What’s worse than getting busted for piracy? Getting busted for pirating a erotic “visual novel” by having your name, IP address and a screenshot of your desktop posted online for all the world to see.
While not very popular in the West, visual novels, sort of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of stories for the digital age, are big business in Japan. Unsurprisingly, many such titles feature erotic content, including Cross Days, which was actually delayed so the developers could incorporate support for the SOM, a hands-free USB sex device. As with virtually all games these days, Cross Days ended up on various file-sharing sites; unfortunately for many would-be pirates, one version making the rounds is, as the saying goes, a trap: A viciously creative trojan that uploads detailed private information about the downloader and a screenshot of his or her desktop to a public website.
When the fake Cross Days installer is run, it first gathers information from the user’s computer and then presents a survey asking for further details. Once it has what it wants (it’s unclear whether the survey has to be filled out to trigger the trojan, or if it just goes ahead with whatever it can gather on its own) the information is uploaded here. Most of the site is in Japanese but at least one screen of text is in English (and hugely NSFW) and it’s a good bet that everyone involved wishes they’d paid a little more attention to what they were doing.
Adding insult to injury and also possibly providing a little legal protection for the perpetrators, it turns out that the fake installer actually explained exactly what it was going to do in its terms of service, which of course nobody ever reads. Fortunately for those who find themselves front and center on the Wall of Pervos, removal is apparently possible but users must first click a button acknowledging that they did in fact try to download the game illegally. Will shame and humiliation work where DRM and the law has failed? I don’t know, but I am most definitely amused.
Source: TorrentFreak
Published: Mar 25, 2010 04:44 pm