As others have said, just use qBit. It’s feature-rich and supports network interface binding. Simply bind it to your VPN’s interface, and it’ll only use your VPN. If your VPN connection drops/isn’t turned on, qBit simply won’t be able to connect.
Yup, same. For the unaware: Macs have always-on HDCP, and it doesn’t always work as intended.
Lots of times, I’m trying to run a projector with a feed from the presenter’s laptop. Laptop is on stage, projector is in the tech booth. And the line in between the stage and the booth will complete the video signal, but not the HDCP handshake. So Windows machines will work fine, but Macs will just outright refuse to send anything.
So yes, I keep an HDCP stripper handy, because whenever a client pulls a MacBook out I know I’m going to need it.
Yup. Researchers will gladly send you the study for free, because they don’t make anything when you pay for it through a journal. For the unaware, the fee charged by research journals goes completely to the journal; The author/researchers don’t get anything for it. In fact, they have to pay the journal to get published. And that shit isn’t cheap! The more prestigious journals can charge upwards of $8-10k.
The research journal scheme is a giant scam, designed to double-dip and extract profit from both ends. And it only works because scientific communities tend to look at certain journals as prestigious. So they want to be published in those journals, even if they have to pay. But I can almost guarantee that the researchers resent the journals, because they’ve been roped into paying for research for their entire professional lives. And that’s why they’re usually happy to send you a free copy of their paper if you just email and ask nicely.
Journals are also bad because they frequently privatize research that public funds paid for. For instance, let’s say the government pays for a study to be done. Then the researchers need to get that published, so they pay the journal to publish it. Then the journal paywalls the study, even though it was already paid for with tax dollars. It’s shit that sounds like it should be illegal, but is commonly accepted for some reason.
Cops will still claim it was suicide-by-cop. Which is some top-tier copaganda, because it’s just another way of them saying “if you call us while in distress, there’s a good chance we’ll kill you then blame you for it.”
Sugar will completely eliminate concrete’s ability to cure. A single pound of sugar can destroy an entire truck of wet cement.
Not that I’m advocating for it. But it’s laughably easy to sneak onto a site with a hardhat, safety boots and a vest, and sabotage active construction.
You’ve got a few questions here, so let me break it down…
What is a crack?
A crack is simply a way of defeating DRM. In the old days, games would often require the game disc to be inserted before they would boot. It was a very easy way of preventing people from simply sharing the files. Because even though the game was installed and didn’t need the disc, the game would simply refuse to launch without the CD in the tray. It was a sort of physical DRM, because disc burners weren’t super common yet so copying a game disc wasn’t super easy.
So the crack simply edited the part of the game that checked for a CD. Sometimes it was as simple as removing the few lines of code that told the game to check for a CD. Sometimes it was simply a matter of telling the game that the disc was always inserted. But that’s just an early example of a crack; It was modifying a game file (or files) in some way, to make them boot even when DRM would normally prevent it.
Modern cracks are much more complicated, but the end goal is the same. Crackers are simply trying to defeat the DRM, so the program will boot. It usually modifies a few files, to get the program to boot when it normally wouldn’t. The cracks are usually fairly small in size, because the actual program .exe and a few .dll files are usually all that gets changed. So patching the program is usually as easy as moving the cracked files into the respective folder, and overwriting the legitimate files.
Why does a crack show up as a virus?
Lots of modern cracks need to do some pretty fucky things to defeat modern DRM. It often requires intercepting network traffic that the launcher would use to “phone home” to a company server. For instance, maybe the launcher checks in with a company server to verify that your program is legit. If the server responds that it is, then the program boots. So the crack would potentially need to intercept that network traffic, then spoof a response from the server. But you know what else does something like that? A virus, attempting to hide itself.
And modern antivirus softwares don’t rely on “hard” virus definitions to identify viruses. The traditional way of scanning for viruses was to just keep a massive database of known threats, then compare files against that. But that’s slow and new threats constantly need to be added in order to keep your virus scans accurate. And if a hacker is able to change their virus slightly, you’ll need to add a whole new item to the database just to target the change.
So instead, they use something called heuristics, which basically means they look at how a program operates, then guess whether or not it’s actually a virus. It uses common virus behaviors and pattern recognition to try to identify a virus. This increases the chances of a false positive, but means scans are much quicker and will catch new threats in the wild even when they haven’t been officially documented yet. But since different companies use different virus definitions for their heuristics, different antivirus programs will give false positives to different cracks.
If it’s only a few flags on VirusTotal, you’re likely going to be fine. It’s most likely a false positive from those antivirus programs.
No, the legit copy of the game allows you to play pirated copies of other games. It bypasses the piracy check in the console and allows you to swap discs to a pirated copy of whatever other game you want.
For actual cooking stuff, I prefer Adam Ragusea. He dives more into the history and molecular gastronomy side of things, to explain how a dish came to be and why it works. Not quite as sciencey as Alton Brown, but I definitely see the influences. And for actual historical food stuff, you may want to check out Tasting History. He’s a creator who does deep dives into historical dishes, then tries to recreate them.
Both interesting in their own ways, but Adam’s stuff has helped be become a better cook simply by understanding the why, rather than the how. Because if you know why something works, (rather than simply knowing how to do it) you’ll be able to translate that to other situations where it will work, and be able to avoid/work around situations where it won’t. It took me from “following recipes” to “making my own recipes” if that makes sense.
Yeah, paying for content streaming is different than simply paying for an app that runs locally. Spotify proved that people will be willing to pay for music, as long as it is easier than piracy. Netflix’s early days (when it was actually a one stop shop for all of the available content) proved the same with TV/movie streaming. They proved that piracy largely isn’t an issue with cost, but rather convenience and accessibility.
But with a local app, that all goes right out the window. There’s no reason you’d need to pay a subscription for an app that runs everything locally and only gets sporadic updates. There isn’t any licensing to worry about, or third party systems to pay off. The only reason to have the subscription in this instance is pure greed.
You don’t always have the luxury of time though. I work in entertainment, and I’ve definitely scrapped adapters together in a pinch. When you have a show starting in 15 minutes and a musician rolls up with some bespoke gear with weird connections, your only real choice is to bodge something together and make it work.
Nothing quite like seeing five adapters chained together, to go from stereo RCA to TRS 1/8” to TRS 1/4” to dual TS 1/4”, to XLR… All because you didn’t have a direct box that went straight from RCA to XLR, because another musician walked off with it after their show wrapped up at 2AM last night.
I disagree that it’s simpler, because most VPNs will use dynamic IPs. So any time your internet flickers or your power goes out, you’ll need to reconfigure Transmission with the new IP. Sure your method works for a kill switch. But it requires manual intervention every time it gets killed. With qBit’s interface binding, it doesn’t care what the VPN’s IP is. All it cares about is that it’s using the specific interface. So if the VPN is disconnected (and the VPN’s interface has no connection) then qBit simply thinks there’s no connection to the internet.
Discord hasn’t historically been kind to piracy communities. Servers on Discord often face sudden bans with no prior warning. So piracy communities on Discord are often pretty useless, because server rules (enacted to keep the server from getting deleted) will prevent users from sharing anything useful. They’re often akin to CrackWatch communities, which only announce when things are cracked, but refuse to actually link to the content.
I personally prefer Plex (I got the lifetime PlexPass before Jellyfin was even a thing) but I agree with this 100%. Set it up on a spare computer (or even a RPi,) and toss it in a closet. Then you can use the *arr suite to automatically download new titles.
FileBot will help you automatically rename downloaded files for easy media detection; Historically, the big complaint with Plex/Jellyfin has been the files need to be named very specifically. But FileBot takes care of that, and even downloads subtitles and posters/box art/etc automatically (though with OpenSubtitles API change, that may not be the case anymore?)