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Repacked games are in high demand on pirate sites as they save considerable bandwidth. One of the leading names in this niche is FitGirl. In recent years, the Russian-born repacker transformed from a home archivist into the best-known releaser on the Internet. Today we unpack part of this fascinating story.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Downloading a pirated game doesn’t cost a penny. However, it does take up digital resources, as some games can be well over 100 gigabytes.
This is a problem for people that have bandwidth caps or those who have limited storage or archive space.
Every problem has a solution, of course, especially in a pirate ecosystem where copyright laws are ignored. For pirated games, this solution comes in the form of ‘repacks’, which are essentially compressed versions of full games that work just like the real thing.
Repacks can be made from legitimately purchased games but, in pirate circles, they come with a crack to remove protection. While there are several active repackers, there’s one who has climbed through the ranks like no other – FitGirl.
When we compiled our list of most visited torrent sites earlier this year, FitGirl Repacks was one of the newcomers. It’s an intriguing handle in a niche that’s more often associated with chubby guys. But whether FitGirl is he or she or they in real-life, our interest was piqued.
To find out more about this largely unknown figure – who uses the likeness of Amélie – we reached out to FitGirl. As the site’s FAQ clearly states that the gender issue is irrelevant, we began at the origins. When did FitGirl get into repacking?
“In 2012, probably, when I started making an offline collection for myself,” FitGirl tells us. “I was using 7-Zip back then and thought that there was nothing better in terms of compression.”
While FitGirl was building a personal home archive, she (we will use this pronoun) stumbled upon public repacks released on pirate sites. These were much smaller than the ones she had made and that’s when things got started.
Instead of relying on 7-Zip, FitGirl became serious about compression and started learning and experimenting. Roughly a week later, the first homebrew repack was ready.
“While my first repack looked pretty much like the current ones, inside it was a mess. Slow loading, slow installation, etc. But I quickly fixed those and started making repacks on almost a daily basis,” FitGirl recalls.
At this point, repacking was still strictly for personal use. That was good enough. However, as time went by FitGirl noticed that some of her own releases were slightly smaller in size than the repacks available in public.
This is when things started to shift. FitGirl decided to make the leap from being merely a personal archivist to a ‘publisher’ of repacks on pirate sites. Being born in Russia, she picked local torrent trackers as a start, and not without success.
“I decided to upload my repacks to a few Russian trackers and they were met with sympathy. Then I decided to continue,” FitGirl says.
The first repack was a copy of Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions. The game was losslessly compressed from 250 MB down to 69 MB. However, with larger games, the ‘savings’ easily expand to dozens of gigabytes.
After this initial release, many more followed. FitGirl continued to experiment and improve her compression skills, sharing the results in public. Today, she has repacked close to 1500 games. On top of that, she has gathered a dedicated group of followers, who eagerly await new releases.
As they are pirated, these repacked games are available for free. FitGirl does accept donations but the main motivation appears to be the appreciation from the public and her love for compression.
A common misconception among some people is that she also cracks these games, but that is not the case. FitGirl mostly downloads pirated releases from a private tracker. These games are often available on public pirate sites as well.
The repacking itself is often pretty straightforward. Some games are done in an hour while others can take up to a day, mostly depending on the size of the source files.
“The average repack actually is very basic. Most games out there use either Unity Engine or Unreal Engine. Both are easily compressed without any special work. So how long it takes depends only on a game’s size and takes from one hour to maybe a day,” FitGirl says.
FitGirl prides herself on using heavy compression and the best settings. She is also somewhat of a perfectionist who likes a challenge. The more complex a game is, the more fun. That’s also when more skill is involved.
“I love based on non-standard or rare engines! Because challenges in compression are what I love the most. I did re-repack GTA V, for example, like five or six times, always improving compression and/or installation speed,” she says.
“One of the most complex games I’ve met was Red Read Redemption 2. And it’s so sad it’s not cracked yet, so I can’t share my results with the world. Hope that changes one day,” FitGirl adds.
The passion for compression is obvious and FitGirl has no plans to stop anytime soon. However, to make things more interesting, she wouldn’t mind having some extra competition.
“I miss some strong competition, actually. I need more professional teams or individuals who are also mad about compression so it would be more interesting for me,” she notes.
Needless to say, the publishers and developers of the games are not happy with repacked releases. They do send takedown notices to some file-hosting sites, who then remove releases, but FitGirl hasn’t run into any legal trouble directly.
That said, these same companies could also learn from the success of repacks. According to FitGirl, publishers could take a lesson or two on effective compression, so customers don’t have to waste bandwidth.
“Hire just one person, who understands the compression,” is her message to publishers. “And make your games so they could be easily updated with additional patch-files, without full data rebuilding.”
“For example, Unreal Engine supports patching natively. But 99% of developers don’t use it. They just rebuild the whole game all over again and then users in Steam download another 50 GB update. Really, you even have the tools to do it for you, love your users, they PAY for your games!”
For now, FitGirl is glad to take up this task.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
ThiefQuest or EvilQuest can grab passwords and credit card numbers.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
The threat of ransomware may seem ubiquitous, but there haven't been too many strains tailored specifically to infect Apple's Mac computers since the first full-fledged Mac ransomware surfaced only four years ago. So when Dinesh Devadoss, a malware researcher at the firm K7 Lab, published findings on Tuesday about a new example of Mac ransomware, that fact alone was significant. It turns out, though, that the malware, which researchers are now calling ThiefQuest, gets more interesting from there. (Researchers originally dubbed it EvilQuest until they discovered the Steam game series of the same name.)
In addition to ransomware, ThiefQuest has a whole other set of spyware capabilities that allow it to exfiltrate files from an infected computer, search the system for passwords and cryptocurrency wallet data, and run a robust keylogger to grab passwords, credit card numbers, or other financial information as a user types it in. The spyware component also lurks persistently as a backdoor on infected devices, meaning it sticks around even after a computer reboots, and could be used as a launchpad for additional, or "second stage," attacks. Given that ransomware is so rare on Macs to begin with, this one-two punch is especially noteworthy.
"Looking at the code, if you split the ransomware logic from all the other backdoor logic the two pieces completely make sense as individual malware. But compiling them together you're kind of like what?" says Patrick Wardle, principal security researcher at the Mac management firm Jamf. "My current gut feeling about all of this is that someone basically was designing a piece of Mac malware that would give them the ability to completely remotely control an infected system. And then they also added some ransomware capability as a way to make extra money."
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The virus has sometimes moved from pigs to humans, but not between humans.
Enlarge (credit: Liz West / Flickr)
SARS-CoV-2 wasn't the first coronavirus that spawned fears of a pandemic; there were worries about SARS and MERS before it arrived. But influenza viruses have also been a regular source of worries, as they can often spread from agricultural animals to us. Earlier this week, a report was released that described an influenza virus with what the researchers who identified it called "pandemic potential." The virus is currently jumping from agricultural animals to us, but it is not currently able to spread between humans.
The institutions that some of these researchers are affiliated with—the Key Laboratory of Animal Epidemiology and Zoonosis, the Chinese National Influenza Center, and the Center for Influenza Research and Early-Warning—provide some indication of how seriously China has been taking the risk of newly evolved influenza strain.
For seven years, these centers supported the researchers as they did something that makes whatever you did for your thesis research seem pleasant: taking nasal swabs from pigs. Nearly 30,000 of these swabs came from random pigs showing up at slaughterhouses, plus another 1,000 from pigs brought in to veterinary practices with respiratory problems. Why pigs? Well, for one, some historic pandemics, named for their species of origin, are called swine flu. And there's a reason for this: pigs are known to be infected by influenza viruses native to other pigs, to birds, and to us humans—who they often find themselves in close proximity to.
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On the 25th anniversary of the SNES game’s US release, it feels more relevant than ever.
EarthBound got a nice Nintendo Power push. But in retrospect, Nintendo of America, you could've tried a lot harder with this trailer.
Give me 10 minutes. I need to defeat five giant moles so the miner can find the gold... which I need to get $1 million and bail out the rock band... who can arrange a meeting with the evil real-estate-developer-turned-mayor I need to beat down.
My partner doesn't get it, which I completely understand. When I first tried EarthBound, I didn't either. The now-cult-classic SNES title first arrived in the United States in June 1995. And I, a nine-year-old, had no chance. I craved action as a kid gamer, and that largely meant co-op, multiplayer, and sports titles (a lot of NBA Jam, Street Fighter, and Turtles in Time). Nothing about EarthBound, particularly when only experienced piecemeal through a weekend rental window, would ever speak to me. As one of the most high-profile JRPGs of the early SNES era, it embodied all the stereotypes eventually associated with the genre: at-times batshit fantastical storylines; slow, s l o w pacing; virtually non-existent action mechanics.
Frankly, I wasn't alone. Based on its sales, not many gamers seemed to understand EarthBound, and it's not clear Nintendo did, either. What on Earth does the trailer above say to you? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company again and again (and again) tried to find a hit JRPG in the States without much success. Nintendo literally gave away games like Dragon Warrior—as a Nintendo Power pack-in—and still couldn't find an audience. Even the heralded Final Fantasy franchise struggled initially, as Nintendo brought it stateside with a big, splashy map-filled box that no one seemed to care about in the moment.
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“This building is not a monument.”
Construction progress of the Vehicle Assembly Building in August 1964. [credit: NASA ]
NASA's Kennedy Space Center is now nearly six decades old—it was formally created on July 1, 1962 as a separate entity from Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Construction began soon after.
At the time, the "Launch Operations Directorate" under Wernher von Braun and his team of German scientists was based at Marshall. But NASA's leaders realized they would need their own facilities in Florida alongside the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. So they created a new "Launch Operations Center" on nearby Merritt Island. President Lyndon B. Johnson would rename the facility Kennedy Space Center a week after President John F. Kennedy's November 1963 assassination in Dallas.
As plans for the Apollo Program developed, NASA also soon realized it would need a large building in which to assemble the Saturn V rocket that would power the Moon landings. Work began on what was then known as the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB), where the big rocket would be stacked in a vertical configuration before rolling out to the launch pad.
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Die Corona-Warn-App ist bislang über 14 Millionen Mal heruntergeladen worden, ungefähr 300 Warnmeldungen über mögliche Infektionen wurden ausgegeben. (Coronavirus, Softwareentwicklung)
Die Corona-Warn-App ist bislang über 14 Millionen Mal heruntergeladen worden, ungefähr 300 Warnmeldungen über mögliche Infektionen wurden ausgegeben. (Coronavirus, Softwareentwicklung) Handelsstreitigkeiten, Sanktionen und die Pandemie sorgen für angespannte Beziehungen zwischen China und USA. Bahnt sich ein Konflikt im Südchinesischen Meer an?
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