gila [any, any]

Have seen a few discussions about various aspects of this that aren’t fully covered in the article.

The “one-time” check is only after the refundable period for the game purchase has ended. If you go offline at any time during the refund window, you’ll lose access after 30 days without checking in. This can be tested by removing the CMOS battery. Game won’t launch.

It’s not retroactive, only affects new purchases.

An unverified claim is that once the refund window has ended, the temporary license is automatically swapped with a permanent one.

Yes, there is a technical cause to do this given the ability for modded ps4’s to effectively get free games direct from Sony by buying them, copying the license file and then refunding them before manually reapplying the copied license.

However, the new system doesn’t prevent the same ps4’s running pirated game copies via other methods. It only saves Sony some bandwidth.

The exploit also wasn’t scalable because it involves the refund process, meaning abuse is easy to detect.

It’s true that the customer impact is limited, but I don’t see how it’s worth it to prevent a small number of unauthorised licenses via one of several available methods. Especially given the negative press.

As always, DRM only hurts paying customers.

Yup that’s what they did, article is out of date

It’s only quite recently that some countries have begun to start trading oil in yuan. It’s certainly not easy to circumvent the petrodollar system that’s been in place since WW2. For one thing, the US will start bombing you.

This game was already in development for several years when chatgpt, stable diffusion etc first released. Which also makes this news one of the least surprising things I’ve read in years.

Many cracks rely on underlying mechanisms of Windows that end users don’t really need to think about. So if “better for piracy” is purely about ease of applying cracks and successfully executing them, Windows is definitely better. That doesn’t mean it offers the best possible experience though.

Any old-school cracks (anything that isn’t a hypervisor bypass for games with denuvo, which isn’t recommended for most users anyway) will run on Linux, with varying levels of required tinkering. A lot of the time you can just add a cracked game or app to steam and run it there, but sometimes it isn’t quite that simple. It depends entirely on the game/app and how the crack functions.

If you’re willing to learn the tinkering part, it’s good knowledge to have and gives you more flexibility over how software/games are run. This is particularly useful for mid-tier machines that can’t max out all settings on all games, for example with forcing specific resolutions, display modes, virtual displays, upscaler presets, global upscaling, gamepad config.

Given there are very few roadblocks with Linux I don’t think there is an OS that is “best for piracy”, rather the best choice depends on user preferences and expectations. Certainly if your top priority is the least amount of effort to get things running, choose Windows. But you’d also need to accept dealing with Microsoft’s bullshit, and forego performance improvements you’d potentially get with Linux.

broadly, gain flexibility, lose familiarity. just try it and see.

one thing i’ll spell out, you’ve likely never had to consider the logic by which windows loads dll versions. essentially, if you put a modified dll file in the same folder as an executable, when the executable calls for it that modified dll will be loaded instead of the system’s builtin version. game and software cracks sometimes rely on this principle. but on linux via wine/proton, that isn’t the case. so you’ll need to configure wine/proton to do a “dll override” in some cases (i.e when your game/software crack utilizes a modified dll). the process is pretty straight-forward, the main thing is knowing you need to do it.

Lineage is privacy focused, not security focused (other than security through obscurity etc). Graphene is more secure but may require tinkering for NFC payment / banking. Graphene is partnering with Motorola for their new phones, but old/current Motorola phones won’t be compatible. IMO best bet for daily driver is a used/refurb older pixel or pixel A, like pixel 6a or pixel 7a are sub-$200 even brand new sometimes. e/os is another option but I haven’t used it (don’t have compatible device) so can’t comment on it.