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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

These days I generally pirate the single-player content I purchase anyway. Anything that requires Origin, Epic, uPlay, or any other cancerous software to be installed gets paid for and promptly pirated. I trust the Pirate Bay more than I trust Ubisoft.

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I do the same thing for my Kindle purchases. Luckily I have a Paperwhite whose serial number works with DeDRM to strip DRM for all my Kindle purchases (except Hindi books which are not downloadable for some reason).

You could also use the PC kindle app to download books and strip their DRM. That might be easier than transferring every book back and forth. (I use the kindle 1.26 version. It requires an additional plugin to convert the new amazon format, but works with DeDRM after that.)

Thanks for the tip, I haven't tried it with the PC Kindle app! An additional issue with (most) Hindi books is that they aren't supported on the Mac app, so they don't even download into the app's storage, let alone as standalone AZWs for manual transfer.

Dont you worry about Malware, Viruses and suchlike?

Not from reputable uploaders. It's about reputation, and people like, say, Fitgirl have a hell of a lot better reputation than Ubisoft or EA.

Yes. From Ubisoft. It's the pirated version that lacks the rootkit ;)

> Dont you worry about Malware, Viruses and suchlike?

Nowadays DRM are running in kernel mode so I'd say that the pirated version is safer in a lot of cases ...

you mean DRM and anti cheats ?

If you use a private tracker you will usually be fine.

What good private trackers still exist and are possible to join?

TL, must be run out of an embassy or Transnistria lol

According to https://opentrackers.org/torrentleech/ account creation on TL is currently open, but unfortunately when I try to create an account via Tor enabled Onion Browser on my phone nothing happens when I push submit. Even with most permissive JS settings in the browser. Sad times.

try a normal VPN then? I hope you are aware that bittorrent is bad for Tor, maybe they are helping you.

when you get in, you need to seed something, if you are worried about torrent activity on your network, try to seed something benign like a linux distribution.

Doesn't sound like he is trying to torrent over tor.. Just access the tracker website. I use tor to access several of them cus they are blocked at an ISP level in my country, and tor-browser is a convenient workaround.

GGn

Is that really practical these days given the frequency of updates developers put out for their games?

More like "frequency of bugs" developers put out for their games. Best to buy only once the "GOTY/Definitive/Special edition" is released and all DLC's are available and when it's a couple of years and 50 patches old - including patches fixing the patches. And when the game is on holiday discount sale. The game is then smooth and playable with no blood-pressure inducing defects and doesn't need too much Googling/forum-posting on asking what went wrong.

It seems there is a window of ideal time. You've described when that window opens. It closes as OS's evolve out from under the last patch. Steam in particular appears in no hurry to require games be playable after any initial QA.

I don't want to be forced to install one-way updates just to play a single-player game.

Apple's iOS App Store has normalized how updates can remove and disable (or just break) features, and there's no way to downgrade.

I don't buy games in a broken state hoping they'll be good later. Either I wait until they're done or don't buy them at all.

And I refund if it's bad and I didn't know it in advance. Steam refund experience has been great but they started warning me about "refund is not for trying games". Good things don't last forever but they day they start to BS me I will go back to piracy or give up on DRM titles.

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