4 ms·
My vote could be swayed by a policy platform making it not merely forbidden, but outright criminal, to market software and hardware that cannot function without
by inopinatus 2y ago
My vote could be swayed by a policy platform making it not merely forbidden, but outright criminal, to market software and hardware that cannot function without assignment of a user id. Everything from drones to games.
In many cases this would thoroughly annoy certain authoritarian regimes that are normalised as totalitarian surveillance states. Their exports would be disrupted. What a pity.
- jackvalentine 2y agoSo, world of Warcraft is illegal now?
- korse 2y agoYou may be aware, but you can acquire and use the World of Warcraft client without signing up for anything with Blizzard. You register and pay to connect to their servers.
- bslanej 2y agoFirst, to download the world of Warcraft client, you need to log into the battlenet client, which requires an account. Second, the world of Warcraft client is completely useless without a server to connect to. Alternative world of Warcraft servers are technically possible but illegal to run.
- gkbrk 2y agoImplementing a network protocol is not illegal. Neither is writing a server.
- bslanej 2y agoYou have to reverse engineer the protocol encryption, which is illegal in some places. Also, lots of copyrighted material such as NPC names and quest text must be stored in the server and transmitted from the server to the client, which is piracy in plain terms.
- jackvalentine 2y agoThis is a dumb take - WoW wouldn’t “function” to a reasonable person’s interpretation of that word without a login.
- beezlewax 2y agoI agree with this. I have an LG TV it basically forces you to agree to sharing data to function everytime it update. TVs are used by multiple people too so how does that even track legally. My partners will fly through menus agreeing to everything if I'm not there. I'm using a universal remote that doesn't have a microphone and it complains about that too.
- lazyeye 2y agoI find a drop of superglue in the remote microphone is very helpful for retaining a basic level of privacy.
- technothrasher 2y agoMy Pi-hole logs are filled mostly with my LG TV and my Roku box. I get literally thousands of hits a day with them trying to phone home.
- n3storm 2y agoI have been using a linux minipc with debian+xfce for more than 15 years and no regrets. Yes having a keyboard with touchpad looked like a bit cumbersome at first, but then when al tvs went smart using an onscreen keyboard with a rf mouse is a nightmare.
- FloatArtifact 2y agoWhat do you do about Netflix or other apps? They have reduced video quality without being on a certified device.
- phkahler 2y agoGet a firestick for those apps
- justinrubek 2y agoThey've sealed their own fate with such a poor decision.
- sokoloff 2y agoWouldn’t a phone be illegal under that scheme? (Because of the phone number being required for function and being a user-id.)
- tliltocatl 2y agoNo, because that is service, not hardware.
- sokoloff 2y agoI think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure. If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)
- justinrubek 2y agoThey can add all the services they want to their drone. As long as I'm not required to use them.
- Jensson 2y ago> I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure. You should be able to use your phone and install software on it without signing up for the sellers services, I think there is no reason to not allow that except evil lockin. See windows for what happens when you don't legally enforce that, its ridiculous windows forces you to sign up to their services.
- inopinatus 2y agoEven then, almost all online services are susceptible to re-imagining such that user/session identifiers are self-declared and can be rotated/discarded at any time. To this, some folks would be yelling, "that's not how my/XYZ service works", which is a proxy statement for those unwilling to say, "my/XYZ business model is abusive". And that of course is also why this only happens via regulation.
- phkahler 2y ago>> Everything from drones to games. And computers. Sure it's a good idea to have a password, but that's not the same as a user ID registered with a company.