The first thing in my view is reliable storage medium. The professional CD you bought ( likely not the one you burn with CD-R ) 20 - 30 years ago would still work in a CD player today. The same going with Gaming CD / DVD / Cartridge.
But Network has completely taken over and we loss that. Even Nintendo Switch 2 Game Card is now only going to be a Game Key.
I am not entirely sure we could solve that with technology. Network has gotten so cheap, and will continue to get faster and cheaper that I think may be in a way there is no point competing.
And if we cant do that. Let say we cant make a write once / a few times 128GB NAND product that last 50 years and cost less than a dollar to make.
May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer that the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.
It is getting ridiculous that both Google, Apple thinks they own everything I paid for. They think they are merely renting out their tech to me, both hardware and software.
> May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer than the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.
Why rely on the original publisher? Let me download it and then share it.
I think it's a much simpler requirement that the product be functional without "phoning home" and when the original prosper stops selling it then libraries abd torrents and archive websites step in.
”real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”
To play the devil/right holder's advocate, the next turn in that game is to never "sell" anything, so you won't have "bought" the content nor have any standard codified right to it.
We're already there in many places of course, and many stores have already replaced the "buy" action with more ambiguous wording.
Next turn to that being people turning to the seventh' seas, and then we have again an iTunes Store/Steam moment, and the cycle goes on.
As an owner of 30+ year old CDs, that isn't necessarily the case. Some of them don't work particularly well these days. I went through a streaming thing for about 10 years but am moving back to physical media now. When I went to re-rip my CDs to FLAC I found some serious issues with a number of CDs which were chock full of errors around the edges.
Anyway after this I decided, fuck it, screw reliable storage or buying things on media. I'll buy it in a digital form and keep moving it around in less reliable media (mostly SSDs) until I'm dead.
I don't care about ownership. I care about not having to buy things twice and care about things I've bought being taken away. That's slightly different.
> available for us to download for at least x number of years.
The company should be obliged to keep hosting all digital assets they've ever sold to an end consumer.
And the law should be that when they want to get rid of this responsibility they have to remove the DRM first.
Of course they could just jump to subscription model entirely where you never own anything, but even that would be at least more honest than the present state.
What if the company goes bankrupt? And what if the company "sells" the IP to a subsidiary which then "goes bankrupt", as a means to offload this responsibility?
There is no solution here unless you force it to be available on day one.
If you go bankrupt but have a thing I lent you, I should get the thing back. If you go bankrupt and you have game binaries you were supposed to host for me, you give me the binaries and the encryption keys so I can make the thing work.
The sleight of hand companies pulled at some point in the past twenty years is that they made us believe we're buying stuff that we're just renting, but we need to go back to ownership. That puts the burden onto the company to make sure you can always get the thing they decided to withhold from you.
If I'm buying a software license from a company, I am not lending the company anything, by any stretch of the imagination. You can view it as a type of limited sale, or you can view it as me renting something from the company. But in either case, they don't have any traditional legal obligations to me in case of bankruptcy.
And my point was not that the current situation is fine and dandy. It was that a law that says "sell licenses for restricted purposes today, but if you want to stop selling these 10 years from now, you'll have to do X and Y at that time" can't work - the company will find some way to discharge that obligation through sales and bankruptcy.
What would work would be an obligation at the time of sale - say, you could sell software licenses with conditional functionality, but only if you provide proof that you have an archived version stored with a third party that would be released to all customers in case of your bankruptcy. Since the cost would have already been paid, there would be no way to discharge this obligation during bankruptcy or dissolution or other similar mechanisms.
Does this matter if you can make a digital copy (cd, cartridge, online game download) ? I think the key issue is ownership, not media. If you pay for a game it should be yours; up to you to back it up, etc, but yours. That's the legislation that needs to be set and explicit. Regulate an option to buy or outlaw licensing for obvious products; games, software apps that serve a purpose (office apps, cad, etc). I'm not sure how we get around online only apps though. We should be able to own stuff without having to be on a network. I would pay a premium for that, but it really should be the standard. It should be obvious that such things are ridiculously burdonsome and consumer unfriendly. We know the current regime in the USA is unfriendly to this but I think most voters would prefer this to the tyrannical methods companies currently use to "protect their IP" yet someone they are still making huge profits before and after it became a trend.
That's okay. You can rip the CD in a few minutes with even the crappiest drive and then use any music player you want. Slightly more annoying but the music is safe.
If I can't throw it in a box for 30+ years then it's not a reliable storage medium.
A server that uses parity drives and regular data checks is a reliable system built on top of unreliable storage. It achieves the same data integrity but it's a lot more annoying and difficult to deal with.
A huge stack of m-discs is not a good option either.
I have a NAS with many terabytes of data stored on ZFS too, but this isn't a solution to the problem because the problem isn't technical one, it's a social one.
We need regulations around this kind of stuff and governments that are willing to break up companies that monopolize industries.
Companies like Autodesk and Adobe for instance have far too much control over very critical markets and the revenue that they extract from them allows them to lock down software in very onerous ways.
No amount of spinning rust and ZFS is going to make running offline versions of Fusion360 or Photoshop easy for the common person.
>>Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us
>Fusion360 or Photoshop
Not my Software not my Problem. Ask your country to support alternatives [1] for this kind of software. You're right that critical software is concentrated among a small group of providers. But an even bigger problem is that they're not open source and are sold under US laws (patents, licenses, restrictions etc..).
That’s true it’s ridiculous. But I kind of view most on my phone as a toy/convenient gadget. Ofc there are important things on it, mfa keys etc, but somehow I just care that I own my laptop and desktop computers. But maybe I think so because iPhone is locked down..
hoseyor wrote multiple interesting comments on this thread that seem to have gotten shadowbanned. (I didn't flag or ban them, this was hours ago).
(@hoseyor if you could repost more toned-down soberly-worded versions of those comments, without directly accusing multiple prominent tech companies of fraud, I think you'd get more traction.)
I'm trying to understand what you're asking for that isn't available. Reliable portable storage? Isn't that what a portable SSD is? They start at like $60 for 1TB and get way cheaper per TB as you go up. Are you talking about a gaming-specific storage product/complaint specifically?
If the complaint is that large game distributors work to make it hard for you to store the bits on that SSD, yeah I totally hear you.
I think he’s referring that it’s becoming harder and harder to buy media stored in that medium, nowadays most content is only available tough streaming services.
For those people the only way to obtain a digital local copy is via torrent.
May not be the sure thing you think. A lot of (professional, pressed, retail)P Blu Rays are failing quite young. Less than a decade in some cases. Density is a bitch.
Network will not continue to get cheaper. Not because of technology limitation, but because of good ol' capitalist monopoly power. Google and Apple don't think they own your stuff and rent to you, they do. The purpose of a system is what it does. We will eventually hit the point when network (via subscription, fees, TOS, and whatever else nonsense they can think of) will be so restrictive and cost-prohibitive that physical media will seem like a miracle cure.
I notice that there's a comment on video from Ross Scott (Accursed Farms), who started the related Stop Killing Games (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) campaign; it's not mentioned in the video itself but you may want to check it out.
He wants to reach as large an audience as possible, and being perfectly principled isn't the way to go. Self-hosted platforms are great if you want to preach to the choir.
I'm not saying there aren't benefits or that it doesn't work. Sometimes people have to buy self-help books about not shopping or eat more food to lose weight. It's still ironic.
it doesn't seem like they care very much about owning videos, the irony would be more if they rented a tractor to drive up to your house and explain the issue.
He's primarily about "right to repair" physical things, not so much self-hosting videos. I think its an important message and he has really spent an enormous amount of time and resources on it and I don't know if he has gotten much benefit from it other than, arguably, publicity.
He is talking about owning the things you purchase with your money. LIke say you buy a device but you are not allowed to repair it or upgrade it, you "buy" a piece of software but you do not actually own it or have any rights on it.
What's ironic about using a reliable, free platform to reach your 2.2 million subscribers with what would otherwise be a difficult and expensive to distribute video?
I don't think you understand irony. Announcing a campaign for ownership via an outlet you don't own is ironic. Read the definition. Irony is not a comment on the campaign's actual or potential efficacy.
It would not be ironic to distribute your ownership-promoting materials through the mail while not owning the post office. There is nothing about YouTube that reduces a creator's stake in their video.
There's some key differences there. 1, the post office doesn't keep your material on hand so people can visit and consume it. 2, you have to pay the post office each transaction. 3, the post office is taxpayer subsidized and administered by elected officials.
Again, I did not say what they are doing is bad, wrong, or whatever.
The first thing in my view is reliable storage medium. The professional CD you bought ( likely not the one you burn with CD-R ) 20 - 30 years ago would still work in a CD player today. The same going with Gaming CD / DVD / Cartridge.
But Network has completely taken over and we loss that. Even Nintendo Switch 2 Game Card is now only going to be a Game Key.
I am not entirely sure we could solve that with technology. Network has gotten so cheap, and will continue to get faster and cheaper that I think may be in a way there is no point competing.
And if we cant do that. Let say we cant make a write once / a few times 128GB NAND product that last 50 years and cost less than a dollar to make.
May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer that the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.
It is getting ridiculous that both Google, Apple thinks they own everything I paid for. They think they are merely renting out their tech to me, both hardware and software.
> May be then the only solution is a law to protect consumer than the digital things we buy would still be available for us to download for at least x number of years. Especially when considering hosting it and the bandwidth is so cheap it isn't really a big risk for companies.
Why rely on the original publisher? Let me download it and then share it.
I think it's a much simpler requirement that the product be functional without "phoning home" and when the original prosper stops selling it then libraries abd torrents and archive websites step in.
”real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)”
- Linus Torvalds
To play the devil/right holder's advocate, the next turn in that game is to never "sell" anything, so you won't have "bought" the content nor have any standard codified right to it.
We're already there in many places of course, and many stores have already replaced the "buy" action with more ambiguous wording.
Next turn to that being people turning to the seventh' seas, and then we have again an iTunes Store/Steam moment, and the cycle goes on.
As an owner of 30+ year old CDs, that isn't necessarily the case. Some of them don't work particularly well these days. I went through a streaming thing for about 10 years but am moving back to physical media now. When I went to re-rip my CDs to FLAC I found some serious issues with a number of CDs which were chock full of errors around the edges.
Anyway after this I decided, fuck it, screw reliable storage or buying things on media. I'll buy it in a digital form and keep moving it around in less reliable media (mostly SSDs) until I'm dead.
I don't care about ownership. I care about not having to buy things twice and care about things I've bought being taken away. That's slightly different.
these days i think people that can afford it should have a personal backup system set up. and music just fits into it passively.
building things up right now as homeserver/tarsnap/friend's homeserver
at some point i want to setup offline tape backups... they last longer than hard drives.
I had LTO. It's expensive and painful. Just multiple copies on good quality SSD is fine. Needs to be left powered up occasionally to do maintenance.
Long term storage with blu-ray optical media is the way. Check out this guys testing: https://blog.ligos.net/2022-04-02/The-Reliability-Of-Optical...
Hot, cold, time - no problem. Just keep them out of sunlight.
> available for us to download for at least x number of years.
The company should be obliged to keep hosting all digital assets they've ever sold to an end consumer.
And the law should be that when they want to get rid of this responsibility they have to remove the DRM first.
Of course they could just jump to subscription model entirely where you never own anything, but even that would be at least more honest than the present state.
What if the company goes bankrupt? And what if the company "sells" the IP to a subsidiary which then "goes bankrupt", as a means to offload this responsibility?
There is no solution here unless you force it to be available on day one.
If you go bankrupt but have a thing I lent you, I should get the thing back. If you go bankrupt and you have game binaries you were supposed to host for me, you give me the binaries and the encryption keys so I can make the thing work.
The sleight of hand companies pulled at some point in the past twenty years is that they made us believe we're buying stuff that we're just renting, but we need to go back to ownership. That puts the burden onto the company to make sure you can always get the thing they decided to withhold from you.
If I'm buying a software license from a company, I am not lending the company anything, by any stretch of the imagination. You can view it as a type of limited sale, or you can view it as me renting something from the company. But in either case, they don't have any traditional legal obligations to me in case of bankruptcy.
And my point was not that the current situation is fine and dandy. It was that a law that says "sell licenses for restricted purposes today, but if you want to stop selling these 10 years from now, you'll have to do X and Y at that time" can't work - the company will find some way to discharge that obligation through sales and bankruptcy.
What would work would be an obligation at the time of sale - say, you could sell software licenses with conditional functionality, but only if you provide proof that you have an archived version stored with a third party that would be released to all customers in case of your bankruptcy. Since the cost would have already been paid, there would be no way to discharge this obligation during bankruptcy or dissolution or other similar mechanisms.
Sorry, that's what I meant as well. The change we need should be that, when we buy software, we buy software, not just rent it.
Does this matter if you can make a digital copy (cd, cartridge, online game download) ? I think the key issue is ownership, not media. If you pay for a game it should be yours; up to you to back it up, etc, but yours. That's the legislation that needs to be set and explicit. Regulate an option to buy or outlaw licensing for obvious products; games, software apps that serve a purpose (office apps, cad, etc). I'm not sure how we get around online only apps though. We should be able to own stuff without having to be on a network. I would pay a premium for that, but it really should be the standard. It should be obvious that such things are ridiculously burdonsome and consumer unfriendly. We know the current regime in the USA is unfriendly to this but I think most voters would prefer this to the tyrannical methods companies currently use to "protect their IP" yet someone they are still making huge profits before and after it became a trend.
> in a CD player today
If you find one. Last year I was searching for good old fashion players. There are only old used in the market. The only new ones are crap.
In 10 years will be difficult to find good players.
That's okay. You can rip the CD in a few minutes with even the crappiest drive and then use any music player you want. Slightly more annoying but the music is safe.
>The first thing in my view is reliable storage medium.
We have that, it's called spinning Rust with ZFS + Backup (M-DISK?), what's more important where do you buy your stuff for example Nintendo vs GOG.
Don't buy Software that you cant "own".
If I can't throw it in a box for 30+ years then it's not a reliable storage medium.
A server that uses parity drives and regular data checks is a reliable system built on top of unreliable storage. It achieves the same data integrity but it's a lot more annoying and difficult to deal with.
A huge stack of m-discs is not a good option either.
>If I can't throw it in a box for 30+ years then it's not a reliable storage medium.
That was never the case with Cartridges, Floppy's or even CD's.
However M-DISK is around 30-100 years.
>A huge stack of m-discs is not a good option either.
What is your alternative? Maybe LTO tapes is then something for you?
Mo Data mo Problems you know ;)
I have a NAS with many terabytes of data stored on ZFS too, but this isn't a solution to the problem because the problem isn't technical one, it's a social one.
We need regulations around this kind of stuff and governments that are willing to break up companies that monopolize industries.
Companies like Autodesk and Adobe for instance have far too much control over very critical markets and the revenue that they extract from them allows them to lock down software in very onerous ways.
No amount of spinning rust and ZFS is going to make running offline versions of Fusion360 or Photoshop easy for the common person.
It's going to take legislation.
>problem isn't technical one, it's a social one
Exactly what i said. Don't give money to corporations who want to control your software.
https://www.fsf.org/about/
>>Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit, not for proprietary software companies or governments who might seek to restrict and monitor us
>Fusion360 or Photoshop
Not my Software not my Problem. Ask your country to support alternatives [1] for this kind of software. You're right that critical software is concentrated among a small group of providers. But an even bigger problem is that they're not open source and are sold under US laws (patents, licenses, restrictions etc..).
[1] https://www.sovereign.tech/
> Even Nintendo Switch 2 Game Card is now only going to be a Game Key.
Lots of games are still stored on the cards. The key-only cards are mostly an alternative to printing the key on a piece of cardboard.
The real problems are that A) not every game lets you choose and B) the cards use flash and will wear out.
I'd say key-on-cartridge games are a compromise between game-on-cartridge and key on paper / email / virtual entitlement.
I can sell/lend out a game-on-cartridge and I can do the same with the key-on-cartridge ones.
A key on paper / email / virtual entitlement is tied to your account. It cannot be lent out, it cannot be sold.
In fact, except for certain conditions it cannot be inherited. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/after-you-die-your-st...
At least key-on-cartridge represent an entitlement tied to a physical good, and not an online identity.
That’s true it’s ridiculous. But I kind of view most on my phone as a toy/convenient gadget. Ofc there are important things on it, mfa keys etc, but somehow I just care that I own my laptop and desktop computers. But maybe I think so because iPhone is locked down..
hoseyor wrote multiple interesting comments on this thread that seem to have gotten shadowbanned. (I didn't flag or ban them, this was hours ago).
(@hoseyor if you could repost more toned-down soberly-worded versions of those comments, without directly accusing multiple prominent tech companies of fraud, I think you'd get more traction.)
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I'm trying to understand what you're asking for that isn't available. Reliable portable storage? Isn't that what a portable SSD is? They start at like $60 for 1TB and get way cheaper per TB as you go up. Are you talking about a gaming-specific storage product/complaint specifically?
If the complaint is that large game distributors work to make it hard for you to store the bits on that SSD, yeah I totally hear you.
The key word is "reliable". Leave that SSD in a box for 5+ years and there's a fair chance of failure / corruption when you come back to read it.
I think he’s referring that it’s becoming harder and harder to buy media stored in that medium, nowadays most content is only available tough streaming services.
For those people the only way to obtain a digital local copy is via torrent.
So ownership is a dmz neutral image hosting server?
May not be the sure thing you think. A lot of (professional, pressed, retail)P Blu Rays are failing quite young. Less than a decade in some cases. Density is a bitch.
Oh dear really? I think I need to test it out someday. I had them stored somewhere. But no longer have my PS4 with me. This is really bad.
Network will not continue to get cheaper. Not because of technology limitation, but because of good ol' capitalist monopoly power. Google and Apple don't think they own your stuff and rent to you, they do. The purpose of a system is what it does. We will eventually hit the point when network (via subscription, fees, TOS, and whatever else nonsense they can think of) will be so restrictive and cost-prohibitive that physical media will seem like a miracle cure.
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I notice that there's a comment on video from Ross Scott (Accursed Farms), who started the related Stop Killing Games (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) campaign; it's not mentioned in the video itself but you may want to check it out.
I've applied to multiple offerings from these folks and never hear back.
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In the Attention Economy, the biggest Attentions whores win.
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He wants to reach as large an audience as possible, and being perfectly principled isn't the way to go. Self-hosted platforms are great if you want to preach to the choir.
I'm not saying there aren't benefits or that it doesn't work. Sometimes people have to buy self-help books about not shopping or eat more food to lose weight. It's still ironic.
He's involved with https://grayjay.app/ btw. Of all people to criticize for using YouTube as a platform, he's the last.
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it doesn't seem like they care very much about owning videos, the irony would be more if they rented a tractor to drive up to your house and explain the issue.
He's primarily about "right to repair" physical things, not so much self-hosting videos. I think its an important message and he has really spent an enormous amount of time and resources on it and I don't know if he has gotten much benefit from it other than, arguably, publicity.
That's were most of the eyeballs are.
He is talking about owning the things you purchase with your money. LIke say you buy a device but you are not allowed to repair it or upgrade it, you "buy" a piece of software but you do not actually own it or have any rights on it.
What's ironic about using a reliable, free platform to reach your 2.2 million subscribers with what would otherwise be a difficult and expensive to distribute video?
I don't think you understand irony. Announcing a campaign for ownership via an outlet you don't own is ironic. Read the definition. Irony is not a comment on the campaign's actual or potential efficacy.
It would not be ironic to distribute your ownership-promoting materials through the mail while not owning the post office. There is nothing about YouTube that reduces a creator's stake in their video.
There's some key differences there. 1, the post office doesn't keep your material on hand so people can visit and consume it. 2, you have to pay the post office each transaction. 3, the post office is taxpayer subsidized and administered by elected officials.
Again, I did not say what they are doing is bad, wrong, or whatever.
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"Appeal to accomplishment" fallacy and you have no idea what I've accomplished in my life.
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