There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.

Your client does not have permission to get URL /comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3 from this server.

What does it say?

I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.

But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.

There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.

On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.

The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.

You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.

Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.

Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.

Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.

Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58

Not to disagree with your larger point, but physical media can also be a nightmare. Try watching a 4K Blu-ray on your computer

If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.

On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.

Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.

E-book DRM is crazy, I agree. I should have included that.

Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.

How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?

We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.

And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.

I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.

GOG is different in that they ban DRM outright.

Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.

HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.

Some have DRM, of course.

I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.

As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.

That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).

I suspect it's actually because the authorities don't know what the project is, if it's only code, or they can't be sure it's an infringing derivative work (it is).

What would stop me from playing it, outside of the hardware dying?

A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.

If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.

Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.

If you buy physical media, you should rip it to FLAC and put the oroginal dosc in a safe place.

However, content shifting (i.e. ripping from CD to digital) is a thing, and that's what I do with my physical media.

I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.

If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.

I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.

The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes

I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.

As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.

Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?

https://xemu.app/

Or so I assume. I have Steam installed, so I wouldn't know.

That seems to be somewhat of a myth.

Discussion here, 37 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698374

How do you run an application? Depends on the application, as they all have different filenames...

Obviously if you buy it with steam you need Steam. But you only need it at the time of purchase, for the vast majority of titles

Edit: Or there are DRM-free copies, but there are good reasons that's only ever done for very old games like on GOG.

Your kid isn't going to know what it was like to play it back then, throw them the classics and sigh in relief knowing that's he's not being tricked in to corporate exploits such as loot boxes, skins and the likes.

My eight year old nephew loves my old mega drive.

Now, my motto is: if I can't run it safely in an emulator and download the files from some "abandoned wares" site then I don't care. And I have zero moral problems with that.

All went relatively well, until I needed to share the slides with others using Office 365: my first try of sharing the slides by clicking the Share button inside Office for macOS caused it to upload to SharePoint as read-only: not even myself (the document owner) could edit it.

I said "fine, I will just upload the .pptx file manually", and it worked well enough, until the file came back with some comments for fixes: now if I clicked the "Open on desktop" button, it kinda created a local copy that I could never sync with the remote one, but they're still clearly the same file because it did show as the same file when I went to properties on both desktop and web versions.

At that point I was getting really pissed off, so I started editing locally and copying my changes to the remote version. Office still had one more surprise: I could copy whole slides remotely, but copying part of a slide (say a rectangle form with some text) would instead convert that part to an image. Seriously, what the f*ck Microsoft?

That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:

https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharted_the_last_of_us_mul...

Rockstar games shut down gta online for ps3 in 2021:

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51989315o2aa3...

To be fair, there are private servers for these games, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, but those are community efforts.

Please say more

FWIW this had its own share of problems, most common being host migration (when the host leaves) and less often, although a bigger problem, is your IP address being given to all players and malicious actors DDOSing the host to make a match unplayable.

But, I was traveling for work and brought the non-"home" Switch with me along with a copy of Breath of the Wild on cartridge. I fired it up on the airplane, ready to go. And then discovered that because I had bought the DLC and the DLC license check couldn't pass, I was locked out of playing at all. It's given me pause on buying any other DLC on a Nintendo platform.

Regarding the download, it's the same issue with physical media. If I don't have the DVD, how can I acquire the game?

So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.

1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion.

2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience.

3. Move it between my devices.

5. Resell it.

6. Pass it on to my children.

No backup and archive is the exception. I can live with that. We'll see if Sony and Microsoft follow Nintendo or not.

*Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them?

The best we have is to have some sort of ownership token that is maintained in a shared store, and build a requirement that possession of that token is required to use the data. Even this is practically nearly intractable; you have to have some sort of "trusted" hardware or software that is responsible for validating the current possession of the ownership token before using the data.

Physical media is another way of trying to solve this problem, especially if the physical media can somehow be verified and is exfiltration-proof.

[1] I say "technology" here but really I strongly suspect that this is actually impossible given reasonable theoretical assumptions around what data means.

I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.

Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.

My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa for me. With Baldur's Gate 3 it even keeps all her mods separate from my mod-free setup.

Some game publishers (activision, ubisoft et al) require their own accounts, and that's usually also taken care of automatically. The xbox goes and sets up a profile on that publisher's system on first game launch.

From 2013

PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630

I am all for 1-4 and 6. But reselling digital copies is silly.

The trouble is, you would have to know about the outage first and go offline before attempting to play.

I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account.

After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number.

I will never buy a Microsoft product again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.

Microsoft is a joke.

If I produce a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to... dictate all the terms upon which I agree to sell it. You have the right to agree to those terms, or not.

There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.

At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.

Office on the web is a horror show this way.

One of the more galling aspects of the inevitable US-NATO[0] trade war is the fact that nobody is willing to reevaluate the legal underpinnings of US tech hegemony - namely, copyright and anticircumvention law. All the proposals for sovereign tech are really just "let's build more AI data centers". People like Cory Doctorow who have the actual way to play hardball with Trump - "let's get rid of anticircumvention and declare open season on AppleMobileFileIntegrity.kext" are sidelined as "IP thieves". Hell, even the Stop Killing Games people got brushed off by the European Commission with an excuse almost like "we can't mandate your game purchases work offline, that'd be stealing".

The reason for this is pretty straightforward: the moves done in the 90s to ensure digital purchases meant no ownership were as much a product of Europe as it was the US. Actually, the vast majority of international copyright law is actually a European invention, and the US was the last holdout on things like copyright registration and fixed (as opposed to life-plus) terms. Europe spent centuries binding the world to the most extreme version of copyright imaginable, specifically to ensure developing countries would never be able to actually economically develop.

Every country that has economically developed itself does so through a subsidy of IP theft. The Industrial Revolution was owned by England but stolen by America; and America itself wound up being stolen from by China, Japan, and South Korea. Economic development is not a game you win by playing by the rules, because the rules are designed to keep the winners on top. The entire debate over games preservation and ownership is downstream of the fact that the big American and European cultural industries are not financially viable without you renting your culture.

The reason why the fight has focused on physical vs. digital is that it's the one battle we've been somewhat victorious on. Physical ownership has generally been treated as sacred: Microsoft tried using the Xbox One launch as a way to massively restrict discs, and it created a backlash so large Xbox never actually recovered from it. Sony in contrast had to boil the frog[1], and Nintendo wound up doing so more or less by accident[2]. And when game consoles have problems loading physical discs, it's still treated by console manufacturers as a bug rather than a feature.

[0] In practice, the US vs. all of it's allies, including non-NATO ones.

[1] They were clearly intending to kill off discs with the PS5, just from the industrial design alone, but didn't actually do it until mid-cycle when everyone's actually bought their consoles and thus the impact would be minimized.

[2] It has been Nintendo policy since the 3DS to ban anyone who goes online with a duplicate cartridge ID. I don't think this was intended to poison the used market, but once cheap Switch flashcarts and means to clone cartridges became available, it absolutely did. The people using 3DS homebrew to load pirated games at least had to know what "public headers" meant in order to avoid getting banned.

I think some of the most prophetic writing in terms of specifics came from Richard Stallman that basically called it all out in the late 1980s, including social media.

You may not always like what he has to say but he did think through how this stuff can be leveraged against the users.

The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year?

And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.

Do you have evidence of this? I've played Xbox for 25 years and never seen this.

since this is a game it's probably mostly kids whose identifying information Microsoft is hunting for. I can't believe it's legal and the company was not sued yet

me I just pirate it now, never played on servers anyway.

Automated enforcement of ownership rules is completely tangential to the actual problem you're running into. You own a physical book, you make a copy then sell the book. That's a copyright violation, no "verification" or whatever nonsense needed. What happened in regards to ownership in this case is already clear. Companies sure do like DRM but it's as much a pale imitation of ownership as anything else.

So in your ancap ideal, producers are not getting anything, why would I sign a contract with them if I can just copy it?

And Nintendo can remote delete your files, ban your uID or even disable your device.

And GameKey are tied to a specific hardware that will be discontinued in the future.

It's not just Microsoft of course, it's a lot of places (streaming platforms only seem to want me to watch very specific movies), but it's very noticeable with Microsoft.

Microsoft used to be imperfect, but it was utilitarian and I felt like I could get on with my task fairly fast and someone somewhere working there thought about how they might facilitate me doing those tasks. Now they think of other things.

It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that.

But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical.

an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down.

Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.

> But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:

> "Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.

> That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/08/wilhoitian/#human-rights-...

I really can't. The only argument I see is "we can't allow it because every customer is a potential thief". What will enabling resale cause? Piracy? Well piracy is happening regardless. People who want to illegally download games can do it today in one click. Instead the piracy excuse is being used to restrict legal resale so you have no option but to pay the publisher's inflated sale price.

10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)

I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?

Microsoft stole two of my accounts.

I bought Minecraft in the alpha days when all you needed was a username and password. At some point they mandated an email in the years I wasn't playing and later found out I could no longer sign in.

I bought a new "copy" and lost it because I didn't migrate to a Microsoft account. I didn't migrate because I assumed it was just a scare tactic and I wasn't playing at the time anyway. When I later wanted to play they stopped allowing me to log in.

When I look at the top selling games[1] and see Minecraft in second place with 400 million, I wonder how many of those are the same people buying it again. I'm sure nobody bought Super Mario because it would stop letting them sign in to play offline.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.

The technology is tort law.

It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are.

Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s

Anything that touches a Microsoft account is fraught with horror and pain. Which is why the idea of requiring one in order to turn on your PC is ludicrous.

Now, i got my kid another switch and he decided he wanted his own account tied to the family nintendo plan and now i am learning what a pain the virtual cards are. If he had just let me put my account on his switch he could have all the games i have, but that's not what we went with ;-)

I have 2 words for you: "soon leaving". You may have seen them on Netflix.

And in the US you have the advantage it's generally leaving to go somewhere. In many smaller countries this is not true.

I've never those words in File Explorer.

On streaming services shows get silently censored or edited, or episodes are just outright removed (and get re-numbered so you don't even realize what was removed), and episodes get put out in the wrong order, or they aren't released at all in the right language, and there are no subtitles, only closed captions. Neither streaming or piracy are perfect, but only one them allows you to save a show to your hard drive so you know it will be there the next time you want to watch it unlike streaming where they constantly pull shows offline

To be honest it's never been easier to pirate media. It is, in fact, much easier to pirate media than to find a show or movie you'd like to watch "legally".

I have Netflix because I have a family plan with my parents, but I literally never use it in favor of regular ass usenet pirate sites that usually have better UI/UX than any of the streaming services do.

Whenever I'm interested in some show or another, I google "Where to watch blah?". You then get greeted with 9000 websites all purporting to tell you which service has blah (the fact that this is even needed is an absurdity). 90% of them say different things to one another, most of them are clearly some hallucinated AI-generated crap created for the purpose of siphoning ad revenue from visitors. You login to whatever streaming service you subscribe to, and there's only 3 seasons out of 9 of blah, and it's the middle 3 seasons to boot (one that comes to mind is Law and Order SVU on Netflix, it only has seasons ~11-18 or something like that). The other seasons are spread across 4 different services. You then go to a different country. The catalogue is completely different, and half the shit you actually wanna watch isn't there. The DRM they use fucks up often, streams get interrupted if you open more than 1 tab at a time, the supposed "4K" resolution they offer with your subscription looks more like 360p, they don't have subtitles in one region when they do in a different one, the audio tracks are horrid more often than not.

I throw my hands up in the air, navigate to one of the 9 trillion piracy websites out there, type "blah" in the searchbar, and I'm watching it in 4K after approximately 30 seconds of effort. It has all the nice features like autoplay, all the episodes are in 1 place.

Gaben was 1000% right in saying piracy is a service problem, considering I don't even bother pirating games pretty much ever because of how good Steam is. I didn't even have a problem with Netflix back in the day when it was a genuinely good service, and I still pay for Spotify and Tidal, but the TV and Movie industry needs to get a grip on reality.

Maybe I'm old school, but the primary lesson Limewire taught me was to always check the media before you show it to someone else.

Every 'issue' that you mentioned about wrong episode, wrong language, etc. If those are the costs to ride the ride then so be it. No CEO gets paid in 'had to redownload a different version'.

Blockchain does not solve this problem.

I think as a compromise I'd be okay with some kind of license database (maybe blockchain-based, maybe not) that keeps track of who owns a legal copy of what. People reselling digital copies of copyrighted material would have to transfer ownership of that license to prove they're conducting legit business and not just minting new copies out of thin air.

This is why.

TLDR: complete incompetence at all levels

I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.

Well that's hilariously untrue. Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again.

> Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?

Yes, those things do happen with commercial streaming platforms; Paramount is especially bad IME, but hardly unique.

The entitlement only lasts a few days. If the online check fails and you’re otherwise online, it gets revoked .

Nearly all DRM systems are fail-Closed not fail-open.

By allowing resale of digital copies outside of platforms all you get is essentially the complete repeal of intellectual property rights for digital media.

Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.

The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.

The Call of Duty series is one of the worst offenders, effectively every game outside of the last 2 years has so many bad CVEs' and remote code exploits that even opening them on your PC is unsafe. Playing the official matchmaking on even something as recent as Black Ops 3 will have your computer compromised in minutes.

Yet they are still on the store front, they never go on sale. Black Ops 2 has been out for well over a decade and still wants full price for it on Steam & its unsafe.

Playing Call of Duty games on PC is probably the most unsafe thing you can do with your computer, outside of downloading malware itself.

Valve should delist these games from the store if they are effectively unplayable. They should ban Activision from selling new games on the store if they cannot make older titles even remotely safe. It's pure neglect, most of this stuff is fixed by the community with a few lines of code.

They gutted QA in 2014, ending their software development engineer in test positions, and suggesting the developers should test their own code to get velocity.

Subsequent releases were worse than before, and things have compounded since then. Hard to say that laying off the rest of the team made a noticable difference.

All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.

[1] https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos...

If I bought a book, made a xerox of the whole thing, and then sold the book to another party, I have committed a copyright violation that is in theory actionable. This is basically unenforceable; in theory if it came to light that I had a copy of it and had sold my copy then there is an actionable claim, but nobody is going to do this. But the friction here is high so we know that we can live with this, because nobody could possibly do this at a scale that would make a difference.

With pure digital goods the friction drops to zero. For a while friction kept up with technology; when CDs were first around, making a digital copy of a CD was just not feasible. You maybe had a 1GiB hard drive and could store a single CD on it. With mp3 compression becoming mainstream that math changed, but at least games and things like that, that were not easily compressed, were somewhat safe. CD-R allowed you to break this but was high friction. Same with DVDs when they were first around.

But now storage is no longer a concern, so all of that friction has disappeared.

Streaming and on-demand content gives a possible solution to this, and that's why everything is moving in that direction -- trying to increase the friction of creating durable copies of the media. As soon as you allow backup of the content (as in the GP's post) then everything breaks, so that's the thing that you (as a content creator or distributor) have to fight.

Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.

Maybe hyperbole... but to some extent I think that's about right. It's like you're not even a cohesive unit other than that thin marketing veneer facing the outside world.

Things are often built in silos. Integration of products is almost always an after thought. Decisions/changes are done in response to outside markets or internal political games for promotional appeal and money. The turnover of people retiring, new hires coming. Most every mega corp today is nothing like it was 30 years ago. And so, things typically end up half-baked and the customer left wondering why the products are often such a mess.

Now some companies do things better than others, and may have their stellar areas and their bad areas. Same goes for cities, and even countries, when you think about it.

It continued to be so, and then Microsoft forced everyone to switch to a Microsoft account, deleting the account of anyone who didn't do so (in complete violation of Notch's original sales contract with players). If you watch the progress bar of Prism Launcher logging you in to a Microsoft account you see it logs into Microsoft, goes through a bunch of indirection, logs into Xbox (!!), bunch of indirection, then logs into Mojang. And then you get to launch the game.

It used to be a simple endpoint with username+password -> auth token. Not any more with Microsoft!

To be honest I too saw them in good light probably since a few years before they bought Github.

They have managed to undo this illusion themselves.

I don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s.

If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today.

(It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)

I mean, come on. The vast majority of services that have apps running on TV implemented QR code based login workflow ages ago, and it just works. For Xbox, logging in is always a struggle.

You already own it, so it's not even immoral.

Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.

The whole collection, mostly on Blu-Ray, was 50% off at Barnes and Noble when I was there a couple of weeks ago.

There was a huge display right at the entrance of this huge chain retailer, so in spite of the online streaming hype, there must be a non-niche audience for optical media.

Me too, but sadly more and more shows aren't getting physical releases at all anymore.

I'd argue even that is done better on underground services. Plus they'll just show you actually useful metrics, like the IMDB rating.

A decent proxy for the maximum appropriate length of copyright might be when the next generation starts making those edits or disclaimers for changing culture (so the original is no longer considered appropriate for current markets), so at most ~20 years or so. One generation, and then it is history/heritage to pass on (or critique, as the case may be).

Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.

(Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)

I've edited my comment to correct this. Cheers!

I had to, for an hour, go through hoops logging into this microsoft service and update my recovery email so i could log into another service that wanted the recovery email as an auth factor, and even then: it happened again when i wanted to play my character on my switch instead of my PC.

i sincerely doubt i'll pay for minecraft dungeons 2, even though i do like the game, very barebones diablo-feeling.

QA doesn't get enough love :(

(I’m pointing out the absurdity of trying to assign ownership within a system of shared creation)

I've no idea. It happens sometimes and only seems to happen with certain fils. In this case I'm sure it's a jellyfin issue, but this just comes down to having to debug while someone is waiting to watch - which is exactly the time I don't want to.

As for language/subtitles it's true if it happens from the start (which I agree, is usually true) but occasionally the downloads get weird midway through.

That's not being offline ;)

Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.

That'd be a bummer.

I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.

I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.

Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.

But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.

On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.

On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.

Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.

This used to be the case when Apple was in dire straits and MS abused their monopoly position to gain 95% of browsers market share. Grim days.

But those days are thankfully long done and there are plenty of people who are completely Microsoft-free.

The one thing people are using one way or another is Linux, because it's now in just about everything. Even those in the Apple ecosystem, with an iPhone and Mac computers, very probably have a Linux router and Linux TV at home.

The number of devices in the world running one version of Linux or another outnumber Windows devices by something like 10 to 1. Maybe more.

Microsoft is a despicable company producing turds since forever. I hate them and the crap they produce with a passion since the DOS days.

As the saying goes: the day Microsoft shall produce something that doesn't suck is the day they'll start selling vacuum cleaners.

Also MS stuff has always been slop. Hate their business practices too. But without Linux we'd be choosing between MS, Apple and Oracle Solaris or something...

If customers buy the product regardless of the quality, then the manufacturer has no incentive to improve the quality.

I don't think I've used a MS product in at least a decade. At least that I was aware of.

Edit: did some research and I have used LinkedIn. Other than that, nothing.

On the other hand there are video cameras that you can't use for commercial purposes because they lack the appropriate video codec license from MPEG-LA :-) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735824)

Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)

I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra.

When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad.

IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.

P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.

Ended up on Minecraft Education on the computer, eventually.

>it's been decade since I played the game

Unfortunately you may have lost access to your account and thus copy of the game if you didn't do the two mandatory time-limited account migrations.

Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.

Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.

There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility. Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.

> Google Workspace, and it's missing features

Sounds like Microsoft got there by having the features.

Companies over 20 staff are on Windows laptops + Office 365 E3 or E5.

Android and iOS? Sure on the phones...

What "clients" are you talking about? Edit: Re-reading I think you mean clients as in general computers, not business clients. Yes, more of the world is on phones but that is due to cost and society (ipad/iphone kids or third world on android). Real work is all done on PCs/Macs.

Schools are on chromebooks for the kids and Windows or Mac for teachers.

I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler

Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will convert laptops to linux or chromebook.

You see it as malicious, but well, even Google have trouble in this space. Because it is hard.

Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.

That is ... interesting. The game use wall clock waits or something instead of "game logic tic" wait?

Even to this day after so many patches some bugs still are present.

The PS4 release was notoriously bad because they were reliant on caching from disk, if it's an SSD it's ok, if it's a hard drive, though luck...

This is even worse when you look at all the marketing material leading up to release, if you put that together it's close to fraud in my opinion...

Maybe for a non tech company yes they cannot navigate anything better due to user expectations, but in my experience those companies usually have support for Mac and at this point I'd rather have that if forced to choose between it and Windows.

Not really in the cards, though I can appreciate your dedication to pirate advocacy.

Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those.

But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)

20 years ago hardware support was a major concern for us Linux aficionados. 10 years ago it was a minor concern. Today I think you may have some issues with newer apple hardware, but it's not like you can install windows on that either, and there are projects with some progress towards running Linux on those too.

The bit about SimCity gives an idea of how seriously they took it.

As an example, Parallels had a version of Docker-like containers on WINDOWS in 2006! They implemented it as a wrapper on top of the native Windows NT kernel API.

But the downside of this flexibility is relatively slow filesystem operations. It was a conscious trade-off from Windows kernel developers, they thought that flexibility was more important.