this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023

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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Remember guys, this is why we don't pay for the apps. (i.imgur.com)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This is the app called Franco Kernel Manager, one of the best kernel managers that are out there... Even when it was outdated (which I think that's the cause it got booted from the PlayStore?).

I used it to check the process of my phone and monitor the active and idle drain mostly, I paid for it a long time ago, but now it just fails to check the licence and it doesn't let me use it fully... I think there must be a cracked APK over there...

EDIT:

Fortunately the app is back in the store and hopefully that update version comes soon enough!

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[–] [email protected] 505 points 9 months ago (13 children)

There are lots of reasons to pirate stuff, but this argument in particular boils down to "We should steal stuff now because maybe some day in the future I won't be able to use the paid version after they go out of business." And that is shitty.

You bought it, so go crack it now that the license check is broken and nobody will care. That's GOOD piracy. Support the creators, pirate when you can't or it's unreasonable to pay (more).

Don't just pirate to mitigate theoretical future inconvenience. Do it to circumvent actual inconvenience, or to get things you couldn't otherwise afford, or to say "fuck you" to big, shitty companies.

But pirating from a small-time dev just in case there are maybe license problems far in the future is not The Way

[–] [email protected] 55 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Couldn't agree more on it being a bad justification for piracy

Though if you bought it and the license check stops working later I'm not even sure I'd call patching it to work without the check piracy, it's simply fixing something you own

Yeah you're going to use the same tools but to me I don't see it as piracy but simply a right to repair thing

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, exactly. It's the same reason I have little hesitance pirating a game I already have when the platform I have it on doesn't support mods (looking at you, Xbox game pass)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

In this regard it's about the ability to pirate, which always comes down to the classic "it's a service issue."

The need for pirating this software wouldn't exist if the license check wasn't broken, but since it is, it's now the only way to access it regardless of your ownership or not.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Back in the day I would often "pirate" games I owned on a CD because ot was faster than finding said CD.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Or when I lived in a place with shit internet and I had games that needed an online handshake to play, I basically pirated every game that needed that check because I wouldn't be able to play otherwise

And they usually ran better too, funny that

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (1 children)

okay but if that's your purpose then there's no problem with purchasing and pirating at the same time.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Absolutely. I do that regularly. Purchase to support the creators, pirate to meet some specific use case.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (3 children)

like I've had more than one super good YouTube video essay go missing, getting permanently pulled because of some copyright issue with a background shot or something, so I'll actually add really good YouTube videos to my Plex library just in case as well

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Totally. Though, that case can be a tiny bit tricky. Like, people should be allowed to remove stuff from the Internet that they've created if they want, but it should also be okay to archive content that may be abandoned or lost. Hard to create rules that differentiate the two effectively for enforcement

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

the specific ones I'm talking about, they were removed by YouTube and not at the creators behest. like one of them is about the three stooges and whoever owns The Three stooges material complained about some copyrighted material in the background horse shit

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sure I'm just thinking about how you'd write a law or policy that accommodated both reasonable scenarios

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

well it's a really interesting concept. there's really no other form of media where you could put something out there and then recall it somehow. like if you wrote a book that you didn't like, there's absolutely no legal way you could prevent people from reading it, etc. sort of ties into the Barbra Streisand effect

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

What's interesting with the comparison to books is that you can stop it from being published. You can't force people to give up the copy they already bought, but they can't make more copies and distribute it.

Hard to draw that distinction in the digital world

And if you want a better comparison, though of YouTube like a drive-in theater. You're not allowed to make a copy of the film with your camcorder and go distribute it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

it's almost more of a philosophical question than a legal one. sure, maybe they can prevent you from recording the drive-in movie and showing it to other people, but would they have the moral authority to say that you couldn't repeat the storyline to someone else?

let's say someone produces some documentary that ends up containing some hideously embarrassing error. something that could really ruin some third party's life. you pull the documentary from theaters, you pull it from streaming services, anybody who owns a copy owns it illegally. but, anybody who's seen it, or heard it described, could sit down in front of an audience and act out the entire thing piece by piece, attributing the entire thing to the original producer's name.

it ties into a line of thinking I had the other day when reading my credit card number to somebody over the phone. me talking to another person, giving them digit by digit, it was like two computers talking but we were people. if we had been computers, using a speaker and a microphone to communicate numbers in that way, we would have laughed at it and called it stone age technology, but that still how humans communicate with each other.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think if more people took that path, pirate only when you actually have a problem, much less content would be cracked and piratable.

Imagine OP and someone who is capable of cracking a software both bought and used this app, then 3 years later the app stops working. OP goes to look for a crack, but one doesn’t exist because the person who would have made it happened to stop using it before they had a need to crack it. So now OP is just boned.

So I say, always pirate everything and do so asap. And then obviously, if you want things to keep being produced, you should probably support the creators.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"I'm going to steal stuff because if I don't then people who NEED to steal it won't be able to" is some serious mental gymnastics.

Your argument only works for creating cracks, not consuming them. Absolutely create cracks even when they aren't needed. But that's not the same as using the crack even when you don't need to, just because you can

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I agree with you completely, indeed I just posted this as in a meme manner.

I love FKM and I paid for it even when it was clear the app wasn't going to be updated that much, I usually don't feel any kind of remorse while pirating, but now this is justified and that is good too.

Regardless this is a good reminder that this can happen anytime with any app or service, being a good or a bad one, having nice or asshole devs/teams behind, and for that piracy will always be a handy solution, I just wish that abandoned apps could somehow being open sourced automatically, but that is a dream.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Solid.

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[–] [email protected] 108 points 9 months ago (7 children)

OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!

[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (1 children)

uwu kill me

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

*kiw mwe

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (9 children)

You can crack most apps using Lucky Patcher

Make sure you get it from the official website though

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Looks like the luckypatcher.com and .info are both terribly spammy. Even with pureapk the download ended up being something called bluejay. Of course the play store chimed in and said installing it would be a horrible idea. I assume I just picked 3 fake sites to download from

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Luckypatchers.com is the real one.
Also you should avoid pureapk, it has malware.
I recommend sticking to apkmirror if the application is available there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Ublock Origin kicks up repeated warnings for this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Show screenshot.
Not even virustotal finds anything wrong with the domain.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Is that true? Most of the time I tried it didn't work.

It has only worked for me with an old game called Nimble Quest so far 😂

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Try different things in the selection dialogue before patching.

If you have root you could install Modded Google Play in Lucky Patcher to automatically succeed License checks

Mods also exist to crack apps, Mobilism is a good site but be careful what you download from whom

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Thanks, I'll check that out :)

Nice to see this app still strong.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's works, but it's much more effective on a rooted device.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

My device is rooted :/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

TIL, I'm going to have to check this out later for sure

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[–] Blizzard 26 points 9 months ago (2 children)

"There's an oopsie!"??? This fucking guy deserves to get his apps pirated.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is an outdated app at beast, I think he wouldn't care, I hope it resurged though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

There are a lot of processes which Android doesn't let you run anymore, eg how much CPU each app is using.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Uhm, we had an oopsie. Don't downvote me! Our r/programmerhumor specialists are working on it. Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago

Franco was a nut. He did put out some nice android kernel mods though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's back on the store.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

IMO if an app is pulled from Google Play their license verification should just return true.

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