Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a third party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)

Or am I missing something about the process?

Yeah I’m not paying for something and it still be illegal. I’d rather stick to piracy. I get your point and if it works for you that’s cool. But it’s not for me.

A good usenet setup with the Arr stack can automatically download basically anything you want and costs tens of dollars per year to run with very little, if any risk. (have there been any prosecutions for people downloading from usenet?)

With a little bit of work and an old computer for a server you can basically run your own automated piracy streaming service.

Disagree. In order to keep those keys secure they can’t publish them, so they’ll have to license some sort of decryption chip. That just pushes the price up as some manufacturer ends up taking a cut from every player sale.

Also means you can’t do what you want with it. You probably can’t play it on an open source device. Etc etc.

I won’t. “Copy protection” is much more about restricting and potentially even removing your access to something you’ve paid for than it is about preventing copying. I am not willing to buy something that can be revoked when alternatives are available.

I know, I modified it to make more sense for video.

I know. I changed the terms. Pray I don’t change them further.

Someone go make Steam for videos and I’ll pay for media again. My stipulations are:

• Once I buy it, it’s mine forever (otherwise piracy is better)
• The file is high quality, DRM free, and in a selection of standard formats (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can redownload it from the service at any time (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can get everything I want to watch (otherwise piracy is better)

Guaranteed they’d find a way to double dip. Price gouging, restricting content behind further paywalls, adding ads anyway… absolutely they’ve investigated all those and undoubtedly more.

Switch to Firefox, Chrome is their biggest lever to force this kind of stuff onto people. While Firefox exists and it remains uncool for them to block it they’ll have to compete against piracy and adblockers which will limit their ability to aggressively monetise.

Switch to firefox!

I know, but those techniques are more likely to cause selection weirdness than flexbox/etc, which is why I mention them specifically.

On mobile: multiple top and bottom tool/nav bars that automatically show/hide themselves when you scroll. They’re invariably more irritating than if they were just pinned at the top of the page (or perhaps viewport, but ideally page - I can scroll to the top of I want it back)

On desktop: animations tied to scrolling.

Anywhere: any kind of popup, modal, etc that I didn’t click on something to get. Please fuck alllllllll the way off.

The browser implements the text selection behaviour, but how infuriating it is depends on how convoluted your page construction is.

On a simple page with no floats, overlaid elements, negative margins, absolute positioning, hidden stuff, and other css layout tomfoolery, it’s perfectly predictable. It’s only when designers do designer things does it start to break down.

“Winning” is like making it to max level in a mmorpg. It’s not the end but it is the beginning of the endgame.

Best of luck with that.

I mean I’m still out here rawdogging usenet without a vpn. I keep waiting for the great crackdown on usenet but it never comes… Surely that comes before any VPN crackdown.

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One gold upvote costs $2, the recipient might get either $0.90 or perhaps $1. But most likely they’ll get nothing.

But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.

The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.

All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.

But for now… it’s pretty good.

Gimme dat blowhole mod

Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.

You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.

Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?