They are running a large community in the middle of Europe, in plain view and being personally known, and as such, liable.
skill issue
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for Windows another good one is https://github.com/audiamus/BookLibConnect
IANAL (and am not a lawyer)
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Be installed on any PC I own
hard pass
Beewho?
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I’m in this article and I don’t like it
By all means please go on, don’t let me stop you from making a fool of yourself.
damn you typed a lot of words just to be completely incorrect.
Don’t worry about it too much, this meme is just garbage and basically everything it asserts is wrong or inaccurate. The other person who replied to you was just being a condescending smuglord because you asked reasonable questions instead of participating in the “Windows Bad” circlejerk.
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When the source of a crack/patch isn’t trusted, I’d do like you said and install it in a VM, then compare the patched files with their unpatched copies using diffing software (Beyond Compare’s hex compare feature is useful for this). If there are a huge amount of changes, like completely different size and content, or it is protected with a packer (typically will be a several MB larger), I would definitely steer clear of it. If it’s just a few changed bytes (and maybe the digital signature overlay is stripped off), then it’s most likely safe and you can just copy the patched files out of the VM and overwrite your main install.
Edit: Also, always prefer official installers directly from the developer’s site if they are available; “pre-cracked” installers are always a red flag to me.
What does this have to do with piracy