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
Only two people willing to crack denuvo games. And publicise their cracks.
Usually talent like that leads to well paying jobs, well paying jobs usually lead to wanting to not go to prison.
That doesn’t mean people don’t have the skill, it means they’re not willing to use it, when someone else is already taking the heat
Is it actually illegal to crack Denuvo?
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
You have to be crazy to crack denuvo, and Empress fits the bill
Football manager uses a really old version of Denuvo too.
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:
removed shut up, they pirated rdr2
Which, to be fair, Hobbes and Kant never did.
I’m fucking dead 😂
that was a great read, i recommend it to everyone who sees this post
Welp, that was a wild read. Thank you for sharing!
and the other only cracks football games
I actually LOLd at this
The other cracks football games? You mean like FIFA? Because I haven’t seen any cracks of those…
Football manager.
And only football manager
absolute legend
who is this cracker? Asking for a friend…
I think they mean MKDEV.
This was a fantastic read, thank you for sharing!
What a crazy fucking read. Thank you for posting that.
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.
psychotic transphobe who speaks like a JRPG villain
Crab Juice
only cracks football games
Mountain Dew
Football as in FIFA?
Football manager looks like
That was a fantastic read, thx!
That was one of the wildest things I read in a while
Holy smokes. Got sucked into that one. So is she still the only one that can crack Denuvo? You mentioned 2, is the other not very active or something?
Great read. Thanks 👍
Both are based in their own charming ways
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Pretty insulting when you’re scared of something so normal that doesn’t affect you
It’s very obvious ragebait, just don’t respond, it’s what they want.
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.
That’s wishful thinking.
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.
Nobody should be afraid of her insane ranting; she’s pathetic and could use some competition to refocus her ego.
We wait until Denuvo gets patched out of a game. There are so many games to play, you can survive without playing Denuvo protected ones.
you know whats sad - there are no denuvo crackers right now other than this psychopath bitch
Is this what cracking Denuvo does to people?
Crack’s certainly involved in all this.
I heard there was this other one who’s in a healthy mental state but only agrees to crack football games
The first part of your comment contradicts the second.
Isn’t it specifically Football Manager games?
I’m just going to assume if she disappears, at any point, that she is in rehab for meth. Lots of meth.
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
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
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.
If she is gone … What will the community do then?
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.
Well her argument is, if Denuvo knows how she does it, they will patch it and it the process becomes more suicidal that it already is.
Can we blame them? When you invest so much time acquiring skill and knowledge at one point you gotta eat and sleep somewhere.
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.
Maybe they don’t have formal training, or live in a country where those jobs are unavailable.
She lives in Russia.
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.
Sounds like a smart tactic for a hat she wants
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”.
That’s a shame. I wonder what it would take to change that. I would really like to see Denuvo become useless some day.
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
and also, empress cracks cost $$$ C:
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.
Which clearly is money they have considering how much publishers pour onto that fire, tbh
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.”
I believe the assumption is the Denuvo people would fix their workarounds quickly.
Perhaps, but more people knowing how it works would help find new ones faster.
She’s the only one to have cracked it.
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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.
Jesus, that’s a rough read. What a horrible person.
Oh. Well damn. Nah, I’m with you on this one fuck her.
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.
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)
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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”.
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This is why I don’t trust her releases. God knows what she’ll put in them to try and get at her “enemies” during some psychotic episode.
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Don’t forget the: “I’m the greatest philosopher who ever lived” and “I use visions and astral-states to crack my games” parts
If the second one is true, even in a subjective sense, I’m honestly just impressed. I mean, if it works, it works.
“hi, satan? Great, yeah i was wondering if i could like, rent out maybe half of my soul for the ability to crack games? wonderful, thank you”
She unironically needs to get help. I can’t imagine what she’s like IRL if she’s this unhinged over something so small in the grand scheme of things.
Gets denied a loan: shits on the loan approvers desk Gets fired: merks her boss
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Well, astral projection is real, though I don’t know the validity in using it to crack computer games
huh? astral projection real? 🤨
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.
Very true! Perhaps it’s best to call them out of body experiences.
Did research on oobe advance past Monroe or are we still operating on vibes and “trust me bro”-based meditation techniques?
Nekoarc is a sane individual in comparison.
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.
It was kind of funny the first few times, now I just kind of cringe at her whenever she has one of these meltdowns.
Genius and insanity are close bedfellows.
She’s a damn moron, the people with the minutest of peabrains are oftentimes the loudest about how “smart” they think they are.
When they’re too close the person usually doesn’t make it beyond around 32 yo…
Quite often only 27.
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.
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??
Life ain’t fair.
Found J Jonah Jameson’s Lemmy account.
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Indeed. She’s an unrepentant bigot and should be ostracized.
you are incorrect.
No. You are incorrect.
I think both of you should elaborate further. This argument is giving me traumatic Reddit vibes
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’m crying this is so funny
no u
No, you are incorrect.
Stop arguing and feed me instead master :3
Me, five minutes ago: “who’s this Empress?”
Me, now: “I need to follow her, it’s free popcorn!”
Man, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole writeup about Empress, and she used to be 10x as psychotic
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!
Wow, what a ride. Thanks for sharing.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing
Theres no used to be when it comes to these rants. It’s just a ticking clock to the next one
Wow that was quite a rollercoaster!
That was… weird, to say the least. More than her inviting people to her sexting game.
Thanks for this wild ride!
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!”
Lol, this sounds like a grandma complaining that Facebook is deleting her posts
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:
As someone who uses GrapheneOS, and likes Louis Rossman, this is very concerning. Could you link me to some info on this?
Louis’ video: https://youtu.be/4To-F6W1NT0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4To-F6W1NT0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
Good bot
I presume video on this site is supposed to actually play rather then just be static images… is there some secret to making it work or does it not support firefox?
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Works fine for me on firefox
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.
The dev is no longer involved with GrapheneOS as of two months ago.
Good to know, thank you.
Hey could you link a source for that? I was thinking of switching to graphene os but this drama makes me feel unsure.
Here is the post that Daniel made claiming that he will be stepping down: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/5235-stepping-down-as-project-leader-of-grapheneos
It’s also available on his twitter and mastodon iirc
There’s also Calyx OS which is another privacy/security Android fork: https://calyxos.org/
I used Calyx for months, it’s great. Switched to GrapheneOS for some reason, I can’t remember, and haven’t had any reason to switch.
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.
Probably just Rossman being paranoid, I assume.
There are video links posted if you’d like to stop assuming.
Rossman is being spreading lies for some years now
Like?
How right to repair is good for the consumer, complete lie. Daddy Tim Cook is keeping me safe with my glued in phone battery, anti-replacement display chip, Apple repair program required NDA, etc. He also bullies manufacturers into cutting off all direct-to-consumer sales of components, so that no nasty unsafe display ends up in my device. Thanks Tim, and fuck Louis! (obvious /s)
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Words not a lady but a Pirate!🦜
YARRR
I remember when everyone was simping over her when she was cracking Hogwarts Legacy but no one cared once the crack was released.
I miss CPY :'(
I’m out of the loop. What happened this time?
A theory, but probably Empress wants to defame 1337x for “bundling cryptominers with torrents” so she can distract the community to not noticing that she will actually be the one to do such thing
Any evidence to this or just speculation? Empress is absolutely batshit fucking insane for sure, but so far we’ve got no reason to believe she’s planning bundle cryptominers with cracked denuvo games as far as I can tell.
Just speculation, but Empress just generally gives me that tinfoil-hats-are-strongly-recommended vibes
I think fitgirl released a bunch of stuff awhile ago pertaining to potential malware in her cracks and her blackmailing anyone who speaks out against her.
