cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25331613

if you're a long time PC games pirate, I'd like to divert your attention to an area you probably haven't looked at (I know I haven't) - Playstation 3.

you're free to look up its history, but in short, it's tech that premiered in 2006, so def on the old side. nevertheless, it's still in active use with game development reaching into 2017.

the kicker here is - it's almost flawlessly jailbreakable, allowing you to play anything that was produced for it, including games for PS1 and PS2! two caveats: a) I haven't registered nor used a PSN account, as I see no value in it so no idea if network play works and b) I only tried 15 or so games.

they can be had in the $30-50 range, the older models (fat and earlier slim) being preferable because they support the persistent hack, while later slims and superslims are less so, but still hackable with a non-persistent hack (you need to patch it every time it powers on).

the hack is super easy and straightforward and involves no hardware mods of any kind - it wouldn't hurt to clean and repaste a 20 year old device, though. the new hack with the custom firmware (CFW) is persistent, so it's there forever unless you decide to flash the original firmware (OFW).

because it's such an old platform there isn't super active resistance from sony towards the hack scene, so you should be good on that front for many, many moons. in contrast, the rare PS4 hacks are quickly patched and rendered useless, even though it's pretty ancient tech from 2012.

I stumbled onto one by chance, found a broken device sans Blu-Ray drive, seemingly useless for normies. thanks to the super-active community at psx-place, I was able to resurrect it, flash the latest 4.91 CFW with a noBD patch, got me a fake sixaxis game pad and an old 500 GB drive and everything works beautifully!

you can get games from dedicated "ROM" sites as well as torrents; I'm not overly familiar with the malware situation but I doubt it's a serious concern. the games can be transferred over the network using plain ol' FTP, copied from USB drives or even played directly from those. although it was the primary method of game distribution, I haven't needed the BD once. there are mods with store-like interfaces that allow you to directly download games from the internet and install them to the disk. also, DLNA is supported, I managed to play movies from my Jellyfin server!

although it won't hurt it, SSD are probably overkill. the SATA1 interface it has is congruent with transfer speeds of mechanical drives, so you're fine with repurposing one of those, as they can be had for next to nothing; max size is 1.5TB.

I've gotten a cheap sixaxis clone; cost me $10 NiB and it works. I don't know if I suck at playing dynamic games because it's shit or because I plain suck (never played with a gamepad before), that remains to be seen. I'm def not buying an original because they cost like $50+, and I'm not getting them used because yuck - who knows who sweated on them and what else they did with it.

a word of warning - you shouldn't spend a ton of money on them because it's decade+ old tech that's on the uptick part of a bathtub curve. the graphics chips they had, especially the early models, are prone to die and repair isn't viable.

it took me a while to piece together all the info as I've never had any interactions with consoles of any kind, let alone the hack aspects of it. if you're similarly challenged, ask away here or on ps3piracy and I'll try to help!

Decided to try a few Repacks on Arch Linux. I used heroic launcher to install the games but now have no clue how to install the updates. Any one have any ideas how to get it to work?

I've never been into torrenting stuff but usually just do streaming via the usual sites (I usually use any site that fmhy recommends). However, I've noticed that most pirate streaming sites have much slower load rates and need a long time to buffer than commercial streaming sites. This often means that I cannot watch an episode in full but have to pause to buffer... As you can tell, I'm a total noob. What can I do to have a nicer experience streaming pirated content?

(And sure, that's probably why people get into torrenting. I already got a raspberry pi that I intent to use for this, but I couldn't find the energy to set it all up yet.)

I have spent some time recently browsing through the various streaming options listed in the piracy and FMHY megathreads and I am curious which one people prefer.

movie-web for example works great but when you click on a title it goes right to playing where as Braflix pulls up a summary, trailer, and list of actors. Braflix also categories based on the streaming service like Apple+ and Amazon which can be good for content discovery.

Unfortunately you can't click on the streaming service categories to view more and it doesn't list a lot of other somewhat popular streaming services like Shudder. Braflix also doesn't say what whether or not something is a cam rip unlike some sites like himovies.

Some websites also handle sorting better than others or have server problems.

I don't know if people really care or if they just click on the first link they see/use what they've already been using for years.

Content discovery for me is probably the most important factor. I like being able to sort by the IMDb rating and having a section that says "If you like X you might like Y" is also nice.

Looks like the new Beetlejuice movie was released as a telesync. I thought they were a thing of the past!

The DeCENC attack, developed by security researcher David Buchanan, can bypass the Common Encryption Scheme (CENC) used by streaming platforms like Amazon and Netflix, allowing decrypted but compressed video to be captured and saved, posing a theoretical risk to DRM protection.

Although DeCENC offers a novel method to exfiltrate protected video data, Buchanan notes it's largely impractical compared to simpler piracy techniques, such as HDMI capture or exploiting existing vulnerabilities like the Microsoft PlayReady client compromise.

Buchanan criticizes the CENC specification's lack of authentication, highlighting the challenge of conducting security research due to paywalled and complex technical documents, and calls for greater accessibility of these standards for researchers.

link for the prompt: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/16895485

UPX is open source and works on linux , windows and mac (ie. cross platform) I would like to know why the torrenting space isn't using it already / having a mature discussion about it.

Regular users in Sweden are in danger because a corporation needs to fill their pockets. Studios are suing your ISPs to get to you.

Use I2P. It will hide your IP address (among the many things it can do), afford you more privacy and allow you to torrent freely, even without a VPN/seedbox. The catch? You'll have to add the I2P trackers to your torrent.

I believe I2P is the way forward for piracy and I look forward to it getting bigger than it already is.

I don't know if this is related to piracy or not, but is there is a list of resources that is watermark free?

Movies, videos, games, sites or webcomics.

I torrented a few episodes from 1337x, but they are quite compressed/low-quality. Is this the best there is or is there a higher quality version hidden somewhere? It wasn't originally filmed it at such a low quality, right?

That's a lot of shit to carry. From 1993 Issue #10 of Mondo 2000.

qBitController is a free and open-source app for controlling qBittorrent from an Android device.

I wrote this a long time ago, but I think it's still pertinent

I get most of my stuff from 1337x but fuck me, it's just all Hallmark TV films and wrestling series now!

Edit - sorry I'm not actually living in the UK; I fell asleep and missed the answers lol Thanks everyone, I'll do a bit more investigation into your suggestions

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/0…

Seems like someone needs to pirate their content back.