Episode: 3991
Title: HPR3991: YOU ARE A PIRATE 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3991/hpr3991.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:24:20

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3991 from Monday the 20th of November 2023.
Today's show is entitled, You Are a Pirate.
It is the 100th Show of Operator and is about 26 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is a rant on about what I think about piracy.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host
Operator.
I'm going to kind of do this from plot, but we're going to be kind of talking about piracy
and how that's changed since I've grown up.
So you know, going to have some contrasting things and there might be some elements of
conflict within it, but should be pretty straightforward around how video games in piracy
has changed and how like TV and movie videos piracy has changed as far as I've seen it.
So I actually, what kind of sparked this was two things is that kind of piracy is hard
now, in general, because you have things like content management systems and DRM types
of things and these are all good and people should be, you know, I don't necessarily
contend on piracy in any way, but I also think that they make it difficult for people
to get the content they need.
So if I could spend a reasonable amount of money in getting the content I need and not
have to sign up for 5,000 different streaming services, then I would do that.
And there was a very brief point in time, at least with movie and TVs, when we had, you
know, we had Amazon and we had, you know, Hulu and we had whatever the other one was.
And you know, you could have had those three and pretty much had most of your bases covered.
But even then, you know, it's always been, the deal breaker has always been for me, you
know, you get season two and season three.
Like, well, I want to start the thing from season one.
So allow me to have the content and I will, you know, gladly watch it or whatever.
So there's always been that barrier to entry where, you know, I have to look at ads or
I have to, you know, constantly be on b-bombarded, even though I'm paying for something, I'm
still being bombarded by ads and that's just an absolute turn off.
So my son doesn't even know really what ads are or commercials are or because, you
know, we have ads skipping all the content that we have.
And he has all the video games and stuff on the, on the actual switch that we have.
So we have the, the rooted switch.
So I'll first start, you know, it started back in the days, right, of copying games all
you had to do was copy the folder, right?
And you could pretty much play the game most of the time.
Sometimes you'd have to do like a registry hack or whatever and that was great for land
games where we didn't really play that specific game except when we played a multiplayer.
So the only other time we would play that game is pretty much multiplayer and we wouldn't
really play it single player because it wasn't really that good and we never really played
it that often.
So that's how kind of that started and then you got to where, you know, they would have
copy protection and CD, they changed over time.
And they had CD ROMs that had certain CDs where you had to have a certain kind of burner
and then that got more complicated where bypassing the copy protection on CDs and then the
same thing happened with DVDs and decrypting DVDs and backing up your content.
So you know, in that regard, it got got a little bit complicated, but now it's, you know,
as everything is more online, right?
It becomes increasingly difficult to back up your own content that you paid for.
So an example of my wife complaining is it's, you know, we had some kind of library check
out thing or something and of course we were in the voonies and tried to play some content
she had already downloaded, but it wouldn't let her play it because she wasn't on the internet.
So it's, you know, it's a matter of convenience, sure, and whatever.
But it's those types of things where you have the content but you don't really have it and
if you're offline, you can't really do anything about it.
So with that, it's like, we've got TV, same kind of thing over the air content.
There was a brief moment in time.
I don't remember the provider, but they basically recorded over the air TV and then sold you
a tiny little antenna inside of a data center and it was like, you know, a TVO, but for
over the air TV.
And they lasted probably five or six years and then they got destroyed by, you know, that
the networks because they were operating like a broadcast network, broadcast provider.
So they got them on those on those terms, but you could basically record like, you know,
all of Seinfeld and have for like $5 a month, you could have all your Seinfeld from any
device, any time, anywhere and it was like a little PBR where they had, you know, the content
for each channel you wanted.
So that's becoming, you know, increasingly difficult to pirate content.
So like, for example, on the, the switch, right, it's the switch you had to have an older
version and to jailbreak it, you had to have an older version and then from there, you
had to do a bunch, you know, a bunch of premarole to get it to go.
So in regards to like pirated piracy, it's gotten kind of hard and almost extremely annoying
at times to be a pirate.
And there's easier ways to get content and things like that.
But in general, you know, it's getting harder to do that.
And if, you know, if there was a way for me to get the content that I want easily and quickly,
and I would, without, you know, being bombarded with ads and advertising and spam and all
that, I would do that.
But there isn't one and it always frustrates me that when I do sign up for something and
I go through the red tape to get the thing, I'm always bombarded with extra ads on top
of it.
For example, the fire stick, you know, I got a fire stick, I have Amazon Prime.
But every time you idle for more than two minutes, it takes you back to the home screen
and it closes out whatever app you're running, right?
So like, it just, it's annoying in that regard because you've got your paying for a thing.
You pay for a piece of hardware and the whole thing is being, you know, monitored and they're
monitoring and capturing your data and selling it and whatever.
And then on top of that, you're just constantly being bombarded with ads and things like that.
So it's like, okay, I left it on this application, went away for two minutes and then now it
goes back to the home screen with a bunch of ads on it.
So and it's not even, it's not even content that you can even, you can even get without
paying 90% of the time.
So like, you know, I can understand, you know, having some kind of, you know, ads or whatever,
but everything and there's just garbage.
It's all just half of it is just a bunch of junk and spam.
So every time I get into something or I pay for a service, I quickly get frustrated with
being bombarded with ads and then I turn back into a pirate because with piracy, you don't
have to deal with ads.
You don't have to deal with, you know, being bombarded with shit that you don't want to
see or hear, you know, and that's some of why I'm still, you know, kind of heavy in that
space because it's just less fuss and if I can spend two hours a month messing with
my flex server, then and not have to worry about ads, then I, I'll take that two hours
and I will spend that two hours a month on maintaining the server and making sure it's
working and all that stuff.
It's, it's, you know, some of that is, is kind of a passion thing just because I like,
you know, messing with computers and getting the content that I want on any device at any
time, but, you know, it's some of that's hot so I'll give you another example.
Last night, I purchased, I don't know what people's thoughts are on these resellers that
will buy, you know, they're super shady ones for games, right?
And likes, they're for activating games or getting a game, video game accounts.
There's kind of two worlds.
There's three worlds really.
There's paying full price for the game.
So was it Star, um, it's about Starfield.
Starfield is the new defense of the game everybody's going crazy about.
It's like $69 in Microsoft right now.
My nephew gave me the free pass for a month or whatever from Microsoft and I activated
it and quickly canceled it just to make sure I wouldn't be out of recharge if I forgot.
So we started playing the game whatever and I've been playing it for maybe, maybe ten
hours now and I've decided that I would like to purchase the game and, you know, we can
argue that honestly paying $69 for a game is actually reasonable, um, considering, you
know, some people play these games for 400 hours, right?
Do the math.
400 hours, you pay what, $10 for a movie, right?
Even if you paid $5 for a movie, 400 hours at $5 per hour, that's like unfathomable
that money to pay for a video game, but as far as entertainment to time spent ratio,
you know, that's, that's some, that's some big numbers.
So we're, I don't think we're paying enough for video games and I can, I can understand
that too, but also the same thing.
The first game, internet game base that I purchased was, um, like, Dragon Age or one of
those RPGs and the first time I paid for it, I installed it, it took forever to download,
took forever to install, I finally installed it and I walk into the whatever and I start
the game and I start playing and the first thing I do, I get back to my house or get
to back to my treasure chest or whatever, what is the first thing that happens after I've
been playing the game for, you know, 30 minutes, 45 minutes?
Oh, I get bombarded with DLC ads and ads to buy more content.
When I haven't even played the game, but for like 40 minutes and it's just this constant
bombarding and spamming of, of content, like, I don't, I just, it's just, I guess it's
the generation of being, my generation is the generation that was just pop-up hell and
having to deal with pop-ups and having to deal with ads and being bombarded with ads all
the time.
Um, I guess I went hyper the other direction and now that whole market is toxic to me and
I don't, I just instantly have anger against all of that because, you know, I felt like
a lot of that was just annoyances.
Um, so I guess that's why I have some history with it, but anyways.
I go to buy a Death Star feel and I'm like $69, that's a lot.
I don't really have a lot of time to play video games, so half the time I don't ever finish
anything.
You know, all the games I purchased out of all the games I purchased the past two years,
I've only finished Cyberpunk, um, and that was a great game and I pay full price for
it.
And, you know, I knew I was going to make myself go through that game, same, same for
some of the assets and screen games, I will make myself run through those games and beat
them.
A majority of the games I just don't have the time to do it and I would like to play the
game for longer, right?
Um, but at $9 a month or whatever it is for the Microsoft thing, um, that's going to
add up quick and from not paying attention, right?
Um, things can get at a hand and I'll end up paying, you know, $300 for a game I've only
played four times, um, because I just don't have the time anymore.
So, um, I went off to go something like G2G and, you know, content providers and game folks
will argue that these services are kind of toxic to the community, um, essentially what
happens, um, the first camp is, like I said, you pay for the game, full price, whatever.
The second camp is, you know, you find a friend that has it and you borrow his account,
right?
And you play through his account when he's not online, whatever, um, kind of the third
camp is you buy these reseller accounts, um, and you purchase, maybe they bought them
in bulk or they got a deal on them or they bought them with a different type of, um, a different
type of money transaction and that's not particularly great, right?
Um, if they're buying them in bulk, maybe they have a discount or maybe they have an
in or some kind of code or whatever, um, they've, they've gotten codes or keys or accounts
for these, um, they usually buy them at bulk and then they assign like a bunch of, you
know, email addresses to them and randomness, um, so with that said, you know, it was like
$69 for the game, I got it for like $34, I think, and it was a steam version.
So you know, it's, now it's 11 o'clock at night, I've picked out whichever one is not
region locked.
There's also region locked ones where you can only activate it in a specific region.
So like if you're, if you buy one that's region locked to say Russia, you have to try
to proxy through, um, try to find like a tour exit node if they'll not block already all
blocked or just sign up for a free VPN or something and come through somewhere close to Russia,
um, usually, usually is a, is enough, which I've only done this like twice for two different
games.
And once you activate it, you can generally play it for a while before you get the tunnel
back through for updates or something like that and you get forced, um, essentially forced
to update the server or talk phone home or contact the mothership and, you know, that's
another thing too.
It's like, okay, you know, I've bought the game from essentially a reseller that bought
stuff in bulk or whatever and you can argue that that's not great for the community,
but that's what people do.
People buy sell, it's a, it's a capitalist world, we buy stuff in bulk and we sell it and
how, how that happens in whatever that's, it's not any different than buying anything
else in bulk and shipping it over to the States and selling it for, you know, 500% markup
what we do every day all day.
So, um, you know, buying that, getting that set up activated is kind of frustrating, but
so I got it, got it set up, um, got the steam account logged in, changed the credentials,
changed the emails, set it to mine, um, a backup email that I had and they say they were
saying that you can share it through the family access or whatever.
So you do this authorized thing and steam and you authorize both sides, you authorize the
computer and then each user you authorize and then the idea is if the game is actually
able to be shared through the family, whatever family link, whatever it's called, you can,
essentially take that, uh, game and borrow it from the other user and as long as they're
not logged in and playing it, you can, you can play the game, um, I don't think maybe
this count that flagged for some reason as not being able to be shared, there's a, there's
a website called like family, it's like family steamcheck.com or something and you can type
in the game and it'll tell you if you can share it through the family, the family view
deal.
So my idea was to, you know, give this other account, share the game and then just not
really ever log into the account, um, much and just have, not have to switch accounts
back and forth and just use my main steam account for whatever.
And I know there's terms and services said that you can't do like the geolocking stuff,
so if you buy like an account with a non-US currency or you buy in, you know, a regional
locked and you go around the region locked stuff, um, you know, it's against their terms
of service and they can ban your whole and not your account or whatever.
But this, in this case, this was a, a US, um, non-region locked game, but when I got
it all set up, I spent like an hour trying to install it and get it set up and do the
family thing and watch videos and whatever, um, when it finally was ready to be shared
or whatever it would work, it just said, like, purchase and there was no other option
to purchase it.
So it finally gave up and just started the game and went through and got a save file
going.
Um, I ended up, uh, finally getting the point where I could save the game and what happened
was that, um, the Microsoft way that Microsoft saves the game is not the same way that's
the team saves the game.
So now I've got a bunch of these random files that don't look anything like the Steam
save games and I'm like, what am I supposed to do?
So I look online, um, and I'm actually using CXNG, which I don't think I've done an episode
on, at CXNG, it's a local metadata search engine and I've kind of boycotted Google because
Google has gotten kind of toxic and disgusting and they say that being is now better than
Google.
I don't know how that happened, but, um, so I, you looked, looked on CX and got some links
for, uh, a tool that's called, um, XGP save extractor and this GitHub project and it converts,
uh, I guess the Fezda titles, uh, from Microsoft to the plain normal save game files that Steam
uses or any traditional, whatever, I don't know what it is about Microsoft, but they, of
course, they have to do everything differently and chop it all up.
Um, so luckily, somebody developed this tool, um, to convert the save games to the, the
Steam, the Steam version or the Steam style.
So I was able to have backups of my save games for Microsoft, convert them over and finally
load up the game and get it going, um, but I will have to switch back and forth in between
accounts.
I don't really play anything on the main account anyways, um, every once in a while
my son wants to play X-Play, um, but that's pretty much it or, um, what's the other game,
uh, um, X-Playing and the, um, Kerbal Space would like to play that, but, you know, it's,
it's, you know, when, and when it's all said and done, I've spent an hour and a half trying
to, to play a game or get a discount on a game or whatever and not have to pay full price
for a game.
Is, is it worth the time?
I don't know, but for me, it's kind of out of spite too, um, just because these platforms,
you know, even, even the launchers to a point are wildly frustrating, you know, everybody
has their own launcher.
I think they've managed to consolidate some of them, but, you know, at one point in time,
I had a screenshot of, of like five different game watchers being updated at a time.
And when you don't play games that often, you go to play your game and it's like, oh,
I'm forcing you to update right now.
You have to update.
I can't not let you play without updating, especially with the online games, they force
you to update.
I was like, I'm not even playing this game online, I'm playing the local, I don't want
to update right now.
I don't have the bandwidth or time to do it.
So I basically had it set up where every time the computer started up, all the launchers
I had start up to and have automatic updates all installed on all of them.
So I, every once in a while, I would turn my computer on when I was playing games, everyone,
now and then.
So I would turn my computer on and start up, it would start up all the game engines and
game clients, and I would make sure they were all updated and happy.
So that way, next time I wanted to play, changes are I wouldn't have to install like every
single patch for every single game.
And you see that in consoles, too, it's the same way, just being bombarded by ads.
You know, every time you go to play a game, this game needs an update, and I mean, I
get it.
If it's an online game, you got cheaters and stuff.
And the thing about cheaters is that, you know, they'll go through a little bit of hoops
to block cheaters and stuff, but they obviously don't care as much about cheaters as long as
the, you know, people are playing the game, the amount of people playing the game are the
number they want.
And I don't know how they calculate all that, but at the end of the day, as long as people
are playing the game, they're not super angry that their cheaters everywhere, they don't
really necessarily care.
They'd rather do silly stuff like region lock your games and do all these anti-piracy
things and spend all their time doing that instead of actually, you know, trying to prevent
people from cheating.
And I know that's difficult, I know it's hard, but I gave up on video games, competitive
video games, or just multiplayer video games in general for that reason because of the
cheating.
And there was so much of it, and I gave up the day they came out with multi-pack cheats
for a single game.
You could, like, download one binary and get cheats from multiple games.
I just gave up.
I was like, I'm not doing this anymore.
This is, I don't know who's cheating, I don't know who's playing for real, I play with
friends sometimes, but mostly, you know, towards the end I was kind of playing it by myself.
So it wasn't really fun for me anymore and I just didn't have the time to play as much
video games.
And when I did, they are so competitive I couldn't tell if it was just me or, you know, cheaters
or all the above.
But anyways, all this is to say is that, you know, I guess some of my, you know, some
of my piracy comes from growing up in the age of just being bombarded with ads and, you
know, and just being completely bombarded with things all the time and I, you know, I struggle
with concentration and staying on task and I have lots of things that I have to do and
I live my life by calendar and to be distracted on top of everything that I'm trying to do
and supposed to do, it doesn't help.
So, you know, if I could pay for the content that I wanted and I didn't have to sign up
for 15 different, you know, there's like 30 different ones, even in Plex.
If you go in Plex and you open up add a, you know, streaming provider, there's like 30
of them in there.
Obviously, there's only probably 10 of them that are decent.
But even with the 10, it's, again, it's more, just more ads, more ads, more ads, more
ads, more ads, more ads.
And, you know, they want you to pay for everything and they want you to always be paying for
this and paying for that and just like throwing stuff in your face, it's all just garbage.
Like, you know, these old movies and having to, like, try to find the content either
want and they're throwing stuff in your face, it's like not even anything you would want
to watch just because they want to, you know, get the viewer ratings up for something.
That's still why I'm kind of in that space is because the whole thing is still toxic and
it's, it's almost even more toxic nowadays.
Anyways, it's kind of a rant and kind of a, you know, lesson in how we're, I feel like
where we're at today is, you know, it's still at the bombarding of the ads, the, the, the
stuff and having to deal with all that and the reason I'm in, you know, I still do the
piracy thing is that it allows me to get the content that I want without all of the bullshit.
And I would pay double if I could get, you know, the content I want for not having to
watch commercials or any of that stuff, I would pay double, but that's not the thing
that exists.
It's pay us, we will bombard you with ads and try to upsell you and try to sell you more
shit and whatever and then also not give you the content that you want and it just, it
doesn't make any sense to me.
We wouldn't, like I said, there was a brief point with like Hulu and Netflix and Amazon
where you could actually pay for the content that you wanted.
And I had Netflix and Amazon, I didn't have Hulu because there was stuff on there that
didn't really want.
But between those two, I could pretty much watch everything that I want.
But even then, there were, you know, limits to that and you got that, you can only get
the first season or you can only get the third season.
It's like, okay, well, that's, that's not, it's not what I want.
So at the end of the day, you know, that's kind of what turned me off of that stuff and
then now, you know, it used to be like piracy and then it was Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.
And then slowly but surely people started to figure out that they could have their own
streaming services.
And so the piracy kind of like went down and with the Netflix and the three combo, you
know, streaming services, piracy went down, friends and family, technical people that
I talked to, they're like, oh, I don't do any of the other stuff I just pay for my content.
And I was like, wow, it's actually kind of cool.
And I started, the more I got into it, the more I realized it's not what I, it's not
what I want still.
I'm not still getting what I want.
I'm still having to be in the way by, you know, being, being sold tough all the time.
So I'd ever switched over and then more and more and more.
It got to where it just got worse and worse and worse and now everybody has their own
streaming thing.
And everybody's pirating it again because, you know, they've made the process so awful
and painful and toxic that, you know, people don't even like my parents can't even get
the content they need.
They have to call me up and figure out, help me, you know, help them figure out how to
get it.
What they're trying to, trying to watch or whatever.
But anyways, that's kind of my rant for today and kind of shoot from the hip and, you know,
it's not easy to be a pirate today, but I still go through the motions to do it.
And, you know, when we can't get the content we need, we pay for it and hope that whatever
we interface we pay for it through, I can block ads with or block stuff, the content
that I don't want to be shoved in my face.
So anyways, appreciate it.
You all have a good one and a good look.
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