conciselyverbose

@conciselyverbose@kbin.social

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I feel like the Steam Deck is the best proof of Gabe Newell's quote that "piracy is a service issue."

They could have easily crammed the Steam Deck full of stuff to make it hard to use for piracy - locking down everything, making it usable only to play games you legitimately own, force you to go through who knows what hoops in order to play games on it. That’s what Nintendo or Apple or most other companies do....

conciselyverbose,

They could have not given you root access and forced you to install your own OS for it to manage things that aren't on Steam. They could have locked the bootloader and refused to install anything they didn't sign.

Neither would violate the license provided they made the source available.

conciselyverbose,

Nintendo is incompetent.

PS5 and Xbox both control what runs on their systems perfectly fine.

conciselyverbose, (edited )

There's a huge difference between not butchering your own chickens and buying some fucking nasty frozen crepes full of preservatives and random filler trash.

If it's premade at a grocery store, it's disgusting and way less healthy on top.

conciselyverbose,

If it's not from scratch it's not good.

conciselyverbose,

Those are two blatantly different things. There's nothing wrong with selling new versions of software.

There's everything wrong with removing the ability to use software you paid for unless you continue to actively pay for it.

conciselyverbose,

I don't want or need continuous updates.

I want to buy something and have it be left alone without trying to steal more money from me for the thing I already bought.

The only possible valid excuse for a subscription to software is services that cannot possibly exist without meaningful spending on server infrastructure. If that's cloud storage as the core of the purchase of the app, computations that are literally impossible to do locally or rely on data that's expensive to maintain, a subscription is legitimate.

If it's anything else it's shitty and you're a shitty person for doing it. Sell actual upgrades when they're actually upgrades, without stealing access to what people bought. It's the only acceptable model.

It's funny how google pretends the music on YouTube isn't straight up piracy and everyone just goes along with it

Most people have extremely weird ideas of what’s considered piracy and what isn’t. Downloading a video game rom is piracy, but if you pay money to some Chinese retailer for an SD card containing the roms, that’s somehow not piracy. Exploiting the free trial on a streaming site by using prepaid visa cards is somehow not...

conciselyverbose,

They have to pay for anything official.

The rest is the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA. Effectively, sites aren't liable for user generated content if they respond to official DMCA takedown requests in a timely manner. YouTube also goes beyond that to directly work with copyright holders to preemptively remove infringing content with content ID, which scans everything for violations, and their own tools to report infringement. They don't need to do that for the DMCA protection, but it's probably cheaper at their obscenely large scale.

conciselyverbose,

Absolutely insane.

I can understand extreme cases, like some sort of disputed IP where their contact to sell the content turns out not to be with the actual rights holder, resulting in no longer serving the content (with an unconditional full refund). But past that they should be legally required to host the content until the heat death of the universe.

conciselyverbose,

Nobody is mentioning TV Show vs video game because there is no difference.

Taking away any content a user has paid for is unacceptable without a full refund at absolute minimum.

conciselyverbose,

A coupon for the same service is not and does not resemble a refund.

Yes, villainizing them is entirely correct. If they sold the license 100 years ago and stopped providing it, they should be legally liable for a 100% refund of the purchase price, plus interest. If they fucked up their contracts in a manner in which they aren't able to serve the content to purchasers until the end of the time, it's entirely their own problem.

conciselyverbose, (edited )

No, backing it up is your obligation.

A digital purchase means they owe you access, in the format your purchased, as long as they exist. Nothing short of that can possibly be acceptable if there is any copy protection at all.

conciselyverbose, (edited )

I've been playing Journey To The Savage Planet lately, and while the gunplay is not awesome, and the unlocks involve collecting materials, the "rare" materials for each enemy are behind a boss or mini-boss, and it's effectively a 3D metroidvania. There's enough hard platforming that I take more fall damage than enemy damage (or at least close), even in the boss fight I'm currently stuck on.

conciselyverbose,

Suggestion that did a lot for me. Get cheap smart lights or at least a smart outlet. Turn them on before your alarm (gradual ramp up is ideal, but just turning on is better than nothing). It makes mornings a lot less brutal.

conciselyverbose,

Not that other means of accessing the passwords aren't worth considering, but in the real world, it takes a lot more for someone to actually coerce your password from you than to use unencrypted storage.

I generally like xkcd, but this is a harmful trivialization of the value of encryption. In the real world, anything that isn't encrypted is negligent as hell. There's no valid reason not to do it, with maybe the exception of a thumb drive you're sharing across a computers you don't control and are clearly aware is not secure.

conciselyverbose,

Yeah, I'd rather be deaf.

One subject I could manage (psychology/AI if it has to be nonfiction or mysteries if fiction counts), but not one voice.

conciselyverbose,

Yeah, this is obnoxious.

It's also truly terrible at being persuasive.

conciselyverbose,

Best guess literally a bag of precooked, pre scrambled eggs dumped in a warming tray for breakfast.

conciselyverbose,

I get your point that the exploit existed before it was identified, but an unmitigated exploit that people are aware of is worse than an unmitigated exploit people aren't aware of. Security through obscurity isn't security, of course, but exploiting a vulnerability is easier than finding, then exploiting a vulnerability. There is a reason that notifying the company before publicizing an exploit is the standard for security researchers.

You're right that it's never an OK title, because fuck clickbait, but until it's patched and said patch propagates into the real world, more people being aware of the hole does increase the risk (though it doesn't sound like it's actually a huge show stopper, either).

conciselyverbose,

It would also completely fuck our critical infrastructure. There's enough that needs connectivity for it to cascade to much more.

conciselyverbose,

In the wrong how?

If you don't believe in copyright, whatever, but IA was doing something blatantly violating the law and getting away with it until they decided to flamboyantly draw attention to themselves by removing the veneer of legality and just giving away unlimited copies.

conciselyverbose, (edited )

No. [I was wrong. In addition to being distributed between servers like I said, you can also enable P2P sharing to distribute the bandwidth even further.]

If you have a server that allows users to sign up, the stuff they follow/watch (you'd have to look at details if you want to host to see exactly how it's distributed) goes through your server.

The flip side to this is that, when your user uploads an extremely popular video (or you personally do if you don't allow signups), you don't have to stream every video to every individual user. You send it on to other federated instances that those users are signed up to, but if one instance has 100 users view your video, you don't have to send it 100 times. (This is likely less efficient than YouTube, because they can control exactly how load is spread between their delivery network with a comprehensive view of everything, but it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for an individual to get involved or handle the distribution demand of a popular video.)

Just as a client, you don't serve anyone else. It's a website (or app) that works much like YouTube does. It's on the server side where the load is distributed.

Question for legal folks: Travel based abortion restrictions

Texas and I believe a few other states have passed anti-abortion laws that attempt to cover people leaving their states to seek safe and legal abortions. The ones I’m familiar with (as I recall) applied to things like traveling on state-owned roads to seek an abortion out of state....

conciselyverbose,

It will never get ruled on because the core concept is so obscenely unconstitutional that it doesn't matter.

conciselyverbose,

Try right clicking and "save as"? On mobile Safari it pops up with view and download as options.

Techrights — The Effort to Silence (Squash) GNU/Linux Advocates and Press Coverage (techrights.org)

THE Google ‘News’ (Gulag Noise [1, 2]) mentions of “Linux” diminish again, partly because sites that used to cover GNU/Linux every day suddenly stopped a few weeks ago (our coverage of it had struck a nerve, attracting about 3,000 readers). No need to shame the publisher or anything (it had done a great job until it...

conciselyverbose,

I couldn't even come up with a take. I guess a conspiracy theory that Microsoft is kidnapping the internet's families to keep them from talking about Linux.

It's mostly just babble.

conciselyverbose,

This is a mess and a half.

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