Everybody talks about torrenting, but recently when searched for some software I stumbled on regular sites with extensive collection of cracked programs. There's many of them, but what I looked at closely was filecr . com and what I've seen puzzled me. They have many, many releases. Old, recent what you need. All neatly organized, just like regular legit software store. I've tried one of files and it was clean and worked flawlessly.
How they operate so openly? What's the catch?
If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. It's possible that this site you found is perfectly safe, but it's also very possible that it's a honeypot or they're serving up their cracks with a side of malware. I would recommend known torrent websites and reputable crack builders. Running a custom, unsigned .exe is already a risky activity, don't make it more dangerous.
Some possible issues are:
It could be a honeypot. While this likely won't be the case, if you connect to a website and download directly from there, depending on your browser and os, general privavy and anonymity, they might be able to fingerprint you. Check against some other databases from sites that you visited today that have your real name and you're bust. Unlikely, but possible.
If the website gets shut down because of suspicion of malicious activity and they intentified visitors, again, through a fingerprint or similar, it's beasically the same as a honeypot.
So basically, the complexity of modern web browsing is the general issue. How do you circumvent this? Ideally you don't. Just use a torrent with a p2p VPN in a secure and anonymous manner and you don't even have to worry about your Javascript canvas.
For decades there have been a wide variety of shady filehosts that will happily host content with no regard for IP and offer downloading for the same (good for them). They manage to make money by offering "premium" subscriptions that allow to download without having to wait / bandwidth limitation (these days you even have services that try to mutualize such premium accounts between users for a smaller fee, using their proxy to serve their own users). For just as long there have been websites that index those direct filehost links, and make money through either ads or members donations. It's an alternative to torrenting. Gog-games is an example of such an indexing website (there are many, many others). 1fichier is an example of the filehosters I mentioned above (same remark).
To answer your question, the reason they don't go down is they routinely operate in jurisdictions that are hard to act on by LE in the imperial core; they also often pay lip service to DMCA requests by actually removing content after reports, though they'll almost universally make the process complicated, long, and pretty useless (not removing identical files reachable from other links, for example).
Look for monetization. Bandwidth costs money which makes torrents great since ideally everyone shares the burden.
Ads alone probably won't cover the burden, so they either have a subscription or have another agenda. Some might be legit for a while to sell out to the highest bidder at some point.
That said, there're some examples of someone just loving to distribute e.g. Wii or older games. They usually have really slow download speed though.
