cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/44122961
After decades of living in a linux-FOSS world, I noticed these games at a 2nd-hand street market:
- Starcraft (few different versions/themes)
- Age of Empires (few different versions/themes)
- Civilization
They were a dollar each, so why not. I grabbed. Got home, installed win7 on a machine someone dumped on a curb, but could not install any of the games b/c I live offline. Fucking hell.
When I last played Starcraft well over a decade ago, I lived online and probably thought nothing of it. But it seems clear this shitty requirement is an anti-sharing policy because these games do not inherently need Internet. You can play against the machine or on a LAN. It’s not just the elitist exclusive WAN requirement that pisses me off… there’s a privacy issue too. And what happens when I enter the product key of a used CD? They probably have a tolerance on how many times that can happen, perhaps dependant on whether the hardware changes. Fuck the nannying.
Also consider that Blizzard and Microsoft servers are not going to run forever. They can pull the plug at any time and then no one can install their game. Should be illegal to make installation needlessly dependant on a service. Forced obsolescence.
Some of these games also require a CD to be inserted, which means you must have a fucking noisey CD drive attached at all times. Back when these games were made it was no big deal because all laptops and desktops had CD drives. Not anymore. I’m mostly annoyed by having to insert the disc, wait for it to spin, then I have to hear the loud spin as I play which also wastes power. So I installed Alcohol 120 to image the Warcraft 3 disc (which I still had from yrs past). It has 3 different versions of the crack for the particular shitty scheme used on WC3. None of the images work.
Obviously if I want to play these games I will need warez versions. How good are those dodgy distros these days? I can imagine some are just the original content but you still enter a product key (which I have anyway). But if they still need a WAN that won’t cut it for me. Do the warez versions overcome all these issues? Are they still in circulation?
Alternatively, I should ask, have there been any versions of these games repackaged and re-released for the retro gamers which don’t impose the shitty protections and server dependencies?
If not, I must say unlicensed cracked versions would be the most ethical ones:
- designed obsolescence thwarted
- privacy kept
- more inclusive (offline ppl and those without CD drives)
- better UX (no fiddling with discs and hearing the spin)
UPDATE
I am surprised about how much attention this thread got. The versions of software I experienced are as follows:
- Age of Empires III
- Starcraft II Wings of Liberty
- Starcraft II Legacy of the Void
- Civilization V
AoE does not require Internet… sorry for any misinfo I implied on that. AoE did not install because of a graphics driver issue that caused the installer to detect 0mb RAM on the video card. It ran fine offline after fixing the driver. The only fault w/AoE is the perpetual demand for a CD to be inserted.
The other three games certainly require Internet. It’s in fact written on the boxes so they covered their asses legally.
You seem to have a strong distinction between direct vs internal systems. I think you underestimate how easy it is to add a facade and convert a direct dependency into an internal one. In software this is called “adding a layer of indirection”. For example, if the government wanted to hide the fact that they use MS for email, they can simply use email aliases. If you send an email to someservice@website.gov, you will have no idea what provider they are using (assuming that they take measures to hide it).
I was talking about minimizing third-party dependencies, not minimizing data abuse.
Those same creators would work just as hard to work around laws that require offline access. Because as you just established, they want to protect their games from being copied, and online access is their technological measure for doing so. These game creators would just add an online leaderboard to their games and say it’s an essential component.
But if we go so far to abolish copyright, presumably other forms of creator compensation would become dominant. Forms that don’t rely on copy restrictions. After all, not all industries can just add DRM and technological measures to protect their creations. Photographers and digital artists also want to protect their works.
Though this is a big topic I’d rather not get into. I’ll just say that trying to force game companies to provide offline playability, is fairly unrealistic. I’ll wait to see how the “Stop Killing Games” initiative shakes out.
An alias would not shield them from an MX lookup (which is exactly what I do before sharing an email address).
Nonetheless, that’s just a technical nuance… your underlying point is still valid. A better example for expressing your point is the use of e-mail firewalls. I once did an MX lookup on an agency which resulted in something like “barracudanetworks.xyz”. I erroneously concluded: that’s not a surveillance advertiser so I will share my email with them. Then they later emailed me from a Microsoft server.
Email firewalls like barracuda effectively hide the role of MS, thus making MX lookups inconclusive. That opacity gives me a tangible thread of ammunition in court when the shit hits the fan because I would have no way of knowing that barracuda feeds Microsoft for that particular recipient. But then how does this play into your thesis? The gov has a choice of whether or not to use an email firewall like that. To support your position of forced-digital-transformation, you would have to mandate that a firewall like barracuda be used by all gov agencies. Of course from there who’s to say everyone trusts barracuda networks?
To be clear, I was talking about /minimization of data/, not abuse, but for the ultimate effect of mitigating data abuses. So that’s what I thought you were suggesting. As for minimizing third-party dependencies, I would certainly praise such a movement. But it’s unrealistic. There are far too many right-wing conservatives. Increasingly so. The hard-right crowd pushes for the extreme opposite. They love capitalism and want all gov services to be privitized to the full extent possible. They want everything outsourced and they are succeeding in that mission. Countless cases where privatization is abusive, inappropriate, and ineffective proliferates in the US.
So I suppose your question is: what if we could hypothetically pass a law the forces the gov to insource everything. It’s borderline crazy talk. Does that mean there should be government farms to provide food for those incarcerated in prison? It’s very unrealistic that you could ever have a minimization of outsourcing. So then the devil is in the details of where exceptions are made. Even in the digital space, surely some gov agencies would make a case for why they need MS OS on their platform because they have some specific special needs. It would be a game of exceptions… a mess by which abusive admins would make uncredible cases for why they should have MS Windows and whatever other garbage. It’s an impossible line to maintain.
So in this hypothetical world where outsourcing is banned, that would eliminate some of my problems with forced-digital-transformation. But it doesn’t wholly address the privacy issue (e.g. an insourced resource could still needlessly collect IP addresses). I doubt any of these problems would be sufficiently addressed in my lifetime to justify forced-digital engagement.
Sure, but to be clear I don’t think I ever said game makers should be mandated by law to support offline gamers. I winged about a problem without prescribing a solution. The solution could be a consumer boycott. Or it could be gov action. I think a somewhat effective gov action might be to simply state that copyrights are forfeited by artificial game requirements. Game makers would then have to choose between legal protections and purely tech protections. Whatever attempt they make to “work around” the law could also be regarded as an “artificially-imposed constraint”.
There is no perfect solution. Certainly across the board abandonment of copyright would not solve this problem. Which is not to say it’s a bad idea.
I agree. But it’s important to recognize that “force” comes in many forms. There is gov force; then there is market force (by which consumers boycott, for example). I will of course use what little force I have at my disposal, which is to never buy a game with absurd artificial constraints.
My point is that if you truly want boycott power, even when dealing with mandatory government services, then you need to minimize third-party dependencies for those government services.
You rightfully recognize the difficulty of such a proposition. Let’s say the government outsourced prison food to www.pizza.com. Then those prisoners would not be able to boycott www.pizza.com.
So if you recognize that boycott power has to be waived in certain cases for practical reasons, then it is fairly reasonable that you might just have to use MS to use a government service. Offline access is very expensive to provide, and very few people want it, thus it’s not a practical alternative.
That’s not necessarily true. Sure that’s the case in some situations, but in those situations it’s orthoganol to the discussion of forced-digital participation anyway. In the other cases (where an analog means successfully avoids a 3rd-party), then we get boycott power not otherwise possible in a forced-digital infra.
Prisoners could boycott in that case by way of hunger strike. In less barbaric countries their human rights would prevail and the food would be sourced from elsewhere. Either way, whether the possibility exists or not, this scenario does nothing to support a forced-digital world that strips us of autonomy.
There are obviously more such cases under a forced-digital regime. Waiving boycott power is not a good thing. Having analog mechanisms reduces the loss of boycott power.
But it’s not reasable. We (both the gov and the people) can function without MS. Being artificially forced to lick MS boots is a loss of important freedoms.
Indeed in the end forced-digital is just all about saving a buck at the expense of our freedom.
I wouldn’t just dismiss it as “obvious” when that’s the topic of the entire discussion. You first have to prove that digital methods make it harder to boycott certain companies. We already discussed how offline access can still use third-party services when processing the data (like OCR services). And on the flip side, digital methods can avoid third party dependencies (like the government hosting their own email).
Maybe try to convince the other citizens to pay more taxes in order to maintain an offline system. Forcing everybody to pay for a system that that most don’t care about, isn’t very “free” either
It’s obvious. Forced-digital implies fewer options. In a liberated society where we have digital /and/ analog options, there are at least two different supply chains; one for the digital mechanism and one for the analog. Forced digital obviously reduces the options. Of course, because cost savings is the purpose to begin with. You’re not going to have a public service that needlessly creates multiple different supply chains for the same digital task. Such a move would not be compatible with the /sole/ purpose of forced digital (which is an attempt to save money-- although without accounting for the cost of increased risk due to reduced national security as a consequence of being helpless when Russian or N.Korean cybercriminals cripple a non-redundant infra).
No “proof” necessary. It naturally follows from having fewer options that a boycott becomes unsurmountable. It’s plainly obvious that fewer options implies a loss of boycott options.
Not generally. Offline access has an /opportunity/ for outsourcing but to a lesser extent than digital. Public services outsource email service to 3rd parties (and they are almost always nefarious, controversial, boycott-worthy adversaries of pro-humanity folks). At the same time, public services usually do not outsource the opening of envelopes to a 3rd party. They could, but even if they did 2 options is better than one for ethical citizens.
Govs are notoriously incompetent with deploying their own digital services. Unlike analog, where the gov has long ago developed the competency to perform analog tasks.
Not realistically, no. There are hundreds of thousands of governments in the world. Not a single one chooses to do this in any of the regions I have lived in. It is far more realistic to insource the opening of envelopes than it is to insource email. You might be thinking 1980s email. But it’s no longer manageable in-house for governments under a 2026 threat model.
If every gov agency were to insource their own email, the cost of that endeavor would more than offset any theoretical savings that might be envisioned by dispensing with the analog variant. Note as well that a portion of the savings you want to rely on is due to surveillance advertisers profiting from the data they exploit, which enables them to subsidize gov services. So that cost “savings” comes at the hidden expense of our privacy. In any case, if you would name a government who insources their own email service, I might find that anecdotally interesting.
Not needed. Taxes have increased in the face of digital transformation. Taxes were lower prior to the digital infra.
Let’s not conflate free as in freedom w/free as in gratis. To have more options is to have more freedom. Oppression to save a buck saves a buck of public money, not your own. In fact you might be required to buy and/or maintain some technology along with service subscriptions.
This does not relate to the tax paid by individuals. Revenue is disjoint. The US demonstrates this. The US has figured out that taxpayers have a particular level of tolerance. Exceeding people’s limits drives them either to do some creative accounting, flee, or cheat. So the revenue is already set at what the IRS can get away with, which is then independent of costs. It does not increase just because some gov agency opens some envelopes.
I also don’t give a shit if someone like Elon Musk must pay more tax in the end. Where the revenue comes from can make for a long discussion for sure.