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I believe that we should treat these questions just like we would any others. They aren't really special, and jailbreaking/rooting is not illegal (at least in the US). I don't see a need to make a special case for these. We aren't really in a position to judge the legality of a motive. That's the job of posters, not us.

Yes. The fact that some software may be intended to work around a limitation in some other software is irrelevant. Most “cracker” software have legitimate uses. Technical limitations in software are often more restrictive than the corresponding license, and even limitations in licenses may not be valid in all jurisdictions. In any case it is not up to us to ...

Whyever would we not accept questions about Youtube downloaders? The topic of this site is software recommendations, not software-that-doesn't-download-from-Youtube recommendations. On the legality of using Youtube downloaders In my jurisdiction, it is legal to make copies of any content covered by copyright (a book, a CD, a website, …) for personal use; ...

We do not enforce agreements between third parties - and we shouldn't set that precedent. You're free to downvote, comment, and refrain from answering, but it's unlikely that any moderation action will be taking based solely on a contract being broken. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't intend to become one.

It is irrelevant whether software is/can be illegal, because that is defined by local authorities. As a user, I can't determine where an asker lives and which laws he should follow. Furthermore, any other person (following other laws) can find recommendations where some other software you never thought about may be illegal. Additionally, you must add time ...

Yes, such questions are on-topic as long as they fulfill our usual requirements. there are legitimate uses of password crackers, e.g. when you have forgotten your own password or when testing the security of your application like in this question about breaking the terms and conditions, we are not lawyers, especially not for all countries around the world ...

helping someone with a task that could turn out to be, somewhat of a malicious task, is that something we should answer here in our community? “That could turn out to be (…) malicious” is not a reasonable criterion. Any question could turn out to have a malicious purpose. As an example, let me take a random question¹: E-tender system Gee, a tender system. ...

Yes we should allow those questions . Crackers, patchers or keygens encompass an extremely large range of applications and goals, let's not blindly ban anything labeled as such. The DMCA is zealous enough, and users/moderators are not lawyers anyway.

The most obvious use case in this that would be allowable is "I have x software, but the company is defunct and I want to be able to use it" I have a feeling that most users in this situation will mention that anyway and this is easy to verify. That is an easy yes we can support it in my mind. Can we not just make it required that for cracks etc the ...

I noticed a distinction worth pointing out in your original question. There are two areas here and I would treat them differently: Questions on how to jailbreak/root (techniques, usage, links to software that will perform jailbreaking/rooting, etc) Questions on software that does other things on a device that has previously been jailbroken/rooted Questions ...

I would think absolutely not. We don't want to be seen as a place that encourages illegal actions - and in this case it isn't even a grey area. Its a clearly illegal, and attempting to circumvent a EULA, There's a precedent for this - SU banning hackintosh questions. It does seem that there's a bit of disagreement on this (even between mods), but if the ...

We don't, and shouldn't attempt to, enforce civil agreements between third parties or laws of any country. It's impossible to do consistently and accurately - turns out there are lots of countries with different laws. Your question looks fine to me.

Youtube prohibits downloading videos or converting them to mp3 AFAIK and youtube-dl is very popular software that does that. The OP could argue that he wants to use it on websites other than youtube and how to judge him? Since you can never know the true intentions of someone, you have to help him, and if he gets in troubles, its his own fault. For instance ...

Knowledge is always good, whether learning how to crack passwords, how to write malware, how to do phishing. Maybe you are a computer security student, or an ethical hacker. Maybe you are just curious. For instance, metasploit is a legit company, if someone uses it for bad activities, it's his fault, metasploit shouldn't stop creating software simply ...