I miss the days of VHS and DVD shelfs in homes, for example. If you bought the tapes and had them in your home, no corporate entity could alter those tapes without your consent, monitor how many times you watch them, sell your data to whomever they please without your knowledge, roll out new mandatory conditions to a ‘user agreement,’ or remove them from your library if/when they like.
I noticed some dumb change in how Dictionary definitions are shown in the Spotlight (ie, overall search my computer function) in MacOS this week. I’ve turned off all auto-updates, and I didn’t make that change or consent to it. But despite paying the full price all by myself for this machine, I clearly don’t have 100% control over it. It seems very clearly to me that consumers having control and privacy over their Internet-connected devices is a bygone era.
After Blizzard, the video game company, replaced copies of Warcraft 3 that I and others had paid for in full and installed on our computers that we could play without connecting to the Internet with a lower-quality copy that prohibited offline play - I swore I’d never pay for a video game again, and 3 years later I haven’t backslid on that. I felt so angry, cheated, and robbed by that.
Many people probably won’t be bothered by these things, but I am. I don’t want to pay full price for something that I don’t truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it’s mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.
Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet
I swore I’d never pay for a video game again
The libre software too?
go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet
They’ll obviously win when we run away. We should take the fight to them.
I might’ve misspoke about never paying for a video game again. I do like the look of gog. I’m really out of the loop when it comes to gaming. I like more privacy- and ownership-respecting platforms, and I would (do) pay for those. What I meant was I’d caught a glimpse of the direction of the mainstream gaming industry with WC3, and I realized it wouldn’t work for me and had to get off it. I use LibreOffice. I’ll check out the libre gaming software, thanks!
They’ll obviously win when we run away. We should take the fight to them.
I appreciate your point of view. The way I see it, I think maybe 95/100 people blindly trust big tech companies and 5 of us don’t (to the willing we’ll avoid mainstream social media, for example); the proportion is debatable, but I think it’s a very uneven divide. I don’t think we have enough power to “stick it” to big tech. I also don’t think we need to. I participated in the reddit blackout last summer and then I left it altogether for here (Lemmy), which I enjoy more and want to help grow more than I did the last place. I guess I do want some people to keep big tech in check and whistle-blow, at least to help spread awareness. I guess I’m just not the person for the job, and I think that’s okay. More tech savvy people would do well in those roles :)
Target Discord first. Games are non-essentials. Discord is a tool, beyond any one game, used beyond gaming. Don’t destroy your influence, don’t leave the conversation, don’t leave Steam just yet but use it strategically (and GOG Galaxy isn’t even for Linux).
Tech savvy people aren’t going to come and join our friends and join our family. For libre software by default, we must act.
You don’t need to use GOG Galaxy since you can download the offline installers for any game (including, for some, the Linux version).
Been buying from GOG for years now and never used GOG Galaxy.
It exposes their priorities.
If their priorities were to track customers, incentivise game integration with their store (i.e. gamemaker lock-in) and the possibility of taking games away from customers, all like Steam does, they would not maintain that glaring backdoor for all those priorities that is letting customers download full installers that they can keep and which do not check back with the store on install.
I’m sure that they would like the advantage of tying people (both gamers and gamemakers) to their store, yet clearly they’re not forcing that as Steam does, so what they’re prioritizing (in other words, their priority) is clearly not that.
Given that their unique selling proposition is “no DRM” or more broadly “customer freedom to use the games they bought”, it makes sense that that is GOG’s overriding priority, even if they would also like all the (for a store) nice side-effects of built-in DRM and phone-home installers like Steam’s.
GOG spreads anti-libre software, like Steam, but do they contribute to libre operating system software?
A new linux user will be born soon
This is the way
Jesus, you people are everywhere
(and I love it, lol)
Everyone basically rents all their stuff until they die anyway.
Another problem caused by greedflation: companies want to collect both money and data for every usage
Pirated content is yours forever
So true. As others have remarked on here, entshittification really changes the calculus of “is piracy worth it?”
Many people probably won’t be bothered by these things, but I am. I don’t want to pay full price for something that I don’t truly own. I miss the familiarity. I miss the reliability. I miss feeling like it’s mine. Dependable. Trustworthy.
Picking my old guitar up again has never looked so appealing. I think I want to go back to investing more time, money, and energy into things that aren’t connected to the internet
Upvoted.
Reject the temptations of short term convenience and adopt sustainable consumption.
Demand ownership of goods. Demand offline-first.
You are so right
You can get games on gog, it let’s you download the game files and play it with no DRM and no launcher.
And for the is part it sounds like you want Linux.
I appreciate the rec’s! I did check out gog a bit a month or so ago and thought it did look refreshingly different
yeah gog is cool, also, if you do want to have your OS do the things you want it to do, you should use linux, i could help you switch if you do decide to
Thank you very much, kind Lemmy! I think it makes sense for me to postpone that a bit due to other things going on at the moment. But it was really helpful to vent and to hear words of empathy and support from people like you :)
sounds good, hope you have a good day!
Thanks, Blisterexe - you too :)
Offline anti-libre software still bans us from removing malicious source code.
IMO the “ownership” thing is a red herring. It has its roots in a specifically American obsession with private property.
If everybody “demands ownership of goods”, that means we share nothing. Hardly a model of “sustainable consumption”. There are loads of examples of redundant private ownership of goods. My favorite stat: the average electric drill is used for 7 minutes in its entire life. All because every household in every building on every street must have its own one, instead of us finding a way to share them.
In the context of digital “goods”, “ownership” really just means control. I wish we would use that word instead.
“How many of you own a power drill?” Rachel Botsman, the author of the book The Rise Of Collaborative Consumption, asked the audience at TedxSydney in 2010. Predictably, nearly everyone raised his or her hand. “That power drill will be used around 12 to 15 minutes in its entire lifetime,” Botsman continued with mock exasperation. “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill.”
Great points! Ownership, control, access, possession - these might apply differently to different things. I could see ownership being more relevant than other concepts in digital documentation of one’s genetic information, for example. I think a public library model (ie, access) would work pretty satisfactorily for entertainment media. Our language might have lagged behind the privacy, consumer, and legal concerns of today. My knowledge certainly has, but that can be changed ;)
I immediately deleted this comment. Why is it getting upvoted?
Ownership is control at the end of the day. If you can’t control something you generally can’t own something.
I want to own something and control it fully. I don’t want backdoors.
Feelling the same nere. I’m investing only in indie games nowadays (Indika and The Invincible lately on gog), but I ask to the pirate ship for AAA. Switching to Linux then provided a reliable, immutable environment. I work in the VFX industry and every software I use support Linux and runs incredibly smoothy.
I appreciate you sharing that! Sounds like you got a good thing going
The masters that be are conditioning us for the vision of WEF. Own nothing, be happy.
That first part is mandatory, but the second is optional and very much not guaranteed.
Ah yes, neo-feudalism, I think
I know how you feel, OP. Regarding data collection; right before I was about to buy a, “Robot Vacuum”, I decided to check the security side of things. I learned that some of these vacuums have a camera, for navigation purposes supposedly, and that camera can save everything it captures and send it up to a server. So I’ve put that purchase on pause for now… I need to further investigate what product I can purchase that does not have a built in camera. I can manage the connections it makes to the internet if it needs to of course through something like pi-hole.
I understand your pause on purchasing the robot vacuum. So many of these devices seem designed to collect every bit of your data that they can get their hands on, ostensibly justified by some veneer of convenience to the customer (ie, data livestock) or their ‘safety’ or ‘privacy’ (lol). As someone with lesser tech knowledge than you do to manage such data siphoning, I think it’s safe to say I’ll never be interested in owning a robot vacuum
Check out Valetudo. It turns supported robo vacuums into local only devices. Works amazingly well and integrates with Home Assistant for the whole tech nerd cloudless smart home experience.
I’ve a Dreame L10s Ultra flashed with it, very happy with my purchase. A bit scary to install everything but if you read the instructions before doing it you should be fine :)
Speaking as someone who has gone through several of them from several brands… All the robot vacuums are scams anyway.
The batteries wear out quickly. They are consumable parts not covered by warranty.
The brushes wear out quickly. Also consumable parts not covered by warranty.
The filters eventually become clogged and render the device unusable without replacement. Also consumable and not covered by warranty.
And honestly I would be willing to put up with all of the above if they did a good job vacuuming, but they don’t and won’t.
It’s fine. Connectivity allows subscription services, but doesn’t necessitate them. It’s a power to connect your machine to those of other people in many parts of the world.
It’s like starting to do your dishes in time because of the cockroach problem. Perfectly normal going “underground” when the cockroaches have occupied the kitchen and make laws there.
I have shelves of dvds but I am getting rid of them.
Because you have a server where you stored the movies on?
nope. in most cases streaming works well enough but we do have many on a hard drive from the included itunes.
But why would you get rid of your actually owned stuff? Streaming is low quality bullshit. Back your physical media onto a NAS and you can stream or access your good stuff from there.
Hey Choom, privacy, security and the ability to be in control is worth fighting for.
I hate how short term profits ruin good things for everyone but stakeholders. But there are independent developers, musicians, creator in generel or those who sell their stuff DRM free. Those actual humans are worth supporting and following.
Also having a hobby, like learning and or playing guitar, besides computing seems like a really good ide.
Just looked up some of the latest Movies. You can still get DVDs of that’s what you want. Even in a store with cash.
Is that what you want?
How are you leaning guitar? YouTube, apps, enshitification sites full of ads? Or buying a book?
Thanks for the info! I general sail the seven seas for that suff but thought it was a pretty good example of the larger trend.
I played guitar for 5+ years, never really learning properly, but being able to jam okay. I can’t do that any more, but I have a pretty good knowledge base to start from. It’s probably a matter of I should just do whatever’s fun until I’m picking up the guitar a few times a week regularly - then I can get more focused. For easy-starting fun, that’s probably strumming and singing through songs on a less ad and malware-bloated website. To get serious, I’d like to work with a metronome, maybe finally feel confident with a 12-bar blues, transcribe some solos perhaps. Very old school 😎. Do you play or want to learn?
For the Spotlight issue, was this certainly a local change without consent, or was it a change in the way the query is processed on Apple’s servers?
There is functionally no difference but it’s a big philosphical difference.
It’s a little beyond me, but I was under the impression that the dictionary lookup feature is purely local. Saying that out loud I’m now not so sure lol
Buy CD’s and DvDs. Check if a game has DRM before buying it (or just buy from GoG where DRM is banned). Run some flavor of Linux.
But if you buy from GOG, make sure it doesn’t have DRM, because GOG has been selling a few games that have DRM for a few years now
Oof I haven’t heard of this. That’s like the whole selling point of GoG. What games have DRM?
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1
This is a pretty maintained list, and even if I disagree with the inclusion of some things because all you’re missing is cosmetics, it is pretty easy to argue that “complete game offline” should include all content of that game, so I’m not gonna start a fight about it
Yeah I see the argument that any content behind an internet connection is DRM, but I think that stance is a bit extreme.
There are a handful of real problems on that list, but it’s like 3/20.
It’s important to maintain this list and call them out though. If I can’t expect GoG games to be DRM free I might as well just use Steam where plenty of games are still DRM free but other features of the platform are a bit better.
Thanks for sharing. I (wrongly) assumed all games were entirely 100% DRM free.
DEFCON - Linux: Game contacts a key verification server as described here. Win and Mac have offline executables that skip the verification. But under Linux there is no DRM-free offline executable.
I find this sort of funny.
