You're falling into the trap of confusing ethics and the law. Whatever you -- or I, since I expect we'd agree -- think of the ethics of the situation, so far I haven't seen anything to suggest their actions in not respecting keys used other than under the conditions they were sold with is actually illegal. The law with respect to digital purchases, DRM, and remote access/activation schemes may be some anachronistic dinosaur, but if it's the law right now then complaining about the action on a forum like Slashdot isn't going to change that.

Maybe, but for better or worse, the situation today is that Ubisoft is effectively empowered to "confiscate" keys acquired through illegitimate channels in violation of whatever terms of sale or licensing agreements those keys came with.

Now, you might argue that the law should be updated to address the rights of customers buying digital products in a more even-handed way. If you did, I'd be the first to agree. But even then, it's hard to see why those rights would or should protect someone with the digital equivalent of stolen property. If you wanted to legitimise reselling keys across borders as a matter of policy then you'd probably also need an explicit change so that DRM schemes attempting to prevent cross-border trade were prohibited and anyone operating them on a commercial basis was required to honour otherwise valid keys for any sort of activation or customer support purposes.

In that case, perhaps it's more closely analogous to paying someone abroad to buy something cheap and ship it to you, but then complaining when your delivery arrives that you got charged the import taxes your oh-so-honest supplier didn't pay.

Sometimes things that look too good to be true really are, but usually there's a catch. Seeing a deal that good and not checking thoroughly for the catch is just asking for trouble.

No, if you read the article they clearly state the keys were fraudulently obtained. If you obtain keys via fraud, they are almost by definition not "good keys".

RedPhone is free and open source end to end encrypted telephony that works OK (not amazingly, but as well as a typical commercial VoIP app does). People authenticate each other using their voices.

This is very true. However, WhatsApp appears to be a counter-example. They are deploying full end to end encryption and instead of ads, they just ..... charge people money, $1 per year. WhatsApp is not very big in the USA but it's huge everywhere else in the world.

The big problem is not people sharing with Facebook or Google or whoever (as you note: who cares?) but rather the last part - sharing with a foreign corporation is currently equivalent to sharing with its government, and people tend to care about the latter much more than the former. But that's a political problem. It's very hard to solve with cryptography. All the fancy science in the world won't stop a local government just passing a law that makes it illegal to use, and they all will because they all crave the power that comes with total knowledge of what citizens are doing and thinking.

Ultimately the solution must be two-pronged. Political effort to make it socially unacceptable for politicians to try and ban strong crypto. And the deployment of that crypto to create technical resistance against bending or breaking those rules.

That's not what the second link says is happening though.

My reading of the second article is that there is the following problem. Website G2A.com allows private re-sale of game keys, whether that's to undercut the retail prices or avoid region locking or whatever is irrelevant. Carders are constantly on the lookout for ways to cash out stolen credit card numbers. Because fraudulent card purchases can be rolled back and because you have to go through ID verification to accept cards, spending them at their own shops doesn't work - craftier schemes are needed.

So what they do is go online and buy game activation keys in bulk with stolen cards. They know it will take time for the legit owners of the cards to notice and charge back the purchase. Then they go to G2A.com and sell the keys at cut-down prices to people who know they are obtaining keys from a dodgy backstreet source, either they sell for hard-to-reverse payment methods like Western Union or they just bet that nobody wants to file a complaint with PayPal saying they got ripped off trying to buy a $60 game for $5 on a forum known for piracy and unauthorised distribution.

Then what happens? Well, the game reseller gets delivered a list of card chargebacks by their banks and are told they have a limited amount of time to get the chargeback problem under control. Otherwise they will get cut off and not be able to accept credit card payments any more. The only available route to Ubisoft or whoever at this point is to revoke the stolen keys to try and kill the demand for the carded keys.

If that reading is correct then Ubisoft aren't to blame here. They can't just let this trade continue or it threatens their ability to accept legitimate card payments.

In this case UBISOFT has a dispute with gray marketeers and decides to take it out on the customers instead of taking it to the courts

Ubisoft might not be able to take them to the courts. For example if these resellers are in China or developing countries where the local authorities don't care about foreign IP cases. Technically speaking, it's actually the customers who have a dispute with the resellers, because those resellers knowingly sold them dud keys. It's not much different than if you buy a fake branded Mac, take it to an Apple repair centre and they tell you to go away. Your dispute is not with Apple. Your dispute is with the entity that sold you the fake goods.

Look at it another way. What if these "resellers" were actually selling you random numbers instead of game activation keys. When you try them out and discover they don't work .... your dispute is not with Ubisoft. They would be totally correct to deny activation of the game. Your dispute is with the fraudster who sold you the invalid keys.

Legally speaking that would be a dispute between you and the bogus reseller. They sold you something that was effectively counterfeit. There's lots of well established law in this area.

Chargebacks can seriously hurt the affected merchants. For one thing, usually the merchant has to pay a fee on top of refunding the full amount for each individual chargeback, possibly losing that fee even if they subsequently challenge the chargeback and win. For another thing, an unusually high chargeback rate overall can result in much worse terms for future card payment services or even being denied the facility entirely, which for many businesses is effectively a mortal injury.

If it's Ubisoft that was taking the money directly, this hurts them directly. It potentially even follows their officers if they move to other businesses later as well. If it's not Ubisoft taking money directly, then it hurts their resellers, and word quickly gets around that being a reseller for Ubisoft is a lousy gig. Either way, Ubisoft are losing something.

All true, but paying actual money for a licence key at an unusually low price from an unlikely source is like paying five bucks for a 60" 4K TV off the back of a lorry. If you're the recipient of stolen goods, however unwitting, the law in most places will leave you empty-handed if the goods are identified and returned to their original owner, unless you can find and take legal action against whoever sold you the goods.

I'm not saying the situation doesn't suck for the innocent party, and I'm certainly not supporting Ubisoft's generally aggressive use of DRM, but in this case it does seem that the situation is exactly analogous on-line to how the law has worked in the real world for a long time.

Let's recap here. Zoe Quinn slept with all the major game reviewers and/or their editors. She gets rave reviews for a game people who actually bought have panned mercilessly. Literally caught with their pants down, they point to their customers and scream "sexist!". That's the point of the scandal. You can dress it up however you like, but at the root it's about corruption in the gaming press.

This sounds about right to me.

You are right that GamerGate has some kind of unholy obsession with Quinn instead of Grayson, who should be the target of criticism if that criticism has merit. That criticism has very little merit.

But if you think the italicised summary is 'about right', you haven't been paying attention. Here's what really went down:

a) Grayson wrote two articles talking about Zoe Quinn's game as an interesting tool for dealing with emotional issues and an interesting direction for games to explore
b) Months after these articles were published, Grayson and Quinn slept together
c) Months later, Quinn's ex aired his dirty laundry in public and made a lot of false accusations along with one or two true ones
d) Depression Quest was and is a free game. It never got rave reviews, except as an interesting anomaly. It's pretty similar to the reviews of Dear Esther.
e) The "Gamers are dead" articles all talked about "The word gamer carries a common stereotype: basement-dwelling misogynistic nerd. That stereotype is inaccurate -- gamers cross all demographics -- and should be discarded. Studios should make more games that appeal to wider and alternative audiences"
f) Actual basement-dwelling misogynistic nerds got mad about this and made a hue and cry.
g) Non-basement-dwellers, non-misogynists, and non-nerds who identify as gamers heard this hue and cry, skipped reading the actual articles, and got involved
h) Folks who have been campaigning for ethics in game journalism for a long time jumped on the bandwagon
i) GamerGate continues to dig into the lives of outspoken women and 'expose' their exploits, and call for boycotts of sites that do actual criticism and talk about larger societal issues in the context of game review, while largely ignoring real actual problems in game journalism like paid shills and editorial conflict of interest with advertisers.
j) The misogynistic troll segment of GamerGate explicitly uses "it's about ethics in game journalism" to distract from their trolling.
k) 4chan (4chan!) kicks these assholes out and they regroup on 8chan.
l) The proponents of ethics in journalism fail to realize that their flag has been ripped and smeared with shit by the channers and continue to wave it.

If you are not a racist, homophobic, misogynistic cockstain, then those names are not directed at you.

The thing is, the perception of GamerGate is preponderantly misogynistic. That's what people see when their only targets are outspoken women who provide evidence that they are targets of constant, vile death and rape threats. Some people in GamerGate, presumably you among them, are not misogynist, and are truly interested in improving the state of video game journalism. Yet you align yourself with this stained movement that continues to focus on these women despite the arguments against them being largely debunked, and ignores the very real and very pervasive real problems with game journalism. Shadows of Mordor? Gamergate gives a quick mention at best, then crickets as people continue to point fingers at Sarkessian, Wu, Quinn.

You take offense when people call the movement out on its bullshit, then wonder why you're getting smeared with the same brush?

One side is arguing based on preponderance of evidence, the other side is arguing based on exceptions to the rule. Which side are you arguing?

Game journalists are friends with game developers. That is true industry-wide, and it's not an ethical problem. Political journalists are friends with political staff. Foodie journalists are friends with restaurateurs. That's how it works -- that how you get the story.

There are real problems with game journalism. Paid video bloggers; advertisement vs. editorial; publisher-sponsored 'reviews'. Zoe Quinn is not among these real problems, yet she is still front and center in the GamerGate discussion six months later. Literally nobody outside GamerGate and depression treatment advocates cares that a free game got top billing in a minor piece as one of 50 minor games that were greenlit, nor that the developer and the writer were friends, nor that the writer was mentioned within a long list of other pre-release testers in the credits of that game. It is in fact counter-productive to keep bringing it up.

GamerGate folks keep complaining about someone shooting a squirrel while ignoring the concentration camp next door. If GamerGate was really interested in journalism ethics, Zoe Quinn would be the least of their concerns. Why aren't you talking about Geoff Keighley or Shadows of Mordor -- i.e. real, major, glaring problems with game journalism? Why is GamerGate so narrowly focused on women? Even in relation to the minor ethical issue with Depression Quest, GamerGate is entirely focused on Zoe Quinn, and not on Nathan Grayson, to the extent that in a slashdot article about Zoe Quinn -- not about GamerGate nor game journalism -- GamerGate still pops up to spout this inanity.