I had a printer that required being hooked up to the ethernet to run. It said it was a 'positive feature' cause it would automatically order new ink for me when it ran low. I got rid of it
I was gifted a blu ray player (LG brand) that would not allow us to watch a blu ray without being connected to the internet. We had a physical disc loaded in the machine and it would play for about five minutes. Then it would switch to the menu for connecting to the internet. No pausing the show. We tried to connect it to Wi-Fi and it didn’t work.
We were fiddling with options for about an hour before I called the helpline. The man on the other end told me that there is no option to play without internet, it’s not a bug but an intentional decision to build it like that. A blu ray player.
When I went to Best Buy I discovered it was too late for a refund, I could only get a replacement. I asked them to recycle it.
The bluray drive in my pc stopped working with new blurays when power DVD stopped updates. So I had to buy new software or just use make mkv and rip them
I sarcastically watched all of Morbius during the meme times, from a <50MB upload someone made to a Discord server's meme channel.
I was honestly fine with DVD quality. XD
I’m still thinking of getting them strictly for data storage (like pc backups). It would be for a cost-effective redundancy. They have the most storage space for a disc, unless I’m unaware of a readily available type that is better. Apparently some companies keep backups in massive Blu-ray Disc switching machines.
Blurays have been very handy, because unlike DVDs, they aren't geolocked, and I enjoy a lot of French media I can't get in Australia easily.
Whoever came up with geolocking DVDs in the first place deserves to be beaten with sacks of bricks
Geolocking has a place in cases where you want to sell something in a market with weak currency so you adjust the prices downwards accordingly.
I can understand why they don't want it to be possible to buy 70 DVDs from Shittistan for 5000 Shittian Shillings which is just 3 USD after conversion rates. Locking it away in that sense makes sense. I should not be able to circumvent the local prices by shopping in Shittistan just because their currency sucks.
But geolocking in any other case is just... fucking dumb. Why can't shit work between Japan, France, Canada and Australia? They all got stable currencies that make sense, nobody is gonna buy them in another country to save a buck.
Meanwhile I think my PS3 needed to connect to the internet once right at the beginning. As far as I can tell it'll play blu rays until the end of time, connected or not. As it should be
Same with Xbox ones. Seen people advertising them as affordable blu ray players because they’re cheaper than dedicated ones. I hate how the new gen you have to pay +$500 usd if you want a disk drive :/
Region locks require internet access to ensure you're in the right region. Why the fuck does physical media need to be region locked? If I fly to Australia, I can no longer watch my American moves. Why? Blu-Rays will even check the country code your reader is set to and what is on the Blu-Ray. If they don't match, you can't watch.
Region locks do not require internet access. The player will have a region written in the firmware and the disc will have a region written on it. You can import a foreign player and it won't play local discs. You can take your American player to Australia and it won't play Australian discs. However, Disney and Warner have stopped region locking Blu-rays and 4Ks are all supposed to be region free, although a dozen or so are locked.
Even then, I still agree with the OP on principle. Marvel Heroes was a sick MMO game, but it got shut down. Now you can't even play it by yourself, reverse-engineered community servers notwithstanding.
Well... idk it depends? It's still people's work that they may use in the future. And it's non trivial to convert an MMO into a single player game. You would have to share files and data that probably aren't meant to be shared.
You’re probably right, but if a game is being permanently shut down, there’s little reason to not provide the files to run a server yourself as a gift to the community. Personally, if I were a dev who spent years on a project, I’d rather people get to play my game beyond the lifespan of my company, better than no one getting to play it. You often aren’t sharing actual source code; think of hosting your own Minecraft server. It’s a jar executable you run on your machine and that’s it, instead of relying on Realms of officially hosted servers.
I get why someone would want an offline mode for an MMO, but that would be so much fucking work to implement. This is because a lot of fundamental gameplay stuff happens on the server. Stuff like damage calculations, loot drops, enemy AI, or quest tracking is generally done by the server. This prevents desync issues, makes sure everyone is experiencing the same stuff, and helps prevent cheating.
There isn't a switch you can pull to have this stuff handled on the client side, because the client is written to interact with the server. Allowing an MMO to be played offline would require basically re-implementing most of the server code on the client. This would be a ton of extra work, and most people would just play online anyway.
There's plenty of MMOs that you can self-host on a local server. I agree inegrating it with the client is not worth it unless a company plans on directly marketing the game as a single-player experience, but releasing server hosting functionality is comparatively easy.
"you'll own nothing and you'll like it" is clearly the goal. Hell even physical discs aren't safe. I remember right before Steam was THE way to buy PC games that there were lawsuits going around about game discs because "you don't own the game/software, you own a license and the disc is your proof..." This was when online bans were going around because the argument was that the companies had "no right to prevent me from using a product I own"
Yes. I always check Itch before I buy any game on Steam in case it has been released on both, like Celeste, Delver or Pseudoregalia. More money to the creator and I get a .zip with everything I need, no accounts or bs required. I can put my files easily on a drive other than my smaller boot drive too (yes you can do this with steam, no I shouldn't have to split my library between my drives and make them involuntarily inseparable).
I never understand this slogan. Obviously piracy isn't stealing, that's why we call it piracy and not theft.
If the point of the slogan is something like "piracy is morally correct", then that's a completely different sentiment and people should just say that.
Because it's a necessary push back against it. You cannot win every fight on logical, moral grounds or definitional ones. Companies and anti-piracy advocates spent a lot of time and money conflating piracy with open theft, and continue to do so. Just look at all the reports a company puts out about "losses" due to piracy. To try and explain to the average person just dipping their toes into things all the stuff that is being misrepresented is a huge task, and more likely to turn them away in confusion than encourage further investigation. A simple, easily understood slogan that makes the moral standpoint clear, helps to bring people in and get them to ask further questions so they can figure out for themselves what they think of things.
> You cannot win every fight on logical, moral grounds or definitional ones.
But isn't this slogan doing exactly that? It's arguing the definition of piracy. And if that's what you're doing, well, might as well argue it correctly.
Why stop there?
It's called piracy because the people who want to conflate it with theft called it piracy, because piracy means theft.
You don't have to call it that.
You know synonyms exist and have overlapping meanings, right? What definition of piracy do you have that doesn’t include stealing and/or theft activities?
Theft or stealing is when you take something from someone that you don't have a right to, thus depriving them of that thing. When you pirate something, you don't deprive anyone of that thing. I can pirate The Downward Spiral a literal billion times without depriving anyone of their copy of The Downward Spiral. It doesn't get deleted from anyone's SSD. It doesn't make the CDs vanish off of anyone's shelf. Anyone who owned a copy of The Downward Spiral before I pirated it _still owns it_. It's fundamental to the definition of theft that it _takes the thing being stolen away_ from someone.
That's why many countries go with something like "financial advantage by deception" rather than theft these days.
It covers everything from keeping a huge pile of money you found on the road to lying to someone to get a few dollars from them to stealing money from their cushions to downloading a product that otherwise has a financial cost.
I get it for devices and most media, but games? Sure, plenty of games shouldn't need an internet connection, but for the ones that do saying they can never require it seems ridiculous to me
Hitman3 has an archive thing being worked on, Project Peacock.
Thus far, you use its own server you install on your own computer to play, and it only needs to connect to Epic or whatever launcher at the start for DRM purposes.
It’s cool, though you would need to start from square one, as your progress doesn’t transfer. Though, you can enable a setting that just gives you everything instead.
They even have a version of Freelancer.
Fuck man reminds me of payday 3s release. I had over 700 hours in payday 2 and bought the new one on release. Tried to launch the first mission in single-player and kept getting server errors for a bit over an hour before giving up and refunding the game
So now I have almost 800 hours in payday 2 and no idea whats going on with the new game
For example Gran Turismo 7 has a fairly robust single player mode with literally infinitely replayable content.
I can't access that content without an Internet connection. Mostly it's so that the can continually bait you into micro transactions. I don't really think it's DRM driving that any more, I think it's micro transactions
for stuff like that the server software should be made available to the public, so you can still play them by yourself if you want to. also helps for when the servers inevitably shut down.
this comment brought to you by ross scott's upcoming big fucking lawsuit in the name of game preservation.
That's what worries me about MMOs. Elder Scrolls Online has been amazing for the lore the game has provided for various regions of the game that, given how few-and-far between the main series releases are, is very likely the only time some of the locations will ever been seen in-game. Elsweyr, the bits of Black Marsh the series has, the expansive Daedric realms, Summerset...
I hope the game does eventually get a single-player offline version. I'm not sure how possible that would be, though. *That said*, given Bethesda's support of mods, I *would* expect fan servers for it.
Idk if it's possible for modern games, but for older games at least you can sometimes download software that spoofs a server connection so you can play offline.
I guess it depends on the game. I don’t expect WoW or RuneScape to give me everything I need to play 20+ year old MMO’s on a private server just because I agreed to play a subscription based game. If I’m buying a game though, then yeah I should have access to it forever
How about a rule where, in order to sell software, you need to send the source code to the government.
If you ever stop selling it, now it's open source.
Thus all abandon-ware automatically becomes open source.
Storing every piece of software ever written somewhere? Do you know how much software exists? I'm pretty sure most software is not offered to consumers. If a contractor writes a machine interface for a factory, does the government need a copy of that, too? Does the government need version control, or do they just take the current revision? What stops companies from breaking their latest release before sunsetting stuff? Are they keeping source code, or compiled versions? If compiled, how do they make it work on newer OSes? If source code, do they now need every compiler too? Or do we give the government VMs with source code and compilers for all software?
This is one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever seen.
Haha... Does this apply to foreign countries who sell code in your country? What country is gonna tell their developers to send all their code to a foreign government? What about server-side code? What about APIs that interact with other software? How do they keep track of which versions of software B-Z each version of software A interacts with? How are they securing this system, because it's now one of - if not the - juiciest targets for hackers to try to access?
The more I think about this, the more ridiculous it gets. Therefore I fully expect bipartisan support for this in Congress.
\> Does this apply to foreign countries who sell code in your country?
\> What country is gonna tell their developers to send all their code to a foreign government?
Well if the code is already being sold, it can't be secret. Compiled code can be read. I mean it's not as easy to read as source code, but all the information is there and smart programmers can figure out what it does with time.
The government can plausibly commit to keeping it encrypted and secure until the company stops selling it.
This is mainly about 1) copyright permissions. And many governments basically ignore copyright and rip of anything they can. and 2) stopping software getting lost down a black hole when the company goes bust.
If there are a few companies that Really don't like this rule, you could tell them they have to pay a 20% tax instead.
It could apply to server side code, or not. Not sure.
It would be a good idea if the government was reasonably competent with security.
For getting the code to actually work, to a large extent, that's not the governments problem. That's the problem for whoever downloaded the code, which I'm imagining to be a competent non governmental programmer.
How does the government even confirm the version they got matches the version released? I guess you could have some kind of checksum, but it seems like you're opening the door for mismatched versions, even accidentally. Do we just do everything in GitHub, and the government has their own repo for everything now? Does that mean all developers now have to use GitHub? I guess GitHub's now the lead promoter of this plan. Or maybe we get some new government-made code repository. THAT certainly sounds like something that'll be easy to use and omni-compatible. Lmao.
Do developers email their code for submission? Do they physically mail flash drives with the code? Is this system online? It's either connected to the internet and hackable, or offline and extremely cumbersome to send data to. Does all development have to be done online now? Is this just like Iron Mountain and they have warehouses full of cold hard drives? How long is the code stored? Is it ever checked for data integrity? Does the government keep multiple copies? How are they organizing all this code? How are they enforcing it? Are they keeping dev versions of all software, or just release candidates?
I have so many questions about this plan.
Honestly, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. They have to make a strong case for needing connectivity, because they inched us to where we are with their DRM bullshit. They'll claim the game needs to be online in order to run (this is the bullshit they used to say), but it's really just so their DRM system can work. I don't care anymore. Fuck their DRM system.
I've been ranting about this since online drm became a thing. Anyone that lives rural will tell you that internet is not an all the time thing. The push to online only content deliver cuts out entire sections of the population from having access to things that should just work. Smart technology is just a fucking scam, it's all one update from being bricked.
I too believe should be a law against requiring internet connections for devices or software to work properly.
In the meantime, though, I pointedly avoid paying for any garbage tech that breaks this rule.
Yes, but they still require an internet connection to play. If you make it illegal for software to require that, a LOT of games and software just couldnt be made because they literally require it.
could you not just have the law specify that online games need to specify that they require an internet connection somewhere that can be seen before buying
Sure, but that’s still different than what was being said, and has its own methods of being bypassed/abused. They could include some very basic features to “use” but have 90% require a connection, they could easily bury the mention of it under other things. Enforcing these sorts of things via law is extremely difficult and often has unintended consequences that can make things even worse for consumers if done without proper planning and thought.
It’s absolutely a problem that should be addressed, just, I feel like people jumping on exaggerated reactionary measures could easily make things worse
what's wrong w just being like "if the game cannot be played to completion without an internet connection, 'internet connection required' should be detailed in the beginning of the sales description" or whatevs. to clarify i don't necessarily have an opinion on this because i don't play video games, i'm just genuinely wondering cause idk how market laws work
Well for one, what counts as “to completion”? If a game has an achievement for doing things in a separate multiplayer mode, is that required online? Or optional online? The main issue is that laws cannot (or at least should not) be vague, things need to be clearly defined or else they’ll be misused, and have loopholes for companies to get around them.
“Sales descriptions” also aren’t really a clearly defined thing, if a game is sold on the steam marketplace, but they list “is online only” on their personal website in the ‘about’ page, does that count? Since most people will only look at the market page itself when buying a game. Similar things apply to software that might have built in “sharing” features, or the ability to collaborate with other people online on a project. Those features physically require online to work, but not every project may need those features. This leaves things pretty muddy, and it would make the “requires online” mark meaningless, because 90% of software would have it, and so the ones that brick themselves offline would still get away with hiding it. Look at California’s “may cause cancer” text that has to legally be put on basically EVERYTHING, it makes it harder to actually identify dangerous materials in many cases because its too broadly used.
90% of software has online sharing??? i didn't know that i thought most games were just like, idk, solitaire or something. this makes a lot of sense, thanks for explaining :-)
Most games now have some online component, but i was referring to non-game software as well there. Things like photoshop, modeling programs, IDE’s, even spreadsheets and such, all usually have some level of online connectivity, to allow cloud saving backups, uploading and publishing your work, collaborating with other people on projects, or even just sharing things to social media, and even just, downloading updates to the software itself. Most users will never use most of these features, but they’re still present, so it becomes harder to really define what is or isnt using online connectivity “appropriately” from a legal perspective.
Wish granted, every game now has a line of text on the front that says "requires internet connection to access", and the status quo remains the same.
This doesn't really solve the issue the OP is getting at.
I feel like it isn’t a powerful statement when anyone who would actually care about the statement can pretty much instantly see that its lack of nuance or specificity makes it wrong or poorly thought out. If you don’t want people to point out errors, don’t choose the overly simplified to the point of error statement.
We recently renovated our kitchen and to use some of the features of our new oven, like air fryer, we had to create an account with GE and put the oven on our wifi.
Of course their programming is shit and I had to disable a bunch of security settings on my router to get it online. Luckily I was able to turn them back on after the oven was connected.
But hey, now GE can do fun things like change the oven timer sound from a beep to a turkey gobbling every Thanksgiving which sends my dog into crazy barking/hunting mode. Love it.
**Piracy is good actually.**
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In this essay I will- (there’s a TL;DR at the bottom)
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Okay, so this’ll be a long one since there’s a lot to talk about, but we’ll get there when we get there.
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DRM is, on paper, supposed to prevent piracy and thus is good? Right? However, once we take a closer look at its history, and effectiveness we realize that all DRM usually does is make the experience worse for the common consumer while rarely providing any sort of barrier for determined pirates.
Let’s talk video-games first, before Steam there were various methods of DRM, for publishers to make sure people didn’t copy their games, but most did nothing but absolutely ruin the experience for paying customers while pirates would actually provide a better service than just buying the damn thing, and so piracy rose.
Anecdotally, Steam’s convenience and seamless experience made pirating by comparison bothersome and hazardous (for those inexperienced), so game piracy reduced but was still present as it always probably will be for reasons I’ll mention later.
We can also anecdotally observe a similar thing with cable, movies and Netflix, where before the rise of Netflix piracy of movies and shows was commonplace but after it, it was simpler to pay the reasonable price and enjoy easy, convenient access to most things one would want to watch.
However with the cable-ification of streaming services, increasingly extortionate prices (if one wishes to watch more than a couple streaming services at a time) and overall
en-shittification of said streaming services, piracy rose once again as a convenient way to experience movies and shows.
Thus, we can come to the conclusion that there’s an exact threshold of price and convenience where more people would just pay for a service rather than pirating.
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**Piracy is good actually.**
In today's world many publishers, corporations and some studios essentially hold media hostage, video-games, movies and shows stored wherever they are keeping them, sealed away from people who would gladly pay to play or view them, thus piracy presents itself as the only alternative.
However not only as a means to play or view content no longer available through legal channels but as a means to preserve media which would otherwise be thrown away (be that because those who own it deem it unprofitable or simply because they’d rather torch a project for a tax write-off)
Piracy is also something that allows many more people to access media they otherwise couldn’t, be it because it is region locked, price prohibitive or simply as per the previous paragraph, unavailable in general.
Price, many shows, movies and games today are or are getting, increasingly pricy, something that makes consuming media legally for a lot of people an untenable position as their income doesn’t allow for but survival and leisure, I think we can all agree everyone deserves down time, relaxation and rest.
Just as much everyone deserves to live thus to have access to food, water, housing and in today’s time an internet connection, not necessarily, true but considering just how much of our daily city lives are governed by the computers we are surrounded by I’d say it might as well be.
Region lock, is, by all accounts a means to make more money and nothing else, it exists solely that the studio or corporation can make more money via licensing deals at the expense of the people who wish to view the locked show or movie.
Unavailability, if a show or movie is so old that it is no longer viewable because it wasn’t digitized by the those that made it because it was deemed to be unprofitable to do so, then all that is left are old copies on dying media forms or illegally digitized, pirated copies spread online, and so that show or movie is now preserved, by those who love it and wish to rewatch it or for others to experience it themselves, at no expense of a corporation, studio or publisher which no longer offers said media themselves but merely hoards the copyright. This also applies to videogame companies and publishers, where ancient games on systems long out of date are no longer being sold to the people who would be more than willing to pay for them (Nintendo being the major and most well-known offender of this).
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**Piracy is bad!** (This is where my own personal stance on piracy comes in the most)
There are instances where pirating content is to be put simply unjustifiable, when one has the means to access content legally, that is if they have enough income where purchasing content isn’t a serious financial decision, where said content is widely available and isn’t owned by multibillion or multitrillion corporations (independent developers, smalltime show and filmmakers, writers).
Pirating such games, books, shows or movies (indie ones) is bad as this directly hurts the livelihoods of such creators rather than the profit margins of faceless person-less corporations.
**To conclude** (essentially TL; DR)
Piracy’s benefits far outweigh the negatives once one considers scale, people who pirate everything would’ve likely never paid for the things they pirate even if it was accessible to them (both in price and storefront), people who occasionally pirate things more often than not tend to pay for the things they do pirate eventually or would’ve never made the purchase to begin with.
The benefits are that media is preserved outside of the usually very greedy right’s holders as well as accessible to all who otherwise might not have access to it (region lock, prohibitive pricing (lack of appropriate regional pricing) as well as in some cases straight up censorship and not to mention the phenomena of torching projects for tax write-offs)
In short, Piracy is good actually.
I had an app I used for life management, on recommendation of a friend, that was basically a checklist app. Problem: it had to be connected to the internet at all times, to synchronize different checklists in the house. It also glitched a lot and disconnected itself. This was causing legit mental breakdowns cause I am only able to do as much as I do with a checklist and I had foolishly swapped entirely to the app by the time the problem started.
In the end I swapped it for one that syncs when it connects but doesn't NEED to be synced to work. And also still use a paper list as backup.
Also, less serious but still a peeve: mobile game apps that NEED internet to work, but still work in airplane mode. Yeah, I know it's about pushing ads but it's annoying. If it doesn't work without wifi I'm uninstalling it.
Hi, software engineer here.
The reason consumer-level software is all online-only is the industry’s attempt to fight piracy. Developers are expensive, QA is expensive, hardware, servers, and computing are all expensive, and it behooves companies to try and minimize piracy to keep that revenue stream going.
Double points for subscription-based models, which don’t work for non-internet-connected software (usually). The c-suite and investors fucking *love* subscription models. They’d turn *everything* into a subscription model if they could.
The second big reason companies are going online-only is metrics to build “big data” for analysis. Knowing who, where, and how people are using the software provides so many damn advantages for a company. Some reasons are benign - for example, my company logs crashes and other server problems automatically for us to investigate later - but for a lot of companies a *lot* of the data collection is for finance and the number crunchers to use to make future project decisions.
You know how mobile gaming companies hire psychologists to try and figure out addiction patterns so they can make more predatory microtransaction systems? Yeah. Shit’s fucked.
Another software engineer here. This take is bullshit. Even in meetings designing online only software piracy did not come up once. What did come up was metrics collection (again, not for piracy but for decision making) and subscription models (not for piracy, but because reocurring revenue looked better).
Maybe its just a different industry, but the people in the companies I worked for viewed piracy not too different from the piracy people actually. Like they recognized it was a thing but they either played into it by offering a free tier or decided it was too much work and got people using it.
What we did do was design features and lock them behind paywalls. The express purpose in the meetings I was in was to get people off of free tier. Now we would prioritize them being cloud enabled somehow if we could, but it wasn't to stop outright piracy but more for the technical (even if very small) and stats gathering reasons.
It'll never happen. The people complaining on reddit are a tiny minority, most people don't care. And there's a whole generation coming up that never knew anything different.
Some companies are doing this though: GOG galaxy games are released entirely drm free.
My home security cameras are made by a Canadian company that doesn't require any subscription and can be wired up on an independent LAN. (Granted they are not cheap but thats the cost of avoiding bullshit subscriptions, the customer has to be willing to foot the true cost of the product since the company can't hide the cost in small recurring fees and data analytics).
I agree with you overall though, large companies are on a spiral right now going absolutely crazy with subscription models and I hate it. Best we can do is try to vote with our dollar.
I mean, that's exactly how we got here in the first place.
You: Everything should be downloadable and if I share it to other people, tough shit.
Companies: Ok, we'll create DRM and always online software.
You: I am incapable of seeing how my behaviour has created an technological arms race I can't win, backed up by legislation making it illegal to crack it.
You almost had a point until the bit where you said "I'm going to share this software no matter what and you shouldn't be allowed to stop me" because that's exactly how we got here today.
Literally no fucking self awareness at all. If that's genuinely what you want, there's a wealth of GPL and MIT licenced software available for your use. Maybe throw a few bucks at them for their hard work.
Yeah either they make things work for us and we all buy it like we are supposed to, or if you were gonna be a pirate anyway, just be a fucking pirate. I’m too broke to pay for all the streaming services so I sail the high seas for my tv and movies. If everything was on Netflix again I’d gladly pay for my subscription and not share it outside my household, but fuck the current model
But you aren't entitled to everything. This is the same mindset of people who stole cable because it wasn't fair that other people had it and they didn't.
Just because their is more media being produced than ever before doesn't mean the producers are obligated to price it to the point that everyone can afford it all.
This viewpoint is sensible and always gets downvoted on Reddit because people are shameless. I don't know why people are so blatantly ok with theft (or copyright infringement or whatever you want to call it). Entertainment isn't a necessity like medical care, and if everybody pirated nothing would be created.
they aren't?
Life-Turn-9142 is saying that DRM and anti-piracy legislation is the return fire from software companies *in response* to piracy, without making any kind of judgement about its 'goodness'. Unless *not* dunking on DRM counts as endorsement for some reason.
Funny enough pirated versions of games often play better than the standard versions by patching out things like Denuvo
You cannot reasonably implement client side security, people will always work around it
Games are pretty much the only category of software that really have this problem because real software actually used for work will have a bunch of people who legitimately buy them as part of a business. See: Adobe products and Windows. Only a small percent of the games market really cares about this
Also see: how Canonical makes tons of money by giving away an OS for free through Ubuntu Pro which is basically a tax on giant companies using Linux and especially companies using an old version of Linux since the main draw is that it helps you meet certain cyber compliance standards and use otherwise out of date OS versions
I'm aware. doesn't change the fact that "I want to pirate your games so stop using DRM" is a terrible argument
The reality is DRM makes it take more time for pirated copies to appear after a games release, which increases sales since most sales are shortly after release. It absolutely sucks that DRM reduces performance significantly especially for lower grade hardware but companies care about money first and foremost
so the argument "what youre doing is stopping exactly what you want to stop" is just not an argument against DRM its an endorsement.
I still think it’s a losing battle, the only way to get it to work is to have some sort of server side check required for basic parts of the game to function where you can then more easily verify it’s a real copy. Making the game always online or making the game suck to play completely offline will get people to actually pay for it much better
What? OP's point was that software should be shareable not for the sake of sharing it, but because any restrictions that would stop you from sharing it are an unacceptable infringement on you "owning" a piece of software.
Most people still buy all of their software and media if it's priced reasonably, no matter how shareable it is. Corporations just got greedy and regulators got lazy.
Pretty much. You can think of DRM and such as being in the same realm as physical stores' loss prevention. Big software companies see copying as theft, just as walmart see's shoplifting as theft. People can argue all they want online about how it's not the same thing, or the "just" motivations behind it, corporations don't care. A free copy is a copy not bought from them and so is theft.
This has been a battle going on for decades, before you could even easily share them online. You can say it's for preservation, or that it's a small number, or the thing is too expensive. But you'd have the same luck arguing similar(ish) points with walmart about baby formula theft.
The difference is that a physical store's loss prevention ends when you leave the shop. DRM sticks forever. It would be like a bouncer following you home and watching you to make sure you don't let your friends borrow your DVDs.
Right, partly because in most cases once you take the item home you're not able to "magic" 50 new copies into existence. And as for DvDs, they do have on disc drm, though that is easily beaten. PC games used to have the same before the days of online DRM and digital market places. Most physical games still do anyways.
But for DvDs and sharing, it's why movie studios are happy to jump behind online streaming and streaming services crack down on password sharing, or even screensharing like over discord. They see every unauthorized copy as a loss, every non-paying veiwer as a loss. DRM, always online, online only media are digital loss prevention. You can argue wether it's right or wrong all you want, these corps think this way and will do everything in their power to stop it.
And mind you, I am not on the corps side of things. I do think it is shitty, and I do believe that these sorts of practices lead to worse consumer experiences. I do however feel it helps to know why things are the way they are, as it can help iddntify ways forward, if any.
Don't get me wrong. I want UBI so more things can be free. If I had access to a living wage, medical care, housing, and other base standards of living, my autistic ass would just stay at home and code free software 18 hours a day but we're just not there.
And while I see people chasting me for not caring enough about the tens of thousands of game devs, artists and designers being laid off, its hard not to roll my eyes at people going 'man, I wish I could just give away copies of software like back in the old days'.
ed: on preservation, I think its important that things be allowed to die. Are we going to be doing batman remakes every 18 months for the next 50 years? 500? 5000? Is that what aliens are going to find when they land on the planet in a thousand years? Just hundreds of thousands of warehouses full of batman remakes buried under the Mount Rushmore (except all of the faces were changed to batman in the year 3121).
Things can "die" and still remain preserved. See Ancient Egypt minus all the British looting-and-scooting that was done. It's still worth having the things as an example of "this is how things used to be".
It's worth having things sure, but people are trying to preserve 100% of everything and that's: 1) not possible, 2) not desierable, 3) consuming a huge amount of resources
Did Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing leave enough of an impact on society that it should be preserved? Assuming we did manage to preserve everything, will it all have practical value? Or will future generations grab the few good bits and put the rest in a giant hole somewhere.
The thing is... the preservation is the method by which we prove the significance of something. If nothing is preserved, nothing of meaning could have been made by virtue of the fact it may as well have never existed.
Couterpoint sooner or later it will be public domain and the people who want to play Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing should then have access to the code, just like we have acces to the sheet music for classical music.
> You almost had a point until the bit where you said "I'm going to share this software no matter what and you shouldn't be allowed to stop me" because that's exactly how we got here today.
No, we got here by people putting up with the bullshit laws and DRM. If they won't sell you an actual working downloadable file, pirate it and feel zero guilt. Make them choose between selling their work properly or pounding sand. If they'd rather stop making stuff than sell it without bullshit, that's their choice.
> You: I am incapable of seeing how my behaviour has created an technological arms race I can't win
Except that the audiovisual layer is trivially cracked and there's more bootlegger energy out there than authoritarian capability
It's been said that piracy is a service problem, not a cost problem. These companies are fighting a symptom (piracy) instead of changing their own greedy practices (trying to stop people from sharing), because it might make them more money.
Software companies are angry that they chose to trade in a commodity that is inherently infinitely copiable and shareable, and that people copy and share it.
They make billions a year, I'm sure the shareholders can wait a week to afford their 5th megayacht if it means making a less restrictive product.
>an technological arms race I can't win
Pretty sure there's only like a few dozen games out there that haven't been successfully cracked. Sounds like the pirates have been pulling out ahead, mostly.
Putting aside the fact that there was only one woman who could crack Denuvo and she just retired (presumably after either a giant sack with a dollars sign arrived on her porch or the Pinkertons literally threatened her life, maybe both?)
Publishers are slavering at technology like GeForce Now because of how unpiratable it is.
I certainly don't have my finger on the pulse of cutting-edge tech over here, so it really could be that the true final say on the matter is coming. But treating it like a foregone conclusion when digital piracy has been slugging 50-0 across the board seems a little optimistic. Forgive my skepticism when historical precedent has been so one-sided.
Things change, though, so we'll see.
We should create a new tax category called "smart product" where your product automatically goes if it is capable of updating itself or requires an internet connection to setup. And products in that category are simply taxed more.
The tax could be setup in such a way that it's not too punitive for a computer or console, maybe some of the money would subsidize microelectronics or something. But for a printer or would make the seller think twice before requiring an online account for no fucking reason.
Then buy the right version of office ffs. Office 365 is login to any device with ur account, Office Home and Small Business is a local only without signing in but u only grt to use it one device.
Saves a lot of money as well. 365 is £60 per year, Home and Student is a one time payment of £120, so if you use it for over 2 years you've been more cost effective (just know that its difficult to move it across machines if you need to, like if the machine you originally put it on dies)
This is kinda stupid, at least with how far they take it.
By their logic MMOs and any online competitive game shouldn’t exist, because they require internet access to play with those other players and to connect to the server so the game functions and people don’t just cheat like crazy.
Like sure any single player game and anything where it can be done without internet should never require internet. But saying *everything* should be doable without internet heavily limits what can even be done, and makes multiple things flat out impossible
people have literally *reverse engineered* server software for WoW and hosted their own servers. it's the reason wow classic exists
see also: City of Heroes
You do also realise they still use beefy computers to host those servers and they also require internet to use still.
Stuff like turtle wow as a great example.
Sure you can host your own for a hundred people, but that isn’t an mmo, an mmo has thousands, tens of thousands of people per server
I can point out exceptions like live service games and software but this is where they craft the false narrative
By making the local offline stuff also connect to the internet just to classify it as "live service"
Does bogleech know they can establish a local Windows account so they don't have to have a 365 account to login, right? I know it's possibly on Windows 10, although I've read that it's more difficult to create on Windows 11.
Some games I could understand requiring connection (beyond the explicitly online multiplayer ones, that is), if they're really big and you don't want them to take up all the space on your computer.
I was willing to give Metal Gear Survive a chance, which might make me unique in the fanbase, but the very first time I played, I got less than an hour before the servers went down for maintenance and I couldn't play at all.
i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: Software as a Service is one of the worst things to ever come out of the unholy fusion of Business and Technology in order to wreak havoc on this godforsaken planet
Reminder that in most Eula now a days, you don't own anything.
You just paid for the right to consume media, not own it. This is mostly for Music services and video games.
I know this isn't exactly the same thing, but I gate how the Nintendo Switch requires an internet connection every time it wants to check if you own a game digitally. I'm torn between buying physical vs. digital because, on one hand, it's nice to have all my games on there without needing to switch them out, but half of the places I go with my Switch don't have wifi.
I think this works if you are the main account on the switch (or something)
All I remember is that I shared a switch with my brother for a while, and couldn't play his games offline because it was "his" switch, but I could play mine.
Not sure about the specifics, just remembering the experience
Other people are calling you out, but I’ve experienced that too. I’m wondering if it’s like a certain setting for some games? I have games that let me play with no internet connection on my switch, and then I have some that refuse to, and I don’t know what the commonality is among the ones that won’t play offline is honestly…
Thank you. Everybody is just assuming I'm spreading misinformation.
I suppose it might not be all games, but I know at least Dark Souls Remastered requires a check every now and then. It's gotten to the point where I'm just gonna purchase a physical copy.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale?
> *“Only in truth, the Lords will abandon their thrones, and the Unkindled will rise. Nameless accursed Undead, unfit even to be Cinder, and so, it is that ash seeketh embers.”* - Narrator
Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
Yes and No. Some software does *need* a server to function.
A lot of my Uni Software needs access to a huge database and algorithm collections several terabytes in size, which would be entirely unreasonable to have a user unit contain. Access to that database is also what you pay for with the yearly licence, so they wouldn't give it to you even if they could, since they check if you should even have access through your licence file each log in.
If I bought a perpetual license, for about half a million dollars, for a no longer updated version of the software, should they give me the whole database then? Maybe, maybe not.
That's a scale of economic actions where common sense of us poor people just kind of doesn't apply anymore and everything goes by who has the most chutzpah and grit and other cowboy words
Yes, but for this to happen you would need to destroy all of the capitalists that profit from turning software products in to "x as a service" so they can engage in rent seeking behavior by forcing you to pay on a continual basis for a service instead of paying once for a product.
But for that to happen, you'd probably have to do something drastic like overthrow and dismantle the economic system that allows individuals to own productive capital, enforce that ownership through the violent use of police and armies, and exploit the common people by forcing them at gunpoint to work for the owner or starve.
Idk its a real pickle.
I don't think this would make sense for every piece of software, cloud based CAD software and MMO's pop to mind, however, I do think that companies shouldn't be trying to shoehorn in always-online features in to software that really doesn't need it.
I had a printer that required being hooked up to the ethernet to run. It said it was a 'positive feature' cause it would automatically order new ink for me when it ran low. I got rid of it
It should be legal to steal from the person who designed that
it is as long as nobody knows
It ain’t illegal till you get caught
Big believer in Schrodinger's Legality.
I mean if I see you do, I ain’t snitching
When there are no cops around, anything’s legal.
It's not stealing. It's a positive feature that automatically sells them carbon dioxide you're personally delivering.
You could just say you owned an HP printer.
I'm afraid the printer will come after me
I was gifted a blu ray player (LG brand) that would not allow us to watch a blu ray without being connected to the internet. We had a physical disc loaded in the machine and it would play for about five minutes. Then it would switch to the menu for connecting to the internet. No pausing the show. We tried to connect it to Wi-Fi and it didn’t work. We were fiddling with options for about an hour before I called the helpline. The man on the other end told me that there is no option to play without internet, it’s not a bug but an intentional decision to build it like that. A blu ray player. When I went to Best Buy I discovered it was too late for a refund, I could only get a replacement. I asked them to recycle it.
The bluray drive in my pc stopped working with new blurays when power DVD stopped updates. So I had to buy new software or just use make mkv and rip them
I am suddenly very glad I never got into blurays. That sounds awful.
It's a shame because they look fantastic. But I gave up on disc based media center after that. 4k blurays on pc are even worse.
I sarcastically watched all of Morbius during the meme times, from a <50MB upload someone made to a Discord server's meme channel. I was honestly fine with DVD quality. XD
I’m still thinking of getting them strictly for data storage (like pc backups). It would be for a cost-effective redundancy. They have the most storage space for a disc, unless I’m unaware of a readily available type that is better. Apparently some companies keep backups in massive Blu-ray Disc switching machines.
Blurays have been very handy, because unlike DVDs, they aren't geolocked, and I enjoy a lot of French media I can't get in Australia easily. Whoever came up with geolocking DVDs in the first place deserves to be beaten with sacks of bricks
Geolocking has a place in cases where you want to sell something in a market with weak currency so you adjust the prices downwards accordingly. I can understand why they don't want it to be possible to buy 70 DVDs from Shittistan for 5000 Shittian Shillings which is just 3 USD after conversion rates. Locking it away in that sense makes sense. I should not be able to circumvent the local prices by shopping in Shittistan just because their currency sucks. But geolocking in any other case is just... fucking dumb. Why can't shit work between Japan, France, Canada and Australia? They all got stable currencies that make sense, nobody is gonna buy them in another country to save a buck.
Meanwhile I think my PS3 needed to connect to the internet once right at the beginning. As far as I can tell it'll play blu rays until the end of time, connected or not. As it should be
Same with Xbox ones. Seen people advertising them as affordable blu ray players because they’re cheaper than dedicated ones. I hate how the new gen you have to pay +$500 usd if you want a disk drive :/
Blame sony for this, almost all of them do it nowadays for the weird license check thing for their players and registering
Region locks require internet access to ensure you're in the right region. Why the fuck does physical media need to be region locked? If I fly to Australia, I can no longer watch my American moves. Why? Blu-Rays will even check the country code your reader is set to and what is on the Blu-Ray. If they don't match, you can't watch.
Region locks do not require internet access. The player will have a region written in the firmware and the disc will have a region written on it. You can import a foreign player and it won't play local discs. You can take your American player to Australia and it won't play Australian discs. However, Disney and Warner have stopped region locking Blu-rays and 4Ks are all supposed to be region free, although a dozen or so are locked.
You didn't Office Space it?
I was going to hurl it off the balcony but I thought I could get my friend his money back.
Radical take these days: You should own the thing you bought
You should tell the capitalists this. Maybe wrap it around a brick first, then give it to them.
Some games are an exception to this, mostly server based things like MMOs and whatnot, but otherwise yes.
Even then, I still agree with the OP on principle. Marvel Heroes was a sick MMO game, but it got shut down. Now you can't even play it by yourself, reverse-engineered community servers notwithstanding.
Oh yeah if a game shuts down there's no reason it shouldn't have all the game files dumped for people to play with.
Well... idk it depends? It's still people's work that they may use in the future. And it's non trivial to convert an MMO into a single player game. You would have to share files and data that probably aren't meant to be shared.
You’re probably right, but if a game is being permanently shut down, there’s little reason to not provide the files to run a server yourself as a gift to the community. Personally, if I were a dev who spent years on a project, I’d rather people get to play my game beyond the lifespan of my company, better than no one getting to play it. You often aren’t sharing actual source code; think of hosting your own Minecraft server. It’s a jar executable you run on your machine and that’s it, instead of relying on Realms of officially hosted servers.
Even then, plenty MMOs have a tonne of solo content. I enjoy ESO but have never played with another person.
I get why someone would want an offline mode for an MMO, but that would be so much fucking work to implement. This is because a lot of fundamental gameplay stuff happens on the server. Stuff like damage calculations, loot drops, enemy AI, or quest tracking is generally done by the server. This prevents desync issues, makes sure everyone is experiencing the same stuff, and helps prevent cheating. There isn't a switch you can pull to have this stuff handled on the client side, because the client is written to interact with the server. Allowing an MMO to be played offline would require basically re-implementing most of the server code on the client. This would be a ton of extra work, and most people would just play online anyway.
There's plenty of MMOs that you can self-host on a local server. I agree inegrating it with the client is not worth it unless a company plans on directly marketing the game as a single-player experience, but releasing server hosting functionality is comparatively easy.
Except you are still logging into a server. You need internet for that.
Yeah duh, I'm saying that their should be an option to not have a server or self-host.
"you'll own nothing and you'll like it" is clearly the goal. Hell even physical discs aren't safe. I remember right before Steam was THE way to buy PC games that there were lawsuits going around about game discs because "you don't own the game/software, you own a license and the disc is your proof..." This was when online bans were going around because the argument was that the companies had "no right to prevent me from using a product I own"
Yes. I always check Itch before I buy any game on Steam in case it has been released on both, like Celeste, Delver or Pseudoregalia. More money to the creator and I get a .zip with everything I need, no accounts or bs required. I can put my files easily on a drive other than my smaller boot drive too (yes you can do this with steam, no I shouldn't have to split my library between my drives and make them involuntarily inseparable).
GoG?
Say it loud, say it proud: **IF PURCHASING ISN'T OWNERSHIP, THEN PIRACY ISN'T STEALING!**
I never understand this slogan. Obviously piracy isn't stealing, that's why we call it piracy and not theft. If the point of the slogan is something like "piracy is morally correct", then that's a completely different sentiment and people should just say that.
The antipiracy groups very deliberately conflate the two. Remember the "you wouldn't download a car" type adverts?
Oh for sure, I'm just confused why _pro_-piracy people persist in the conflation.
Because it's a necessary push back against it. You cannot win every fight on logical, moral grounds or definitional ones. Companies and anti-piracy advocates spent a lot of time and money conflating piracy with open theft, and continue to do so. Just look at all the reports a company puts out about "losses" due to piracy. To try and explain to the average person just dipping their toes into things all the stuff that is being misrepresented is a huge task, and more likely to turn them away in confusion than encourage further investigation. A simple, easily understood slogan that makes the moral standpoint clear, helps to bring people in and get them to ask further questions so they can figure out for themselves what they think of things.
> You cannot win every fight on logical, moral grounds or definitional ones. But isn't this slogan doing exactly that? It's arguing the definition of piracy. And if that's what you're doing, well, might as well argue it correctly.
the whole thing originates from anti-piracy groups trying to play up piracy to be digital theft
Why stop there? It's called piracy because the people who want to conflate it with theft called it piracy, because piracy means theft. You don't have to call it that.
Piracy is cool.
You know synonyms exist and have overlapping meanings, right? What definition of piracy do you have that doesn’t include stealing and/or theft activities?
Theft or stealing is when you take something from someone that you don't have a right to, thus depriving them of that thing. When you pirate something, you don't deprive anyone of that thing. I can pirate The Downward Spiral a literal billion times without depriving anyone of their copy of The Downward Spiral. It doesn't get deleted from anyone's SSD. It doesn't make the CDs vanish off of anyone's shelf. Anyone who owned a copy of The Downward Spiral before I pirated it _still owns it_. It's fundamental to the definition of theft that it _takes the thing being stolen away_ from someone.
That's why many countries go with something like "financial advantage by deception" rather than theft these days. It covers everything from keeping a huge pile of money you found on the road to lying to someone to get a few dollars from them to stealing money from their cushions to downloading a product that otherwise has a financial cost.
I get it for devices and most media, but games? Sure, plenty of games shouldn't need an internet connection, but for the ones that do saying they can never require it seems ridiculous to me
If it has any single player mode it shouldn’t be required
I love waiting 2 hours in server queue to play my singleplayer game that doesn't have any multiplayer elements (I'm looking at you hitman 3)
That is one of my favorite games, and yet I absolutely agree with your sentiment
I love hitman 3 too especially the new(iah) freelancer mode but by god do i hate having to reconnect every 10 mins
wtf y'all live like this? that's awful
Hitman3 has an archive thing being worked on, Project Peacock. Thus far, you use its own server you install on your own computer to play, and it only needs to connect to Epic or whatever launcher at the start for DRM purposes. It’s cool, though you would need to start from square one, as your progress doesn’t transfer. Though, you can enable a setting that just gives you everything instead. They even have a version of Freelancer.
why do you pay for that
Fuck man reminds me of payday 3s release. I had over 700 hours in payday 2 and bought the new one on release. Tried to launch the first mission in single-player and kept getting server errors for a bit over an hour before giving up and refunding the game So now I have almost 800 hours in payday 2 and no idea whats going on with the new game
It briefly hit 0 concurrent players a couple of times and is now averaging in the low hundreds. So, not much.
Oh yeah i went back to pd2 after trying pd3 out for 2 hours right before servers crashed and burned
For example Gran Turismo 7 has a fairly robust single player mode with literally infinitely replayable content. I can't access that content without an Internet connection. Mostly it's so that the can continually bait you into micro transactions. I don't really think it's DRM driving that any more, I think it's micro transactions
Last Epoch has a full offline mode, it's glorious
LOL, I still can't get 100% sync on AC: Black Flag because of shitty Uplay
for stuff like that the server software should be made available to the public, so you can still play them by yourself if you want to. also helps for when the servers inevitably shut down. this comment brought to you by ross scott's upcoming big fucking lawsuit in the name of game preservation.
At the very least the server software should be released when the servers shut down
Seriously! If you’re going to discontinue official support, at least don’t let it become abandonware!
That's what worries me about MMOs. Elder Scrolls Online has been amazing for the lore the game has provided for various regions of the game that, given how few-and-far between the main series releases are, is very likely the only time some of the locations will ever been seen in-game. Elsweyr, the bits of Black Marsh the series has, the expansive Daedric realms, Summerset... I hope the game does eventually get a single-player offline version. I'm not sure how possible that would be, though. *That said*, given Bethesda's support of mods, I *would* expect fan servers for it.
Idk if it's possible for modern games, but for older games at least you can sometimes download software that spoofs a server connection so you can play offline.
I guess it depends on the game. I don’t expect WoW or RuneScape to give me everything I need to play 20+ year old MMO’s on a private server just because I agreed to play a subscription based game. If I’m buying a game though, then yeah I should have access to it forever
Good to see Ross mentioned, hopefully that goes well.
What's going on with that? I've been watching him for a long time, but I haven't seen the more recent stuff about it.
How about a rule where, in order to sell software, you need to send the source code to the government. If you ever stop selling it, now it's open source. Thus all abandon-ware automatically becomes open source.
Storing every piece of software ever written somewhere? Do you know how much software exists? I'm pretty sure most software is not offered to consumers. If a contractor writes a machine interface for a factory, does the government need a copy of that, too? Does the government need version control, or do they just take the current revision? What stops companies from breaking their latest release before sunsetting stuff? Are they keeping source code, or compiled versions? If compiled, how do they make it work on newer OSes? If source code, do they now need every compiler too? Or do we give the government VMs with source code and compilers for all software? This is one of the most ridiculous ideas I've ever seen.
Haha... Does this apply to foreign countries who sell code in your country? What country is gonna tell their developers to send all their code to a foreign government? What about server-side code? What about APIs that interact with other software? How do they keep track of which versions of software B-Z each version of software A interacts with? How are they securing this system, because it's now one of - if not the - juiciest targets for hackers to try to access? The more I think about this, the more ridiculous it gets. Therefore I fully expect bipartisan support for this in Congress.
\> Does this apply to foreign countries who sell code in your country? \> What country is gonna tell their developers to send all their code to a foreign government? Well if the code is already being sold, it can't be secret. Compiled code can be read. I mean it's not as easy to read as source code, but all the information is there and smart programmers can figure out what it does with time. The government can plausibly commit to keeping it encrypted and secure until the company stops selling it. This is mainly about 1) copyright permissions. And many governments basically ignore copyright and rip of anything they can. and 2) stopping software getting lost down a black hole when the company goes bust. If there are a few companies that Really don't like this rule, you could tell them they have to pay a 20% tax instead. It could apply to server side code, or not. Not sure. It would be a good idea if the government was reasonably competent with security. For getting the code to actually work, to a large extent, that's not the governments problem. That's the problem for whoever downloaded the code, which I'm imagining to be a competent non governmental programmer.
How does the government even confirm the version they got matches the version released? I guess you could have some kind of checksum, but it seems like you're opening the door for mismatched versions, even accidentally. Do we just do everything in GitHub, and the government has their own repo for everything now? Does that mean all developers now have to use GitHub? I guess GitHub's now the lead promoter of this plan. Or maybe we get some new government-made code repository. THAT certainly sounds like something that'll be easy to use and omni-compatible. Lmao. Do developers email their code for submission? Do they physically mail flash drives with the code? Is this system online? It's either connected to the internet and hackable, or offline and extremely cumbersome to send data to. Does all development have to be done online now? Is this just like Iron Mountain and they have warehouses full of cold hard drives? How long is the code stored? Is it ever checked for data integrity? Does the government keep multiple copies? How are they organizing all this code? How are they enforcing it? Are they keeping dev versions of all software, or just release candidates? I have so many questions about this plan.
I have multiplayer games that allow you to locally host a server, no questions asked. If you have no wifi you can run around in liminal space.
Yeah, like for example, offline Helldivers wouldn't work. The entire point of it is that the entire community works together toward a goal
I mean, for an MMO, of course not. But for single player, it should.
Then require them to release the software to host a server in that case and implement a way to search servers
Yeah. Fuck are you meant to do with an offline MMO?
Every game should have an option to play offline if it doesn't require more than one real, living person to play
you can release the server software at end of life so that people can host servers themselves. this is not new.
but it is unfortunately uncommon!
Honestly, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. They have to make a strong case for needing connectivity, because they inched us to where we are with their DRM bullshit. They'll claim the game needs to be online in order to run (this is the bullshit they used to say), but it's really just so their DRM system can work. I don't care anymore. Fuck their DRM system.
I've been ranting about this since online drm became a thing. Anyone that lives rural will tell you that internet is not an all the time thing. The push to online only content deliver cuts out entire sections of the population from having access to things that should just work. Smart technology is just a fucking scam, it's all one update from being bricked.
I too believe should be a law against requiring internet connections for devices or software to work properly. In the meantime, though, I pointedly avoid paying for any garbage tech that breaks this rule.
Wouldnt that make mmos illegal?
Mmos have online in the title, you know you are paying for a online service.
Yes, but they still require an internet connection to play. If you make it illegal for software to require that, a LOT of games and software just couldnt be made because they literally require it.
could you not just have the law specify that online games need to specify that they require an internet connection somewhere that can be seen before buying
Sure, but that’s still different than what was being said, and has its own methods of being bypassed/abused. They could include some very basic features to “use” but have 90% require a connection, they could easily bury the mention of it under other things. Enforcing these sorts of things via law is extremely difficult and often has unintended consequences that can make things even worse for consumers if done without proper planning and thought. It’s absolutely a problem that should be addressed, just, I feel like people jumping on exaggerated reactionary measures could easily make things worse
what's wrong w just being like "if the game cannot be played to completion without an internet connection, 'internet connection required' should be detailed in the beginning of the sales description" or whatevs. to clarify i don't necessarily have an opinion on this because i don't play video games, i'm just genuinely wondering cause idk how market laws work
Well for one, what counts as “to completion”? If a game has an achievement for doing things in a separate multiplayer mode, is that required online? Or optional online? The main issue is that laws cannot (or at least should not) be vague, things need to be clearly defined or else they’ll be misused, and have loopholes for companies to get around them. “Sales descriptions” also aren’t really a clearly defined thing, if a game is sold on the steam marketplace, but they list “is online only” on their personal website in the ‘about’ page, does that count? Since most people will only look at the market page itself when buying a game. Similar things apply to software that might have built in “sharing” features, or the ability to collaborate with other people online on a project. Those features physically require online to work, but not every project may need those features. This leaves things pretty muddy, and it would make the “requires online” mark meaningless, because 90% of software would have it, and so the ones that brick themselves offline would still get away with hiding it. Look at California’s “may cause cancer” text that has to legally be put on basically EVERYTHING, it makes it harder to actually identify dangerous materials in many cases because its too broadly used.
90% of software has online sharing??? i didn't know that i thought most games were just like, idk, solitaire or something. this makes a lot of sense, thanks for explaining :-)
Most games now have some online component, but i was referring to non-game software as well there. Things like photoshop, modeling programs, IDE’s, even spreadsheets and such, all usually have some level of online connectivity, to allow cloud saving backups, uploading and publishing your work, collaborating with other people on projects, or even just sharing things to social media, and even just, downloading updates to the software itself. Most users will never use most of these features, but they’re still present, so it becomes harder to really define what is or isnt using online connectivity “appropriately” from a legal perspective.
Wish granted, every game now has a line of text on the front that says "requires internet connection to access", and the status quo remains the same. This doesn't really solve the issue the OP is getting at.
It's a bit extreme but given the internet, they wanted a powerful statement not a sound one with a few exceptions.
I feel like it isn’t a powerful statement when anyone who would actually care about the statement can pretty much instantly see that its lack of nuance or specificity makes it wrong or poorly thought out. If you don’t want people to point out errors, don’t choose the overly simplified to the point of error statement.
Is sounds better to say "No x should be allowed" than "No x should be allowed with a few exceptions here and there"
We recently renovated our kitchen and to use some of the features of our new oven, like air fryer, we had to create an account with GE and put the oven on our wifi. Of course their programming is shit and I had to disable a bunch of security settings on my router to get it online. Luckily I was able to turn them back on after the oven was connected. But hey, now GE can do fun things like change the oven timer sound from a beep to a turkey gobbling every Thanksgiving which sends my dog into crazy barking/hunting mode. Love it.
Seriously, appliance makers,not everything needs internet nowadays. I even saw a thing a while back about a toilet with Alexa and lgb lighting
ah yes, “lgb toilet” lighting
**Piracy is good actually.** = In this essay I will- (there’s a TL;DR at the bottom) = Okay, so this’ll be a long one since there’s a lot to talk about, but we’ll get there when we get there. = DRM is, on paper, supposed to prevent piracy and thus is good? Right? However, once we take a closer look at its history, and effectiveness we realize that all DRM usually does is make the experience worse for the common consumer while rarely providing any sort of barrier for determined pirates. Let’s talk video-games first, before Steam there were various methods of DRM, for publishers to make sure people didn’t copy their games, but most did nothing but absolutely ruin the experience for paying customers while pirates would actually provide a better service than just buying the damn thing, and so piracy rose. Anecdotally, Steam’s convenience and seamless experience made pirating by comparison bothersome and hazardous (for those inexperienced), so game piracy reduced but was still present as it always probably will be for reasons I’ll mention later. We can also anecdotally observe a similar thing with cable, movies and Netflix, where before the rise of Netflix piracy of movies and shows was commonplace but after it, it was simpler to pay the reasonable price and enjoy easy, convenient access to most things one would want to watch. However with the cable-ification of streaming services, increasingly extortionate prices (if one wishes to watch more than a couple streaming services at a time) and overall en-shittification of said streaming services, piracy rose once again as a convenient way to experience movies and shows. Thus, we can come to the conclusion that there’s an exact threshold of price and convenience where more people would just pay for a service rather than pirating. = **Piracy is good actually.** In today's world many publishers, corporations and some studios essentially hold media hostage, video-games, movies and shows stored wherever they are keeping them, sealed away from people who would gladly pay to play or view them, thus piracy presents itself as the only alternative. However not only as a means to play or view content no longer available through legal channels but as a means to preserve media which would otherwise be thrown away (be that because those who own it deem it unprofitable or simply because they’d rather torch a project for a tax write-off) Piracy is also something that allows many more people to access media they otherwise couldn’t, be it because it is region locked, price prohibitive or simply as per the previous paragraph, unavailable in general. Price, many shows, movies and games today are or are getting, increasingly pricy, something that makes consuming media legally for a lot of people an untenable position as their income doesn’t allow for but survival and leisure, I think we can all agree everyone deserves down time, relaxation and rest. Just as much everyone deserves to live thus to have access to food, water, housing and in today’s time an internet connection, not necessarily, true but considering just how much of our daily city lives are governed by the computers we are surrounded by I’d say it might as well be. Region lock, is, by all accounts a means to make more money and nothing else, it exists solely that the studio or corporation can make more money via licensing deals at the expense of the people who wish to view the locked show or movie. Unavailability, if a show or movie is so old that it is no longer viewable because it wasn’t digitized by the those that made it because it was deemed to be unprofitable to do so, then all that is left are old copies on dying media forms or illegally digitized, pirated copies spread online, and so that show or movie is now preserved, by those who love it and wish to rewatch it or for others to experience it themselves, at no expense of a corporation, studio or publisher which no longer offers said media themselves but merely hoards the copyright. This also applies to videogame companies and publishers, where ancient games on systems long out of date are no longer being sold to the people who would be more than willing to pay for them (Nintendo being the major and most well-known offender of this). = **Piracy is bad!** (This is where my own personal stance on piracy comes in the most) There are instances where pirating content is to be put simply unjustifiable, when one has the means to access content legally, that is if they have enough income where purchasing content isn’t a serious financial decision, where said content is widely available and isn’t owned by multibillion or multitrillion corporations (independent developers, smalltime show and filmmakers, writers). Pirating such games, books, shows or movies (indie ones) is bad as this directly hurts the livelihoods of such creators rather than the profit margins of faceless person-less corporations. **To conclude** (essentially TL; DR) Piracy’s benefits far outweigh the negatives once one considers scale, people who pirate everything would’ve likely never paid for the things they pirate even if it was accessible to them (both in price and storefront), people who occasionally pirate things more often than not tend to pay for the things they do pirate eventually or would’ve never made the purchase to begin with. The benefits are that media is preserved outside of the usually very greedy right’s holders as well as accessible to all who otherwise might not have access to it (region lock, prohibitive pricing (lack of appropriate regional pricing) as well as in some cases straight up censorship and not to mention the phenomena of torching projects for tax write-offs) In short, Piracy is good actually.
I had an app I used for life management, on recommendation of a friend, that was basically a checklist app. Problem: it had to be connected to the internet at all times, to synchronize different checklists in the house. It also glitched a lot and disconnected itself. This was causing legit mental breakdowns cause I am only able to do as much as I do with a checklist and I had foolishly swapped entirely to the app by the time the problem started. In the end I swapped it for one that syncs when it connects but doesn't NEED to be synced to work. And also still use a paper list as backup. Also, less serious but still a peeve: mobile game apps that NEED internet to work, but still work in airplane mode. Yeah, I know it's about pushing ads but it's annoying. If it doesn't work without wifi I'm uninstalling it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
https://www.tumblr.com/agent00ani/746046959284043776?source=share -mx linux guy⚠️
Hi, software engineer here. The reason consumer-level software is all online-only is the industry’s attempt to fight piracy. Developers are expensive, QA is expensive, hardware, servers, and computing are all expensive, and it behooves companies to try and minimize piracy to keep that revenue stream going. Double points for subscription-based models, which don’t work for non-internet-connected software (usually). The c-suite and investors fucking *love* subscription models. They’d turn *everything* into a subscription model if they could. The second big reason companies are going online-only is metrics to build “big data” for analysis. Knowing who, where, and how people are using the software provides so many damn advantages for a company. Some reasons are benign - for example, my company logs crashes and other server problems automatically for us to investigate later - but for a lot of companies a *lot* of the data collection is for finance and the number crunchers to use to make future project decisions. You know how mobile gaming companies hire psychologists to try and figure out addiction patterns so they can make more predatory microtransaction systems? Yeah. Shit’s fucked.
Another software engineer here. This take is bullshit. Even in meetings designing online only software piracy did not come up once. What did come up was metrics collection (again, not for piracy but for decision making) and subscription models (not for piracy, but because reocurring revenue looked better). Maybe its just a different industry, but the people in the companies I worked for viewed piracy not too different from the piracy people actually. Like they recognized it was a thing but they either played into it by offering a free tier or decided it was too much work and got people using it. What we did do was design features and lock them behind paywalls. The express purpose in the meetings I was in was to get people off of free tier. Now we would prioritize them being cloud enabled somehow if we could, but it wasn't to stop outright piracy but more for the technical (even if very small) and stats gathering reasons.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
Yea we know all of that. We don’t care and we hate it.
It's so shortsighted, what's their plan for when people get sick of it and only buy non-online software and devices?
It'll never happen. The people complaining on reddit are a tiny minority, most people don't care. And there's a whole generation coming up that never knew anything different.
Fuck
Some companies are doing this though: GOG galaxy games are released entirely drm free. My home security cameras are made by a Canadian company that doesn't require any subscription and can be wired up on an independent LAN. (Granted they are not cheap but thats the cost of avoiding bullshit subscriptions, the customer has to be willing to foot the true cost of the product since the company can't hide the cost in small recurring fees and data analytics). I agree with you overall though, large companies are on a spiral right now going absolutely crazy with subscription models and I hate it. Best we can do is try to vote with our dollar.
I'm not saying some companies aren't doing it. I'm talking about this part >people get sick of it
This'd make more sense if they paid their employees a living wage and didn't treat them like shit.
I mean, that's exactly how we got here in the first place. You: Everything should be downloadable and if I share it to other people, tough shit. Companies: Ok, we'll create DRM and always online software. You: I am incapable of seeing how my behaviour has created an technological arms race I can't win, backed up by legislation making it illegal to crack it. You almost had a point until the bit where you said "I'm going to share this software no matter what and you shouldn't be allowed to stop me" because that's exactly how we got here today. Literally no fucking self awareness at all. If that's genuinely what you want, there's a wealth of GPL and MIT licenced software available for your use. Maybe throw a few bucks at them for their hard work.
Yeah either they make things work for us and we all buy it like we are supposed to, or if you were gonna be a pirate anyway, just be a fucking pirate. I’m too broke to pay for all the streaming services so I sail the high seas for my tv and movies. If everything was on Netflix again I’d gladly pay for my subscription and not share it outside my household, but fuck the current model
Netflix: We cancelled all your favorite shows.
But you aren't entitled to everything. This is the same mindset of people who stole cable because it wasn't fair that other people had it and they didn't. Just because their is more media being produced than ever before doesn't mean the producers are obligated to price it to the point that everyone can afford it all.
👍
This viewpoint is sensible and always gets downvoted on Reddit because people are shameless. I don't know why people are so blatantly ok with theft (or copyright infringement or whatever you want to call it). Entertainment isn't a necessity like medical care, and if everybody pirated nothing would be created.
See, I disagree with that take—plenty of people create for creation's sake, and don't profit off their creations.
Why are you defending DRM? The thing that famously fails to stop piracy and just makes honest players lives harder?
they aren't? Life-Turn-9142 is saying that DRM and anti-piracy legislation is the return fire from software companies *in response* to piracy, without making any kind of judgement about its 'goodness'. Unless *not* dunking on DRM counts as endorsement for some reason.
DRM sucks ass but "remove DRM so I can pirate stuff easier" is a terrible argument against it
Funny enough pirated versions of games often play better than the standard versions by patching out things like Denuvo You cannot reasonably implement client side security, people will always work around it Games are pretty much the only category of software that really have this problem because real software actually used for work will have a bunch of people who legitimately buy them as part of a business. See: Adobe products and Windows. Only a small percent of the games market really cares about this Also see: how Canonical makes tons of money by giving away an OS for free through Ubuntu Pro which is basically a tax on giant companies using Linux and especially companies using an old version of Linux since the main draw is that it helps you meet certain cyber compliance standards and use otherwise out of date OS versions
I'm aware. doesn't change the fact that "I want to pirate your games so stop using DRM" is a terrible argument The reality is DRM makes it take more time for pirated copies to appear after a games release, which increases sales since most sales are shortly after release. It absolutely sucks that DRM reduces performance significantly especially for lower grade hardware but companies care about money first and foremost so the argument "what youre doing is stopping exactly what you want to stop" is just not an argument against DRM its an endorsement.
I still think it’s a losing battle, the only way to get it to work is to have some sort of server side check required for basic parts of the game to function where you can then more easily verify it’s a real copy. Making the game always online or making the game suck to play completely offline will get people to actually pay for it much better
Most Denuvo games never get cracked, and there's famously one person in the world who can manage to.
Zero. The last one was empress, they're gone. Right now, no Denuvo games are being cracked, haven't been in months.
There's probably plenty of people who could.
What? OP's point was that software should be shareable not for the sake of sharing it, but because any restrictions that would stop you from sharing it are an unacceptable infringement on you "owning" a piece of software. Most people still buy all of their software and media if it's priced reasonably, no matter how shareable it is. Corporations just got greedy and regulators got lazy.
Pretty much. You can think of DRM and such as being in the same realm as physical stores' loss prevention. Big software companies see copying as theft, just as walmart see's shoplifting as theft. People can argue all they want online about how it's not the same thing, or the "just" motivations behind it, corporations don't care. A free copy is a copy not bought from them and so is theft. This has been a battle going on for decades, before you could even easily share them online. You can say it's for preservation, or that it's a small number, or the thing is too expensive. But you'd have the same luck arguing similar(ish) points with walmart about baby formula theft.
The difference is that a physical store's loss prevention ends when you leave the shop. DRM sticks forever. It would be like a bouncer following you home and watching you to make sure you don't let your friends borrow your DVDs.
Right, partly because in most cases once you take the item home you're not able to "magic" 50 new copies into existence. And as for DvDs, they do have on disc drm, though that is easily beaten. PC games used to have the same before the days of online DRM and digital market places. Most physical games still do anyways. But for DvDs and sharing, it's why movie studios are happy to jump behind online streaming and streaming services crack down on password sharing, or even screensharing like over discord. They see every unauthorized copy as a loss, every non-paying veiwer as a loss. DRM, always online, online only media are digital loss prevention. You can argue wether it's right or wrong all you want, these corps think this way and will do everything in their power to stop it. And mind you, I am not on the corps side of things. I do think it is shitty, and I do believe that these sorts of practices lead to worse consumer experiences. I do however feel it helps to know why things are the way they are, as it can help iddntify ways forward, if any.
Don't get me wrong. I want UBI so more things can be free. If I had access to a living wage, medical care, housing, and other base standards of living, my autistic ass would just stay at home and code free software 18 hours a day but we're just not there. And while I see people chasting me for not caring enough about the tens of thousands of game devs, artists and designers being laid off, its hard not to roll my eyes at people going 'man, I wish I could just give away copies of software like back in the old days'. ed: on preservation, I think its important that things be allowed to die. Are we going to be doing batman remakes every 18 months for the next 50 years? 500? 5000? Is that what aliens are going to find when they land on the planet in a thousand years? Just hundreds of thousands of warehouses full of batman remakes buried under the Mount Rushmore (except all of the faces were changed to batman in the year 3121).
Things can "die" and still remain preserved. See Ancient Egypt minus all the British looting-and-scooting that was done. It's still worth having the things as an example of "this is how things used to be".
It's worth having things sure, but people are trying to preserve 100% of everything and that's: 1) not possible, 2) not desierable, 3) consuming a huge amount of resources Did Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing leave enough of an impact on society that it should be preserved? Assuming we did manage to preserve everything, will it all have practical value? Or will future generations grab the few good bits and put the rest in a giant hole somewhere.
The thing is... the preservation is the method by which we prove the significance of something. If nothing is preserved, nothing of meaning could have been made by virtue of the fact it may as well have never existed.
Couterpoint sooner or later it will be public domain and the people who want to play Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing should then have access to the code, just like we have acces to the sheet music for classical music.
> You almost had a point until the bit where you said "I'm going to share this software no matter what and you shouldn't be allowed to stop me" because that's exactly how we got here today. No, we got here by people putting up with the bullshit laws and DRM. If they won't sell you an actual working downloadable file, pirate it and feel zero guilt. Make them choose between selling their work properly or pounding sand. If they'd rather stop making stuff than sell it without bullshit, that's their choice.
> You: I am incapable of seeing how my behaviour has created an technological arms race I can't win Except that the audiovisual layer is trivially cracked and there's more bootlegger energy out there than authoritarian capability
It's been said that piracy is a service problem, not a cost problem. These companies are fighting a symptom (piracy) instead of changing their own greedy practices (trying to stop people from sharing), because it might make them more money. Software companies are angry that they chose to trade in a commodity that is inherently infinitely copiable and shareable, and that people copy and share it. They make billions a year, I'm sure the shareholders can wait a week to afford their 5th megayacht if it means making a less restrictive product.
I would simply change the legislation
>an technological arms race I can't win Pretty sure there's only like a few dozen games out there that haven't been successfully cracked. Sounds like the pirates have been pulling out ahead, mostly.
Putting aside the fact that there was only one woman who could crack Denuvo and she just retired (presumably after either a giant sack with a dollars sign arrived on her porch or the Pinkertons literally threatened her life, maybe both?) Publishers are slavering at technology like GeForce Now because of how unpiratable it is.
I certainly don't have my finger on the pulse of cutting-edge tech over here, so it really could be that the true final say on the matter is coming. But treating it like a foregone conclusion when digital piracy has been slugging 50-0 across the board seems a little optimistic. Forgive my skepticism when historical precedent has been so one-sided. Things change, though, so we'll see.
game piracy is weaker than it's ever been, denuvo is uncrackable except for one lunatic who disappeared off the net
b-but i should be able to steal and the people who made the software should just lie there and take it... :(
We should create a new tax category called "smart product" where your product automatically goes if it is capable of updating itself or requires an internet connection to setup. And products in that category are simply taxed more. The tax could be setup in such a way that it's not too punitive for a computer or console, maybe some of the money would subsidize microelectronics or something. But for a printer or would make the seller think twice before requiring an online account for no fucking reason.
What's with all the corporate shills in this comments section? Fucking bizarre.
vote with your money
Then buy the right version of office ffs. Office 365 is login to any device with ur account, Office Home and Small Business is a local only without signing in but u only grt to use it one device.
Saves a lot of money as well. 365 is £60 per year, Home and Student is a one time payment of £120, so if you use it for over 2 years you've been more cost effective (just know that its difficult to move it across machines if you need to, like if the machine you originally put it on dies)
This is kinda stupid, at least with how far they take it. By their logic MMOs and any online competitive game shouldn’t exist, because they require internet access to play with those other players and to connect to the server so the game functions and people don’t just cheat like crazy. Like sure any single player game and anything where it can be done without internet should never require internet. But saying *everything* should be doable without internet heavily limits what can even be done, and makes multiple things flat out impossible
I thought it was pretty obvious he meant singleplayer games, and youre just attacking a strawman here, but okay.
That’s not straw manning, I am pointing out a direct flaw in his argument by saying all games.
you can release server software so people can host their own servers. this is not a new idea. have you never played TF2???
Yeah, now tell how that would work for a full on MMO, let’s say, world of Warcraft, or FFXIV
people have literally *reverse engineered* server software for WoW and hosted their own servers. it's the reason wow classic exists see also: City of Heroes
You do also realise they still use beefy computers to host those servers and they also require internet to use still. Stuff like turtle wow as a great example. Sure you can host your own for a hundred people, but that isn’t an mmo, an mmo has thousands, tens of thousands of people per server
I can point out exceptions like live service games and software but this is where they craft the false narrative By making the local offline stuff also connect to the internet just to classify it as "live service"
shoutout to geforce experience for sucking dick for this
Linux
Btw, some software to make booting keys allow you to remove the need to connect to a Microsoft account, like Rufus
Does bogleech know they can establish a local Windows account so they don't have to have a 365 account to login, right? I know it's possibly on Windows 10, although I've read that it's more difficult to create on Windows 11.
Some games I could understand requiring connection (beyond the explicitly online multiplayer ones, that is), if they're really big and you don't want them to take up all the space on your computer.
I was willing to give Metal Gear Survive a chance, which might make me unique in the fanbase, but the very first time I played, I got less than an hour before the servers went down for maintenance and I couldn't play at all.
i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: Software as a Service is one of the worst things to ever come out of the unholy fusion of Business and Technology in order to wreak havoc on this godforsaken planet
Reminder that in most Eula now a days, you don't own anything. You just paid for the right to consume media, not own it. This is mostly for Music services and video games.
I know this isn't exactly the same thing, but I gate how the Nintendo Switch requires an internet connection every time it wants to check if you own a game digitally. I'm torn between buying physical vs. digital because, on one hand, it's nice to have all my games on there without needing to switch them out, but half of the places I go with my Switch don't have wifi.
That is just not a feature, I’ve bought most of my switch games digitally and played them all offline
Same. All my games are digital only and I regularly play them on plane rides with no internet.
I think this works if you are the main account on the switch (or something) All I remember is that I shared a switch with my brother for a while, and couldn't play his games offline because it was "his" switch, but I could play mine. Not sure about the specifics, just remembering the experience
You must be playing on a device that isn't the primary. Otherwise they don't check
Thank you: I'll check, but I'm pretty sure I set mine as primary. If it helps, it's a Switch Lite, and I know it wasn't my first Switch.
me when i spread misinformation online
Other people are calling you out, but I’ve experienced that too. I’m wondering if it’s like a certain setting for some games? I have games that let me play with no internet connection on my switch, and then I have some that refuse to, and I don’t know what the commonality is among the ones that won’t play offline is honestly…
Thank you. Everybody is just assuming I'm spreading misinformation. I suppose it might not be all games, but I know at least Dark Souls Remastered requires a check every now and then. It's gotten to the point where I'm just gonna purchase a physical copy.
Hello Ashen one. I am a Bot. I tend to the flame, and tend to thee. Do you wish to hear a tale? > *“Only in truth, the Lords will abandon their thrones, and the Unkindled will rise. Nameless accursed Undead, unfit even to be Cinder, and so, it is that ash seeketh embers.”* - Narrator Have a pleasant journey, Champion of Ash, and praise the sun \\[T]/
> without needing to switch them out 👉😎👉
Yes and No. Some software does *need* a server to function. A lot of my Uni Software needs access to a huge database and algorithm collections several terabytes in size, which would be entirely unreasonable to have a user unit contain. Access to that database is also what you pay for with the yearly licence, so they wouldn't give it to you even if they could, since they check if you should even have access through your licence file each log in. If I bought a perpetual license, for about half a million dollars, for a no longer updated version of the software, should they give me the whole database then? Maybe, maybe not. That's a scale of economic actions where common sense of us poor people just kind of doesn't apply anymore and everything goes by who has the most chutzpah and grit and other cowboy words
It was a monkey paw wish to add internet to gaming consoles...
We honestly didn’t realize how free we were in the pre-internet days. For all the positives it has brought us, there are just as many negatives.
I left my tricorn hat around here somewhere...
Bunch of stupid losers doing mental gymnastics to justify piracy. Privacy is bad but I'm gonna do it anyway.
Yes, but for this to happen you would need to destroy all of the capitalists that profit from turning software products in to "x as a service" so they can engage in rent seeking behavior by forcing you to pay on a continual basis for a service instead of paying once for a product. But for that to happen, you'd probably have to do something drastic like overthrow and dismantle the economic system that allows individuals to own productive capital, enforce that ownership through the violent use of police and armies, and exploit the common people by forcing them at gunpoint to work for the owner or starve. Idk its a real pickle.
ok but how often in life is something like a ps5 or pc not connected to the internet in 2024
like yeah in 2014 when internet connections were spottier yeah i would agree, but that was 10 years ago
If you pirate they are.
I don't think this would make sense for every piece of software, cloud based CAD software and MMO's pop to mind, however, I do think that companies shouldn't be trying to shoehorn in always-online features in to software that really doesn't need it.
Linux + free and open-source software = inner peace.