very inaccurate measure for piracy. for countries with average low uplink speeds most of them use hosting sites rather than torrent. this is basically a map of how good your internet quality of service is times your population.

windows users when bill gates has sex with their girlfriend (she’s owned by Microsoft)

companies experimented with appearing more “socially conscious”, waited for a bit, saw it didn’t generate any extra revenue for them, then axed it to appear more profitable.

capital has gotten really dumb, and if you think any one of these really gave a shit about diversity, you might be dumber.

community servers are fine, and it’s a great game. people were just holding out hope that valve would do something but they didn’t.

they would prefer you use their pirated software rather than using their alternatives. if you aren’t someone that would be paying for it anyway, this is the desirable outcome for them. stick it to them by abandoning their platforms all together.

by available i meant available. it’s on a per channel/group basis and not on individual messages but essentially you can’t join or view their messages even if you have their id and even if someone forwards it to you it displays a “this message is nor available on clients downloaded from google play” error message or something similar. if you joined a channel prior and it get blocked from your client you stay in but can’t view its messages.

telegram has different visibility based on which client you are using and your phone number’s region. I’ve seen it firsthand how some channels are not available on telegram downloaded from app store vs direct apk download. unless if you mean in spirit they’re basically the same which i agree but everyone that has used telegram at all knows that telegram values being accessible more than free speech and privacy.

thanks. 32% of malicious traffic is still a lot. the 50% increase in bad traffic in gaming is interesting though.

well nice job ignoring literally everything else i said but alright. my rule of thumb for comparing my purchasing power vs an american is to multiply the product’s value by 15. so you tell me that you wouldn’t feel annoyed if you had to pay 375$/year (ignoring the increased data cap costs that comes with using a VPN of course) for a service that might get blocked at any moment? never mind the scammers that are absolutely littered everywhere.

and the regions that are not supported by PSN probably don’t have regional pricing in steam as well, so we also have to pay that fuck you fee if we want to buy our games legit, unless of course you are willing to risk a ban (which actually isn’t that unlikely) in order to region hop, or get a CD key that was most likely bought with stolen gift card money of scam victims. and steam recently has been cracking down on both region hopping and the price disparity seen between different regions.

yes it’s not the most earth shattering issue on the planet, but at least we get to complain about it online right?

since you didn’t fuck off let me explain.

i don’t play nor care about helldivers 2 but i can certainly emphasize with people that have had their favorite game linking to a service that is blocked/not supported. you either use a free VPN which good luck with shitty connectivity, high packet loss and ping, or use a paid VPN which basically converts all your games into a subscription that is most certainly not affordable for many 3rd world users, and at the end you are still probably dealing with the issues mentioned before since you are adding extra hops in your route. and that’s if you can get your hands on a working VPN which since most companies have their IP addresses known you get forced into shady VPNs automatically.

plus you are massively risking your data since you can’t trust the person at the other end, especially with free VPNs that could be loaded with viruses and spyware. in addition in most cases using a VPN can and will trigger false bot flags, causing either a temporary block or worse a ban, not to mention lying about your region when creating an account is in most cases is against TOS (although it’s unlikely you get banned for it).

for example i wanted to play titanfall 2 when it came out but couldn’t due to it being linked to EA account system which is definitely blocked here. never bothered with the official Ultima Online because EA. wanna play the free copy of GTA V? can’t download shit off Epic Games. wanna play any games made by Riot? you better get that DNS service ready cause otherwise you can’t get in. wanna update warframe? too bad the CDN service they use blocks your region (this was a long time ago i remember being pissed off about it).

so stop being an asshole online. we deserve to play games like other people without resorting to hacks in order to have a worse experience that was forced upon us. even ignoring all of my rant this decision is still against privacy of most users by handing their data over to yet another big company. i cannot imagine what would compel someone to make an ass out of themselves to call people that are against this cry babies.

can’t read this article, can some explain what their definition of bot is?

as someone who is in a country where services are regularly blocked and you need to use a VPN,

fuck off.

is your country a member state in WTO? are your copyright laws compatible with that of the US? does your country recognise foreign copyright claims from the countries that your pirated media comes from?

your worst risk as someone who just pirates safe media for personal consumption is getting a letter from your isp and that only happens if there are laws against it on the books and your isp feels threatened. if your country simply doesn’t enforce its copyright laws it’s unlikely you’ll be chosen to be punished to set an example (they’ll most certainly target notorious distributors) and your chance of getting sued by a media company amongst thousands of potential defendants in what i assume is a third world country is almost non existent.

Roku is a pioneer in most of this crap but don’t be fooled to think that only cheap stuff is gonna have these and that somehow you are safe if you spend a lot on your TV. as it turns out high end and average TV producers would also like to squeeze the tiniest profit margins out of their consumers and if they could get away with it they would do the same.

in fact nowadays most TVs regardless of price are actually collecting and selling your data and in the best case it’s an opt out option in the worst possible place in the menu.

i appreciate the human touch on the shoes lmao

mostly around my university but i have also seen the 5G symbol pop up at random places. it’s never consistent though outside uni. the speeds are almost the same as 4.5G so it really doesn’t matter.

lmao yeah. long live Mokhaberat

here we are getting some limited “5G” (bandwidth is fucked it’s basically early 4G speeds but with a 5G written at the top) here and there, but most cable connections are still on ADSL2. if you want fibre you have to pay for replacing the cables and congratulations now your bandwidth maybe increased from 8 Mbps to 16 Mbps but now your data cap costs are twice more expensive and you basically limited your choice to 1 or 2 ISPs.

the irony is now that almost everyone are on the mobile network the speeds are basically the same as landline connections but data caps are much more expensive. internet here is just fucked.

getting multiplayer working on a pirated copy really depends on how the game handles multiplayer itself. in general you can divide them into these categories based on how you pirate them:

the easiest ones would be games that allow community or self-hosted servers. getting multiplayer working on them is essentially just cracking the game itself and turning off a few validation checks. if you wanna play with your friend it can be as simple as checking a tick box when creating a new game, although some games have a separate server binary and you probably need a static ip and other complications that arise when you wanna host a server. these games usually have communities that host servers for everyone and some of them can be as active as the original game’s server or even more. this would also probably disable any anti-cheat that the game might have so they may force the players connecting to have a separate anti cheat. some examples that i’ve played would be older valve games and minecraft. most game these days don’t use this model though.

a little harder would be games that only work over LAN. these also don’t need anything special done to them and if you genuinely get people on the same network you can actually play together, however in this day and age gathering people around on the same place can be quite hard, and also if your group is large enough your router may not be able to handle it, not to mention you can’t play with strangers online. that’s why you need an extra layer of software to simulate people being on the same LAN. the ones i have worked with are Hamachi and GameRanger. these tend to be very finicky about the exact version everyone is using so make sure to have the exact version with the exact patch number. these tend to be much older games, mostly strategy games since that was the most popular genre at the time, although early fps games are also LAN based. the games in the previous category also usually have LAN support. some examples i remember would be borderlands 2, age of empires 2 and stronghold crusader.

the biggest category today would be peer-to-peer (p2p) games which use p2p connections as the main way to communicate. in these games one of the clients usually acts out as the host while others connect to it over the internet. some of them might not even have a host and everyone connects to everyone else… and it’s all a giant mess that you really shouldn’t care about. what you should care about is that these games are way much trickier since game clients need to find each other, be aware of each other and send stuff to each other at all times, therefore most of these games usually use third party APIs do all the syncing. this makes it harder to play them online since they also use these APIs to check if the game is genuine or not. wouldn’t it be nice if we could take a free game that uses one of these APIs, send our requests as if we were playing that game so the validations checks wouldn’t happen? since most games on PC release on steam we can use the steam API (steamworks) to play them. these games need to be patched in order to pass off the game’s requests as if it came from another app. these patches are usually called steam-fix or online-fix patches, and most of them use the Space Wars game which is an example game that valve uses in their documentation to explain how their API works, and developers can use it in order to test out their game to see if it’s compatible with steamworks or not (some patches might use a different game like cube racer or TOXIKK but these are rare). that’s why it works since it’s all exposed and it has a legitimate use so valve is unlikely to nuke it. most modern games that can’t afford dedicated servers (usually indies but sometimes big games) use this method instead. i’ve played too many games this way but the most recent example was lethal company.

last but not least is games that use dedicated servers. unfortunately you can’t play most of these since the server is closed source and no one can host their own server except for the game developers. however some games have had their source leaked, or someone has gone through and painstakingly recreated the game and emulated the server of these games. they are called “private servers” and you can usually find people hosting these, or even host one yourself since most of them tend to be open source. most of them don’t work with the ordinary cracked version of the game but rather have their own special clients. be careful with these since you are trusting the host to actually be secure and most of them are not and you might get your data leaked. most of these private servers tend to be for MMOs since recreating a game demands a very dedicated player base over a long period of time. the most famous example are WOW private servers, specifically Warmane servers which have their own ecosystem.

there are also some oddities here and there that don’t neatly fit in these categories. you can’t play most emulated games online, but some emulators have networking functionality and with modified ROMs you can to play multiplayer, some emulators are purpose built to just play one game really well (like slippi for super smash bros melee), some games originally didn’t have online play at all but someone patched it in etc etc.

TL;DR: there are some general ways that you can get multiplayer on a game working, but it depends on the game. if the game can’t have a steamworks patch or it can’t work with LAN, then you need game specific ways of making it work. if there’s a way, someone has posted about it online so don’t be afraid to look for it. i’m sorry about the length of this comment hope it helps.

this is exactly me every time i’m showing someone how easy it is nowadays to run games in linux, only for the game that was running perfectly the previous night to throw some random error and crash my system