Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
- Those PDFs are created immediately before download starts - like the .dbf from Renderhub
with current local time stamp of the download serverThis was already known about.
- The PDFs contain an unique identifier for the user (downloader) account! Hidden in the
PDF's metadata!All (!) image based files are modified by a new time stamp!
Thumbnails (.png / .duf.png / .png.tip), textures, product cards (support data, also those
for shape morphs in /data tree), additional images for documentation... they all get the
server time stamp at time of download!Metadata in the .pdfs is a new one AFAIK. I think the image timestamps might be as well.
Dude... what is your problem? If you don't have anything useful to add, don't bother commenting.
I heard/read that the word " woman" no longer was ok,
Ironically, I read recently that in Old English the word for man was originally gender-neutral and used to refer to both males and females.
Language and especially slang has always been used to signify 'In' and 'Out' groups; teenage slang and professional acronyms and regional accents are prime examples of this. We use it to establish who we are and to identify others of the same group(s) and within and without those groups words can have different meanings. Just look at 'woke,' 'liberal' or 'Trumper' for example. For the people in those groups they're a description of their beliefs, a badge of honour, but for others they're slurs and insults. As the groups age or grow their slang enters general usage. Mobile phones/SMS and the internet have put abbreviations like l8r, wtf, noob, etc. into common usage even if their original use, to fit a message into 128 characters, is no longer needed.
Change is inevitable, In 20 years time, Gen-Z will be asking the same questions about just wtf Gen-Αlphas' are talking about. As that great sage Abe Simpson said, "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!"
@Reinecarola, Two cultures separated by a common language... I've worked with and for Americans so got quite used to dropping as many British-English colloquialisms as possible when in conversation. Although... it was sometimes amusing to hear the stunned silence on the other end of the phone when I said I was just popping outside to smoke a fag. The UK/US differences in meaning for the word 'fanny' always make me giggle like a schoolboy as does listening to an American try and pronounce Worcestershire or Leicester (hint: it's 'Wust-er-shear' and 'Lest-er') for the first time.
There are a few bits of youth slang that wind me up, but I'm also old enough to remember using words like 'rad' and 'wicked-cool' so I'm in not position to judge.
@gaver, that makes me think of this quote:
“Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and LadiesIt sounds the same, right?
One of my pet peeves is the way Americans use a hard Ch when pronouncing words like Chassis. I mean, I'm English and we have rivalry with our French cousins going back to 1066, but we still use the French soft Ch!
Don't even get me started on Solder! There's an L in there for a reason!
@Ethiopia, It's our generation who came up with all the text/tech-speak TLAs, (the ancestor of emojis) smileys and leet-speak! 😉 lol
1 b3t h4lf th3 k1d5 t0d4y d0n't kn0w wh4t ID-10-T 0r PEBCAK m34n5 4nym0r3.
The men and women who create the items we share freely, spend long tedious hours
creating their vision and hope to someday sell these items and be paid
for their work.There was a discussion on the discord server a couple of months ago about how much the sellers make vs how much the vendor sites take. Apparently, most of the sites take between 50% and 90% of the sale price of the item leaving the artists with peanuts, and also do things like put items on sale without any input from the artist. Vendor sites like 'rosity and 'rotica haven't updated their websites in decades and RH is okay with piracy as long as they are the ones doing it. Their only costs are hosting (which these days is cheap as chips) and payment processing yet they take the lion's share of profits from their artists and act like they're doing them a favour. Contrast that with how a site like Cults3D (a 3d printing vendor where I sell my side-hustles) treats their artists; a flat 20% fee, the artist has full control over sales price and discounts and the owners of Cults don't throw a fit if I sell directly to a customer off-site and roll out new features all the time both front-end like artist-set discount codes and back-end stuff like tax reports and multiple payment options.
While I'm fully aware that downloading an item from here is taking money from the artist, I find the predatory nature of the vendor sites and the way they treat their artists to be abhorrent and the only way I can protest their behavior is to not give them my money, especially money for content that I'll probably never use. I do still purchase items from them, but only ones that I use in my side-hustle and that's only because I can't easily send a payment directly to the artists. 90% of what I download from here will be installed into my temp runtime, tested one or twice and then deleted. If I use something, I buy it, while grinding my teeth that the vendor is taking the majority of my money for almost zero work on their part. As far as my conscience goes, I treat piracy like a library; I download something from here, test it and if I like it and can use it, I buy it. If I don't it gets deleted.
As an addendum, My 3D printables appear as printed models on sites like Etsy all the time without my permission, despite that being against the license agreement with Cults. Probably one in twenty Etsy sellers bother to contact me or credit me and less than one in one hundred offer any sort of remuneration, despite me being very clear on my store page that all they need to do is let me know what models they're selling and credit me and I'll give my permission to do so. It used to annoy the hell out of me but I can either spend my limited free time getting more and more annoyed while trying to police it, or relax by doing something I enjoy and creating something new.
I've not tested how far back you can go, but there shouldn't be a limit on it and ten years shouldn't be a problem at all. Just open ZGFX-Detrack.ps1 and change
$MinDays = 60
$MaxDays = 365to whatever offsets you like, $MinDays = 365 and $MaxDays = 3650 would give you random dates between 1 and 10 years before the current date.
@Nobunagaoda, Yes, the script does three things in this order:
1. Deletes any file with the .dbf extension
2. Renames any PDF files in the archive
3. Changes the timestamp of every file and folder to a random date between 60 and 365 days before the current date. Each file or folder gets a different timestamp.(#2 might cause some issues with tutorials that have shortcuts from within Studio).
By editing the main script, you can change or add to the extensions being deleted or renamed and change the time offsets.
The only non-text file in the download I posted is 7za.exe, which is the command line version of 7zip.
I strongly encourage anyone using the scripts to open them in their text editor of choice and take a look at what the scripts are doing, I've left comments within the scripts explaining what each section does as well as a readme.txt in the archive explaining how to use them and what each file does. Feel free to download your own version of 7za.exe from 7zip's webpage as well.
I've uploaded version 2 (actually more like version 24 or something) to bunkr:
https://bunkrr.su/d/MONJseiv6PHy5
The TL:DR is that the script now correctly fixes the timestamps for folders and the resulting zip file by using 7zip (7za.exe), deletes any .dbf files it finds and renames and re-timestamps any .pdf files in the archive.
Open the zip from above and extract the 'ZGFX-Detrack' folder to somewhere convenient,
(ZIP FILES TO DETRACK MUST BE IN THE SAME FOLDER AS THE SCRIPT!)
Either:
Drag a zip file from RH/Rotica onto "ZGFX-Detrack.bat" (make sure it's the .bat file, NOT the .ps1 file!)
or
Move several RH/Rotica zips into the folder and double-click on "ZGFX-Detrack-All-Zips.bat" to detrack several files at once. (I'd recommend not doing more than 20-30 at a time, the unzip/zip process can take some time for large zip files).
Read the "Readme.txt" file for more information.
As before, use at your own risk, no responsibility is taken for getting your wife/girlfriend/daughter pregnant.
Do you think renaming any PDF files in an archive to something like <zipfilename><random number> would be a safe alternative to deleting them?
I redownloaded and checked a couple of my old 'rotica purchases as well as a few new ones yesterday and it looks like they're also changing the timestamps on some of the other files in the archive to be the same as the download time, specifically any image files. I'm also only seeing EndUserLicense.pdf in the root of the archive on my downloads and new purchases. Vedor_Item_name_readme PDF is now in the Documentation folder.
Deleting all the pdfs is easy enough - I can use the same function as the one that deletes any .dbf files - but I was hoping to avoid it as the documentation is useful for some products. I'll add it as a stop-gap though.
I think the version I've been testing today is correctly changing the timestamps for the folders and the final detracked zip file using 7zip and I'm working on a second script that will act on any zip files in the same folder. Once I'm reasonably sure they're working, I'll zip 'em up and post them.
(I would have been a bit quicker, but it's a couple of decades since I last wrote any powershell scripts and I'm not a coder so I have to keep googling stuff while keeping the script as flexible as possible for if and when RH and 'rotica change things again.)
Can anyone confirm that the 3 pdfs are always present with the same names in 'rotica zip downloads?
@Warrant63. Yeah, I noticed the folder timestamps after posting yesterday. It seems to be a function of using powershell's built-in zip function to re-zip the files. Changing the timestamp on the zip file should be easy enough to add though. I can look at using 7zip rather than the built-in function to re-compress the files, but that relies on people having 7zip installed as well. The other option is to use your method to change the system date and time, but if I can, I'd rather avoid doing that as if the script fails before resetting the time, it could lead to some unintended behaviour with Windows.
Give me a couple of days and I'll see what I can come up with.
