this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I wouldn't trust anything from a P2P site that purports to be:

  1. A cracked game / application for desktop and mobile platforms. Maybe it's legit but assume it is malware.
  2. A serial number generator. If you absolutely must run one of these do it from a throwaway VM, or via WINE emulation to mitigate what it might do.
  3. An encrypted archive with a README. It's a scam designed to make people sign up to other scams to release a non-existent password.
  4. A movie / audio with an extension such as .scr, .wma, .com, .exe etc. It's malware.

Movies, audio & books are generally safe providing they use a recognized extension - mp3, mp4, pdf, mkv, aac, flac, epub etc. Stuff that runs under emulation like console games is generally safe. I say "generally" because an exploit could still be crafted to escape a popular media player or emulator and cause actual harm to your computer.

All the ads and 3rd party scripts should be considered malicious too and should be erased with an adblocker, or even better use Tor.

So basically use some common sense and if you really want some game or app, just buy the damned thing or wait for it to go on sale.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

wine is a windows api implementation, it's specifically NOT an emulator

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Read their own FAQ. It's not an emulator in the classic sense of emulating the OS. It is however emulating the API of Windows. I quoted the pertinent line of the FAQ elsewhere and made my point clearer

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Not sure what the thumbs down is about. It's right there in their own FAQ.

In fact it ends by saying - "Wine is not just an emulator" is more accurate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There is a storied history in computing to use tongue in cheek self referential acronyms to denote some humor and finality in distinguishing things that purposely fill a niche in the world of competing, often pricey, commercial software and other hackable reasons.

So I bet you're rubbing wrong those of us who remember that gnu is not unix, and more specifically wine is not an emulator. Because they really aren't.

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