welp, when you cant buy original minecraft cuz your region is blacklisted by Mojang, but still wants to burn your money anyway on something stupid, you can always pay for this useless subscription :P (But if you living in usa or other non-blacklisted regions, you are just completly stupid if you do that)
Glad to help with the video! Before, it was unexpected to me to find out that TLauncher is popular outside of Russia. I hope now this story will become much more known!
@@hihellothere9569 More like PLUS based points, looking at your profile picture i can already understand you are one of those maniacs, and because you litterally had to comment about notch being transphobic as a reply on a comment talking about pirating a game.
@mark-zy1xw be sure it's not past your bedtime though edit: spare your time reading this shitty reply section. just a bunch of 13 year olds being edgy on the internet living in a parallel universe. just so you have an idea, most replies to me are just talking about my pfp.
With Russian developers, it's either you get very dedicated and nice people working with extreme passion or you get massive scam artists assholes. Never any in-between
I want to express my huge gratitude to the original TL for the message it shows to each player at the first launch. A welcome message motivating you to buy an original game one day. Thanks to it now I have a licensed Minecraft. Thanks also to Arthur for giving me a way to join the Minecraft community even though I didn't have the money to buy Minecraft at the time.
I'm Romanian and I can say that this Launcher is really popular here. A lot of kids use it. The most popular server here is called Gamster and it is mostly played with TLauncher, but they also seem to longer be happy with them, since the server has its own cracked launcher and they promote it heavily, including the fact they give you a special rank if you use it.
As a kid in Russia, I never even knew that TLauncher was not actual minecraft. You could hold a gun to my head and I could not tell you a single russian person to not have used it
Bro Switch To SKLauncher Even tho my worlds are from Tlauncher lol, I still can access them using SKLauncher guess what? I have never experienced a fast paced graphics before.
@@JK_Cookie funny you should say that, because visa and Mastercard left russia you literally can't buy it lol, maybe through like a third party, but most people wouldn't bother, besides, 30 buck is a lot of money here for a Minecraft, especially with our current currency value 💀
@@JK_Cookie besides, even if we did have normal working cards, Microsoft seized operations in russia, therefore, from their standpoint, you literally can't buy anything from them in russia, they basically gave a green light for piracy because there's no official alternative nowadays.
As a person from Russia it's so good to see someone from west covering this! It such a frustrating story, glad to see it getting out there. Good video!
Me too bro. I got introduced to tlauncher by my friends in 2017 and that's how I finally was able to play the game on PC. Now I own it ofcourse for a long time
Man 2014 was wild. I remember playing on the TeamExtreme launcher because my parents didn't have any way of actually paying for the game online back then, it was fun. It's sad to see that their server eventually died out, but I personally think that Mojangs policy of not dealing with pirated copies was very helpful in making MC this popular, as I f.e. later bought the game
truly miss the team extreme launcher, used to always be in the OP Factions servers that would give you x25 stacked armor sets & all that. such a beautiful time back then
@@0qerq15 I live in Russia. All Russians who know about Minecraft know where to buy it, but strange things happen in their brains, and they think that it is better to buy premium pirated Minecraft than the official one.
As someone who started with TLauncher (current TL Legacy), I'm very glad this story was brought to english-speaking community as well. Sadly, such way of doing buisness in Russia is very common and requires a great efforts to fight such scams (Some person tried to literally privatise entire SCP franchise at one moment, but fortunately failed in the end). Also was quite interesting to learn some new parts of this story from this video (and quite unexpected to learn it from someone who doesn't speak russian) P.S. Though I bought licensed MC account, I still use TL for some tests cuz to set up an account in it is stupidly simple and I don't have an alt
While I was in middle school, we had these laptops. For a while while I was in eighth grade, people would get tlauncher on their computers. The teachers found out, and people (including myself) were frantically getting it off their laptops. Watching this video is a hit of nostalgia for me, and makes me thankful for not using it for longer than a week.
I remember in 7th grade, the regular launcher was blocked from the school computers, so I downloaded this launcher instead. Minecraft itself wasn't blocked, just the official launcher, so I was able to freely get online using my account and play. Eventually TLauncher was also blocked, but that program was on those computers for months. If I recall, they never actually blocked the launcher programs themselves, just the websites used to download them, so the program may have been on those computers This was in 2018, and I was getting bullied for still playing Minecraft and not moving on to Fortnite, so me and a close friend were likely the only two people doing this.
I remember in 7th grade, the regular launcher was blocked from the school computers, so I downloaded this launcher instead. Minecraft itself wasn't blocked, just the official launcher, so I was able to freely get online using my account and play. Eventually TLauncher was also blocked, but that program was on those computers for months. If I recall, they never actually blocked the launcher programs themselves, just the websites used to download them, so the program may have been on those computers until the computer was wiped. This was in 2018, and I was getting bullied for still playing Minecraft and not moving on to Fortnite, so me and a close friend were likely the only two people doing this.
@@Max-zo6rv it's 4 times cheaper, and 4 times more useless. HD skins and capes, on a client only poor people who play with their friends use? Come on. What a waste of money.
It's insane how they still ask for higher cuts from server owners when they literally rake billions of dollars. This really shows how insatiable people can be.
No, it's just the money they deserve. No matter what you think, it won't change a thing. Their launcher, their rules. Go make your own if you are going to complain so much.
As a russian programmer all i can say: never touch a thing coded by a russian with a ten feet long stick, even if you are the one who hired that coder for the project.
That said, editing "hosts" file is probably to reroute MC client away from the Microsoft server for checking the clients' authenticity. That's a file deep in system32 folder, and they could've done a workaround with splicing the connect() function to avoid this strong reaction, which shows that this launcher was a sloppy job with a bunch of lazy workarounds.
yeah thats the problem terraria can be shortened as T and Launcher you get "TL"auncher its dumb since you cant also use MCLauncher too this Whole cracked Mc's Laumcher were a mess
Also because it's easy to get out of the law's reach by that way Until some international law gets established where internet wrongdoers can get punished by the USA legal system under the USA's law as long as they harmed USA in some capacity,we won't get anywhere
FYI: As far as I can tell, TLauncher is not to be confused with the TechnicLauncher, another modpack launcher/launcher. This one isn't 'cracked' to allow offline-accounts to play online I don't think.
Thanks you for covering this topic TLauncher popular not only in Russia, but in CIS(countrys of past USSR) in general. You can say it's popular in every country but no. there's A LOT of people who use TLauncher in CIS. For 1 guy who owns a minecraft there's 8 people who don't and they use Tlaucher, and there's also always be a guy who owns minecraft, but still uses TLauncher.
Hey, software engineer here. The code you've listed doesn't appear to be malicious. It's odd they use Java from their own servers, but not unheard of. Is there anything else? It seems dozens if not hundreds of locations cite the same sources, but no one has a single example of hard evidence of wrongdoing?
I remember that for a school project everyone needed to install a pirated version of minecraft, after that, the almost 10 yo computers were changed for new ones because every single one had a virus
Just letting anyone who wants to know, there is a bug that lets the official demo world last forever. It only allows for one world, and some other limitations, but that is much safer than pirating.
Hi MrEpic, Software Developer here. Not completly sure but from the code shown at 11:50 it appears to be checking to see the winver. I looks like its doing this because something may be blocked with a older version so its trying to update? it does some weird stuff after it like resetting your web socket which i believe is for flushing. Doesn't look like its doing anything harmful.
Wouldn't tlauncher come after you because you made a whole entire documentary about it so then they could take down the video or get you sued? I think uploading this video itself is a dangerous move edit: someone needs to report this to Mojang they can take this down
@@toara normally if someone pirates your game, you can sue them to shut it down, but since the company is based in Russia, and Russia has pretty bad copyright protection, so it's get hard to get them shut down
Original TLauncher is so nostalgic to me. When I was a child I had literally no money, so buying a game wasn't an option. Now I'm an adult and I use official launcher. Still I knew that story about stolen TL. But I hadn't knew that was THAT bad. Thank you for the video
I used to use this TLauncher thinking that I was using the original, but after I found out that there is a TL Legacy that looks like the original TLauncher, works like the original TLauncher, I realized that I was using the wrong launcher. Thanks to TheMisterEpic for this video!
Reminds me of the British guy who tried to copyright the word "edge" just because he owned the rights to "EDGE", a gaming magazine. Seriously. This dude tried throwing copyright claims at anyone and anything that had the word "edge" in it. The courts basically laughed at him, though. (:
That was the first launcher of Minecraft dad got for me more than a decade ago. That's where I played on a childhood server of mine, Team Extreme. It's a shame what it's become.
The executeFixed() function you showed will simply download the latest version of the TLauncher updater program & then run a reset on the winsock API. It's not malicious, as far as I can tell. The "crash.switch.antivirus.system.auto" string is a pointer to a localized alert message. It has multiple languages, which is why it does that. What it's doing is displaying a message that says "The launcher will start fixing the problem after closing this message (you may need administrator access, in this case, allow the launch from the administrator). Wait 20 seconds and restart the computer, then check if the problem is resolved." And if you're wondering, I decompiled TLauncher and reviewed bits of the code.
I keep finding comments similar to this one and I'm also questioning the video itself. The company IS shady with their practices, I know this because there was a similar thing in my country too, but this youtuber's only source is the code (which he doesn't understand) and the reddit post with broken english and horrible explanation (2 files keep getting replaced therefore spyware). We really need some people who actually understand coding to confirm/debunk this, because I can't really trust this guy.
As someone who plays on cracked launcher, I find it incredibly scummy that they're trying to monetize pirated software and wouldn't feel bad for them if they got hit with a DMCA from Microsoft
TheMisterEpic should have included this in the video, but when you uninstall TLauncher do NOT use the "uninstall" option as this runs an uninstaller designed by THEM, and among other things will nuke your Minecraft files. Just delete the TLauncher stuff manually.
@@alguienxder3xd539 i need to install another thing to manually uninstall the other? Or can i just do it without those? lol sorry if these are a Lot of questions, i just want to make sure i got it right and be more careful
When I heard about it half a year ago, I gave up with piracy and bought official account (first game that a I've ever bought). I'm from Ukraine and our country is kind a poor when we start talking about buying games (majority), so owning Minecraft licence is very rare here
@@Samstercraft77 curseforge might affect performance on low end pc's, they should install the mods manually and store them in folders if the person have bad an computer
If youre not worried about losing anything. Piracy is still king. And thrust me, the countries in which these pirate launchers are mainly made for, people aint giving a damn shit.
TLauncher wasn´t used only for the pirated version of the game, i used it for some time to play with an original account, because for some reason the original launcher refused to run on my computer.
Actually this video makes so much sense. In 11:52 I remembered that Windows warned me couple of times in the past that a file called javaw detected it as a trojan and didn't understand why, but now I understand why. I used to have TLauncher but now I don't since as I was not playing Minecraft, was in vain to had it in my PC.
Fun fact: The same is happening in hungary, except its named "MesterMC". Its actually been happening for almost 10 years now... It was "HU-Minecraft" at first.
@@arminivanics1916 Well. As i can see it, it still hurts minecraft's EULA by monetising and making their servers pay2win (literally pay for skins and such). And its still kicking about. Owned by a random company that sells merch that is related to it.
Me and my friends are currently using TLauncher as it's the only cracked Minecraft launcher that we felt comfortable using. We never spent even a single cent in TLauncher because we are broke, and also we did not buy Minecraft as Minecraft's price is similar to some big AAA games in our country and maybe also other countries (again, broke). After this, I'll probably be researching and testing other Minecraft launchers. UPDATE: I have tested multiple launchers and 2 cracked Minecraft launchers were up to be mentioned. SKLauncher is very good. It's highly customizable and very clean in terms of design (this came from me, a design major). It's also just an .exe file, no installer necessary. Unfortunately for non tech savvy or lazy people, it's slightly inconvenient. However, it's one of the only ones with capes, which both skins and capes system mirrors the actual minecraft skin system (can be seen by anyone) rather than just allowing people with the same launcher to see each others' skins. TL Legacy, the one mentioned in the video, is very similar to TLauncher in terms of the free features. The only gripe I had is that the website used as the account system (to use skins and more) is slightly clunky and unintuitive. However, if you are already used to it and you only exclusively use forge or fabric for mods, it's pretty much the same with a different UI. Others fall short as they are mostly very limited in terms of features and customisability. Note: I personally cannot get into any server using SKLauncher, even "offline" servers after everything I did, even when the official website says you can. So, experience may vary from person to person.
Would You mind recommending some alternatives? I have bought Minecraft however i want to use another account to play apart from the Xbox account and found tlauncher the most handy, i used to use another one called launcherfenix but on My new PC it just doesnt work
you think that when you have a virus the virus says "hello i am a virus an i am going to infect your computer" viruses are ment to be hidden so the user can't detect them they could be stealing information and you won't notice it
Of course "nothing has happened", since spyware isn't something eager to reveal itself. Instead, it sells info about your life and habits to advertisers who can use it to exploit and destroy your financial, political, social and religious habits.
The Code in 11:44 is not just to check if a certain update is installed. If it is it also blocks all Messages that would inform the user about a new windows update that needs to install.
Uhh, i have tlauncher right now, I've gotten every windows update notification. God i am so scared, but i heard spyware works only when tlauncher is open, so i hope they don't have my parents card information. Omg i am so fucking scared
@@muki3856 If you look at the code it just checks for one specific windows update and then disables the windows update notification. I don't think that many people even had this specific windows version. Its "KB4515384"
I had heard about tlauncher virus and their shady practice however I never gave it a second thought. Yet after I bought my own account from mojang I was suspiciously having trouble joing any multiplayer servers apart from the cracked ones even after removing tlauncher....as it turned out they had messed with something related to wifi code or something which blocked me from joining any multiplayer servers. Thanks for throwing light at this
I tried downloading TLauncher once, and then my PC crashed during downloading, so I lost all the progress and files associated with the download. Now that I see this video, I feel it was a weird blessing...
М-да... Только в России возможно зарегистрировать компанию пиратского лаунчера, думаю. А потом, в добавок к этому, ещё и удалять контент, из-за "нарушения авторских прав". Это же гениально.
@@damntrain5145 Такие были, даже известный в кругах ютубер, Пятерка одно из таких смотрел на стриме, угадай что с этими роликом стало? Верно, удалены по DMCA Самое забавное, что запись реакция до сих пор не удалена(283к просмотров на данный момент)
@@otomir23 Кто ни будь может, пожалуйста, вкратце перевести главные пункты видео? С Английским вроде всё норм, но конкретики про "Вредоносные файлы" так и не услышал
Hello, i was one of the people that have used this launcher for about 2 years, i never knew about this information up until i watched your video, thank you for making this community a safer place, i made sure to uninstall every single folder that is related to tlauncher!
You mentioned that other sites are trying to impersonate even the TL legacy website so should have included the link to the real legacy version to avoid further damage to players wanting to install the non-spyware one.
Never had any issues with TLauncher for the past 2 years (I use cracked minecraft because minecraft here is really expensive). But I'm reinstalling windows 2 times just to make sure I was safe. I'm considering to buy Minecraft once I had the budget.
Okay, a warning for everyone who watches this video: Be VERY careful with how you remove it. It deleted all of my worlds, resource packs, server list, and game installations when I uninstalled it.
Even as russian, i didn't know the full story of this launcher. Thank you for this video! P.S. i laughed so hard when you were trying to pronounce russian names :)
thanks to you i quit t launcher and started to use sk launcher and not just it is safer it is better than tlauncher in every way now there is even modspacks built in and individual mods are also coming soon
I remember installing TLauncher on my Windows 7 and uninstalling it a day later after seeing how shady it was on Reddit. Installing TLauncher was the dumbest decision I made on that computer. Goodness knows what I have installed on that computer
i literally deleted the launcher like days before this video came out (not because of spyware but my disinterest in minecraft lately and mc taking up too much space) this was my go-to launcher even as an owner of licensed minecraft. it was so cool to just, download a modpack (or just mods in general) with just a click of a button without having to drag n' drop everything in to the mods folder. but alas, all good things must come to an end.
i only used it cause on my personal friends servers i couldnt see other's skins when i was visiting via normal client and they wanted me to use a specific modpack from the tlauncher mods page. i dont really play minecraft that much anymore
the second code snippet (at ~11:50) doesn't actually seem to be all that suspicious, as long as what it's downloading really is an updater. figuring out what it does might be a little bit hard without knowing the context of where and why the function "executeFixed" is called. the part of the code you highlighted is quite interesting though. it looks like it would show some sort of an alert, but it's not inside of any if statement, so it would appear every time that function would be called. I wonder why it mentions the antivirus to be fair. the whole cryptic string which is one of the parameters is likely just a string which tells the localization script which text to use based on the chosen language. The way they download they updater file there seems weird to me, but i personally haven't really had to download files myself in Java, so maybe I just don't know if that's the way it should be done. I also don't really know why would they need to reset winsock, but then again I never really had to download files using java. I'd say it is sus, but only if you really start to investigate it.
Interestingly enough if you look up the exact line of code in the second snippet, you find a reddit post where someone claims that code is attempting to "turn off the antivirus and restart the launcher", but this feels totally wrong. It looks like it downloads a temporary updater using an IO library, can't really wrap my head around why they would execute a winsock reset at practically same time, but I don't think it's too incriminating. I'd be super interested in checking out the updater they download on a VM or something. The last bit of the code is definitely normal, it's just looking for any errors while the function is executing and then logging them; likely to be displayed to the user.
This is very common practice in the Russian speaking Minecraft community. I used to administratrate a fairly large server. What took place is pretty much called. "Business the Russian way" (бизнес по-русски) There is a good reason why I have a hard time trusting even the official Minecraft launcher and compiling multimc myself
You just made this possibly fake video about tlauncher so that people cant play cracked minecraft, and yes I know that there is russian language but I never thought that deep but after using tlauncher for like a few years maybe like 5, I had no problems with Tlauncher
@@InternetExplorer716 some people just cant buy Minecraft, either because it costs WAY more in their country or because they're young and their parents said no or something
@@sidneyghatisingh5720 I still switched to tl legacy. But honestly I hadn't found any sus activity by tl. We should think instead of just believing what the media spoonfeed us.
Great video, and thank you for raising further awareness about the dangers of TLauncher. Many users who are not well versed with computers tend to gravitate towards these type of applications and unfortunately fall victim to these malicious launchers. TLauncher is also a menace for mod developers as users of it often generate strange bug reports that are the result of a pirated account, which could have otherwise exposed a genuine bug with the mod. Keep up the excellent discussions and research into these topics.
Idk what exactly is tlauncher spyware steals data from users..is it something like google account or maybe visa password? Idk man I've been using it for a year and my laptop is still fine and nothing bad has happened.
Thanks so much bro, I'm Bulgarian and I have 4 cousins who are playing on tlauncher and I was super suspicious of it. Whenever they were playing on servers the connection was laggy, their skins weren't loading and half of the time they couldn't even join any servers. In addition to this, when I tried to download the real paid version of minecraft on his PC, the page would just display 'Страницата не зарежда' which means 'page not loading'. I thought that there was something off about this launcher and this just confirms it. Thanks so much bro.
You forgot to say (and we forgot to mention) that TL (Legacy) has open sources available for free download, while other one has not Also, thanks for the video!
you can't because of Russia, which we are literally at a war with, and cracks and piracy is ramped in Russia and eastern Europe been that way since the 80s..
Tlauncher is almost 9 years old since its release and Microsoft haven't done anything about piracy. It will never be an issue to make another fishy launcher with different name
Thank you so much for shedding light on this story! I'm glad I could've been of help even if a little. I hope this helps with the uphill battle TL Legacy users have with convincing people about the truth.
I had been using this for years and made a lot of real friends through the cracked servers there. Haven't used it since I purchased Minecraft. Thank you for this
I honestly did use Tlauncher for quite a bit before the Bedrock Java “merger” and yes, I’m outside Russia, it’s sad it was a real security issue but this brightens the malicious intent this software can have.
TLauncher actually just reuploaded a scuffed hats resourcepack that took me weeks to make, It scuffed since I have no idea what i was doing at first but slowly got a bit better. I uploaded it to curseforge then after like a few weeks of it being up, i searched my resource pack's name on google and BEHOLD! Tlaucher reuploaded it without any credits whatsoever in the page, good thing I added my own credits inside the file itself
Man you brought my childhood back with this video. AnjoCaido was what got me into the game and I played 1.5.2 for years! Bought the game before ever reverting to TLauncher. I used TeamExtreme for a little bit of 1.6.4 though :)
THE SAME, I haven't been realizing it until recent time. I even haven't been knowing about AnjoCaido until recent time. I also played 1.5.2 for YEARS and got fun and excitement from it.
Just a guy here, to give a "quick" explanation of that first bit of code. The meat of that section is on the line starting with "final boolean" where it executes something on the terminal. That much is obvious, but saying that it "checks if a windows update is installed" isn't exactly accurate. WIMC, or the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line utility, is the process being ran. This utility, that is now depreciated in favor of Powershell, is a tool typically used by enterprise organizations to manage large amounts of deployed windows devices. Think about any kiosk you have ever used, if it is at a large company then someone at some point has to manage all of those kiosks (send updates specific to the settings they are running, add/remove programs/features that an update may or may not have, etc.). WIMC is ran with a get on the alias QFE, or Quick Fix Engineering (the group responsible for creating and pushing hot fixes at Microsoft) and is requesting the property HotFixID. Now the specific hot fix they are looking for is quite old, being released in September 10 2019, but like most hot fixes mainly contains security patches. The meat of this hot fix was the result of the weaknesses discovered in the majority of CPU hardware that resulted in possible side channel attacks that could expose information that otherwise shouldn't have been revealed. A great explanation of this family of attacks here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-I5mRwzVvFGE.html From the first and second code snippet it is hard to say if they are actually employing MDS, Microarchitectural Data Sampling or the specific subclass of side channel attack the hot fix patched, as the first snippet simply sets a config setting (probably to be acted on at a later date) and the second is code to drop clean files for the antivirus to look at. Going further and looking at hybrid-analysis, and I am sure other analysis sites could give varying degrees of insight this was just the first that popped up, it seems like the MDS gets a little more likely. None of the DLLs they hook into for network communication (WINsock api) have been updated at or even around that patch, so its not like they are checking to ensure their malware will work on that front. Maybe it has something to do with the other part of the hot fix where there was high CPU usage from SearchUI.exe if you disabled the web search in the desktop search, but that raises more questions than answers. As a final note, the code in the first snippet is just weird, if not bad. There is probably little reason to declare the variable outside of the if, let alone as final, instead of having the call directly inside the if statement. I mean whichever compiler you use will compact that down either way but for readability. But, what makes less sense is setting a config flag true when finding they do have a patch. If we were to imagine a segment of code down the line looking to act on that flag and that action is based on them not having the patch then wouldn't one set the flag to true if they don't have the patch? This is personally what bothers me the most they find the hot fix then "know" that they can preform some action? Could be spaghetti code, could be an attempt at obfuscation, could just be something completely meaningless. This would be interesting if someone did, or if someone has already done, a deep dive into the inner workings of what their launcher (and apparently "custom java runtimes") does.
Good thing i switched to another cracked launcher (after noticing a slight decrease in my pc performance and weird things happening in the background), planning to buy a real minecraft account soon
@@ThinkingWithTunneler when your talking about the curseforge client? no the curseforge api is changed so you cant use the curseforge client in sklauncher (well, i have like 226 client side mods from curseforge website, just downloaded the mod files manually and placed them on the mods folder)
Never heard about Tlauncher until I saw your poll. I always used Crystal launcher back then. Even after I bought MC I still was using it to play with mods becouse they were easy to install on it.
@R2R I doubt it to be honest. if you have not launched it in years the program likely has broken at some point after windows updates/virus checks as most antivirus programs have malware archives that can detect older viruses. plus I check my programs in the background every so often and as a person who has used tlaucher once years ago and has found nothing suspicious he is probably fine.
I used to play on Tlauncher (not Tl Legacy), because i could not afford the original Minecraft since it was more than 100 bucks for me, i thought i could trust this app and could install it again for me to play Minecraft when I get my new PC, but thanks to you i see the hidden stuff they do nowadays, I'm very grateful for that.
There was actually drama in Russian community four years ago. Client know as mclauncher su began to buy youtubers that "expose" Tlauncher, but they had shady stuff in their client as well. So Tlauncher started buying their youtubers exposing mclauncher su! Everyone was confused, so everyone forgot it like nothing happened.
