…Assuming the flash drive isn’t loaded to the gills with malware alongside of every game it offers to install…that sounds fair.

But let’s be real; No legitimate company stands a chance of doing this without getting sued into oblivion. Unfortunately that means the risk of getting viruses and malware with your purchase, likely ransomware or cryptominer droppers, is really high.

…but let’s assume you’re technical enough that you can disarm all the malware on the USB stick and clean the cruft out of it. Then; yeah…maybe you’ll get your value’s worth.

0.00000003% 3 Satoshis of a percent.

This actually doesn’t surprise me. Valve is getting greedy.

But; to be clear; by using these tools, to unlock the DLC without paying for it, you are cheating in the game. That’s a mere fact; and not a moral judgement of anyone choosing to do so.

Personally, I don’t judge anyone for doing so; and would use these tools myself if I thought a DLC were too predatory, expensive or otherwise unfair to not have it available.

That’s not saying it’s fair or right for Valve to do so; nor is it saying the VAC bans or account suspensions are deserved. If you get hit by this; you absolutely should pirate every title you already own/purchased via Steam right away, and pirate anything else you want in the future.

The only way to make them regret doing things like this is voting with your wallet; and asking others to do the same. Stop spending money on Valve. Once their earnings fall they’ll be forced to hear people’s concerns.

Godspeed. May this measure succeed with all haste and become the new normal.

For once it overtakes one country; others can choose to follow suit as best as they can.

Why Not Both?

In most sharing channels you could possibly just report those to the channel ops (@/&/!/~) and get them kicked or devoiced (removing their (+ or %) state depending on the channel)

I don’t know any channel that would put up with people who wasted your time with DRM’ed files back in the day. It’s less problematic now yes; but still something they don’t want people doing…since you have to be signed in as the purchasing account to de-drm something.

What happens is what’s intended.

Everyone is going to do it; and it will cause companies, artists and creatives to step back and rethink a bit on how they monetize their creations responsibly. The ones that refuse to rethink and adapt will fail and flounder under the tiny handful of straw that Piracy adds to the load.

That’s a GOOD thing.

What’s unfortunate is that companies and people still think it’s productive to worry and handwring over piracy as if it’s killing someone; instead of being the thing you “don’t fly too close to, lest your wax wings get melted off and you plummet to the ground.”

You can automate this; but you have to make sure that the automation you create is going to respect the ratelimits. I’d recommend something simple like using a command alias or short script written for your specific IRC client.

It’s what I used to do with that sort of thing; and there are plenty of well known Open Source scripts in the wild as well

As an example; I would use mIRC with it’s scripting system and write my own event trigger scripts to automatically request, wait for and then accept the DCC chat requests and route them appropriately in the interface. There were also scripts that helped with getting the lists; unpacking them, and displaying those lists in my client…so I didn’t have to extract the text from the zip myself, and could select what I needed from the bot.

All of this was lightweight automation that was intended not to flood the bot with commands and fed into command queueing modules that let the bots have time to process.

Sometimes in those days you could get actually (+b)anned, Auto/KILL’ed or /(G/K):LINE’ed for causing a bot to crash…so you had to be careful and respectful with regard to scripts.

TL;DR; know your bot, source channel & network rules, and write your own scripts for safety or read any scripts you import in carefully and understand what they’re doing.

Your comment missed the mark entirely. Please don’t reply-guy me; I know what I’m talking about.

So much for using airplane mode to conserve battery.

Your understanding is slightly off.

Airplane mode Does In Fact Turn off your CELLULAR Radio This radio is what powers your (2/3/4/5)G and LTE (This is 4G btw) connection to the cell towers.

Most international radio communications laws can prohibit the use of Cellular Radio in flight; however they often don’t prohibit the use of shorter range radio technologies such as WIFI or Bluetooth.

It’s all about ‘loudness’. Think about it. Your phone must ‘scream louder’ at a farther away cell tower than it would need to communicate with a nearby WiFi router or a Bluetooth headset.

This is factually wrong; as installed plugins aren’t accessible to just any webpage…and plugins actually exist that obscure this anyways.

Not to mention there’s more hardened forks of modern browsers that don’t share plugin information anyways.

Aye; I remember GPM, and before they enshittified it into the ground, it was damn near comparable to Spotify.

While this feed issue is manageable if you Pause Your Watch History and Clear Your Watch History before doing so; it does disable a lot of suggestions.

Unfortunately Google and YouTube do not make these options easy to find and they are quick to nag you about turning them back on; and You Must Refuse This and ignore the errors and whines at every prompt for a while before they leave you alone.

So by it’s very nature NewPipe completely defuses this garbage by simply being a much saner front-end than using the “Native” YouTube apps ever were.

You know I think YouTube might start learning their lesson if more and more people began refusing to use their scummy front-end more than strictly necessary. Unfortunately they’re going to go through the usual stages of grief while doing so and they absolutely are currently trying to attack apps like GrayJay and NewPipe with spurious lawsuits.

So instead; maybe those of you who “Pay” for YouTube Premium should simply cancel your service and start donating that amount to projects like NewPipe, when that is possible. (Yes I know Team NewPipe will not accept donations for legal reasons, but similar projects do exist, like FreeTube or Invidious, that can and do accept donations to cover costs for server hosted things in their developments.)

The best way to prevent misuse of the Comstock Act is to hit them where it hurts. Find out what items their funders sell or trade in the most; then find logical ways to link it to sex or abortion.

Pretty soon you’ll gum up all trade and they will cry for mercy.

The best way to prevent misuse of the Comstock Act is to hit them where it hurts. Find out what items their funders sell or trade in the most; then find logical ways to link it to sex or abortion.

Pretty soon you’ll gum up all trade and they will cry for mercy.

Mandatory https://archive.is/Dt8FX link

With that being said; I do fully support an Instance’s choice to federate, not federate or even limit their federation with them.

In most cases this should not affect instances; but unfortunately there are people who will ignore all warnings and use the Fedi Garden as a whitelist instead of a list of instances that you know will handle policy violations quickly.

On the other hand I absolutely also respect the needs of communities who ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY WILL NOT TOLERATE instances who choose to federate with either X, Threads, or any other instance they deem to be too toxic to play nicely. As instance operators you absolutely have the right to block problems BEFORE they happen, and if you happen to KNOW an instance will absolutely be a HEADACHE, you have every right to say NO. If the users do not like your decision; they are free to find a better instance for themselves; or spin up an alt account on a better instance.

I would argue that federating with either of the biggest companies on the fediverse is a monumentally bad idea.

Not just because of “Reports of genocide” or anything specious like that; which can be debated for days and days on end by people in both good and bad faith; but because both Threads and Meta are simply too large to be moderated correctly and be capable of managing basic issues such as harrassment and extended bouts of hate-speech which should never be considered acceptable; even if you do not necessarily agree with all of the goals and policies of the Fedi Garden; as strict as they are.

Copying is not theft. It does not remove the original.

If I send you a PDF copy of a book that I own, that I scanned into a PDF myself; that is not theft, that is ownership. So long as I make you pay nothing for that copy; and I do mean $0.00, I cannot charge you for any costs incurred while making that copy; I am not breaking the law until a judge summons me before them and tells me I am abusing my rights and are summarily breaking the law in another manner as is judge’s right to do.

I own the physical book and I am allowed to enjoy it in any manner I see fit…including loaning the book to you physically or digitally in perpetuity.

The law supports and recognizes fair use and ownership. It is up to us not to abuse that ownership. I do not recommend making 1,000,000,000 copies of a book and giving them away just because you are mad at the author. That’s an asshole move and likely to get the metaphorical judge I described involved in the matter.

Similarly; it is an asshole move for a content creator to sell you a copy of a book or some other media and then go about trying to tell you how you may or may not enjoy the material you just purchased. They can recommend ways to enjoy it; but they do not have an enforceable right, even through contracts, to tell you that you cannot exercise your ownership rights in a certain way…unless you overdo it to asshole levels and a judge and/or the police get involved.

In most cases either they filled option 1; or having no access to a purchase option they feel is reasonable fills option 2.

Few people, if any, are truly rank 15. I don’t give a damn what the corporate folks say or think. Most of the time they’re basically blaming the victims of their own poor decision making anyways.

I don’t agree that Rank 10 should be placed where it is; it is more akin to Rank 15 in similarity…the attitude is more entitled than it should be. Ripping your own copy should be something you are not only allowed; but encouraged to do…as it often nullifies any content protection that might interfere with your right to enjoy the content that you purchased in a way that the rights holder didn’t expect. Furthermore it removes all doubt that your digital copy is legitimate, as you derived it from a physical copy that you already own…and have fair use doctrine as well as purchase license and access to.

Ripping your physical copies is also a further message to creators that DRM and Copy Protection is an unacceptable format.

As an additional note: I firmly believe that people who sell copies of things they pirated are ranked at 15. They are blatantly ignoring the law for no justifiable reason. You as a customer purchasing from those people are not liable for their law breaking however; similar to how you are not liable for people who are ignoring the law by handing out free pirated copies to everyone. The burden of breaking the law is upon the one committing the crime.

The reason I advocate ripping your own copies; is simple. If you got caught with a copy you obtained from someone else’s physical copy; you could be reasonably ordered by a judge to “Forfeit (delete all copies in your possession of) that illegitimate copy”. It’s likely to happen when they catch the person making the illegal copies. Ripping your own personal digital copy from your physical copy is provably not piracy. It’s a different act altogether; as you are using something you already own within your rights of possession and property. Instead, ripping your own copies is legal preservation.