I know the chances of getting a virus or crypto miner on my pc are slim but still it never hurts to ask. Winblows antivirus flags anything that’s cracked as a false positive anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene
Skidrow is a scene group. There’s this thing called “The Scene”. It’s been around since the 1970s. It’s not a website or centralized at any place. The Scene is made up of decentralized groups and they talk over IRC and agree upon release rules and release their files on ftp servers called “Topsites”. Topsites are only accessible by scene members but the releases get leaked to torrent sites. The structure is sort of anarchistic, but which I mean nonhierarchical and consensus-based decision making. It’s kind of fascinating.
To determine whether a scene release is trustworthy, it would depend where you downloaded it from and whether the release is still in the original rar files. Scene releases are uploaded to Topsites, but they are also announced in what is called a “pre”, the pre is the announcement message on the IRC server. There is a thing called “predb”, which records all of the release messages and makes them publicly searchable. The scene rules say that a game release has to be published in a multipart RAR archive, which also includes an .nfo file and a .sfv file. The reason for this is that Scene is very old and file transfers used to be slow so they broke up big releases into small even-sized files to easily replace corrupted files. The NFO file includes ascii art and information about the release. The SFV file contains CRC32 checksums for each RAR file. The SFV file is used to determine whether the RAR files were modified or corrupted.
I will say disclaimer. It is possible to fake CRC32 checksums. Matching CRC32 will not guarantee that files have not been tampered, but if the CRC32 doesn’t match then the files have been tampered or corrupted.
- Make sure that you are getting the files from a website that you trust.
- Make sure that the release is still in the original scene multipart rar files.
- Search a predb website for the release name which matches the files that you downloaded.
- Look at the CRC32 checksums on the website and check that it matches the file you downloaded.
I not sure the best way to do CRC32 checksums on windows. I usually do checksums on windows using 7zip software. With 7zip software, you can right click on a file in windows file explorer > 7-Zip > CRC SHA > CRC 32.
https://predb.org/ (I think this site is correct, there are other predb sites as well)
Why don’t they use e.g. sha256 for checksums
These are just the rules of the community called “The Scene”. Fitgirl is not scene, for example. Also torrent sites are not part of the scene. Groups which release their content to torrent sites are usually called P2P groups. Torrents have built in hash checking as part of the torrent protocol. A release is only “The Scene” if it is listed in a predb.
The reason that Scene use CRC32 is probably because the scene is focused on racing. SHA256 would have a much longer calculation time. The scene has bunches of different groups, but there is only allowed to be 1 scene release per content slot. The scene rules set a minimum quality requirement. Whichever group fills the slot first has their group name in the predb forever. If a release is a duplicate or doesn’t match the rules, then it gets “nuked”. The groups compete with each other to be fastest.
I think also the CRC rule was originally decided in 1998. This might be the main reason.
https://scenerules.org/html/1998_GAMEiSO.html (1998 scene game release rules)
In either case, be sure that you are not creating a solid archive, because if you do, the FTP sites will not be able to test the CRC integrity of each of the individual 15 meg segment file.
Before you start thinking about uploading your RAR files, please run a quick CRC test on each .0* file to check the validity of the archive. Ensure that you didn’t run out of hard drive space during the archive processing which could result in bad files.
https://scenerules.org/html/2021_GAMEiSO.html (2021 scene game release rules)
1.15 The final release directory may contain only the following items:
- RAR archive volumes
- NFO file (singular)
- SFV file (singular)
Phenomenal post, really good info. 7zip is still the best way to do crc32 checksums as far as I know as well.
Thank you for that explanation! I’ve been pirating for nearly 20 years now and didn’t know that.
iirc theyre a real group, just be aware that skidrow does NOT have any official site. any site claiming to is lying and just using their name for search SEO reasons.
The site I found the link on is skidrowreloaded and it seems legit enough? idk I’m clueless, I just never download anything that fitgirl doesn’t have but sadly they don’t have lost planet for the pc.
I have downloaded from there a few years ago and that particular game was fine.
I usually only trust websites from this list, though: https://rentry.co/megathread
Good news then and thanks for the link.
I still just get my pirated stuff from the top result on thepiratebay.org. It might be old-fogey work, but it’s yet to fail me.
While I can’t claim any personal experience here I know that it was slapped with a warning on the /r/piracy megathread years and years ago because of persistent issues with even skulled users uploading malware and nothing being done in a timely manner. This is really one of those areas where using a semi-private site like rutracker with real moderation or a private tracker or place that’s dedicated to software (and trusted due to staff checking of all submissions) primarily is safest because a big general tracker like TPB just doesn’t moderate for that stuff or have staff who actually check.
