I found about Usenet and the sort of "hype" relative to it and I wonder some stuff.

Maybe I'm a bit old school but is this process not against the spirit of piracy,

• be generous to share
• fight against censorship and DCMA takedown
• work in a decentralized way

Just wondered it, if someone wants to give his opinion

To celebrate 10 years of Tabula Rasa it is open for registrations for 96 hours

Basically is there a way to watch kick without ads that you know of?

Just started using paywall bypass plugin - BPC. Honestly, love it so far. I found that both their github and gitlab are blocked. I found that tool at gitflic.ru

Never, used this repository or the extension before. Curious, if people from the community use it and how secure they would consider this?

Mike Kennedy wanted to save video games. Not from microtransactions or mobile shovelware, but from the present itself. He didn’t want software patches. He didn’t want online updates. He didn’t want DRM. Fuck that noize.

Nah, he wanted cartridges. Plastic. Solid. Tactile. He wanted to drag the spirit of 1992 out of the grave, jam it into an Atari Jaguar shell, and make it dance. Back to the good ole days. Hot Pockets oozing death-lava. Kid Cuisine's Hamburger Pizza flavor still alive and smoking straight from the microwave, baby! Sunny D was orange gold. Beating off to Tiffani Amber Thiessen and Shannon Elizabeth. Ahhh, memories.

But before I unzip and get lost in that tastiness, let’s rewind and talk about Mike Kennedy and his lame-ass attempt at being a cool pirate.

In late 2014, Kennedy, known in retro circles for RETRO Magazine and GameGavel, pitched a dream console. It would run physical cartridges. No downloads. No updates. No nonsense. A digital hermit box. A time capsule you could play.

He bought up leftover molds for the Atari Jaguar. That dead console from the ’90s? Yeah. He was going to resurrect it. Not metaphorically. Dude, he literally used its casing. The guts, he claimed, would be custom hardware. Maybe even an FPGA core. Something that could run SNES and Genesis games. Old-school indie devs would supposedly line up to code for it. Capcom was name-dropped. Sega too.

Bullshit, of course. But people wanted to believe.

The crowdfunding started to cook. Kennedy hyped it up through his RETRO followers, forums, Facebook. No working prototype. Just vibes.

Kickstarter didn’t want them unless they could show working hardware. So they pivoted to Indiegogo, where snake oil has fewer fences. That campaign flopped hard. Barely over $80K raised on a $1.95 million target. No backers got charged. Just embarrassment.

But Kennedy wasn’t done. The moldy dream had a few more mutations to go.

December 2015. Enter: Coleco Holdings. They licensed their name to the project. Now it was the Coleco Chameleon. Retro heads perked up. Toy Fair 2016 was on the calendar.

And that’s when things turned from weird to shameless.

At Toy Fair, Kennedy unveiled the Chameleon inside a clear plastic cube. A prototype. A freakin’ miracle! Finally!

Except it wasn’t. It’s was bullshit.

Musky neckbeards online can’t be tricked that easily. They zoomed into the photos and noticed the internals looked a little too familiar. The ports. The components. The electrical tape.

It was a goddamn SNES Mini, stuffed into a Jaguar shell like some plastic Frankenstein. It ran a multicart through a flash cart. Not custom hardware. Not even close.

Interwebs lit up. Forums exploded. Tech sleuths dissected every angle. The Chameleon was a hoax. But it got worse.

Kennedy posted another prototype photo a few weeks later. This time with the guts visible through a clear shell. Bold move. Too bold. Meh, bullshit too.

This one wasn’t an SNES. No, this time the brain of the console was a cheap DVR capture card. The HICAP50B. Not even a gaming component. Just a glorified HDMI passthrough.

Two fakes. Back to back.

Now Kennedy came clean. Sort of. He wrote a novella-length apology on AtariAge, throwing his hardware guy under the bus. A mysterious character named Sean "Lee" Robinson, who apparently swindled him out of over $10,000, lied about prototypes, and convinced him to show off fake units.

Kennedy said he never opened the boxes. Said he didn’t know what was inside. Said he was duped. Said his only crime was believing too hard in a dream.

He dropped links showing Robinson's record. Felony grand theft. Jail time. Grifting history. He practically begged for forgiveness. He even asked people not to cancel RETRO Magazine because of this whole mess.

But by now, nobody cared. The retro scene had already made its memes. Burned its bridges. Buried the Chameleon.

In the end, no console was made. No games shipped. No dreams realized. Just fake hardware. Bruised reputations. A whole lot of cautionary tales.

Kennedy offloaded the Jaguar molds to AtariAge, hoping they'd be used for something real. He vanished from hardware dreams. RETRO Magazine limped along for a while, then died quietly.

And the Chameleon? It became a punchline meme before memes got cool. The mascot for vaporware. The kind of scam where the road to hell isn’t just paved with good intentions. It’s duct-taped to an SNES motherboard and passed off as innovation.

Mike Kennedy was almost a badass. He could’ve been a folk hero. If he’d dropped the act, if he’d just said fuck it and pirated the stuff outright. Dump the ROMs. Hack the FPGA. Throw it online with a wink and a middle finger. Burn a few carts, sell 'em out of a duffel bag, vanish before the lawsuits sniffed his trail. That’s pirate shit. That’s subversion. That’s punching up.

But he didn’t. He wanted to be a visionary, but he played it like a startup guy with a nostalgia kink. No code. No console. Just branding and wishful thinking stapled to an empty shell.

He wasn’t a pirate. Pirates deliver. They crack locked files, duplicate the sacred, and pass it on. Not for glory. Not always for cash. But because the idea deserves to breathe. Because someone said you can’t have this, and a pirate said watch me.

Kennedy? He wanted you to buy back your memories. From him. He was a capitalist dressed in a thrift store hoodie, praying that retro gamers wouldn’t check the receipts. A wannabe messiah hawking vapor and plastic. No payload. No rebellion. Just a mausoleum to his own childhood, carefully monetized and full of ghosts.

The retro community wanted to believe. But belief needs more than molded shells and Facebook posts. It needs circuitry. Sweat. Code. Truth.

Next time someone promises to save gaming with nothing but a clear case and a press release, open the lid, brah.

Does it really work as explained and is the script really safe to download?

Sorry for the low effort post, I just want to know if this works. ChatGPT 4 is actually fun to use, I mean chatting with it about math is really fun and constructive.

The U.S. Solicitor General has urged the Supreme Court to accept Cox Communications' petition in a landmark piracy liability lawsuit. The USSG argues that ISPs are not necessarily liable for pirating subscribers and warns that the current precedent may lead to disconnections for many innocent subscribers. At the same time, the USSG urged the court to deny a petition from the opposing music companies, which seeks to expand the current liability verdict.

I just bought two kindle books that were only available as ebooks and I didn't realize that it has been made so difficult to download them. Everything I search comes up with "download them before Feb. 25th!"

Has anyone got a work around for this? I have no desire to use the kindle app to read them and I HATE that I don't own these books to do as I please.

Disclaimer: I really do not mind buying the game actually and it is probably one of the games that really deserve to be bought. This is really just a (maybe stupid) question out of curiosity.

So, I have been interested in homm3 for a while and I recently found out that apparently there is a free and open source rewrite for the game called VCMI.

First I figured since this is a complete rewrite that I can just download and run it to play homm3 but the website did state that apparently you should buy the game to get the game files but is this really how most people go on about this? Are the game files lying around somewhere so you can easily use VCMI? I mean its just assets from what I know..

Or do I just have to buy/pirate the game?

Sometimes I’m just too lazy for torrenting because downloading whole 8 seasons when I want to watch series is kinda off. Whenever I give chance to streaming it’s always low quality and sucks. I checked streaming links on reddit’s r/piracy, you know the wiki, year is 2025 and it’s still slow and sucks. Maybe I don’t know good sites. Can you link me up, and what do you think about streaming vs torrent way in general? Thanks guys.

I have a MacOs running as a sort of seedbox seeding 70ish torrents. But macos qbittorrent is buggy and means that for various reasons I have to restart the client every couple hours so or the connection breaks. Which is inconvenient.

Transmission macos doesn’t have this problem. So it’s much better long term. Tho I’m not sure how I can tranfer all the seeding files to transmission. Manually sounds like a nightmare, and even then, I tried one and for some reason it wouldn’t verify my downloaded files and insisted on redownloading the torrent from scratch. Even though I had made sure I was pointing to the correct directory. This may be because I’ve renamed files in the past (don’t really remember) but qbittorrent seems to have no issue with it.

This is complicated by the fact my torrents are in different directories or “nestled”. Like my directory looks kind of like

>TV Shows
>> Futurama 
>>> Futurama S01 [Torrent]
>>> Futurama S02 [Torrent]
>> Planet Earth III [Torrent]
> Movies
>> Up [Torrent]
>> Star Wars
>>> Phantom Menace [Torrent]

Edit: Thanks for the replies. Seems about what I figured. I guess every time i open my client I’ll have fun moving 2-3 torrents over.

Anyone know of a way of ripping the videos from corridordigital.com? I have a subscription to this site actually but I'd like to be able to watch their videos on my TV or when I'm travelling and don't have a stable internet connection.

Im obsessed with this game at barcades but its impossible to play at home. There is a shitty steam version that doesnt have online anymore. Since its an arcade cabinet im guessing they use a computer under the hood of some kind that has the game loaded.

How could one possibly get the game to play on a computer of some kind? Reverse engineering?

https://bumblebeargames.com/products/killer-queen

https://killerqueenarcade.com/

Seeing the official website states that the client is "barely supported," I'm wondering, is it worth using a different one?

Hey,

I'm looking for an old portable software (Illustrator CC 2015.3.1 v20.1.0 x64 Portable by punsh)

Links I've found are off or torrents without seeder.

Anyone know another place where I can found it.

Thanks in advance,

One of the rare Streaming site with schedule and most of Tv show up to date until ''srs'' come back

When Piracy Had a Kiosk at the Mall: Power Player Super Joy III

“You wouldn’t download a car, would you, fuckers?”

Okay, I would. Hell, I will the second someone makes it possible. But it turns out that the meme phrase came from a real anti-piracy ad campaign that tried to guilt-trip an entire generation. The original line was, “You wouldn’t steal a car.” Slapped onto a thousand DVDs like a pre-movie sermon, it played in the shadows of living rooms and late-night rentals. You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a TV. You wouldn’t steal a movie.

You wouldn’t steal the socks from your best friend’s sister, then sniff ‘em and jerk off into them.

Except you would. Maybe. Well, at least I did. No kink-shame!

Apparently Yonatan Cohen didn’t really give to much credit to the feels of the anti-piracy campaign from the early 2000’s either. He went off and decided that a mall kiosk was the perfect place to go full Robin Hood.

Unfortunately for him, “The Man” doesn’t really love Robin Hood. In December 2004, the FBI raided two kiosks at the Mall of America in Minnesota and storage units tied to Cohen’s business, Perfect Deal LLC. They weren’t looking for drugs or guns.

They were hunting knockoff Nintendos. Specifically, the Power Player Super Joy III, a bootleg console shaped like a janky N64 controller, preloaded with 76 barely-legal NES games and marketed with subtle claims like "76,000 games in one!"

Cohen bought the knockoff rigs wholesale out of China for around $7 to $9 apiece. Then he flipped them in U.S. malls for $30 to $70. Pure capitalism, but not the suit-and-boardroom kind. This was capitalism with a folding table and a kiosk, a one-man supply chain trying to make rent while corporate America clutched its pearls.

It wasn’t subtle, but it was profitable. Each console contained copyrighted titles from Nintendo’s golden years, and selling them made Cohen a target.

The government didn’t just slap a fine on him. They made him an example. In April 2005, Cohen pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement. By November, he was sentenced to five years in federal prison, lost hundreds of thousands in property, and got the added humiliation of having to run mall magazine ads warning others about the crime of piracy. He had to pay for the ads as part of his restitution. His mug was in the ad. His crime laid out like a cautionary tale. It was digital pillory.

But here’s where the story gets a little warped. Cohen wasn’t a hacker. He wasn’t running around cracking encryption or spreading ransomware. He was selling plastic boxes full of 8-bit joy. Ancient (at the time) ROMs of Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Contra. The kind of stuff that’s been cloned, remixed, and uploaded to archive.org a thousand times over these days. Back then though, Nintendo’s legal team treated it like digital arson. (Actually Nintendo still does that, they go hard on pirates.) The feds rolled in like it was national security.

Nine days after Cohen’s guilty plea, the FBI busted four Chinese nationals connected to a much larger piracy ring and seized 60,000 more Power Player units from warehouses in New York and New Jersey. But Cohen was already cooked. He kind of became the poster child for IP enforcement.

What made him vulnerable was scale and visibility. He wasn’t hiding in darknet forums. He was out in the open, selling knockoff joypads to middle-class shoppers hunting for last-minute Christmas gifts. A digital gray-market peddler in the age of moral panic.

Was it legal? No. Was it theft? Well, that’s the real question.

In the same era, game companies were battling over clones. Games like Zuma versus Puzzloop, lawsuits about lookalike mechanics and half-borrowed sprites. A lawyer named Gregory Boyd wrote that copyright law covers not just the idea of a game but the way it looks, plays, and feels.

Which is fine on paper. But when you apply that hammer to a guy selling 20-year-old games out of a folding table in a mall, it starts to feel a little like overkill.

Cohen didn’t invent piracy. He didn’t build the Super Joy III. He just sold it. But he was the one in arm’s reach, and the ad campaign was already rolling. You wouldn’t steal a car, remember?

What he did wrong, more than anything, was give people access. Unauthorized, unlicensed, dirt-cheap access. The same thing millions of us were doing in silence with LimeWire, torrents, and burned CDs. He just did it where the FBI could see him.

Five years. For selling childhood. For selling nostalgia.

That’s the part no one wants to talk about. This wasn’t about protecting code. It was about protecting control. Yonatan Cohen broke the unwritten rule of the digital age: you can steal, but you better not get caught making it easy for others. Unless you’re on Wall Street.

And yeah, maybe he wouldn’t steal a car. But he’d damn sure sell you Mario on a knockoff controller. And for a lot of kids in 2004, that was close enough to magic.

Sources, for those who still believe in paper trails or give a shit:

Wikipedia, bitches!

BootlegGames Wiki: Power Player Super Joy III

Vintage Computing: EGM Advertisement: Sell Famiclones, Go to Prison

Hey, everyone! I have a few questions about the 3D stuff in the pirate stuff segment:

1. Where can I find Quixel Megascans packs?
2. Where can I find a trusted website to download Substance Painter?
3. Is there any way to make the AI work in cracked Adobe Photoshop (2025 and later)?

you guys got anything?

Tried to support the industry by buying a movie a watch a lot. Well, no more. If I need a pihole just to watch a movie I own, that's ridiculous.

I am just going out on a limb here:

A week ago I downloaded e1 and e2 via my private tracker of murderbot. My setup is that my jellyfin library directly points to the downloads folder for TV shows. This has always worked in the past, but now last week for murderbot e1 and e2 and now again this friday for e3, jellyfin only recognizes the file but cannot pull any metadata and is somehow unable to stream it to any of my clients.

I haven't tried any usual troubleshooting steps yet since I was really busy this past week, but was wondering if this is some Apple mechanism to hinder piracy.

Thoughts?