Everything about it is fascinating. These people all have day jobs yet they provide a better experience than the multi-trillion dollar corporations that are releasing the product in the first place.
People come to HN to discuss whether the hacking blog's title was too big for their tastes or if the content is readable by every disabled person under the sun. The comment section is literally pain incarnate for actual hackers.
I feel like I have to defend the parent here. My experience in the nulling/warez/pirating community is that it tends to be young adults doing the majority of the work and mostly they do it for kudos and not monetary benefit.
Adults might be giving them the kudos, but the hard work (again, in my experience) is young adults, of school age.
A lot of them started as young adults, but the scene has been going on for over 20 years. Some people quit over time, and some other joined as they got old enough to contribute, but I wouldn't paint with as wide of a brush as you're doing.
Young adults aren't breaking into streaming devices to extract the CDM keys. They also aren't running trackers like Orpheus and Redacted. Those are small examples, but I'm not sure I understand how young adults would ever have the mobility and network to do these things.
George Hotz (geohot) was a teenager when he cracked the iPhone and was 20 when he cracked the PS3. So...yes, young adults certainly can extract keys if they have the time and motivation, and being young adults they often have plenty of time on their hands.
Before that most of the protections were just not that severe (and thus interesting), and after 2015 Steam, Netflix and Spotify severely stemmed the influx of people being exposed to piracy and thus potentially going deeper into the culture.
Tangentially related but I think that’s also why in a strange way the advent of the smartphone and other ‘curated technological experiences’ has lowered computer literacy for the average person born after ~1995.
Yeah, I think software piracy was a huge part of technological learning for me from an early age, figuring out how to the name of what I was even looking for (cracks, Warez), using astalavista, early torrent clients, forwarding ports, finding good torrents, using a firewall to block applications, applying cracks, learning about loaders, key generators, patches, protectors, and later reverse engineering and cracking software myself... staring at assembly in IDA for a few days straight so you can do something no one else online has done is a pretty interesting experience and probably one of the most formative ones to my enjoyment of computing.
