this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Ko-Fi Liberapay
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I understand that sharing video, photos, documents etc. is relatively safe because the data is not executed in the processor as instructions. How come people are willing to download and install pirated software though? How can one be confident that it does not contain malicious addons? Are people just don't know the risks? Or are there protection mechanisms that I am missing? I mean since the software is usually cracked there is not much use in comparing checksums with the originals, is it?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's one of those high-risk, high-returns case scenarios. You gamble. If you succeed, you will be saving some buck. Some software licences can be very, very expensive.

There is no way of knowing the answer to your questions. You just use your intuition and take a leap of faith.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Some software licences can be very, very expensive.

When I was in art school in the early 2000’s, I worked with computer controlled weaving looms. The program for drafting patterns and running the AVL Compu Dobby on the loom was free to download. In order to use it, though, you had to have a $3000 usb key.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

same I attribute some of my success to the fact that our computer lab teacher provided cracked versions of adobe and 3dsmax. Well over 10K in software and this is in the 90's

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The part that hurt was the ancient Mac II that ran the loom. When I encountered the Y2K bug on it, some upperclassmen said, “Oh we’ve just been turning the clock back a year.” Turned it back as far as it would go…1969