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
Illegal? Probably not, so long as you were careful about not hosting any of their code/data
Would doing it publicly end with you getting buried in lawsuits? It might. Anyone can sue for any reason, and copyright holders love making examples of people
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:
I knew about Empress, of course, because how could I not? But I’ve not been in the game piracy community for years, and I had no idea she was this… Unstable.
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.
shit, what happens when she kicks the bucket? maybe someone else will emerge but it's been so long already, and they haven't, so it could take years and years
Demand is what causes Supply. Somewhere out there is someone with the skill to crack Denuvo, but no need to, because this lunatic is already doing it. And being the competition means being on empress’ radar, which is really something a sane person would not want.
She can only crack so many games, so the demand for the other games already stays without supply.
The scene was much bigger before denuvo, the supply obviously went down independently of the demand.
Also the demand/supply argument only makes sense where there is payment. There are starving people in the world who’s demand is not met bc the can’t pay while there are millions of facelifts administered to people who will pay large sums.
Denuvo has succeeded in imposing such a huge threshold onto cracking that from the talented people only the most driven stayed in the game. With no money in it you need to be driven by something else, usually ego. Even if there is a successor to empress chances are that is true for them as well.
I should be clear that I don’t think supply and demand are immovable levers by which the world economy does or should work. I also don’t believe there’s only one person with the ability to do this. If they stop, I’m left to assume one of the eight billion people on this rock with the time and talent and resources to do this will.
And if they don’t then I’m just going to have to deal with it because this is internet piracy, my dude. But there’s no world in which I’m going to defend what empress does as a vital public service. I think I would prefer that they stop and get help, but I don’t expect that to happen.
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?
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
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.
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
granted, i know nothing about this woman’s financial situation. im just speculating as to why she wouldn’t want to share her knowledge or expertise
By keeping the knowledge to herself, she is slowing down the society’s progress on destroying Denuvo. She also created a single point of failure. If she is gone, a lot of that knowledge will be lost. What will the community do then?
I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve to earn money for her work. But she has the power to make it easier for other crackers to crack Denuvo. With enough people like that, maybe Denuvo could be destroyed entirely? Wouldn’t that be a more worthy cause to support? But it seems that instead of actually helping the society, her priority is to be the only one who benefits.
I think Empress disappearing would be a net-positive for the cracking scene.
If there is nobody cracking the latest releases, the pressure will mount for new crackers to enter the scene. And perhaps we’ll get a new generation of crackers that bring some competition back into the space.
There’s also a lot of money involved in pirated games, with shops in poorer countries selling cracked games for pennies on the dollar to people who would otherwise be unable to afford, or even download the latest games.
So it’s my opinion that denuvo cracking will never go away, it’ll just evolve over time, like it has since the beginning.
Is that really good enough for you? Wouldn’t you prefer to make this area as easy for new people to enter as possible? Keeping this knowledge secret benefits only those few people. I don’t understand why anyone would be ok with this.
What will the community do then? Carry on. There’s always a new hotshot waiting in the wings. This cycle has been going on since before I was born and it’ll continue long after I’m dead. There will always be new cats and new mice in the scene.
Since only one person is doing it right now, I’m not sure that it’s so certain that there will be other people who will want to do this. Even if someone new shows up, how many years will it take them to learn all of this? There is no reason to be ok with this secrecy. It only hurts the community.
I’m not “okay with it”. Empress is a psycho the scene would be better without, but when they’re gone, it doesn’t all just burn down. There’ll be someone else. There always is.
I admire your optimism. To me it seems like the situation is getting worse. Corporations invented a DRM that’s difficult to crack in order to make pirates less effective and they succeeded.
People have been cracking games and pirating for absolutely nothing for decades. In fact, I’d almost guarantee she got where she is off the notes and info freely given by the people that came before her. Make a living off of it? Seriously, ew. It’s just wrong. Also, she’s a huge bigot. Some comments elsewhere in this post elaborate.
And those people can continue to do it for nothing, but there’s no requirement that she should need to. It’s her choice if she want to do it for nothing or not, and it’s everyone else’s choice whether they want to support her with their money
That’s actually pretty strange. Person who is able to crack Denuvo should have superior hacking skills. Such skills obviously allow to work as information security specialist, and such job easily delivers salary of 5+ thousand of $ per month even to specialists who are not skilled enough to crack Denuvo. So Empress asks to sponsor her for the money that she could easily obtain in less than two working days. This makes no sence.
tbh from what I’ve seen of her, I’m not sure that she has the temperament for a corporate job. Like, despite having the technical skills, she would probably be wholly unable to function in a typical white collar environment.
If she didn’t charge it would be free labour regardless. Also if what I am reading here is true and she is russian then the wages are likely more poor than you think. $500 would be worth more in that country.
Correct, they never published documentation, which has led us to this situation. The lack of “training” for newer crackers is something i even remember empress herself pointing out. There is some crackjng training centering around archaic drm like securom on spore. However cracking groups had gone more and more “closed source”.
Probably one of the big things keeping them from open sourcing their knowledge is denuvo though, they download games with their (cracked) DRM to RE and prevent future cracking
More people working on breaking Denuvo would mean more cracked games and more vulnerabilities being found. Even if Denuvo team could keep up with that, it would be extra cost for them.
Probably, but they raised the cost for us, so we should do the same to them. Maybe we would eventually reach a point when companies using that product decide that it’s not longer worth it to pay X amount of money for a game to be “protected” for only Y amount of days. I think that should be the goal. To raise the costs, to make DRM as impractical for them as possible.
I think that the cracking groups could have released better explanations on how their tooling worked so that others could at least be closer to “up to date” with the current DRM technology. Right now public cracking info is years behind because the groups that did have any knowledge took it with them. The idea that this would help only denuvo was a bit myopic since either way when they left cracking it would help denuvo. However I heard that many cracking groups now work for denuvo so that may be part of it. But considering they did all that work for free, I don’t want to conspire about them or claim that I am entitled to their work.
Edit: Also the people who have released “how to break denuvo” guides have been some of the more aggressively persued legally. So my lamenting over no documentation/explanation may be a bit “man i wish someone would break the law for MY benefit.”
Have you seen her SPECIAL MESSAGE that was attached to the crack of Hogwarts: Legacy? There’s an awful lot of hate there, too. What was the need to pointlessly insult an entire group of already marginalized people? Pointing out someone’s bigotry and disliking them for it is nowhere near as bad as spewing bigotry, but that might just be my opinion.
The yin yang duality of day/night and hot/cold is so hilarious to me every time. You’re the greatest mind ever but you don’t know about the existence of twilight or room temperature?
Familiar with Temple OS and its creator? There are super brilliant people that don’t fit in society and end up with vile views. I mostly feel bad for them.
Not gonna get involved in a political conversation here but I still don’t see what warrants the hatred you and others spew on Empress, particularly when you do so because you deem awful the hate for a marginalized group. Kind of hypocritical to hate someone because they hate someone, isn’t it? If all you want is tolerance you should be the first to practice that and show tolerance for those who have different opinions on things.
You should start be reading about the Paradox of Tolerance, which pretty nicely describes why you shouldn’t be so accepting of bigotry.
I still don’t see what warrants the hatred you and others spew on Empress, particularly when you do so because you deem awful the hate for a marginalized group.
Why are you so eager to defend bigots? Do you really not understand the difference between hating someone for their beliefs they hold versus hating someone for who they are as a person?
Although I will admit it's kind of funny you're making the exact same argument Empress was.“THE WOKE SYSTEM” of today runs with and “claims” that it mainly wants “fairness, justice, equality and total freedom”. But then … when someone with views against trans and tries to express themselves today, they are treated as GARBAGE and fired/banned from wherever they are, is a clear sign of huge “Contradiction”.
I think she’s definitely not a bigot. Just fed up with this extreme left wing woke b/s. With that said, I’ll block you: I can’t help but keep reply if I see a reply and this should be a topic about piracy, and I don’t want to be offtopic. Don’t take it personal: it’s not because of you, it’s because of me who can’t refrain himself from talking about politics. I hope you’ll understand. Take care. (I’ll read that, I like Popper).
there´s something hilarious about her going on a transphobic tantrum and talking about how she supports jk rowling while giving a out a harry potter game for free making sure that rowling receives less money for it since she still gets payed in royalties(yeah I know she´s rich but it´s the irony of the situation for me)
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.
Empress has a long history of narcissism and delusions of grandeur. I hate to link back to reddit, but there’s a good but outdated writeup on hobbydrama. She’s only gotten worse since and is now going hard on bigotry. She’s trying to form her own little cult too.
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
Why does spiderman get to wear tights and assault people on the streets while being called a “hero”, while this person fighting the real fight is called a delirious psychopath??
lmao. this reminds me of a dude on r/chemistry that was 19, first year uni dropout, a stalker, psychoanalysis enjoyer and face on dick pic poster, that claimed that he’s about to cure cancer and rabies by pulling some random molecule out of his ass and claiming it will definitely work. mind you, drug development takes years to decades for specialist teams with med chemists, biologists and so on in the loop, who know what they are doing and have 10s to 100s of millions in funding, at minimum. then he tried to get to this molecule in his homelab, while not using any PPE, with history of him getting poisoned by allyl bromide and uranium previously (the latter by licking some mineral), damaging some of his living room with acids, and later giving up after three or four steps in, all while asking really basic questions that he would know answer to if he bothered to go through first organic chemistry lab at uni (usually at 2nd year). so, you see, he focused on the easiest part, the one that can be subcontracted to CRO. he got sitewide ban after calling for genocide of everyone who doesn’t recognize his genius, because obviously it’s close minded professors who are in conspiracy to suppress him
then two weeks ago he made another account, still going about his bs “miracle cure”, doxxing himself in drivel filled medium post before presumably giving up chemistry and focusing on psychoanalysis. i guess frequent breaks from reality won’t bother him anymore
Of course it’s real. Have a wander through the Reddit astral projection subreddit (I’d point you to the Lemmy one but it’s not populated well).
It’s a deep topic, with various theories how it works however it’s not lucid dreaming, which is also real, of coursez and anyone can do both. There are many guides how to, if you read the faqs on the subreedits.
It’s as though you told someone from an undeveloped country that electric cars are on the roads and they said, “what? Electric cars?”
Reality is a lot stranger than you think.
I’d recommend you listen to Mark Gober’s podcast “where is mine” - start with the NDE one (NDEs are also, very, very real, and have been documented since Roman times)
Ehhh, looking into this a bit it seems like “Astral Projection” and “Near Death Experiences” are paranormal explanations for a category of ‘Out of Body Experiences’ that aren’t very well understood. I guess it’s fine to say that those experiences are real, but those specific terms seem rooted in esotericism rather than science.
I’m torn between this and thinking she wouldn’t want to risk the hit to her reputation.
FitGirl refused to repackage her content out of similar fears, though I’m sure the thought alone of FG getting to make a “told you so” post drives enough rage in her to ensure it likely wouldn’t happen.
Yeah personally I’m thinking I’m gonna go uninstall my Harry Potter game 😂 chance sof me ever playing it again are slim and I’m sure it’ll go on sale and I’ll actually buy it if I ever want to play again.
I was hoping it would be a HobbyDrama writeup, but this blew me away, this feels like a gold standard post that I can’t believe I’ve never seen before. What a talented, skillful writer! The detail, the flow, everything is just right - just the perfect amount of background, just the perfect amount of depth. Thank you so much for this link!
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:
Had a computer and lots of free time.
Had 0 money but friends that would lend me a game for a week or two.
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.
I remember how at a lan party I stumbled onto a problem with Worms 2 game. After being patched it asked for cd to be present in the drive all the time. And the only nocd I found required to place game data from the cd in the root of a C:/ drive. It made me curious and some days later I tried to investigate the case and yeah, game did some checks and assembled path to game files using drive letter. In the nocd they just cut out loop that went over the drives. Which afaik misbehaved on machines with floppy drive. And I went further and patched game to use ./ instead of drive letter. Which was tricky as there was not enough space to just patch it in place and I had to search for free space and do long jumps.
I definitely messed up details here and there, but those were fun times nonetheless :)
Some had hilarious protections where the game would screw the player if detected
I will never forget that one day one of my high school friends called me after I’d hooked him up with a pirated version of Crysis and yelled into the phone: “WHY IS MY GUN FIRING CHICKENS?! I CAN’T KILL ANYTHING!”
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:
Holy shit, that is so unhinged. Multiple accounts of, what seem to me like, paranoid delusions from the GrapheneOS dev. As a user this is concerning, and I will keep an eye on it going forwadd.
Hey don’t let this scare you away from GrapheneOS as Louis states he doesn’t know how this works and cannot trust the code.
You cannot be specifically targeted as a user of GrapheneOS with backdoors from the project. The entire user base would need to be targeted and this project has to many eyes on it to not be noticed by now.
I’ve still never had one in like 30 years lol. My husband got that weird dolphin one forever ago and that’s it. That one was just kinda funny tbh. It’s not that hard to avoid them even if you’re donning your pirate cap. Not that uh… Not that I know that from experience or anything.
As crazy as that makes Empress sound, I’m definitely willing to look past this kinda stuff because it’s best not to bite the hand that might feed you.
Also, we definitely need more crackers (especially of the d€nuvo kind) to step up and train the next generation of crackers instead of just ranting online about their torrents being removed from popular sites.
I’m just saying getting stuff from Empress is no worse than getting it from a corporation. She’s going to be equally crazy whether you download her cracks or not, at least she’s not exploiting child labor or destroying the environment in the process.
Corporations aren’t going to fill their software with crypto mining malware and when exposed go torched earth trying to put the blame on their accusers.
I personally believe that, since piracy is already illegal in the developed world, and since I live in a politically divided first world country, that we don’t need to bring politics and stuff into this.
Besides, we don’t have many better options when it comes to d€nuvo than to accept the people who crack games with modern variations of it. I especially don’t since I’m not smart enough to crack it and also since I go for pre-cracked games for the convenience of not having to apply the cracks myself.
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