• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, I used to work a job where I was basically on call for 6 hours at a time, but didn’t need to do much unless something broke. I’d help set things up at the top of the day then tear things down at the end. But in between, I was basically just waiting for things to break. It’s safe to say that I used the fuck out of my gaming laptop and VPN at my desk. Because I obviously didn’t want to try playing games on a company computer.

    I played a lot of single player and idle games at that job, because those are easy to walk away from at a moment’s notice. Just hit pause and you can give your full attention to whatever problem has popped up. Then once it’s resolved, you’re right back where you left off.











  • Historically, games would refuse to boot unless you had the game disc inserted. Even if the game was fully installed and didn’t need the disc to run, requiring the disc was a primitive form of DRM.

    One of the most common forms of cracks was a NoDisc crack, which did exactly what it says on the label; It removed the requirement for you to insert a disc. This was usually just a quick file replacement. So it was easy to take the game disc to your buddy’s house, use it to install the game on their computer, apply the NoDisc crack, and then your buddy could play the game whenever they wanted without using your disc. This was many people’s first intro to piracy. Obviously game publishers hated this, and constantly played whack-a-mole to shut them down. On the data preservation and user friendliness side of things, NoDisc cracks were popular because they allowed you to play your games without digging through your giant book of CD’s. It also meant you weren’t locked out of a game just because your little sibling scratched your CD.

    When transitioning to digital sales, the disc requirement obviously won’t work. You can’t require a disc when the user never actually received a disc. So the game publishers had to remove the disc requirement when they put their game up for sale on Steam. And this is showing that in the official Steam release, a pirate’s signature is found. They simply used a NoDisc crack (from one of the crackers that they had constantly been battling) on their own game, to remove the disc requirement. Instead of finding an “official” way to do it, they just used the most straightforward route.

    And yet game publishers still constantly harp about piracy.



  • Was going to say the same. Windows and Linux both use “lazy” ways of deleting things, because there’s not usually a need to actually wipe the data. Overwriting the data takes a lot more time, and on an SSD it costs valuable write cycles. Instead, it simply marks the space as usable again, and removes any associations to the file that the OS had. But the data still exists on the drive, because it’s simply been marked as writeable again.

    There are plenty of programs that will be able to read that “deleted” content, because (again) it still exists on the drive. If you just deleted it and haven’t used the drive a lot since then, it’s entirely possible that the data hasn’t been overwritten yet.

    You need a form of secure delete, which doesn’t just mark the space is usable. A secure delete will overwrite the data with junk data. Essentially white noise 1’s and 0’s, so the data is completely gone instead of simply being marked as writeable.