this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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.
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
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.
Based
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.