What’s best practice to safely play pirated games on Linux? Looking to mitigate potentially malicious executables from wrecking havoc on my system.

  • cecilkorik@lemmy.caEnglish
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    9 months ago

    It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”

    It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.

    • stratosfear@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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      9 months ago

      Maybe times have changed but when I was in the warez scene 25+ years ago and essentially pirated every game I played, I saved all those games and the keygen.exe files and when they get scanned by modern AV they all come back infected. If anything it’s different because viruses are pointless now with the internet and there are much broader malware injection points nowadays than the minimal game pirating scene. But yeah I don’t know what I’m talking about, just my historical POV.

    • Glide@lemmy.caEnglish
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      9 months ago

      Downloaded a game which Windows Defender flagged as high-threat for containing “Cracked game content” the other day. Why yes, my cracked copy of this game IS cracked, thank you for noticing.

    • lemmyingly@lemm.eeEnglish
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      9 months ago

      Unless you inspect every line of code and/or monitor your computer activity to a super human level then you’ll never know.

      Viruses don’t behave like a neanderthal like they used to 20 years ago, so just because you don’t notice a virus doesn’t mean you don’t have one. Let’s be honest, viruses are still a thing and botnets have become a thing. These don’t magically appear from nothing.

      You shouldn’t be blindly trusting anyone on the internet, especially those not abiding by the laws. People and entities can be impersonated. They can behave differently at any moment.

      Personally i would do one of three things, run pirated content, in a VM, on a separate drive, or on a dedicated computer - because why take the risk when you don’t have to.

        • lemmyingly@lemm.eeEnglish
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          9 months ago

          I think corporations are doing quite well if your example is from 19 years ago.

          In the same era, we had things like LimeWire where files were frequently viruses, CP, or similar masquerading as innocent files like the latest song from your favorite artist.

          I’ve never tried closed trackers, so I can’t speak on that side of pirate life but I think it’s naive to trust pirates on public trackers.

      • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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        9 months ago

        It’s kinda trivial to limit their ability to do anything in Linux though. It’s not as if virus authors are gonna waste their time trying to exploit a demographic that is both small and extremely fragmentary when they can just write for windows.