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.

lmao your brain is so fried that you cannot understand that people making a game for the first time 10 years ago might’ve not understood the importance of proper version control and backup.

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.

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

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

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.

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.