Pirate sites have reputations the same as anybody. The more reputable ones actively remove spam and malware.
So it's kind of like saying, I don't understand how people dare to run executables downloaded through the internet. Depends a lot on where on the internet you downloaded it.
I have no idea what the landscape looks like today, and I’d be reluctant to run anything outside a vm, since I no longer know where the reputable sources are, but I’m sure there are still private trackers and discord servers where you could trust every link.
They happily ban users for sharing the wrong links, and have banned entire instances for discussing anticheating technology.
Or use Vagrant if you want better security.
Do you have an alternative to trusting them?
The unpaid WinZip still works great though.
Free, open-source, and much faster.
This is just one example of a basic feature, used on a regular basis, which has obviously been tested thoroughly by the Office 97 developers, but has seemingly barely received any attention from LibreOffice.
I use a very basic laptop, and through the wonders of virtualization have a Windows ME VM with Office 97 on it, and it runs just as fast as LibreOffice does natively, if not faster. In a VM, being used for an hour or two at a time, Win ME has no stability issues.
Win ME came with IE 5.5, and I eventually upgraded it to 6.0. Because I built my site to be compatible with both, I can easily copy and paste what I wrote into my blog. Office 97 and IE 6.0 support Unicode well enough that I can do all this in two different character sets.
I rarely print anything, and I'd probably still use LibreOffice for that. But if I really wanted to, I could probably figure out how to print, too.
The Win 9x series is remembered for being unstable and crashy, but I think it's also a marvel of engineering and UI design. And when you take away malware, random utilities, registry decay, hardware malfunctions, and so on, it's a comfortable, almost typewriter-like experience.
About the Ctrl-s thing, maybe it's specific to windows, I use libre office on linux and have for years and Ctrl-s on a new document has always brought up the save-as dialog for me.
Either way, I'd rather use an older version of word or libreoffice over new versions of office.
I grew up using older windows, I don't really remember it being overly good or bad, it just kind of was. I remember lots of crashes, but used to do a lot of things I probably shouldn't have been and I do remember it working for everything I tried to do so I don't really have any complaints really. I don't really have any fond nostalgia either though to be honest.
I stopped using windows entirely outside work over a decade ago so none of it really matters all that much to me.
I'm using LibreOffice on Fedora, and I've used it on Mac and Windows too.
Yes, it brings up the Save As dialog, but the name is not pre-filled with an intelligent choice.
In Office 97, it typically pre-fills the suggested file name with the first line of the file. If that's not available, it tries to think of something else.
But never does it ever suggest a file name that is either invalid or would overwrite an existing file.
It ensures that the suggested filename is not too long, and doesn't contain unacceptable characters.
If there's already a file with the first name it thinks of, it appends a number, so that you don't accidentally overwrite an existing file.
In case you don't care about the filename, and just want to save the document, you are never forced to change the default, and it always works.
Many of my files begin with "I'm ..." and sometimes the best that Word 97 can come up with is "I7.doc".
Well, that "I7.doc" is a whole lot better than LibreOffice's "Untitled 1", which will overwrite the last "Untitled 1" it already had me save.
After how many years of development is LibreOffice still not smart enough to do any of these things?
Surely, LibreOffice today has been in development longer and by more people than Office 97 had been in '97?
What is the cause of this unfortunate circumstance?
No, but it's usually helpfully preselected so a single keystroke, changes the name.
>Many of my files begin with "I'm ..." and sometimes the best that Word 97 can come up with is "I7.doc".
>Well, that "I7.doc" is a whole lot better than LibreOffice's "Untitled 1", which will overwrite the last "Untitled 1" it already had me save.
Personally, I dislike that feature of word because typically I do not want my files saved by the first thing i've written and yes I care about file names and take the time to name things sensibly and even put them in related folders.
Also, it should automatically detect an untitled1 and enumerate to untitled2 if untitled1 exists, again this is how it's always worked for me. So your file overwriting example seems a tad dubious to me.
I have to be honest, of all the gripes i've heard, this one's just a bit ridiculous. The save feature works exactly as it should. A program should allow me to choose a name for a file or choose a reasonable generic default, not decide what it thinks I want.
If I see an untitled1.doc around, I know I forgot to rename a file and I investigate, if I see I7.doc or a my name is.doc, I dunno what the hell it is. Maybe it's something I forgot to rename, maybe it's something I wrote before and forgot about, who knows?
Then you can rename it?
>Also, it should automatically detect an untitled1 and enumerate to untitled2 if untitled1 exists, again this is how it's always worked for me. So your file overwriting example seems a tad dubious to me.
But it doesn't! That's what my complaint is about! Do you think I'm just making it up?
>I have to be honest, of all the gripes i've heard, this one's just a bit ridiculous. The save feature works exactly as it should. A program should allow me to choose a name for a file or choose a reasonable generic default, not decide what it thinks I want.
To me, this reads as, "I read your text, but I don't think your problem is real, because I think it should work differently."
I think you should do a deep examination into how you relate and communicate with people, because you spent this whole thread invalidating what I'm saying and telling me the problems I'm describing in detail are not real problems.
You've given me the impression of being an insensitive and careless person.
I mean just look at these instructions
https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Using_the_notebook_bar/v...
I can't make heads or tails of this...first I gotta switch layouts?? Then I gotta go to view and turn notebook bar mode on? Then i've gotta choose between tabbed, contextual groups or contextual single bar...nope no siree this is why piracy's just not for me.
These knockoffs are always so complicated, why can't they be simple like the official certified word? And shiny and jazzy lookin'? I know ya get what ya pay for, but how hard would it be to slap some bezels and rounded edges on there? Maybe some 3d transitions?
And being open source, the project won't have the same luxuries in terms of user-testing and iterative improvement of things as trivial as a 'shiny' UI. Again, if you have the time, you could help them out.
Ah well: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Online proprietary software sells you to advertisers for money, or locks you into an ecosystem so they can sell you to other third parties, and they use some of that money to fund development.
With free software you either have to improve it yourself (the source code is on the internet) or give them money so they can hire someone to do it (they all have donation links). If you're dissatisfied with the user interface, have you tried doing the things that cause it to be improved?
Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say.
Great looking software existed long before the rise of everything being always online.
Only if by "nothing to do with" you ignore that it is the method by which development is funded.
> Great looking software existed long before the rise of everything being always online.
At which time you had to pay a lot of money for it. If everybody gave the same money to free software developers, they'd have plenty of resources to build interfaces that are more to your satisfaction.
>If everybody gave the same money to free software developers, they'd have plenty of resources to build interfaces that are more to your satisfaction.
You're just arguing to pay for software, but in a more roundabout way. And again, great looking software existed far before the popularity rise in always-online.
You're unlikely to get a direct answer because... Well you don't talk about fight club. But if you watch the subreddits a bit you'll get a much better idea of where to start, how to get invites to private trackers, etc.
I don't remember when PirateBay or other Warez sites first appeared, but they have been around for at least 20 years. I remember people were even using Blogspot to promote their wares/z with links to RG, FS, DF, etc.
I know and trust(?) the results of Virustotal, and I tell all my clients that when in doubt, drop that bad (?) boy in VT and let it scan it.
Way back when, we had usenet, telnet and gopher, and local BBS's would sometimes have a private stash of cough shareware.
Prior to usenet etc being easily accessible to people outside of educational institutions (the majority of the 80s), it was more common to share programs via "sneakernet" on floppy disk as well, these would often contain a text document that would say what other programs were available and some clues on how to obtain them, but usually it was just a viral spread among friends and acquaintances.
Cracked software would often include intro screens and trainers, the intros sometimes included animations and catchy music to showcase the elite skills of the cracking crew and build reputation, and often they improved the software so it would load more quickly, unlock hidden functionality, or give you infinite lives etc. This spawned the DemoScene, which still exists today unrelated to piracy but historically rooted in the 80s cracking scene.
Here's a compilation of crack intros from 86 to 89 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFqBkSJOYOQ (skip to 11:40 and you'll see an advert for "cleveland cracking service" with a phone number for an example of how stuff got around before internet was common)
Essentially even back in the 80s and 90s there were the serious crews trying to demonstrate their awesomeness and generate rep, and dumb kids like me naively sharing "free stuff" we were given on disks because we had no idea what things like copyright and licensing even were, let alone stopping to consider whether the stuff we were loading onto our machines had any malicious intentions.
So I'd say that the idea of building reputation and trust in regards to piracy "crews" has a long history going back even further than 20 years, well before the web was common in homes, and I'm at least aware of early to mid 80s cracktro / intro scene materials so perhaps ~35-40 years is a good guess?
Who are your clients? Are you aware that everything that's uploaded to VT becomes public? As in full file contents, not just metadata & scan results. There's no harm in uploading .exe's there, but you should at least warn them not to upload private documents.
Also, VT results are trash for anything new so "all green" doesn't necessarily mean you're safe to run stuff if it also happens to be the first time VT has seen the file. It's not even the VT's fault, AV's suck and everybody knows it. The value of VT is that once something gets detected people can go back in time and look for other incidents that had flown under the radar previously.
Not running pirate software is the only valid path for security.
...that aren't there own.