Startdock & warez, piracy, etc.....
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I am a bonified warez junkie. It all began back in the days of Atari and dial up and just sorta blossomed over the years. So here's my story from the Piracy Site Admins perspective. You see, I never would own a site because it wasn't gonna be my ass that got sued in the end, but I was known in the world of warez and was hunted down by those that wanted to make their site competitive.
In Draginol's CD Copy protection is not the way to stop piracy article, https://forums.stardock.com/209 several great points were made. I actually believe that there are 3 types of pirates tho. He breaks his pirates down by "The Kids", who won't buy it anyways. Not exactly the term I would use for this classification but for whatever their reasons, these pirates download and don't use the program anyways. There are many times that I have fallen into this little group but it was usually to help out a noob that didn't know how to use the crack or was having problems making it all work together. Something a serious warez site would do to give itself credibility when starting out or maintaining its membership base. I would also have to put many of the Crackers and Key Gen makers into this group too. They download something just to beat the activation codes, copy protections, etc.. Many don't bother using the programs after they have beaten it, it's just a thrill for them in an unexplainable warez way.
Draginol's "The Casual Pirate". The term I would definitely agree on but I have to disagree with "This being where the biggest chunk of lost sales come from. For them, it's about convenience. These guys pirate not because they're cheap but because it's convenient". Times have changed over the years along with this type of prirate. When I first started out using warez, it was more of a, what program do I need to do
what it is I want to do, kinda thing. Then break out the search engines and start looking. Found a program that has potential, great, time to find a working crack. No crack, onto the next potential program. Why bother spending hours or days trying to find something your only gonna use once or twice? For exactly that reason, because why should I waste the $$$$ to purchase it when its only short term use anyways. Now your asking yourself why not use the trial version? That's pretty simple too, most trials are not full working versions. All have some limitations and obviously the best functions are the ones that can't be used. So actually these folks pirate because they ARE cheap and out to save a buck and most definitely NOT because of the convenience. Trust me, finding working programs today is not normally as easy as doing a search and getting lucky on your first hit. Most links are no longer working, many times the cracks don't work, muddling through pages and pages of porn, battling the sites that force you to vote for my site shit over and over again, risks of viruses or spyware. This kind of user is usually pretty inexperienced when it comes to warez and since it's not something they do frequently enough to have weeded out the trust worthy pirate sites, I just don't feel they are a big loss of sales. Need an example, do a google for the latest version of Windowblinds and see how long it takes to find a working copy. The casual pirate has the basic gist of what to look for in order to begin and many will quit long before they succeed in finding one. Oh but wait, now we have torrent sites. Just because someone provides the program and crack, doesn't mean it will work. The same threats with warez applies to torrent sites too. It all boils down to just how bad do they want it.
The 3rd type of pirate is the Dedicated Diehard Pirate. This pirate IS the primary threat to monetary loss for many companies and let me say many of "The Kids" Draginol referred to, fall into this category. I am this kind of pirate. I have many reasons for doing what I do. It just all depends on my mission that day. Lets see, I purchased an OEM copy of say Windows XP from Tiger Direct. It's mine, I own the rights to install it on my pc forever and ever right? Not anymore. Someone at Microsoft decided this copy is only good for say 20 installs. Hmmmmm, that just doesn't seem fair since I reformat my system regularly, now does it. I paid $250 for this program and it now has installed limitations with its updates. So, now I have used up all my installs and start looking on the web because I'm not paying Microsoft any more money to use a product that I purchased. True story? It is for many diehard pirates out there. I own several programs that offered LIFETIME support, upgrades, updates, etc., when I purchased them and not a single one of them today stand behind that, even when I can provide a copy of the terms of service showing thats what I paid for. I now have to pay for yearly updates and/or upgrades.
So lets see, I purchased a program from a company that was just starting out or offering a new product and suddenly since it became popular and they have became greedy, I am now penalized for supporting them at the beginning of their venture. I have read many comments over the years about how it's only the price of a pizza and your not going to miss that. Well in Microsofts case, it's usually several pizzas and that kind of service tends to piss off some folks and they in turn, turn to piracy.
Now lets look at "The Kids" Most of these are gamers and they usually have it pretty easy when it comes to finding what they want and the cracks or fixes to make the games work. I agree with Draginol and the copy protection concept too, but thats not the only reason why kids would bother. Lets look at EA and their Sims 2 Series. Yep I said SERIES. Not including the primary game, there have been a total of 17 expansions for this game. The primary game costs in the area of say $40 and every expansion is anywhere from $20-40. Lets use the $40 figure to keep it simple and the cost to own the entire series is......... $720. Just how many hard working folks out there can afford to spend that on a frigging game?!?! Oh I know, it's not like you have to come up with it all at once, but it's the principle because you know what EA does about 2 years after the initial release and they want to continue to increase sales? Of course, they begin packaging the eary versions all in one package because all the excitement has slowed down along with their sales. So this new buyer only has to purchase the first 3 or 4 games for the low price of $40 instead of the $120-$160 the person that was there from the beginning, had to pay. Most buyers learned their lesson from their Original Sims 1 purchase and decided to hold off once Sims 2 was released, for this very reason and sure enough EA did it again. Lets say that for every 1,000,000 folks playing this game 5% of them bootlegged it off the internet. That's 50,000 folks @ $720 and thats an easy 3.6 million dollars in lost business. Now think of how many kids out there are pirates and by golly that's an awful lot of lost revenue just from "The Kids".
Now I'm sorry for my little rant there and your probably wondering why on earth would I come to this site and even bring this up. For what it is worth, yes I do own a purchased copy of Windowblinds. I tried it years ago, fell in love with it, and did buy it. I actually commend you for trying to stop your products from being leeched into the world of warez. To be honest, I haven't been actively involved in the piracy world for the last couple of years. We switched to HughesNet for internet and there is only so much a person can do with an up/download limit of 300mb a day. That's our only option now unless we go back to dialup. No DSL either. For the most part, my tastes were more towards the movies anyways. For the price of a movie I could buy a spindle of dvds and have 25 movies instead of 1.
Are you aware that the piracy world has finally successfully cracked the Stardock line? I was never involved in the cracking aspect so I don't really know what they do and all that. I just know how to make it work and yes until yesterday, I was using the entire Stardock line with no problems what so ever for the 2 weeks it was installed. Plus a pretty nice collection of the Premium stuff too. I just built a new system from scratch and was curious to see how everything would hold up under a massive amount of memory hogs, so I went on the hunt for the entire Sims 2 series and all the Stardock products. Running all that together would be the ultimate test for any pc. I actually went down to a friend's home and used his cable for the Sims 2 and had all 18 downloaded in 12 hours total and used Hughesnet for your programs. Left my system on after the last forced reboot for the 2 weeks and not a single blue screen from hell while running anything. Pats self on back for an awesome new system while it reformats.
So is this something that the average Joe Blow will find? Maybe after a couple weeks or so of non-stop hunting, lots of trial and error, a reformat or two. They might get lucky. In my case, I had the entire Stardock line downloaded, installed, and running with no problems, in less than 4 hours. Personally I was amazed because it seems like since version 5, most crackers were fit to be tied. Stardock had, it appeared, became unhackable. I'm not sure of the latest build but the version I found that worked was 6.02 Build 43X86. I was also shocked to see so many of the premium products that dedicated skinners created that were made available too. What really blew my mind was how many of these sites were hotlinking the images they were using, directly to your site. Helloooooo, is this thing on?!?! They are personally inviting Stardock to visit their little piracy site and shut them down, simply by hotlinking and yet you do nothing? I realize that most of these site are operated by kids or in foreign countries, and the members are made up of the inexperienced user but the fact still remains, a REAL warez site enforces no hotlinking for that reason and will verify every image posted on their site making them extremely hard to find. Your image can be traced when hotlinked and now your product is crackable. It is only a matter of time before someone stumbles into a real warez site and leeches (stealing a link from another warez site and posting on theirs), a valid link to a working copy of your product. Once that happens, it will spread like a wildfire because all sites leech from each other. Good golly, I am unemployed right now, if you are going to throw lost revenue away, by all means toss it my way. I could switch sides if the price was right...lol Seriously tho, email or pm me for the links if you are interested. Obviously posting them for all to see here, would be very wrong. Maybe if you had the cracks you could see what they were doing to stop them from working or at least shut down the sites. Then again you could flood the warez world with bogus downloads too. Lots of options there. Sure wish there was a way to stop them from sharing the premium stuff tho, I really hate to see the skinners lose out for their hard work.
Feel free to delete or forward to those concerned. Good Luck!
In Draginol's CD Copy protection is not the way to stop piracy article, https://forums.stardock.com/209 several great points were made. I actually believe that there are 3 types of pirates tho. He breaks his pirates down by "The Kids", who won't buy it anyways. Not exactly the term I would use for this classification but for whatever their reasons, these pirates download and don't use the program anyways. There are many times that I have fallen into this little group but it was usually to help out a noob that didn't know how to use the crack or was having problems making it all work together. Something a serious warez site would do to give itself credibility when starting out or maintaining its membership base. I would also have to put many of the Crackers and Key Gen makers into this group too. They download something just to beat the activation codes, copy protections, etc.. Many don't bother using the programs after they have beaten it, it's just a thrill for them in an unexplainable warez way.
Draginol's "The Casual Pirate". The term I would definitely agree on but I have to disagree with "This being where the biggest chunk of lost sales come from. For them, it's about convenience. These guys pirate not because they're cheap but because it's convenient". Times have changed over the years along with this type of prirate. When I first started out using warez, it was more of a, what program do I need to do
what it is I want to do, kinda thing. Then break out the search engines and start looking. Found a program that has potential, great, time to find a working crack. No crack, onto the next potential program. Why bother spending hours or days trying to find something your only gonna use once or twice? For exactly that reason, because why should I waste the $$$$ to purchase it when its only short term use anyways. Now your asking yourself why not use the trial version? That's pretty simple too, most trials are not full working versions. All have some limitations and obviously the best functions are the ones that can't be used. So actually these folks pirate because they ARE cheap and out to save a buck and most definitely NOT because of the convenience. Trust me, finding working programs today is not normally as easy as doing a search and getting lucky on your first hit. Most links are no longer working, many times the cracks don't work, muddling through pages and pages of porn, battling the sites that force you to vote for my site shit over and over again, risks of viruses or spyware. This kind of user is usually pretty inexperienced when it comes to warez and since it's not something they do frequently enough to have weeded out the trust worthy pirate sites, I just don't feel they are a big loss of sales. Need an example, do a google for the latest version of Windowblinds and see how long it takes to find a working copy. The casual pirate has the basic gist of what to look for in order to begin and many will quit long before they succeed in finding one. Oh but wait, now we have torrent sites. Just because someone provides the program and crack, doesn't mean it will work. The same threats with warez applies to torrent sites too. It all boils down to just how bad do they want it.
The 3rd type of pirate is the Dedicated Diehard Pirate. This pirate IS the primary threat to monetary loss for many companies and let me say many of "The Kids" Draginol referred to, fall into this category. I am this kind of pirate. I have many reasons for doing what I do. It just all depends on my mission that day. Lets see, I purchased an OEM copy of say Windows XP from Tiger Direct. It's mine, I own the rights to install it on my pc forever and ever right? Not anymore. Someone at Microsoft decided this copy is only good for say 20 installs. Hmmmmm, that just doesn't seem fair since I reformat my system regularly, now does it. I paid $250 for this program and it now has installed limitations with its updates. So, now I have used up all my installs and start looking on the web because I'm not paying Microsoft any more money to use a product that I purchased. True story? It is for many diehard pirates out there. I own several programs that offered LIFETIME support, upgrades, updates, etc., when I purchased them and not a single one of them today stand behind that, even when I can provide a copy of the terms of service showing thats what I paid for. I now have to pay for yearly updates and/or upgrades.
So lets see, I purchased a program from a company that was just starting out or offering a new product and suddenly since it became popular and they have became greedy, I am now penalized for supporting them at the beginning of their venture. I have read many comments over the years about how it's only the price of a pizza and your not going to miss that. Well in Microsofts case, it's usually several pizzas and that kind of service tends to piss off some folks and they in turn, turn to piracy.
Now lets look at "The Kids" Most of these are gamers and they usually have it pretty easy when it comes to finding what they want and the cracks or fixes to make the games work. I agree with Draginol and the copy protection concept too, but thats not the only reason why kids would bother. Lets look at EA and their Sims 2 Series. Yep I said SERIES. Not including the primary game, there have been a total of 17 expansions for this game. The primary game costs in the area of say $40 and every expansion is anywhere from $20-40. Lets use the $40 figure to keep it simple and the cost to own the entire series is......... $720. Just how many hard working folks out there can afford to spend that on a frigging game?!?! Oh I know, it's not like you have to come up with it all at once, but it's the principle because you know what EA does about 2 years after the initial release and they want to continue to increase sales? Of course, they begin packaging the eary versions all in one package because all the excitement has slowed down along with their sales. So this new buyer only has to purchase the first 3 or 4 games for the low price of $40 instead of the $120-$160 the person that was there from the beginning, had to pay. Most buyers learned their lesson from their Original Sims 1 purchase and decided to hold off once Sims 2 was released, for this very reason and sure enough EA did it again. Lets say that for every 1,000,000 folks playing this game 5% of them bootlegged it off the internet. That's 50,000 folks @ $720 and thats an easy 3.6 million dollars in lost business. Now think of how many kids out there are pirates and by golly that's an awful lot of lost revenue just from "The Kids".
Now I'm sorry for my little rant there and your probably wondering why on earth would I come to this site and even bring this up. For what it is worth, yes I do own a purchased copy of Windowblinds. I tried it years ago, fell in love with it, and did buy it. I actually commend you for trying to stop your products from being leeched into the world of warez. To be honest, I haven't been actively involved in the piracy world for the last couple of years. We switched to HughesNet for internet and there is only so much a person can do with an up/download limit of 300mb a day. That's our only option now unless we go back to dialup. No DSL either. For the most part, my tastes were more towards the movies anyways. For the price of a movie I could buy a spindle of dvds and have 25 movies instead of 1.
Are you aware that the piracy world has finally successfully cracked the Stardock line? I was never involved in the cracking aspect so I don't really know what they do and all that. I just know how to make it work and yes until yesterday, I was using the entire Stardock line with no problems what so ever for the 2 weeks it was installed. Plus a pretty nice collection of the Premium stuff too. I just built a new system from scratch and was curious to see how everything would hold up under a massive amount of memory hogs, so I went on the hunt for the entire Sims 2 series and all the Stardock products. Running all that together would be the ultimate test for any pc. I actually went down to a friend's home and used his cable for the Sims 2 and had all 18 downloaded in 12 hours total and used Hughesnet for your programs. Left my system on after the last forced reboot for the 2 weeks and not a single blue screen from hell while running anything. Pats self on back for an awesome new system while it reformats.
So is this something that the average Joe Blow will find? Maybe after a couple weeks or so of non-stop hunting, lots of trial and error, a reformat or two. They might get lucky. In my case, I had the entire Stardock line downloaded, installed, and running with no problems, in less than 4 hours. Personally I was amazed because it seems like since version 5, most crackers were fit to be tied. Stardock had, it appeared, became unhackable. I'm not sure of the latest build but the version I found that worked was 6.02 Build 43X86. I was also shocked to see so many of the premium products that dedicated skinners created that were made available too. What really blew my mind was how many of these sites were hotlinking the images they were using, directly to your site. Helloooooo, is this thing on?!?! They are personally inviting Stardock to visit their little piracy site and shut them down, simply by hotlinking and yet you do nothing? I realize that most of these site are operated by kids or in foreign countries, and the members are made up of the inexperienced user but the fact still remains, a REAL warez site enforces no hotlinking for that reason and will verify every image posted on their site making them extremely hard to find. Your image can be traced when hotlinked and now your product is crackable. It is only a matter of time before someone stumbles into a real warez site and leeches (stealing a link from another warez site and posting on theirs), a valid link to a working copy of your product. Once that happens, it will spread like a wildfire because all sites leech from each other. Good golly, I am unemployed right now, if you are going to throw lost revenue away, by all means toss it my way. I could switch sides if the price was right...lol Seriously tho, email or pm me for the links if you are interested. Obviously posting them for all to see here, would be very wrong. Maybe if you had the cracks you could see what they were doing to stop them from working or at least shut down the sites. Then again you could flood the warez world with bogus downloads too. Lots of options there. Sure wish there was a way to stop them from sharing the premium stuff tho, I really hate to see the skinners lose out for their hard work.
Feel free to delete or forward to those concerned. Good Luck!
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