey are f1 = b5-9,47-51,33-37,19-23, f2 = b43-47,29-33,15-19,57-61, and f3 = b24-28,10-14,52-56,38-42. The top 5 bits and f3 are never actually checked, so they can be ignored.
Considering f1 and f2, the values in the sample basekey are 0x25DA and 0x1500, respectively. The base factors are 0x26 and 0x1C, which are multiples by 0xFF and 0xC0, respectively.
Rather than analyze the code in detail, I wrote a small script to translate over the disassembled PPC to Python wholesale. It is sufficient for generating keys to EV: Nova, using the perfectly-valid multiple of 1x, but I have found it fails for other v2 products.
With bitstring installed, you can renew codes like python aswreg_v2.py renew “L4B5-9HJ5-P3NB” “Barbara Kloeppel” 1 “EV Nova” (just sample syntax, blacklisted codes will still fail in the app). There’s also a function to check a code’s timestamp with date or create a new license with generate.
As earlier cautioned, generating basekeys relies on code copied from disassembled PPC and will likely not work outside EV: Nova. In my tests with other v2 products, all essential parts of the algorithm remain the same, even the regions of the basekey which are checked as multiples of the factors. What differs is the actual calculation of base factors. Recall that these keys were created by Ambrosia outside the local registration system, so the only options are to copy the necessary chunks of code to make passable factors for each product or to fully reverse engineer the basekey algorithm. I’ve no doubt the factors are an easy computation once you know the algorithm, but code generation becomes less critical when renewal is an option for other games. I leave it to the authors of the Zeus renewal bot if they know how to find these factors more generally.
To renew codes for other games, keep in mind the name must be correct. For instance, Pillars of Garendall is called “Garendall” internally. You can find a game’s name by typing a gibberish license in the registration app and seeing what file is created in Preferences. It should be of the form License.
Finally, a couple disclaimers: I have only tested with a handful of keys, so my interpretations and implementations may not be completely correct. YMMV. Furthermore, these code snippets are posted as an interesting case study about how a defunct company once chose to combat software piracy, not to promote piracy. Had Ambrosia remained operational, I’m sure we would have seen a v3 registration system or a move to online-based play as so many other games are doing today, but I hope this has been helpful for those who still wish to revisit their favorite Ambrosia classics.
I have a link to how to take an old serial for the game and generate a new serial based on the algorithm. When I get back to my computer I’ll send it along.
I remember this game being one of the reasons I love Macs so much as a younger kid. Zooming around and then this guy showing up “remember to buy the game” and then, eventually, it becoming a game of seeing if I could leave a system before getting wrecked by him.
Good times.
If you happen to miss those days, check out Endless Sky. It’s a free remake of the game for more modern machines. Still under active development.
More corporations with zero responsibility and way too much fucking power. We need regulators with teeth and we need to remove the legal hand of business from the pockets of our legislatures. I can’t believe someone actually burned down Studio Ghibli HQ before Citizen’s United was. Wtf.
It was Kyoto Animation that was attacked. They have quite a few similarities in artstyle and themes to Ghibli, and you could maybe call them a spiritual successor. But neither is owned by, or a part of, the other.
Ghibli recently released How Do You Live, probably their last film. With the last surviving founders retiring, Nippon TV will manage the studio and the museum.
Proofs can be represented as programs, not the other way around. Also, USA allows for algorithm parents, and algorithms are maths. While I agree with you, your reasoning is not correct.
piracy
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