Welp, that's a first...

[IamLEAM1983]

Never thought I'd have to remove a Pubber from about six months ago from my Steam Friends list - basically a guy who prodded me every once in a great while for some Borderlands 2 or God Mode - but there ya go, it happened.

So this guy just barges in, not knowing that I'm trying to unwind in a post-thesis post-dinner half-hour or so and that I'm not exactly predisposed to chat it out. This guy's nice enough for someone who has the flimsiest of online existences to my eyes, in stark comparison to how much you guys are a huge part of my life, but he figures we oughta swap stories about The War Z. It's his new 3$ darling, whereas I just nabbed myself State of Decay for the XBLA. Game 1's a complete piece of shit put together by Russian scammers with about zero scrupules and this is a fact that's widely known* in the games journalism industry by now; and Game 2 is an actually carefully crafted piece of sandbox survival with everything The War Z tries unsuccessfully to juggle and then some.

The guy, who in a previous conversation claimed to have a serious thing against pirates, throws me the shadiest of all hyperlinks in Steam's chat window. It's basically one of those fairly overt sites with names like AwesomeWarez dot com or Crackserials and whatnot. I don't even give it a sideways glance, seeing as I get all my schtick from Torrent trackers and legitimate purchases. These sites might sometimes contain fairly honest download links, but they have to remunerate themselves somehow. Oftentimes, the only way they can find to generate enough revenue to stay afloat without putting an obvious pay wall in front of the user is by striking a deal with a small metric fuckton of consumer survey companies.

So I leave the laptop - as I've been using the family lappy in the living room to enjoy the early dusk. Grandma slips in while I snag a Pepsi and clinks on the guy's link, which I'd ignored...

Lo and behold, she's calling me over within five seconds, as her screen is filling up with shady deal after shady deal. Gotta love Warez sites...

After managing to close all those damn windows and double-checking to make sure she hasn't infected us, I run a background check on the link she'd clicked on, which supposedly concerned State of Decay's cracked PC release.

You can do that search for yourself, it'll just show you how fairly predictable fake torrent uploaders can be. Once you've been downloading releases from a few scene groups for a while, you figure out their relative update schedules, and how their NFO files are laid out. There's something like a micro-culture for each hacking label, oftentimes intersecting with a bit of the Demoscene crowd. The usage or absence of ASCII art, the overall file size, the way the scene team's name is spelled... Slight discrepancies to that can mean a lot.

SKiDROW, for instance, spells its name like that. All capitals, with a lower-case I. Anyone who releases a crack as "Skidrow", "SkIdRoW" or SkidroW" or pretty much any other variation is suspect. Check one for shiftiness, the scene name in most releases was only spelled with a capital S.

Then, the file size. State of Decay's a smallish open-world survival sandbox. It has to be; its roots are online on the Xbox Live Arcade. That means one or two gigabytes, max. There was no consistency in the torrent files I was seeing. Six gigs there, twelve there, one here, a few hundred megabytes there... That's the mark of a seeder pushing out infected torrents. They don't give a shit about correct metadata, all they want is for something to exist in the tracker's database. That can involve everything from pro-copyright organizations uploading a legitimately cracked game they've "retouched" with bits of data they can watch out for to "flag" files purposefully planted there by everyone from EA to Sony BMG to 20th Century Fox.

Wrong scene name spelling, wrong filesizes on all accounts, shitty delivery system that was liable to riddle the family laptop with the Virtual Clap.

So I call up my Borderlands 2 fragging buddy and ask him if he knows that there's no tangible way the game could have come out on PC so early. It might be up for Windows 8, I dunno - but there's no way a cracked version is floating around out there. He swears that's the copy he's been using, while I'm remembering what I started out with. Which is that I began our exchange feeling cranky and a bit defensive.

Thinking back on that, I remember that this dude takes my own tiredness-caused sour temperament and lack of patience for shitty game choices very personally. So I figure I'll ask him if he has any beef with me. Lashing out by trying to get me infected seems like a pretty childish thing to do, right? Well, he goes all evasive once I mention that I haven't downloaded anything from his offered URL and that I've double-checked with my antivirus. That's the version he's using but he hasn't snagged it from that link, obviously, so he's sorry he's almost trashed my PC; or so he says.

Nice try, dude. I don't retort with that, but being a member of two private Torrent trackers has its uses. When a file comes out, you're sure the community's put it through the wringer once or twice. Infection warnings crop up and if need be, you end up knowing to steer clear of the whole thing altogether.

Kickass Torrents confirms my suspicions. Demonoid's new incarnation confirms my suspicions. TorLock confirms my suspicions; and so do H33T and The Pirate Bay. State of Decay is most assuredly not out for the PC just yet.

So - am I to assume that the guy was so petty because I perhaps made the mistake of being too pointy about my disapproval of his finding ways to enjoy Sergei Titov's unscrupulously broken brainchild that he figured baiting me to a virus would be a decent comeback?!

That'd be something, huh? Talk about immaturity!

Oh, by the way - Steam's been misbehaving as well, but these two things are unrelated. I can wholly connect now, but I couldn't about a half-hour ago. Be aware of that if your online experiences suddenly turn all spotty.

*http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/th ... ontroversy

[Weirdlet]

Ooh, Demonoid's back?

[IamLEAM1983]

Not in the literal sense, though.

Just head on over to www.d2.vu and log in with your old Demonoid credentials.

Basically, fans managed to more or less snag the old tracker's entire database from the now-imprisoned admins. It's essentially Demonoid with a new coat of paint.