One thing I would suggest is using local encryption of anything you store in AWS. Plausible deniability is useful for all parties involved.
Far, far better than my residential internet connection, that's for sure.
Of course, I have offsite backup of important stuff in case of fire.
That said, ease of use is likely a lot better with S3 for those who don't like to tinker or have a box sit and hum.
Nobody cares about the 9s. If Amazon wants to they can render the service inoperable legally, over time. Fortunately, S3 is semi-standardized so it’s ”migratable” in a real sense.
The real issue is getting locked out of your account for any arbitrary reason. This happens a lot with big tech and it can be impossible to get help by a human. That’s what scares me the most but more so with Google than Amazon (at the moment).
Excluding power outages that are out of my control, during which I couldn't do any work anyway, I've had practically zero downtime of my homelab services in the many years I've been running them. Even the dozen hard drives in my NAS with several years of power on time have given me zero issues. I know that I've been lucky, and according to SnapRAID the probability of one failing in the next year is 82%, but so far I haven't had a failure yet. Even when it does happen, I'm fairly confident that the interruption will be minimal and my data will be safe.
All this is to say that running and managing services yourself doesn't require much effort at all, assuming that you're technically inclined and enjoy tinkering. The idea that cloud services are inherently more robust is a myth.
Most service interruptions happen because of two reasons: large scale distributed systems are very difficult to run and maintain, and the constant churn of large engineering teams introduces many operational risks. Essentially, it's all due to complexities of scale. These are not problems that a machine in a closet serving a few users will ever have, especially if you're smart about choosing simple and robust technology.
1. I'm not going with Amazon, I live in France so I chose a french cloud provider. Laws are a bit different here.
2. I believe whatever could happen to my data, I'll see it coming and have time to move it all.
3. It's dirt cheap, and doesn't require me to manage my own storage.
Thanks for the laughs.
What do you do for games that don't have "DRM-free copies", such as Denuvo games, or the increasingly large number of online-only singleplayer games?
What happens?
> And some games have online components. Do I expect, for example, Bungie's multiplayer servers to stay up until the end of time? No.
If the company fails to do this, they are effectively committing theft, and should be punished accordingly by the law. If studio execs think this it's an unreasonable thing to do, then they're free to not release their games to the public and keep their proprietary services to themselves.
Well, yes. As in any case of any decisions that result in violation of the law by companies.
>For existing video games, it's possible that some being sold cannot have an "end of life" plan as they were created with necessary software that the publisher doesn't have permission to redistribute. Games like these would need to be either retired or grandfathered in before new law went into effect. For the European Citizens' Initiative in particular, even if passed, its effects would not be retroactive. So while it may not be possible to prevent some existing games from being destroyed, if the law were to change, future games could be designed with "end of life" plans and stop this trend.
Alternatively they can use proprietary technology in the backend without permission to redistribute, so long as it is replaced before support is ended.
1 do not sell such a game, use a subscription
2 If you sell a online game you need to release the a server, not the source code but binarties, yes I know it is more work, but also lazy people were complaining that adding the mandatory "Unsubscribe" button in email is too much work or even impossible but they eventually do it and nobody dares today to defend that this rule was bad
3 make your game/software work offline, this entire thing was started because a greedy company killed a game that also had a single player mode. So if I bought Minecraft to play mostly single player I will be super pissed if Microsoft kills it because they were really special bastards that decided to force the Microsoft login to let me play the game. When they will abandon the game they need to make a final update and disable the online requirement.
4 The game will not be sold but will be "rended for N years", the customer knows what to expect and the developer is forced to keep the game working for N years from last purchase or refund the users. So if you launch soem AAA battle royale shit and it fails you refund your customers if you don't wana keep the servers running.
5 if all above is too much work then do not sell in EU or whatever USA state is demanding that you will not brick your sold software or hardware when you stop your servers because reasons.
It's actually relaxing to just drive around with different cars into the sunset, turn the radio on and occasionally overrun some pedestrians.
I knew I can't be the only one finding it relaxing, yet the anxiety before starting the game if I can play it or not because of yet another update is really a downturn.
I own these games, but I still use the repacked games instead just because they allow me to actually play it fully offline
"After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"
With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would that really change everything..? everyone would suddenly stop complaining？ I doubt it
B/c the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences. But just like you don't have some inaliable right to go see Terminator in theaters because you did it once as a kid. I don't see why you have a right to emulate and replay a game. You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work. If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right. They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
I think it's easier to think of the mortality when it's not a big mega corporation and think of it as a singular person's creation and you as a passive consumer asserting your rights to what they made and how they should share it
The secondary issue of "owned" and "leased" being not clearly labeled.. I think is an issue. You should know a priori what you're getting in to - and at the moment it's really unclear at times (ex the washing machine example)
Changing these buttons to "Rent" would force people to acknowledge what they're getting for their $60 bucks -- effectively a rental.
Once the problem is identified en masse, capitalism can do its work more efficiently.
Also known as "please pay attention when kickstarter says this is a crowdfunding system and not a preorder system".
This is the thing people should learn to accept - and take on the responsibility to refuse to engage with cultural performances that are artificially gatekept.
I did buy a number of films/series on Amazon, but the moment Jeff decides to pull the rug, I will absolutely pirate them without the slightest feeling of guilt. I don't play video games, so thankfully I'm not at the mercy of those particular sharks. But when it comes to buying ebooks on Amazon, I removed the DRM on every single one of them when I bought them. Since Amazon has moved to stop download via USB, I've simply stopped buying any drm-infested ebooks from them. I'll buy them off kobo or I'll simply not have them at all.
People need to vote with their wallet.
But you're still engaging by pirating and going against their terms. Jeff spent a ton of money making the TV show. He chooses who gets to see it and in what way. I'm not going to shed a tear for Jeff, but I find this sort of weaksauce to then pirate it..
How about if the license is fine, but you don't like their price? Is it okay then too?
> People need to vote with their wallet.
Seriously: why? If you think this practice is wrong, and you wouldn't participate in it, and you think voting with your wallet isn't utterly futile (i.e. it would cause some companies to change their behaviour) then why is individual, atomised action the only legitimate one? Why is it not legitimate to make a change in the law, as a collective?
What? You do have the right to set up a theater and watch Terminator in it. And you can even use the old DVD and an old DVD player to do it. There's no law against that.
There shouldn't be a law against letting you play a game on whatever hardware can play it, provided you have the physical game available to you
This doesn't really solve anything . It just ends up promoting SaaS. Where you never own the game at all and don't have access to any part of it. You only rent access to a server where the software resides and runs (ex Google's failed game streaming service)
Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much.
Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.
In the UK at least, not that exact one on that disc, because you may own the disc but not the rights for public display of the content.
They even changed the law in 2016 to make it apply to venues that don't charge admission (e.g. staff rooms): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/changes-to-sectio...
Whether a movie theater with only you sitting in it counts as "public" sounds like an open question (in the government's own words "What amounts to a public space is a question of fact and only a court can make definitive pronouncements about this"), but I suspect the theatre wouldn't be keen on chancing it.
> the core issue is people/consumers feel entitled to relive childhood experiences
> You don't own a right to enjoy other people's work
> If they want to show it to you once and then burn it in a fire - that's their right
I do, absolutely, think I am entitled to this. Why not? Do you really think it is a good thing that people can make something valuable, share it with people in a way they find moving, and then destroy it? Do you think it's a good thing when people burn books?
I feel like you are appealing to the way things are ("it's their right") and not thinking at all about how things should be. Why should it be their right? What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right? That doesn't mean obliterating intellectual property, it just means that for this fake pseudo-property we change the already-artificial rules very slightly to make society better. Why not?
> What if we changed the laws so that they didn't have that right?
I think it doesn't solve anything ultimately. It just makes things worse and more inconvenient. For instance piracy just made everything a SaaS where the code isn't even accessible and is on a server behind an API. If everyone can own and copy games, then business models will just shift to where nobody ever sells games and everyone just has to stream through some online service. Everyone will lose out
> I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument
> "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'"
> With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would everyone suddenly stop complain？ I doubt it
That's not what the campaign is pushing for, the campaign is pushing for not allowing such things in the terms of service in the first place, within reason. The simplest way we can explain it is if you're paying for a subscription (i.e. MMOs) then the current behavior is fine. If you're paying a one-time fee for a game that depends on server somewhere to even play the game, then the publishers would be required to make end-of-life plans so the server isn't required to continue playing, even if in a limited state. I.e. all the single player games that require online connections because publishers are pushing for single-player microtransactions now.
The campaign aims to stop publishers from adding unnecessary dependencies that can shut down the games. This would stop for example publishers from killing a game when releasing a sequel to the same game, forcing users to repurchase what is essentially the same game. The Crew is a good example of this (and what started the campaign in the first place), other examples are sports games and other games like CoD that get yearly releases and services for older versions get killed arbitrarily.
> They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit.
The law and society decides that, game publishers want to of course control things end-to-end and rent-seek instead of sell, because having an eternal source of revenue is much more profitable for them, those have been established by the rest of society to be predatory. No consumer should be happy that adobe does subscriptions only, no consumer should be happy that apple controls their ecosystem end-to-end to the point that they get a cut of all monetary transactions in their system. Gamers already see similar behavior with Sony and Nintendo on the hardware side, and EA, Warner, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are pushing things further on the software side. This campaign is meant to be a push-back from such behavior. There used to be a time where charging money for horse armor was a scandal, we'll never go back to those times, but most gamers agree that gaming has gone too far in nickel-and-diming the consumer, so this a pushback to at least not have publishers kill games because of their greed.
The law already restricts software sales in many ways, there's many cases of mass-refunds because software is sold with deceptive practices, or when they do anti-competitive shit like forced bundling or market dominance abuse.
Slightly OT (or maybe not) older dishwashers are usually not very hard to fix (depending on the problem). My dishwasher is over ten years old. The pump broke: I replaced it. It was easy and cheap (EUR 60).
It wasn't even the pump that was broken, just the heating resistance attached to it that had fried. You can replace only the resistor if you're skilled enough to reattach a new one. I couldn't: removing the old one was easy, but I couldn't put it back in place so I bought a whole pump instead.
Likewise, my laundry machine is over 15 years old. I just replaced the carbon brushes: they last for something like 10 years and cost less than EUR 10 a pair.
I don't think I will buy a new machine any time soon, or if I have to, it will be a used one.
You won't even need to pull the oven out, chances are you can unscrew it right there from within.
£20 replacement coil for 10 minutes of work, or pay for a whole new oven?
(The retailer assured us over the phone that they could not repair it, but had great discounts on new ovens...)
Then suddenly we got into this throw away garbage culture at the slightest sign something stops working.
The only way back is rebooting the system, or having governments step in.
After reading it, I was parsing why I don't return it, and remembered that the other options in our area had their own problems. But now I'm wanting to reconsider.
When does software become a videogame?
Frankly I think this whole "movement" is kinda dumb and deeply misguided.
– it’s intended for entertainment
– it isn’t intended for productive use.
In practise, publishers must get an age rating or stores can’t have the game on the floor and may only sell it to adults, so it’s kind of up to the publisher. You could probably just tie a preservation responsibility to that.
But really, all software should be preserved, so the distinction is kind of pointless anyway.
I think best is to buy a game from these platforms, and as a permanent backup, download a pirated copy of that game.
I holeheartedly agree with it. I used to have a Netflix subscription until about 3 years ago. Then, the quantity and quality of content got so bad, I’ve reverted back to a trusty radarr + sonarr + BitTorrent solution.
Not only it’s faster to have it all hosted locally, but I also don’t go through mindless binge watching as the only content available is that I’ve previously willingly tag it for download.
Now, the only content I pay is when I go to the cinema sometimes when a movie really seems worth it.
You can have your own moral compass. But most people who pirated games didn't do that out of spite. They didn't do that to protest against game-as-a-service or microtransaction or whatever "unethical" practices that the industry adopted.
The community stepped up and started running their own servers. Eventually the game client proper was also rewritten (by one of the guys who would go on to create Kazaa and Skype).
I don't think anyone expects companies to keep servers running for free forever. But if a community steps up, the IP holders should let it.
But I honestly just don't care about video games. If a game company pisses me off, I'm just gonna not play it, and opt for one of the thousands of other games that came out this year. This is needless regulation, and will probably be counterproductive to your interests in the long run.
Not only that, this is such a small problem in the grand scale of things, that I don't know why we're giving it breath. Law makers have far more important things to concern themselves with. This feels like a South Park parody of hand-wringing nerds crying about video games because they have nothing else worthwhile in their life.
politelemon•3h ago
That aside it's surprising to hear about the features-behind-an-app behaviour from Bosch, they've normally been a trusted name in appliances for a long time and it seems even that is no longer going to be true.
gxd•1h ago