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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Not necessarily. For a game like this that only functions online, you could presumably determine all the possible server calls and point them to a server you own. You could do this purely via clever network settings without modifying the game at all. If you could do that, the game would run fine and you could even use the original authentication server to ensure the user holds a valid license.

    At that point, you “just” need to implement and run a server for the game. This also doesn’t involve modifying the game, but could run afoul of potential laws against reverse engineering if not done in a clean room manner (I’m not a lawyer so there could be other things too since unfortunately US law tends to not favor the end user).

    Regardless of any of that, it always feels silly to me when companies fight tooth-and-nail against people not only performing free work and hosting for a dead game but ALSO trying to ensure people actually own the game before playing on their private server. Of course they could just use 🏴‍☠️ versions and black-hole the authentication server. All the company does by withdrawing licenses is ensure they have to skip authentication so the company loses out.






  • I’m not the person who found it originally, but I understand how they did it. We have three useful data points: you are 2.6 km from Burger King in Italy, that BK is on a street called "Via " and you are 9792 km from Burger King in Malaysia.

    1. The upper BK in Malaysia is not censored, so we have its exact location.
    2. Find a place in Italy that is 9792 km away using the Measure Distance tool on something like Google Maps.
    3. Even though there are potentially multiple valid locations in Italy, we know you’re within 2.6 km of another BK. Florence is sensible because there are BKs near the 9792 km mark.
    4. Once we do that, we can find a spot that is both 9792 km from Malaysia BK and 2.6 km from a nearby BK on a street called “Via”, effectively finding where the image was taken.


    It’s not perfect but it works well! This is the principle of how your GPS works. It’s called triangulation. We only had distance to two points and one of them doesn’t tell us the sub-kilometer distance. If we had distance to three points, we could find your EXACT location, within some error depending on how detailed the distance information was.