I had a physics class that required Mathmatica and a stupid expensive textbook. The professor said the college forced him to use those because the college gets a kickback for it. Luckily he was awesome and told everyone that we could buy the much cheaper older version of the book and pirate the software.
Cracks are usually released separately from the uncracked game files. Repackers take those cracks and package them with the correct version of the game, compress the files and add an installer. Then they upload them to the more mainstream public trackers.
Repacks have several benefits. They tend to be easier to setup and usually more reliable. They download faster and use less data because they are compressed. They are also sometimes packaged with extras like soundtracks, mods, etc.
Fitgirl repacks are known to be more compressed, so the files are a little smaller but take a fair amount longer to install.
I’ve had issues that I’ve been able to work around.
I have previously had the error, “settings could not be applied”, which I worked around by uninstalling my YouTube updates, installing the recommended version and clearing revanced manager data. I now get an error about not being able to load the original APK. I work around this by deleting the two apks in /data/abd/vanced before patching.
I’m rooted and have to repatch on each reboot. Not complaining, just want to share my experience in case it helps others.
I love revanced, and feel so thankful for it. I can’t afford YT premium, without revanced I would miss out on so much great content.
Rsync everything besides media to a Storj free account. I also rsync my most important data(docker compose files,config files, home assistant, a few small databases) to Google drive.
I have many of my services open to the internet, but behind authelia w/2fa and a reverse proxy. I haven’t had a security issue yet, been running this way for a few years.
I think it’s pretty safe as long as you keep them up to date. I run backups weekly and do updates at least once a month.
Using geoip restrictions will also help a lot because you can block most of the scanner bots by denying connections from outside your geographic region. These bots detect what services are open to the internet and then add them to databases like shodan. If a security flaw is found in one of those services, hackers will search those databases for servers with those services running and try to exploit them. If you aren’t in those databases they can’t easily find you before you are able to patch.
I think SSO is less important than having everything behind the reverse proxy. The importance of the proxy is that if there is a security hole in the web server component of your service, it cannot be exploited without a second flaw in the proxy. It’s an additional layer of abstraction and security that doesn’t add a ton of overhead.
An attacker would have to find an exploit in nginx, which is used by most of the big tech companies, so it is well secured compared to the services many of us selfhost.
Another advantage of using SWAG is being able to use fail2ban and geoip restrictions. Any ports open to the ipv4 internet get scanned by security services and malicious actors many times each day. It’s nice to be able to have nginx refuse connections from any of them that repeatedly fail to login, or that come from outside your geographic region.
If you’re going to try Authelia and a reverse proxy, I recommend using SWAG. It’s a docker container that includes Authelia, nginx, fail2ban, geoip restrictions, and has premade config files for most of the selfhosted software that people run. The config files are especially useful since they include comments that describe the settings you need to change within the services you run, like changing the external domain in Emby for example.
No catch that I know of. I use it for subscription services constantly. I don’t even bother to try to cancel them anymore, I just set the card to $1 all-time and forget about it.
Same. It was a shame to let a working server go to waste, but the fan droning was making me crazy.
More expensive doesn’t always mean quality, though. I’ve had $100 sneakers that fell apart quick.
I did a few meal kits subscriptions a while back when I got coupons that made them very cheap/free(can’t remember). Did them in my name and then my wife’s name, too. One was called Home Chef, I can’t find where I got the coupon, though.
Privacy.com makes doing that so much easier. It allows you to create debit card numbers that have spending limits, and can be shut off. You can sign up for subscription plans and not have to worry about these companies making it insanely hard to cancel.
Crackers mostly post the cracks to IRC sites, cs.rin.ru, and private torrent sites. Repackers are the main way releases make it to the mainstream torrent sites.
Repacking isn’t that complicated anymore, it’s more about reputation. There was a time when games were big and internet speed was slow so saving every MB of size was important. Repackers would reencode video files and find other ways of dramatically reducing the file size. Nowadays they don’t do a lot of that, but repackers are still important for casual pirates who just want to easily play pirated games and not worry about malware.