Warez: Do you pirate software or just use FOSS?
In the past, most software I used was paid and proprietary and would have some sort of limitation that I would try to get around by any means possible. Sometimes that would be resetting the clock on my computer, disabling the internet, and other times downloading a patch.
But in the past few years I've stopped using those things and have focused only on free and open source software (FOSS) to fulfill my needs. I hardly have to worry about privacy problems or trying to lock down a program that calls home. I might be missing out on some things that commercial software delivers, but I'm hardly aware of what they are anymore. It seems like the trend is for commercial software providers to migrate toward online or service models that have the company doing all the computing. I'm opposed to that, since they can take away your service at any time.
What do you do?
I don't pirate software. Usually closed-source, proprietary garbage has a lot of sketchy stuff built in already, and I don't have the energy to reverse engineer every cracked binary blob I download to make sure it doesn't have spyware or ransomware or anything. Just pirate media, not software.
What if you were presented with the choice to download a prepatched binary or a file that allowed another program to do the patching? How about if you had the choice between downloading a python CLI keygen or a compiled gui/cli ELF or PE keygen? Granted, that would allow the DRM makers to more easily modify their key validation or obfuscation
If the process was reproducible (i.e. there's a published checksum for the prepatched binary, and a script that you can run on your local unpatched binary, which creates a binary with the exact same checksum) I would feel pretty good about that.
Run the Keygen in a VM, job done 👍