Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?

It's a complete crapshow IMO.

I still have the source code for the simple stuff I developed over 12 years ago, but these organisations don't think it's important to hang on to source code and assets for something they plan to make money from?

Really telling about the attitudes towards software outside of the FOSS space and datahoarder communities, and more importantly how little the management/publishers actually care about the product.

Although to counter that, I'm aware of at least one situation where the opposite has happened. One of my simulation games for example is really buggy and isn't able to receive more updates because the studio behind it voluntarily disbanded, leaving the publisher without access to the source code (I believe the publisher Aerosoft has tried to get a copy of the source to provide further game fixes, but the individuals behind the disbanded studio could not come to an agreement on this)

Even if they have the source, they may not have all the build tools anymore.

Or they have the build tools but the wizard that set up the build system back in the day no longer works there.

Or they have the build system archived and documented but it doesn't run because some license expired, and the tool vender doesn't sell that version anymore.

In the near future, there will be another possibility - SaaS cloud tools that are impossible to preserve so they are forever lost.

I'd say they probably still have the source. It looks like they did the same thing for Manhunt and Max Payne, but then pulled older, pre-SecuROM exes from their archives when they got busted.

I don't know about Diablo 2, but Blizzard is so shady and messed up nowadays that I wouldn't be surprised that they "lost the source code" to prevent modders being able to port games, etc.

As for transformers, it was never lost (PCGamer, if you don't like Xfire). Hasbro claimed they wanted to provide access to legacy games, but completely made up that the source was lost. Now that we know that the source is still available... well, Hasbro clearly hasn't tried to rerelease those games.

(note: I know this is the same company, Activision Blizzard in both cases. For anyone reading who doesn't know, they were not the same company for the release of Diablo II, and a good amount of time afterwards.)

I believe it was a CSV file of every item in all of the shops (comma separated values) and it was being read and stored into memory single threaded so it was maxing out a single core on the CPU.

Are you talking about the guy that found a bug in the JSON parsing?

Writeup: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/

Are you saying the INSANE GTA Online load time is fixed now?

Back in the old day, I literally just throw my hands up and said "I can't wait for this shit anymore, I don't have all day" then rage quit and delete the game.

The nitter link: https://nitter.net/_silent/status/1698345924840296801

It's not really a crack, it's the corporate activation script. But yeah, MS don't care about sales anymore, they're all about stealing your data.

Or Ubisoft. A colleague of mine was super hyped for Far Cry 2, both the collector's edition but it wouldn't start on his PC. He contacted Ubisoft support and they gave him an actual scene crack. There were other reported cases of Ubisoft support handing out scene cracks to go around their shitty DRM.

"A" for effort for the support people in finding ways for customers to be happy and play the games they paid for. But a Steam release for a humongous corporation just straight up using the crack and releasing it as is, that's a new low.

cant even play their legitly purchased SINGLEPLAYER games without internet connection.
I fucking hate rockstar

When you view or edit a text (.txt) file in a text editor like Notepad, you're most often opening a file in ASCII encoding that uses the ASCII binary values for common letters, numbers and punctuation. The only values allowed in that kind of file are lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers and punctuation.

You can also view or edit binary files, like executables (.exe), but you typically need a hex editor. If you tried to open a binary file in a plain text editor it wouldn't know how to handle all the binary values that are not part of the standard ASCII set of letters, numbers and punctuation.

Hex editors show the data in hexadecimal format. They convert the binary data to numbers from 0 to 15 where the numbers 10 to 15 are replaced by the letters A to F. Often to make it clear people are talking about the hex number they add "0x" in front of the number. So, 0 becomes 0x0, 9 becomes 0x9, 15 becomes 0xF, 16 becomes 0x10, and 255 becomes 0xFF. This is an efficient way for people to work with binary data because 16 is 2^4^ or 222*2.

Within binary files, there will still be a lot of sections that are in ASCII. For example, any error messages that have to be printed out for the user to see, like "this program cannot be operated in DOS mode".

Razor 1911 is an infamous cracker group that has been around for decades. They often "sign" the programs they crack by putting "Razor 1911" inside the files, in a way where you can see it if you open it with a hex editor, but so it doesn't affect the program.

So, what this is suggesting is that a program that Rockstar has released on Steam is not something they built themselves, but they're actually distributing a cracked version that was released by Razor 1911.