4 ms·
General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be lock
by jerf 2mo ago
General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.
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 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.
- inigyou 2mo agoAnd it's very hard but fame-inducing and illegal to defeat locks.
- flerchin 2mo ago1. Hard. No. 2. Fame-inducing. No. 3. Illegal. Maybe where you live.
- inigyou 2mo agoReally? You cracked Denuvo?
- goodmythical 2mo agoDenuvo doesn't exist in a vast majority of games. It's not even used in all modern games.
- nemomarx 2mo agoDenuvo cracks have sped up a lot lately, and usually take two months or less.
- inigyou 2mo agoBecause the system itself has been thoroughly defeated. Apparently GGP did that, because they think it isn't hard.
- not_a9 2mo agoback.engineering folks seem to imply that Denuvo is another case of virtualization based obfuscator being vulnerable to a symbolic execution/optimization approach. > As AI assisted static deobfuscation continues to improve we will see more virtual machine based obfuscators fold away. In an upcoming article we will publish details on how we fully statically devirtualized Denuvo anti(tamper/cheat). One of the most attacked pieces of software second only to anticheats. …or you can not bother with analyzing at all and just feed correct CPUID/shared data/whatever values to Denuvo, like the hypervisor thing does. https://back.engineering/blog/31/07/2026/ https://back.engineering/blog/31/07/2026/
- not_a9 2mo agoTo add to this, the obfuscation used for their anticheat seems to be… kinda bad? Worse than Epic’s virtualizer/Griffin probably https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/entry/2026/08/06/032440 https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/entry/2026/08/06/032440 Mind you, odds are their anti-tamper/DRM is a different case.
- ragazzina 2mo ago>and I maintained it How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
- autoexec 2mo agoRip them to a hard drive and they're yours forever.
- otaconjh 2mo agoremember that time all of the frontier AI labs trained their models on copyrighted material and no one batted an eyelid? If they can do that, I don't see why I can't back up my CD's and DVDs or digital purchases with digital copies sourced from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...
- saghm 2mo agoThe obvious risk is that you don't have nearly as much budget to spend on lawyers if someone does come after you for it. The copyright system tends to disproportionately punish small players and not punish larger ones.
- queenkjuul 2mo agoPersonal backup copies are fully legal, RIAA and MPA admit as much on their own websites; this was settled back in the VHS and cassette tape era
- saghm 2mo agoThe part I was responding to was "with digital copies sourced from the high seas". The premise that they were responding to was if the only domestically available media playing devices required subscriptions. It's not clear why the assumption would be that getting content from arbitrary international online sources would be something that isn't also sanctioned in this scenario. That doesn't mean the entire scenario is likely, but if that's the objection, then why reply to me and not the original comment proposing it?
- jonhohle 2mo ago> An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too. First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games. I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.
- jerf 2mo agoLock in isn't about physical versus digital. This came up a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138750 Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free.
- overfeed 2mo ago> Lock in isn't about physical versus digital. I fully disagree with this statement, it equates very unequal scenarios. > Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free. Disks can't be locked-in - the OEM console that runs them can. Platform emulators can't be locked-in: MAME, Dolphin, RPCS3, Eden, etc offer user freedom, and all depend on access to the game's physical media in order to dump, rip, or play directly off of. You need an exploit and/or decryption key to archive a game on a locked-down, downloads-only disk-free console. Something valuable is lost when there is a forced physical to digital transition. When represented on a quadrant wirh physical/digital on one axis and locked-down/open on the other, the locked-down + disk quadrant can be nullified by user-controlled emulators. Until recently, this quadrant had a lot of games, while digital+open is nearly empty, save for GoG, old non-steam, Humble Bundle games, quirky Indie games, and old game DVDs on a shelf.
- f055 2mo agoI would hope an old Xbox One disconnected from LAN and WiFi, with a GTA VI DVD inside, could start the game just fine.
- 2mo ago
- BiteCode_dev 2mo agoOr for cheaper, you can sail the high sea. You build a collection of music, movies and games that will last you a lifetime for free. Then you can spend the saved money on supporting artists you like, studios you respect or buy a locked on guilty pleasure once in a while. No reason to play by the rules if decency is not in the picture anymore.