Auster

Cynical as I have become in recent years, I can’t help but to think it’d be due to a VM seldom carrying interesting data for data brokers - your real machine is usually where the “good stuff” is.

Depending on what you work on, maybe there’s an alternative FOSS or at least paid DRM free software?

Or, if you work for a company and it demands this tool, maybe you could ask them to provide the software for you?

On a 3rd point, I’ve seen official softwares detect when they’re being run in VMs or similar, so maybe that’s what happened.

On a 4th point, if you must use a crack, maybe do so on a less usual Linux system, so if it’s a functional one but packaged with virus, the virus breaks either because it runs under Wine or similar, or because the less usual system lacks some needed dependency for the virus if it can run on Linux as well?

Found a few candidate tools though can test neither now, mutool (part of the mupdf tools), PDFtk, qpdf, pdf2txt (name sounds familiar though it might be memory playing tricks).

If any of those could be found as a single portable exe around 2020, chances are it is the tool I used for it.

Iirc, tested it out quite a few years ago, and I had to use a software that would both decompile and recompile the PDF, and while it was decompiled, I had to remove the repeating pattern I didn’t want with something like Notepad++. File got recompiled a bit over 50% bigger iirc, maybe different compression methods, but the pages themselves didn’t seem affected.

Sadly can’t remember the name of the program I used for compiling and recompiling, only that it’d do both and that I looked for how to remove watermarks from PDFs. Also the program was certainly offline.

Mind sharing a link to the tool? Checked the post on the original url and it doesn’t seem to be there either so guessing it was forgotten.

Some times it isn’t about the destination, but about the journey itself.

Yt-dlp doesn’t deal with cracking, but by fetching the files from DRM-free endpoints of a given service. And from what I’ve seen in issues from both yt-dlp and Grayjay, such endpoints were all removed in recent months for Crunchyroll (and by extensions, neither support downloading from Crunchyroll anymore).