[IndieGala] Sexy Girls Bundle (warning: NSFW) - now updated with links

Reservations are already full with 20 people and I think most didn't even bother to post because there won't ever be a Happy hour most likely.

View attached image.

Not to encourage piracy (if you want more English games of anime girls being violated in every imaginable way by tentacles, the people localizing it need to make more money for themselves and the original developer to both pay for the localization and to encourage more developers to have their games localized), but...

Before the piracy "scene" people would post tutorials on removing copy protection from floppy disks on BBS', usually small text files detailing hex offsets and bytes to change to bypass checks. Physical media is prone to failure, floppies being particularly notorious but CDs being scratchable and breakable if not handled with care. It only made sense to back them up, but of course software companies didn't want their software copied so easily in fear of piracy and many opted for sophisticated media checks over manual-based protections (which could easily be photocopied or faxed by your average Joe). Many people, myself included, wouldn't pirate software but would simply grab cracked executables so they could use the software without having to have the physical media in the machine every time, whether due to laziness, it being misplaced, or being damaged or unreadable. Before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 outlawed copy protection circumvention of any sort in the United States (which has been challenged many times - particularly for DVDs), the law entitled you to own backups of your software. The infamous "Don't Copy That Floppy" video produced by the Software Publishers Association even makes this clear, with the quote "Although the licenses may vary, the law is very simple. Copyright law says that when you buy a piece of software, you can put that software on one computer and that's it. You can make a backup copy of the software, but you can't give that backup copy to a friend and you can't put it on another computer. Every program that you buy, that's one program for one computer.". This practice of protection carried on throughout the life of physical media until almost everything moved over to digital distribution, with copy protection advancing from simple CD checks to malformed media (e.g. Illegal TOC), unreplicatable signatures on the disc verified before decrypting and launching (e.g. SafeDisc), to much more sophisticated methods like VMs which control all aspects of executing the binary (e.g. SecuROM, StarForce).

Then of course the scene emerged. That has a history all of its own, but generally it's done for fame and fun, beating all the other groups and showing your superiority. It's meant to be kept internally, where groups affiliate with others sites and share warez between one another. The idea of encrypting releases in a way that only members of the scene can use them has been brought up, but has been shot down every time as there would never be a secure or practical way to do it. People who sell access to these materials or leak it to public places are ousted when they are caught, and you need only look at so-called "scene notices" to see this. It is generally those that leak this content, people who sell "leech access" to people who want to buy warez, that are in it for the profit, from the dirty "leech" site operators to the private torrent trackers that take donations, pride themselves on being the first to have these available and whose operators may be actively involved in the paid process of obtaining the warez, down the chain to people posting on shady file lockers with "affiliate" programs (or historically, sites were you had to click banners and vote for access to downloads, which were often hosted on compromised servers). Through these leaks this software makes it into the hands of the general public, which has long been shown as an inevitability. This is not to say that what these people do is moral, even if it was shared amongst a small group of people and was never accessible nor known by the public at large, but to establish an understanding of history and motive for all parties involved.

When the software makes it to the public and passes through many hands, of course it could be tampered with in any number of ways, although the files are originally packed and accompanied with checksums for verification. You could argue that this applies for non-pirated software too, like illicit sites that bundle free software (Firefox, Java, VLC, etc) with adware or malware. If anyone in the scene were to maliciously tamper with it though, they would be banned from the scene. To say that "There's a reason why it makes sense for crackers to remove DRM, and it's usually not the greater good" implying that they want to create some huge malware botnet or something is just simply wrong. Many groups don't even obfuscate their binaries in any way, and at times have openly encouraged other groups to disassemble them to learn their methods for cracking a new form of copy protection.

TL;DR: "SKIDROW" and "RELOADED" aren't uploading torrents of cracked software to infect millions of PCs.

Some concessions:
P2P groups (e.g. 3DM) and releases have nothing to do with the scene, so none of the scene stuff applies.

To say that financial gain and the scene have never been entangled would be false. Many BBS' affiliated with scene groups back in the days would sell hardware for example, especially things like copiers for consoles. It's also been rumored many times that some groups were associated with supplying counterfeiters.

For science! :P