• Draconic NEO
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    383 days ago

    Obligatory Goldberg link since lots of people these days are still unaware that SteamWorks DRM is easily bypassed these days (you don’t even need to patch the files, you can just bypass it).

  • @ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    What does she mean there was a “generational shift” that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn’t pirating a ton of software?

  • Snot Flickerman
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    3 days ago

    I had a friend back in the early 2000’s who did this.

    He paid for this way through school by abusing the schools T1 access and pirated shitloads of movies and would dump them all to DVD-Rs and then sell them on ebay. He wouldn’t make exact DVD rips, he instead would fill the DVD with tons of different movies or shows and sell them as collections. He did especially well with anime, which was difficult to access in the US at the time.

    He later went on to be an electrical engineer at Boeing.


    I also remember people hating Valve at first for this DRM scheme, and it’s also weird that people forgot that Steam itself is a minimally invasive form of DRM.

    • krolden
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      683 days ago

      Back then everyone had enough sense to hate all DRM.

      Now they’ll complain that Linux sucks because it can’t play the harry potter game

        • metaStatic
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          113 days ago

          buying a game doesn’t give you the right to be cruel.

          both things are free. Enjoy.

          • @flicker@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            22 days ago

            When I tell people Lemmy is like the old internet, I’m going to use this specific comment chain to demonstrate it.

    • @ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      He later went on to be an electrical engineer at Boeing.

      He wouldn’t happen to have been named Kenneth D. Pinyan, would he?

      Jokes aside, real question did he meet ol’ Kenny Pin?

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮
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    3 days ago

    I made so much money in high school downloading MP3s or anime from Napster/Kazaa/Limewire and burning then to CD/DVD since I was, like, the only kid in town with a computer, access to the internet, and a DVD burner. I remember getting asked how my parents let me get away with it and I was like “my dad is the one who taught me how to do it!” He was always borrowing games or music from co-workers. He got the DVD burner to make copies, since DRM was basically non-existent at the time for a majority of games. S’how we had Quake!

    • @dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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      123 days ago

      Same. We even had a music store in the UK, called Music Zone, this place would let you buy a CD and if you didn’t like it you could return it and get a refund and then rinse and repeat.

      As for parents. Mine had no clue what I was doing on the computer, but even when they learned due to all the people coming to the door, they were pretty chill.

      It got bad when our ISP would charge us for excessive downloads.

    • @sik0fewl@lemmy.ca
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      73 days ago

      Of the 50ish Amiga floppy disks we had, I think Bubble Bobble was the only one my dad actually bought.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮
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        3 days ago

        IIRC, we first got DSL when I was just leaving junior high. Or maybe when I was a sophomore. I really don’t remember when, but when I was doing most of this downloading, it was on DSL. When we still had dialup, I couldn’t even reliably play UO all weekend (first-world problems, AMR?), because we only had 1 phone line and someone would eventually need the phone.

          • Kal Ort Por

            Hehe reminds me of my Hide macro. I would make it bow 3 times and say “Kal Ort Por” before hiding, so people would think I teleported away when being chased by PKers in Felucca. 🤣

        • @IllNess@infosec.pub
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          83 days ago

          Yeah, downloading on 56k was not fun. My average per song was 1 hour, which I thought was decent considering it was free. My house got an additional line just for internet.

          We eventually got a coax modem, I was at high school at the time when we went high speed too. I felt like I was in the future. Lol.

          What I missed was losing access to AOL sites though but now that I look back, those were kinda trash.

          • Night Monkey
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            53 days ago

            Oof. I’m guessing your modem wasn’t actually connecting at 56k then. Or anywhere near it. I was able to get a 3-5 megabyte mp3 in about 12-20 mins max using my dial up service. This is using Napster.

            • @IllNess@infosec.pub
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              22 days ago

              I never thought to check my speed when I had a 56k modem. Interesting.

              You are probably correct that I never got full speed.