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!
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)
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
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.
@@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.
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.
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
@@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 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
I will never forget the classic TeamExtreme launcher. Incredible. It replicated the old minecraft launcher before the massive overhaul. Sure it was minimalistic and basic, but man, did I spend a lot of time on it before I got the game
I remember when I was like 6 I downloaded Team Extreme launcher for free Minecraft because my parents didn't trust online purchases when I asked for official Minecraft and TeamExtreme server was the first multiplayer Minecraft experience I had, that's where I met my first online friend yuraj1314 ( don't remember exactly the name) haven't seen the dude ever since
@@playerarmy6890 I played teamextreme a while back on an old version, back when times were better. I was Alexbubu7, don't think I met a "yuraj". May you one day reconnect with him.
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.
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.
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
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.
@@00qerq 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
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
that tweet from notch at the beginning , thats literally what i did a few days ago , ive been playing for years on cracked , and i just bought a premium account
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.
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
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!
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. (:
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
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
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.
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
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.
Same Situation. They teased me saying you wasted money. One of my friends *actually* got a virus and root cause was TLauncher Spyware told Malware websites his IP, Password, And Info. I was like Bruh, I told u
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.
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 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...
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.
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
This thing deleted a resource pack I was working on, I did have a backup but I made so much progress so quickly and was so focused on it I forgot to backup my progress, this thing deleted everything from worlds to resourcepacks to screenshots. It has a special place in my heart, I'll always hate it but now I have even more reasons to do so:)
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.
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 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 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
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.
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 knew something was fishy with Tlauncher years ago, but I ignored it because of the convinience it provided. Back around 2020, me and my friends who use tlauncher noticed a bug after a recent update. Everytime someone typed something in chat, the fps would dramatically drop. I found this weird and so I opened task manager to see what was up and saw that everytime a chat message appeared, the CPU usage would spike. The issue would continue for about a week before it magically dissappeared. Fast forward a couple of months later a came across a reddit post claiming Tlauncher was malicious and contained spyware and I recalled the previous incident. I still ignored it however and continued to use the launcher because I don't know any alternatives with the same features. For me and my friends, the main selling point of Tlauncher, aside from being "free" is that the skins you upload to their site can also be seen by your friends who use Tlauncher, making a somewhat decent substitute for having premium minecraft With all that being said though, if only minecraft was easier to buy in my country, I would have had it a long time ago. If it was on steam, or if you could buy physical copies of the game, me or my friends wouldnt be resorting to using shady launchers. I barely know anyone with a credit card as usually only the upper class here in my country have them. I want to buy minecraft, I currently have funds set aside for it, its just not that easy to do.
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
I never used Tlauncher itself, but my friends used it, and it worked just fine for our playthroughs (Me being the only one original owner XD). I, however, started playing through the AnjoCaido version, and I liked the game so much that I bought it in 2014/2015. I really think that one of the reasons that Minecraft is so popular, is because of these versions that allowed us to play it before buying it (Some still use them, but way more people have an original Minecraft nowadays than back then, at least for people that I know).
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.
Yup, that particular Windows update is a regular Patch Tuesday update. September 10, 2019-KB4515384 (OS Build 18362.356) it seems the launcher wants to avoid doing something if that update is installed.
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.
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 :)
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.
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
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.
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
From those two snippets of code. That's alarming. One is checking for a specific knowledge base containing a number of vulnerability patches (likely how they leverage this attack) to make sure the system isn't patched with that KB and the larger snippet is even worse - downloads and stores an executable to a temporary file location without any security requirements, executes, runs a windows socket reset, waits 7 days and runs it again resetting networking settings and logs any exceptions. Yeah fuck that off and delete that off your machine immediately.
@@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.
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!
eh nah, several systems, several upgrades there is never a slow down in my pc besides nothing in the background is running when I close the launcher. We mostly play offline.@@xijinping880
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
@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.
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: th-cam.com/video/I5mRwzVvFGE/w-d-xo.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.
Make sure to subscribe!
Follow up video - th-cam.com/video/GPpt1K7OP3A/w-d-xo.html
Join the discord - discord.gg/WGc9UNM
Okay
hi😊
Hey Mr epic love your videos keep doing them! ❤️
ok
no
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!
пошли на бадландс спайр изи рат😂🤣😆🥳🐀🐁🐀🐁🐀🐁
its the main launcher in brazil too
Wow
Yeah same, my brother uses it because you literally can't buy the game from Russia
I was gonna see if this works when i looked up and found this video THANKS FOR SAVING ME
Imagine paying a subscription to a client for *cracked Minecraft* 💀
tlauncher subscription < one time pay for actual minecraft
Ikr i never understood the point- if you're willing to dish out money might as well just buy a premium account
a total paradox lol claiming not to have money for the game but paying a sub for a cracked one.
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)
@@leamissyoylack of money isn’t the only reason people pirate lol. They might not like the company
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
Pathologic intensifies
That's actually true guys
TL legacy and Tlauncher
s there anything between a passionate person and a scammer
few examples of the latter are Wargaming and Gaijin
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.
Hi I am Russian
@@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.
@@JK_Cookieminimum wage in russia is 250 bucks, gl with telling them 30$ is not a lot
Notch is unironically one of the most based game devs for saying "Just Pirate It"
However he gets minus based points for being transphobic
@@hihellothere9569 nothing wrong
@@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.
@@hihellothere9569 no one asked
@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.
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 got minecraft first then tlauncher cuz I was too lazy to install mods
Can i have the link for tl legacy
i need tl legacy link
@@aentn your goals are beyond our understanding
@@Felix14_v2 thx
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.
Yeah here in Romania a lot of people also use it during IT class
@@dariuspetrea2150 "baaa, baga-ti-va minecraft hai sa ne jucam".
I have a friend in Romania who uses cracked launcher, I'll have to ask her if she uses this :(
@@nottoofast I have a friend who went to Romania and they stole his teeth when he smiled
@@iGamezRo Daca vrei tu cum sa nu
Hearing about this 1 year later 💀
ive been using tlauncher for 3 years and there are no problems, tlauncher has no malware since 2016, and i never had problems with tlauncher
clickbait video
could not be said more accurately @@gayouya117
guess we now know who are the russian bots in this reply section
@@lillyie i dont think anyone in this comment section is a russian bot
Minecrafts creator said it best himself.
"Just pirate the game until you can buy it." - Notch
That's 10 Years Old Tweet
@@byzantiumsoldier1706 and? people cancel you over some fucking 20 year old tweet
@@byzantiumsoldier1706 still holds up even today
I’m gonna buy it once I get out of college
And thats exactly what I did
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
AYO another TeamExtreme guy
@@Suwawako me too
Used to play on TeamExtreme in around 2013-14 up until I bought the game in 2014. Man... it has been so long that I've forgotten TeamExtreme lol
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
BRO I DIDNT EVEN REMEMBERED THE NAME but i remember going to the server and not being able to move lol. Good times
I always found it funny that TLauncher has a premium version, thinking why would anyone buy it if they could just purchase Minecraft outright.
Its 4 times cheaper, but i think its not very safe
@@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.
@@Krisztian08 that's what it's for... You get what you pay for
@@Krisztian08 yeah, but it's not like you have to buy it. It's just an option.
@@assbeater still not worth it, it's like you know it's jilly juice and know the effect after drink that "potion" to your body.
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 Shauna said it best: "yikes! That's how the rich get more richer"
COMMUNISM 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
@@yourdadsbuyingmilk TLauncher doesn't deserve it. They obfuscate code, change your registry, falsely DMCA other people, and much more.
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
im gonna tell putin about you
this is a joke no offense pls
Tell Vladimir Putin he gay
@@klipped_skipped bruh
what cracked launcher do you suggest??
I will never forget the classic TeamExtreme launcher. Incredible. It replicated the old minecraft launcher before the massive overhaul. Sure it was minimalistic and basic, but man, did I spend a lot of time on it before I got the game
I think this is maybe the one i had back then, but im not sure
Yea I still have their server on the server list good times 😔
I remember when I was like 6 I downloaded Team Extreme launcher for free Minecraft because my parents didn't trust online purchases when I asked for official Minecraft and TeamExtreme server was the first multiplayer Minecraft experience I had, that's where I met my first online friend yuraj1314 ( don't remember exactly the name) haven't seen the dude ever since
@@playerarmy6890 i think that was the launcher i had back then
@@playerarmy6890 I played teamextreme a while back on an old version, back when times were better. I was Alexbubu7, don't think I met a "yuraj". May you one day reconnect with him.
7:37 terraria GameLauncher isn’t a cracked launcher, it just patches the current steam version to allow users to play old versions of terraria.
yeah, but "terraria gamelauncher" could theoretically be shortened to tlauncher.
@@SluggishRain that's how it was called before they got hit with DMCA takedown
@@Brawaru of
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
@@SluggishRain but the guy in the video said it was cracked, that’s why this guy said it wasn’t
6:25 - btw, a lot of russian companies try to hide their location and origin by this way or by changing place of registration to a foreign one.
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.
Technic allows cracked players and so does salwyrr
Also not to be confused with ATLauncher, another modpack launcher.
@@interstellar_1phew. was looking for this comment 😅
@@entgay3767 Salwyrr is so underrated...
@@Lilia·Liuu fr
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 already knew the risks when i inatalled it so im kind of not suprised but i will only keep playing it off line
so that's what bricked my computer
@@seraph8293 I dont think it can brick your computer because your computer only gets bricked if you have problems with your firmware
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.
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
if you are using multimc or some kind of fork of it there is an option for launching an instance in offline mode that 99% replaces tlauncher
I still can't get over the fact that some jackass tried to do that with SCP. So stupid...
@@alexistrinon4402 That would be tlaun and .ch.
If anyone touches SCPs im getting a catchine gun
Where do u get the legacy version
how is this 11 months old, time flies by so fast
its been 8 months buddy
@@unicornsupergirlno way 1 hour ago
@@Skittle503 no way 2 weeks ago
No way 10 days @@breadnmotmaker
@@gmazfaarlwdu3588 no way 14 hours ago
Ive had tlauncher for years (5-7 years) and have recommended it to so many friends. I havent watched through the whole video but thanks
so can i use it?? nobody in the comments is telling if i should use it or not
@@cheezburger509 yeahh i also want to know that
@@cheezburger509 yes you CAN use it but I very strongly recommend you to NOT use it, the video too is telling you to not use it.
The launcher is good, some of the information in the video is fiction. Write to the developers and ask for an interview
@@ЛучаноРотштейн why should we trust THEM with this information?
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.
@@holden_fella big brain
@@holden_fella nothing in windows had to be changed for cracked accounts to work.
tetris 💀
@@knuckelz8923 tetris is...
SOVIET
I literally have that launcher installed 💀
Thanks for the information, amazing video!
it might be to late for you it could have already sent your info to the moon natzis
me too noo
@@O_2og I have iFunny installed. Too late for me
@@O_2og Yea the amount of porn would greatly amuse them
@@imnotwritingmyrealname6451 lmfao
Why will you buy TLauncher premium if you can just buy the real minecraft?
most of the Russians don’t know there is another real Minecraft it is the comment right above also im sure there’s other reasons
@@00qerq 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.
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.
When the Minecraft demo-world is left open as you start it a second time it will reset the timer, but not the world.
@@losasta oh damn that's cool
Pirating is pretty safe tbh, as long as you are careful
Just use salwyrr
The official demo also lets you play forever before version 1.2.1. I loved doing that.
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.
What's CIS? Commonwealth of Independent States?
@@TankEngine75 CIS is basically country's of past USSR, but not all of them
For example Kazakhstan, Belarus, Russia, Ukrain, Tatasrtan
It's all CIS
@@cornkidboring Oh I knew it, countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, etc
@@cornkidboring Didn't know that there is Tatarstan, you learn new things every day
Can confirm, out of the 5 classmates i play on a Minecraft server with, only i have a bought copy of Minecraft (commenting from Moldova here)
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
Wtf kind of school project needs you to install pirated Minecraft😭
well, at least your school got new computers😅
@@dejus_e fr
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.
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!
@@aksHandler I think yes
You know, from all the things that are downloaded on the PCs in my school,
I didn't expect TLauncher to be one of the viruses.
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?
Yes, seems like FUD to me. Not surprising since it's anti-Russia, which seems to be popular to hate on now.
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.
sounds like what a russian hacker would say
sounds like what a russian hacker would say
@@uncolorr just an honest review. both are sussy, I was just pointing out that the code he showed in the video wasn't malicious
@@moderator_man ok fine then
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.
Me watching videos telling me the programs I use turn out to have malicious code in their files
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
Same about buying official mc
I have mc official account but Tlauncher has more like mod loader
@@Samstercraft77I use ATlauncher (unrelated to Tlauncher)
@@Samstercraft77 i am thinking to shift to other clients who has really good features
@@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
that tweet from notch at the beginning , thats literally what i did a few days ago , ive been playing for years on cracked , and i just bought a premium account
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.
use salwyrr instead
its basically lunar client but free
@@elliethejellie Can i play modded minecraft on there
Nope
it’s always been like that lmao. don’t steal
RIP TeamExtremeMC
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.
And how do you do that? Like, you just go to archives and start uninstalling it?
@@alguienxder3xd539 ok thanks! 🤙
@@alguienxder3xd539 what do you mean by old java version? i dont understand
@@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
Damn nice i already uninstalled it 🙃 now i'm fd i guess?
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!
Did it ruined your computer or you had any problems with it??Did you got your money or emails or accounts stealed?!? If not, WHY DID YOU DO THAT?!?
it is still probably spyware, which you do not want@@ddbcjekdkcjeksocjrkfkfje
@@ddbcjekdkcjeksocjrkfkfje i haven't noticed anything
@@ddbcjekdkcjeksocjrkfkfje I also used it back then. My pc was slow as hell. Then I just decided to buy real minecraft and it works fine
@@ddbcjekdkcjeksocjrkfkfjebecause there's spyware???????
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. (:
was it in response to Microsoft releasing Microsoft edge?
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
good for u i dont have mc and i cant crack it
@@nemanjastefanovic171 u can crack it
@@YoPlxntrprobably dosent have a pc
@@TubZ_24MCPE exists Pojavlauncher Exists Mobile Lanuchers Exist
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
that would be kinda funny since they are literally pirating a game
the end of the video clearly showed that mojang is aware of TLauncher but aren't really able to due much due to TLauncher being russian.
@@JoshNotJohn0 why though
@@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
@@wigglear dang
Thank God I haven't used Tlauncher myself Thanks for the amazing video!
Same
Same
@mnx11 I recommend SKLauncher, it's much more better than TLauncher in my opinion...
I had tlauncher THANK GOD I HAVE ANTIVIRUS cus that would be R.I.P for my pc
God is good
Alternate title:
My and my friends' childhood absolutely broken and destroyed.
true
Figures that people involved in piracy would be doing other shady stuff. Interesting dive into this kind of stuff!
Rule number 1 of free stuff, "You're the product." Was taught that at a very young age.
@@gregariousgaming6265 damn I never thought about it like that
@@gregariousgaming6265 100% facts right here
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.
@@GERAT023 i thrust you bro..
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
which launcher do you recommend?
@@ruaraidh74 buy the game
@@TerxdAnims No. I own 6 copies.
@@ruaraidh74lmfao
@generaln00ne12 Sure. What's your discord?
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.
This happens with me
use multimc
Same here
Multimc
@@innonq I wouldn't support the creator of multimc. He's really rude and stuck up with his code.
my friends were calling me dumb because i bought the original minecraft,but i was just like,,its your prblem if you get viruses"
Spyware*
Same Situation. They teased me saying you wasted money. One of my friends *actually* got a virus and root cause was TLauncher Spyware told Malware websites his IP, Password, And Info. I was like Bruh, I told u
@@Cpd879 so i am not the only one
Can you stop lying this video is obviously click bait
You guys just feel left out but I know you guys use tlauncher
@@Rebiox78 bro I play the real minecraft it's better to actually play minecraft than a Spyware type
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.
Atleast MesterMC cant do much damage cuz it died the fuck out. Like 300 players on a good day
@@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.
@@lydierayn ye well fair i guess, and all the mineshows and stuff are still going
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 It could also be running in the background. The safest solution is to uninstall it for sure.
@@JonathanDotExe well none of my acounts, profiles, information etc. hot corrupted or stolen or changed so i think i am not gonna lose everything.
@@muki3856Still would uninstall and get TL Legacy instead for good measure
@@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 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...
what an essay dude! So well structured and engaging as well, keep up the great work! I'm subbing ofc
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.
I knew it was shady when they sold vip memberships on a cracked launcher, when users could just buy minecraft instead if they can pay
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.
Sklauncher is way better
would you mind recommending some if you do find good, safe ones? me and my friend were using tlauncher as well and now we have no way to play
Bumping this because I could use the info as well
I believe there is a cracked multimc launcher
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
ive had tlauncher for over 2 years now, i have not noticed anything wrong with my laptop
TLauncher is like a Palpatine in Star Wars, at first glance, it seems normal, but as you dig deeper, you soon realize the dark truths
“So this is how Minecraft dies, with thunderous malware”
Bit of a stretch...
@@Ewokpilot65
From a literary sense, mate.
This thing deleted a resource pack I was working on, I did have a backup but I made so much progress so quickly and was so focused on it I forgot to backup my progress, this thing deleted everything from worlds to resourcepacks to screenshots. It has a special place in my heart, I'll always hate it but now I have even more reasons to do so:)
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.
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 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
did you manage to fix the issue?
yeah i wanna know too
@@modycebula8161 yep I found a video on youtube that had instructions for removing it
@@xyroah video link?
can you provide the name of the video? if i encounter this
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.
Prism Launcher does this much better
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
@@fenn_fren interesting, however i've moved to curseforge launcher
i'll try it out though
Minecraft is literally like 500 mb how do u not have enough space for that 💀 mc is literally has the smallest size out of every popular game
@@SmitePlayz1 Minecraft gets really big when you have many many worlds, screenshots, and mods taking up the space
Nearly had a heart attack for a sec there thinking you were talking about TechnicLauncher (the modpack launcher) lol
Same haha
Never had issues using TLauncher for many years
Americans simply hates russia
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.
i uninstalled tlauncher and delete the minecraft folder and tlauncher folder should i reinstall windows
@@justarandomskyfan Up to you, if you see any problem with the current windows, reinstall it.
@@justarandomskyfan i dont think there is a need but there is no harm in it, better safe than sorry
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 knew something was fishy with Tlauncher years ago, but I ignored it because of the convinience it provided. Back around 2020, me and my friends who use tlauncher noticed a bug after a recent update. Everytime someone typed something in chat, the fps would dramatically drop. I found this weird and so I opened task manager to see what was up and saw that everytime a chat message appeared, the CPU usage would spike. The issue would continue for about a week before it magically dissappeared.
Fast forward a couple of months later a came across a reddit post claiming Tlauncher was malicious and contained spyware and I recalled the previous incident. I still ignored it however and continued to use the launcher because I don't know any alternatives with the same features. For me and my friends, the main selling point of Tlauncher, aside from being "free" is that the skins you upload to their site can also be seen by your friends who use Tlauncher, making a somewhat decent substitute for having premium minecraft
With all that being said though, if only minecraft was easier to buy in my country, I would have had it a long time ago. If it was on steam, or if you could buy physical copies of the game, me or my friends wouldnt be resorting to using shady launchers. I barely know anyone with a credit card as usually only the upper class here in my country have them. I want to buy minecraft, I currently have funds set aside for it, its just not that easy to do.
Was just about to get tlauncher but you redirected me to get to launcher, thank you!
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
I never used Tlauncher itself, but my friends used it, and it worked just fine for our playthroughs (Me being the only one original owner XD). I, however, started playing through the AnjoCaido version, and I liked the game so much that I bought it in 2014/2015. I really think that one of the reasons that Minecraft is so popular, is because of these versions that allowed us to play it before buying it (Some still use them, but way more people have an original Minecraft nowadays than back then, at least for people that I know).
If I still play Tlauncher will everythimg be fine and is there any other free minecraft launcher?
@@DailyPodcastDose1 sklauncher is the best alternative. and you should be fine if you still keep using tlauncher.
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.
Yeah, because launcher is located precisely in .minecraft folder
You'll need to backup your worlds for that.
Because tlauncher automatically to make it comfortable is setup itself as default
I don't care for my worlds because they're small, I just need to be sure it removes in a safe way for my computer.
I uninstalled Tlauncher and got legacy launcher instead. A spyware that can look at all your private info is nothing to sneeze at.
Yup, that particular Windows update is a regular Patch Tuesday update.
September 10, 2019-KB4515384 (OS Build 18362.356)
it seems the launcher wants to avoid doing something if that update is installed.
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.
zdr
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 :)
I'm been using Tlauncher for 6 years, never knew this.
Well yeah. They don't want you to know they're selling your data and spying on what you do on your pc. I hope you don't go to your bank on that pc!
On a good note, in the Arch User Repository (AUR), the tlauncher package is in fact TL legacy.
finally, a way to confirm it's the real deal. Thanks!
Same with Flathub and NixOS
You do not use Soviet TLauncher. Soviet TLauncher uses you.
No, All TLaunchers are malicious.
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.
the function is probably called only if something else fails.. good explanation though. it's hard to see its purpose without more source code
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.
Just use an open source client. Why does people always avoid open source?
true
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.
Нам нужен подобный видосик на русском, а так же альтернатива для челиков, кто все-таки играет на пиратке
@@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)
Это база
@@damntrain5145 на счет видео хз, но я знаю на minecraft main про это статья была еще давно, вроде даже в двух частях
@@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
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.
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
good to see that anjo caido is an brazilian craked minecraft version, make me as a brazilian proud
Before today I didn't know you could feel out of place for actually owning a game 🗿
most of minecraft is younglings or poor folk
yeah man, minecraft is probably the most often pirated gamd
@@pockigit7668 along with GTA San Andreas and the most popular old Nintendo games
Minecraft is way too expensive. They've increased the price of membership too high
@@C2O4 What? Membership? Minecraft is a one time payment of 25 bucks.. Most new games go for nearly a 100 at this point..
From those two snippets of code. That's alarming. One is checking for a specific knowledge base containing a number of vulnerability patches (likely how they leverage this attack) to make sure the system isn't patched with that KB and the larger snippet is even worse - downloads and stores an executable to a temporary file location without any security requirements, executes, runs a windows socket reset, waits 7 days and runs it again resetting networking settings and logs any exceptions. Yeah fuck that off and delete that off your machine immediately.
Idc. Had it for 10 years. Nothing happened.
wait until you find out what valorant and games published by activision need, just to work, lol
fkn xenophobes
Thanks to Artur to giving this TH-camr the background information, and all the others who helped.
i would rather have crack in general than cracked scam clients
best comment
he never told us how to remove the spyware if we already have tlauncher👀👀
This is quite sus. Considering this video is made by an American hypocrite (he claims to be against p2w servers but kneels before hypixel lol)
@@marixsunnyotp3142 Lmao
Its click bait its completely safe but it has a cool story
@@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.
@@marixsunnyotp3142 take your own advice, why do you think its unsafe or the alternative is safe if its from others then your a hypocrit
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.
this
i've been using tl for 6 years and nothing malicuos happened
@@user-jl8wj8fz5q same
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.
Bro created alt accounts to make people believe his video is real 💀
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!
Omg I almost downloaded it! Thank you very much, gotta warn my cousin who already downloaded it
who cares 🤣 even google is a spyware. just enjoy the game buddy no one is interested in your silly data
This is scary. I've been using tlauncher for years and I had no idea about this. Thank you for this video, very informative
So, what else can we use now ?
@@sikemender idk :(
Been saying TLauncher was malware for years, thankfully someone is actually speaking up about this.
Used TLauncher back in 2019 to 2020, but stopped using it after reading about it in the Pirated Games subreddit, and migrated to SKLauncher
we used Tlauncher everytime for 4 years mostly LAN multiplayer with my cousins. Nothing crazy happens still using it today and it works very well.
not all viruses are visible when using the computer it steals and corrupts files in the background and slows down your pc
eh nah, several systems, several upgrades there is never a slow down in my pc besides nothing in the background is running when I close the launcher. We mostly play offline.@@xijinping880
@@xijinping880 no slow down at all for years so idk 💀 honestly I've not met any problems using it since 2016
For once I do really hope Microsoft takes serious action this shit is just so scummy
If they would price games more competitively for local economies, this would be less of an issue.
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
@@zenithowo i live in kz and i never saw anyone pirating anything. Well the only thing i saw being pirated is books.
I dont care that people are pirating the game but the company and application do some shit they are not supposed to
Thank goodness I haven't used Tlauncher in a while
@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.
All th kids at my high school used it like 5-6 years ago on the school laptops.... kinda hilarious now that I think of it
thank goodness after getting my laptop fixed i didnt use tlauncher
I have deleted it and used sklauncher instead
This is before this video uploaded, I heard it from Reddit
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: th-cam.com/video/I5mRwzVvFGE/w-d-xo.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.
sure was "quick" =)
Question if i delete it will all the harmful files and everything go away or would it still stay
Once you delete it clear ya' trashbin