Here in Latvia that's still somewhat the case, at least according to statistics like these: https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/latvia-leading-in...
I've personally seen people who choose to pirate everything from movies, to OSes and IDEs, and have no problem with doing that whatsoever. That said, I can kind of understand it, due to many not exactly having lots of money to throw around.
Personally, I live a bit more ethically, but it kind of sucks: I'm not sure what I'd do without JetBrains offering student licenses, followed by a graduation discount and recurring discounts. I've also not bought a AAA game on release in years, it's always sometime later on sale etc. The same goes for server hosting, most PaaS solutions are too expensive and vendors like AWS and GCP are outside of my price point.
But hey, OSes like Linux and software like LibreOffice are a godsend. As are free IDEs and text editors as well, sometimes.
It's less out of an ethical sense though. Video I still pirate by the terabyte. Most of that comes from large media concerns that I don't really have much care for. The small games industry I support as much as I can on GOG.
Latvia and Bulgaria are great for torrent sites indeed, there seems to be nobody even trying to take them down unlike in western europe.
I suppose it was still the case back in the day (more for botnets than coins?) but I just simply cared less. Had to get my hands on the AAA games.
That and the "official" "Linux" app is basically unsupported.
That client was basically an electron app.
How lazy is it to drop support for it? Especially as they’re pretending to be nice now, not hate Linux anymore, rolling it into windows etc.
MS will always be the greedy MS. Embrace extend extinguish.
Fwiw, teams runs well enough in chromium. I don’t use chromium for anything else so chromium has basically become my MS teams “Linux” “client” since they dropped support for it.
I’d run it in its own Firefox container but it would seem like MS purposefully cripples teams in Firefox as I can’t get background blurring or live captioning/translation to work there.
Just like google that requires you to use chrome AND be logged in to unlock background blurring… same evil, but story for another time.
Also analyzing malware tends to make one more paranoid. This is definitely a thing too.
And the most powerful features of it like hexrays require cloud cooperation so they don't work :(
I really wish it was affordable for individuals because I would pay for it if I could.
For me IDA Home seems to lack at least one key feature we needed back then: customizable CPU plugins. We had to extend one with a newer version of the instruction set. On top of that, that CPU type is not even available via Home. Also no RISC-V support (yet?).
On another note: the whole cloud based concept for a disassembler/decompiler with debug support sounds like a recipe for disaster. One wrong key press and you might run malware on an internet connected system. Even when only disassembling, I am tempted to run everything in an offline VM to defend against bugs in the disassembler.
[1] https://hex-rays.com/cgi-bin/quote.cgi/products [2] https://hex-rays.com/ida-home/
As binary ninja is proprietary, I would recommend against getting locked into its workflow, too.
While it's true that malware could hide well theoretically, I'll also add that in my experience investigating malware infections from friends and family and occasionally hunting for malware myself, samples attached to cracked software tend to be things like miners, iStealer, script kiddie RATs, etc using simple "binders" - which are usually incredibly obvious, like extract the real executable into %temp% or the usual RunPE gimmick. People posting malware on torrent sites are not exactly APTs using spear phishing attacks.
If you regularly swapped disks with someone you’d just mail the envelope along with the disk
It was cheaper to find someone on a phpbb forum to send you physically something than dealing with ISP and shitty local internet laws.
It lasted for a year or so. I send hundreds of disks. Was getting pay thought bank wire on my older brother account.
I think I drink all of it in cheap pastis drink.
And the localization was epic. It would be basically equivalent to all movie/TV star localization on the west. I still like the translated narrator better than the original.
https://spidersweb.pl/plus/2021/04/cdprojekt-niekoloryzowane...
translated, but broken images: https://spidersweb-pl.translate.goog/plus/2021/04/cdprojekt-...
There was also that site with all the trainers and cracks for every game ever, with a little landing page that would dynamically show online and offline mirrors before it was cool. I forget its name but as a 10–14 years old I loved it.
I had lots of learning experiences with this kind of stuff that I’m very glad I could have in my little years of first being online, when it wasn’t tied to anything really important, it was all just for fun. Everything would be different for me today if I didn’t have the opportunity to play with non-zero but relatively little risk.
That said, when I do recall that period of time I do feel a bit guilty about the piracy angle. But I'm also reminded of how the original premise (having people give me software) was eclipsed by all of the other things the BBS provided. Within about a month of getting it up and running I'd joined a network of other BBSes that'd automatically call up other BBSes to distribute "packets" (I don't recall the terms used) that'd contain emails, forum posts, and more, of all the other BBSes in the network. It was like having a (very slow) internet connection in my bedroom in 1991, which was not a thing a typical high school skater kid with, at best, a 2.0 GPA, would have, let alone even know existed at the time.
Suggesting that what I learned from that experience was the foundation of my career is a massive understatement. It got me my first tech job, gave me confidence in starting a dot-com (which survived the dot-com-bubble-burst), and built relationships that have lasted over 30 years.
Everyone was doing it. I remember my teachers, friends, and family all giving me pirated software at some point. I remember my friends and I getting excited when someone got a ripped copy of some game and we couldn't wait to burn new CD-ROMs to share. If one of us got our hands on the copy of some game, we all got copies. It was kind of like a free-for-all in the world was starving for cool applications. Computers were starting to live up to their promises and software was just like recipe cards.