Items tagged with Piracy
You’d think Bowser would have more money, given his rampant kidnapping campaigns against princesses, but it would seem that he didn’t have any offshore accounts once behind bars. At least, that is how it would appear based on a new interview with Gary Bowser, the figurehead of the piracy group Team Xecuter, who was...
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Console video games go through an extensive qualification process with the platform holder to make sure that they meet specific standards. This was even more true back in the day, when it wasn't so easy to simply patch a game that shipped with serious flaws. Despite that, the developers of Alien Resurrection, a cult...
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Luminous Productions, the developers of Forspoken, have removed Denuvo anti-tampering technology from the game. Square Enix published this title in January 2023, and within the PC gaming fraternity it became known as a game with performance issues on systems with 16GB of RAM, or less. Denuvo has something of a...
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Today's AAA video games can cost hundreds of millions to produce over the course of years, so it's no surprise many publishers use anti-piracy tools to protect their games. Denuvo is one of the most effective, and therefore the most well-known of these DRM systems which has drawn the ire of many. Gamers claim Denuvo...
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Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, sanctions against Russian and Belarusian politicians and oligarchs, as well as Russia at large, have continued to pile up. These sanctions have contributed to an historic currency devaluation in the region, and are causing additional problems for Russia.
Many major...
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If you're not a video game pirate—or not a regular reader of HotHardware—you might be confused by that headline. It's completely true, though "Bowser" in this case refers not to the giant, spikey, fire-breathing turtle above, but instead to Canadian web developer Doug Bowser. Mr. Bowser pled guilty last month to...
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Installing pirated software is always risky business. The hacking tools used to bypass legitimate software activation quite frequently include viruses and malware. The latest in a long line of malware piggybacking is a popular activation tool that targets your cryptocurrency wallets.
The threat was first noticed by...
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When you think of "video game piracy," you probably think immediately of PC games. That's not really a fair association, though; console game piracy has been going on as long as there have been video game consoles, and it's a bigger market than you likely realize. Perhaps not as big as it once was, though, as famed...
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A bunch of record labels including Sony Music, Capitol Records, and Warner Music have filed a joint lawsuit against Frontier Communications for not disconnecting internet subscribers who "repeatedly infringe" on copyrights by illegally downloading and sharing music. The lawsuit also suggests Frontier allegedly...
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Streaming video is big business today with sites like Netflix and Hulu offering huge amounts of content that people can stream anywhere they have an internet connection. As many subscribers as Netflix and others have, two of the biggest streaming sites were illegal. Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to...
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Nintendo has been selling the Switch about as fast as it can build them resulting in some bountiful profits for the company. The Switch has been the subject of some hacks with all the consoles on the market suffering from an unpatchable exploit thanks to the NVIDIA Tegra chip inside. Hackers have been able to leverage...
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Video game piracy is not exactly rampant on modern consoles, certainly not to the extent that is on PC. However, even though the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have largely been able to avoid piracy from becoming a problem, a whole bunch of ripped PS4 games have found their way to the web, including Grand Theft Auto V and...
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It's hard for many of us to trust the studies that seem to come out on a daily basis covering a variety of topics. You can find studies on the same subject that come down on completely different sides of the topic depending on who funded them. You might expect a study commissioned by the European Commission (EC) to be...
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Mark Zuckerberg has big aspirations of expanding Facebook into the professional video space and wants to bring independent content creators into the fold. It is an appealing proposition with Facebook able to reach so many eyeballs, though the threat of piracy could scare content creators off. To address that, Facebook...
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Microsoft has just been granted a patent that could help the company to fight back against users that have been taking advantage of its OneDrive cloud storage service to share pirated materials. Now more than ever, users are storing a lot of their data outside of their homes or devices, taking advantage of services...
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If you live in the United Kingdom and regularly use search engines like Google and Bing to easily search for pirated wares, you might want to find another method to fuel your madness. Both Microsoft and Google have signed a pact in the UK that would in essence demote pirated content from search results.
The purpose...
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In less than a week Nintendo will release its first official Mario game for smartphones, Super Mario Run. It's a big moment for Nintendo, which is starting to embrace gaming on mobile handsets, and Super Mario Run could end up being huge. That is, if Nintendo doesn't get in its own way. The reason that is a concern is...
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This past summer, we learned that even though the US government is adamant about fighting piracy, it found itself in a "Do as I say, not as I do" situation. So far, it's managed to - but given hard evidence, we can't imagine that it's likely to last for long.
Starting back in 2011, the Department of Defense's US...
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What would you do and how far would you go to eliminate copyright infringements? Warner Bros. Pictures may be hurting its own cause, as the company has inadvertently flagged their own legitimate websites for "pirating" comment.
Warner Bros. and other major movie studios claims that Google does not do enough to...
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Oculus suddenly finds itself embroiled in a game of cat and mouse as it attempts to keep titles exclusive to the Rift from running on competing VR headsets. Unfortunately for Oculus, its latest attempt at padlocking content with a DRM update backfired, and instead of stopping hacks like Revive from working, Oculus...
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You might not know it, but pirates in the digital age are an organized bunch. We're not talking about pirates with eye patches who sail the seas plundering ships and cities, but software pirates who rip movies and TV shows for illegal distribution on sites like The Pirate Bay and other torrent sharing portals. It's...
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Piracy is often cited a reason why many game developers don’t focus their efforts on the PC. Here at HotHardware, we believe the PC is the ultimate gaming platform and urge developers to leverage the PC to properly showcase their wares, but there is no denying that a large number of PC gamers pirate games. How that...
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