Indeed. I once read that the limiting factor on how high we can build skyscrapers is not structural engineering but the explosion in space occupied by elevator shafts as you try and go higher and higher whilst preserving reasonable wait times.

Didn't SH3 have starforce? That was a pretty invasive copy protection despite it not having an online component.

Torrent seed box.

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".

The good news is that there are tens of thousands of games already out there that are not subject to this ball & chain. Those of us who refuse to put up with the nonsense of Ubi and other have plenty of choice already.

"if you buy in place A at price X and sell in place B at price Y, those who are selling in B are competing with an unfair disadvantage probably related to differences in taxes."

I see. Once again it's bad if the common man does this, but if big companies and governments do it, A-OK!

There is a much greater chance of the poor getting away with stealing from other poor. If you steal from the rich, there will be actual investigative work done to track you down.

We should try that though. Maybe there will be some feedback effect and the rich will get their investment back tenfold! Yeah, that's it, we'll call it "trickle up".

And just like they do with our money, if it doesn't work out, we can claim it was because we didn't take enough, and we'll need to take more next year.

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.

"They" invested a bunch of money in SACD, which was totally unnecessary, so that's a meaningless metric.

I've seen 4k displays at electronics stores. Meh. I can tell the difference, but I wouldn't upgrade unless there was a noticeable problem with what I already had, which there isn't. I only upgraded from DVD when I got a large screen LCD that made some of them look pretty poor. On the other hand, many of my DVDs still look good on a 50" screen, and the upscalers have gotten better.

ipadm is pretty good once you get used to it.

I still don't care for the move of nearly everything in /etc into the SMF though. That's just annoying to modify, and I don't see any added benefit to it.