#DRM Bullshit

[aetherspoon]

Hi total stranger here sorry to jump into your inbox but I saw you mentioned a drive that allowed you to bypass the truly awful 4K uhd settings that I've literally only just heard about?

Oooo, my first ask!

So, I'll post the short version here and the long version under a cut.

The short version is simple - I have a USB UHD (4k) BluRay drive from LG. At the time I bought it, it had firmware that could be upgraded to some unofficial firmware that can avoid that garbage. That drive isn't recommended anymore, which is why I'm not bothering to give you the model number, but if you look at this site:

It will give you the list of drives that ARE recommended for this type of thing. You can even buy some pre-flashed drives from people if you don't want to mess with that.

My drive has worked fine for me, but admittedly I've only used a few UHD discs on it (and a whole lot of normal blu-rays and DVDs).

Now, the longer version is under the cut, including one of my patented totally normal (blatant sarcasm tag here) analogies that still somehow work.

-----

I'm going to use an analogy here, because that's how I explain tech.

Let's pretend your Blu-Ray (regardless of whether it is UHD/4k or not - see my notes at the end for a fun fact) is a VIP performing at your exclusive club called Blu-Ray Drive. You'd think that, because you own the club, you can watch the VIP perform, right?

Wrong.

You see, the club has a bouncer by the name of AACS. Every VIP insists on one of their bouncers being at the club, deciding who to let in and what they get to do. The bouncer doesn't actually work for you, they work for the VIP, and no VIP will come to your club if you don't have one of their bouncers.

Also, just for more paranoia, every VIP will have its own list of who and what to allow, along with where they're allowed to stand. Each time you have a new VIP come to your club, they give their own list; if the bouncer sees the list is newer, they throw away all of the old lists and only keep the newest one. On top of that, AACS is a nationalist asshole that decided to only allow people from their own country in, because the VIPs want to charge people differently based on their nationality.

The VIPs even require some fancier clubs to have a courier continually delivering them new lists (this is where that UHD/4k Internet connection thing comes from).

All of the stuff you want is inside of that club, but the bouncer won't let you in because you're not on the list (and might not even from the right country). And you can't just sack the bouncer because then no VIP will play at your club.

You heard of another problem at a similar club (Club DVD), where their more local VIPs required them to hire a bouncer named CSS. However, CSS wasn't paid very well, was near sighted, and never bothered to update the list; all of your friends just called themselves "Maria Wang" and CSS let them in. Your VIPs know about that though, so they insist on the updating list thing and giving their bouncers eye exams. So what do you do?

Simple. You call a buddy and they kool-aid man through the back wall of your club shouting OH YEAH!, of course.

This is a completely logical analogy, I know. I should really commission an artist to draw this.

This buddy is called LibreDrive. Your VIPs still have their bouncer - anyone who doesn't know about the secret entrance still goes through the bouncer. The people who do know - including you and your friends - just go through the secret entrance instead. The VIP company is none the wiser.

-----

Now that my completely logical analogy is over, what does this actually mean tech-wise?

The way DVDs work is by using an encryption technology called CSS. However, in late 1999, someone figured out how to break the encryption, mostly because they did a really lazy job in making it to begin with. This is DeCSS. There were huge lawsuits, poetry made using source code, a whole lot of weird things. Today, we don't even need DeCSS; the encryption on DVDs are so bad that a modern computer can brute force decrypt it in seconds.

Fundamentally, both DVDs and blu-rays work the same way. There is a portion of the disc (DVD or blu-rays) that no drive is allowed to directly read. This contains the encryption information for the rest of the data on the disc. That encryption information is used by the player as to what is and isn't allowed to read the disc and what parts they ARE allowed to read. This is also where region locking comes in, where it checks what region your drive is set to and allows/denies discs to play based on that region; this is called CSS. If you are old enough to remember the bad old days of WinDVD and PowerDVD, those applications had encryption keys allowed by the DVD drive to play back the video content on the drive.

Anyone remember those cheap knock-off "region free" DVD players that used to be really common in the 2000s? They just ignored CSS entirely; the drives themselves can still read all of the data on the disc, it was just CSS telling the drive what it could or couldn't read.

Anyway, the movie studios, seeing their "beautiful creation" get ripped apart like that, wanted to make sure that it didn't happen the same way with their next technology.

Where blu-ray differs from DVDs is how it isn't using CSS at all, but something called AACS instead. It makes this list into a continually updating list; every time your drive (whether it is in a computer or a standalone player!) sees a new disc, it checks that hidden encryption information for a list of what is and isn't allowed to access the drive. If the list on the disc is of a newer version than what the drive currently has in its firmware, the disc will actually flash the firmware of your blu-ray drive with the new allow/deny list. Then it checks again - does the firmware match what the disc has? If so, it continues. If not, it refuses to play no matter what. From there, the rest of the process is basically the same, checking any player for a list of keys allowed to play it. If it sees a key not allowed (say, your ripping software), it says no and stops everything from reading it.

Unlike DVDs with CSS, these keys are actually pretty darn secure... and even if they weren't, studios would just release an updated allow/deny list and suddenly your computer can't rip discs anymore because the latest version of Frozen came out.

UHD (4k) blu-ray players take this one step further and just continually update that allow/deny list across the Internet rather than waiting for new discs to update that allow/deny list. This is why a standalone UHD blu-ray player needs WiFi, by the way. It isn't used for anything else.

So... how to avoid it? You could use a leaked key and basically hope that it isn't updated. This is how most blu-ray ripping software works, which is also why they need continual updating while movie studios play cat and mouse. And with UHD content, that's a really tiny window of time that you can do unauthorized things with the drive.

Remember our surprise tool - the drive itself still has to be able to read everything, it is just AACS stopping us. If we can somehow just get a drive to not care about AACS, we'd have access to everything we care about.

LibreDrive is a custom firmware that basically lets all of the above still happen, but any program aware of LibreDrive can just use it to access the full disc. It acts as an intermediary between the physical drive itself and software on your computer, similar to AACS itself. Like the analogy said, you're kool-aid manning a security hole into the drive's encryption. AACS is still happy because it can still update its firmware allow/deny list, you just bypass AACS entirely. Every byte of data on the blu-ray is accessible to whatever programs know about this security hole, which includes programs like MakeMKV and anything using the open source (and illegalish - see below) LibDriveIo library. Fun fact, you can just copy that library in to VLC and it'll use it.

Unfortunately, you can't just flash LibreDrive onto any drive. Basically, someone needs to be able to read the existing firmware on a drive in order to know what to modify to open up that security hole. This means you need specific drives on specific versions of firmware to flash LibreDrive.

The industry, however, caught on to this. They started requiring drive manufacturers to encrypt their firmware, so some newer revisions of drives that used to work now don't - this is the case with my drive.

And that's... the rest of the story.

Now, my notes:

You know how I said UHD/4k and regular blu-rays work the same? Yeah, it isn't just that they work the same - sometimes they're actually the exact same drive. Some regular blu-ray drives can actually read UHD discs, they're just not allowed to by AACS because "fuck you that's why". LibreDrive can work around that, too.

Illegalish? Well, circumventing copy protection isn't allowed under the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), outside of specific scenarios. And the US's copyright laws tend to get copied over to a lot of other countries as a result of the trade deals they make with each other, hence "illegalish". You make your own moral call, my morality says that personal use to rip your own media should have always been legal and I should be able to play a Brazilian version of the Phantom Menace if I want to.

Some additional source reading material: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856 for "What is LibreDrive", which explains the same thing I did but without my fun analogy and using more technical terms. It also includes the full list of drive firmware that works with LibreDrive.

[fanotastic]

HOW DOES ONE PLAY TRON EVOLUTION IN 2024???

[kulvefaggoth]

What do you mean it's the year of our lord 2024 and i just lost my entire night of sleep because of the new dragon age game??????????????????

[dwtdog]

VIDEO DISCUSSION WARNING

i think his goal with the video should be to show how many bad actors there are trying to use this shit against him, twisting everything he does to be bad, rather than Just being a debunking of the allegations. i think the two go hand in hand, that he can debunk them by showing how they’ve been twisted and then people will be able to understand, when people in the future try to do it Again, that he isnt a monster and every claim against him should be critically looked at rather than taken as fact

[emeraldspiral]

The great folly of sites like YouTube is thinking that "give us money to make the user experience less annoying" is a good business model and that when competing with adblockers that provide the same benefit for free they should aim to simply negate the ability of the free service so their own site remains annoying for non-paying users. Essentially trying to extort users rather than actually sell a desirable product.

[frankenmouse]

Finally got around to safely archiving the 130 or so K1ndle ebooks I bought. Converted to Epub, stored in my Calibre library, and mirrored on Dropbox.

Which is my legal goddamn right and should not have taken several hours to get around a certain company’s DRM for books that explicitly state they were being sold without DRM and cracked from their walled garden proprietary format.

Unfortunately They Who Will Not Be Named changed their file format this year and folks haven’t yet figured out a crack for it. So anything purchased in 2023 won’t be convertible. Which sucks.

And I absolutely will not tell anyone who drops a note in my DMs how to legally archive their own digital goods.

[jinjeriffic]

Any product or service that requires an internet connection has a limited life-span. As soon as it's no longer profitable to keep the servers running, it's dead.

smartphone storage plateauing in favor of just storing everything in the cloud is such dogshit. i should be able to have like a fucking terabyte of data on my phone at this point. i hate the fucking cloud

[tentajack]

I don't use spoitfy, so I am once again sitting on the sidelines while everyone else posts a bunch of things for me to look up on other sites :)

[h34vybottom]

Hi, hello! Today's Video Game Bullshit is about DRM, digital rights management. The nitty gritty about what DRM is happens to be irrelevant. The method of the system doesn't mean a lot, we're talking about a particular system. A lot of Gamers know Denuvo DRM, though that's not the only DRM scheme in existence so I'll keep it broader. Let's start off w/ intellectual property rights. IP rights and laws are a bunch of horseshit created by capitalists to "'control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers'" (Doctorow). DRM exists to serve IP in the digital space. Make no mistake, this is about control. The new Sonic game used cheap tricks and abused Steam store page to sell people on DRM-less game before updating the build to include DRM a few hours before launch? It's about control! Saying this is pretty redundant; Neoliberal Capitalism's end goal is that a wealthy few own everyone as serfs and are allowed to live in a paradise while everyone else is literally dying for their utopia. DRM in software isn't that serious on the face of it and I'd wager that most people stop caring after a week or so. What's important to note about DRM is that it's both completely useless and serves to control customers. DRM effectively enforces that people have to use the products the way the corporation wants. So many people, me included, have been caught up in the web that this just increases piracy BUT piracy is on the fringes. Fully fledged piracy isn't something most people know how to even start getting involved w/. How do we break out of this web? Personally, I read Cory Doctorow's IP, linked and quoted above, and I think that's a good framework for understanding the state of modern life. If everything seems like it's hostile, that's because everything is hostile. When you cannot access the software you bought because a corporation has decided that the software you own is no longer you're own, they've declared you an enemy. I can, and will, advocate for piracy all the time, but just "Do Piracy" isn't going to solve DRM. DRM can play fast and loose where physical goods cannot. DRM is ever changing, even if the status quo itself never changes. I don't have a good or tidy solution other than getting rid of capital and all of its bullshit.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mareastrorum]

Story time.

When I was a kid, my mom signed me and my siblings up for Tae Kwon Do classes for various reasons. One of the more fun reasons was that Dragon Ball Z was on Toonami and it was a thing we all enjoyed, so it was easy to convince us to behave for an hour a day several times a week. Easily half of the kids in class were DBZ fans. The owner was a DBZ fan. The giant hulk of a Navy vet who sparred with me was a DBZ fan. We all loved the show.

The classes were taught about half a mile down one road from where we lived, so on Saturdays, we would walk the whole way on our own to and from class. One of the fun reasons was that there was a comic book shop about halfway there that sold manga and Japanese merch, so we left early and spent maybe $1-2 of money we had each hoarded on cards, comics, etc. (I’ve worked since I was 7ish doing stuff for cash.) I had a collection of DBZ trading cards and comics in Japanese. The shopkeeper was sworn to secrecy lest he lose sales because we weren’t actually supposed to have spending money.

One day, on the Computer, I learned that a DBZ video game for PlayStation was going to come out in the U.S. and it was going to have the newest characters in it and some characters from the rumored GT sequel that wasn’t even translated to English yet. HYPE. I eagerly awaited news only to find none. I couldn’t call retailers to check if they had it because this was back when calls were charged per minute and most of the big stores were technically not local even though they were in the same county. I asked the comic book guy if he knew what happened, and since he was also looking forward to the game, he checked around. Not available anywhere nearby. I’d have to go to downtown Los Angeles in person to maybe find a copy. It may as well have been in Siberia.

>:(

I looked on the Computer to see what other people were doing on the various Geocities fan webrings whose URLs I had memorized (because I couldn’t bookmark any of them or my mom would find out I was spending money on stuff). Online shopping wasn’t really a thing yet, and the only thing they could find was that the game was supposed to be available in the U.S., but it was either bullshit or there were basically no copies made. Apparently, it was a hit in Japan, and the most I could find was a picture of the cover art.

>:(

I went to the comic book guy to complain the next Saturday, and he introduced me to a new idea: there’s a Japanese version of the game that he saw on eBay, this new website where people sold their stuff online. But the game would only work on a U.S. PlayStation if I used a kit to circumvent the DRM. It wouldn’t be in English, but at least I’d be able to play.

Off I went home to learn about eBay on the Computer. THERE WAS THE GAME. A whole $20 plus shipping. I had to look up what shipping was because I didn’t know the term. So more like $30. And I needed a bank card or credit card to buy on eBay. (I didn’t care about the 18 or older disclaimer because I had lied about that on every website I had ever visited.)

>:(

I did not make a plan. I went and got my cash box (I’d bought it at the flea market) that I hid in the box spring under my mattress and counted out $30. I then immediately confronted my mom when she got home. I WANT A GAME. HERE’S THE MONEY. BUY IT ON EBAY. I had to explain eBay. She did not ask where I got the money because I had perfect grades and that was all that mattered.

A month later, the game arrived from Asia, and I cannot recall if it was actually Japanese on the shipping labels or if it was Chinese because I couldn’t tell the difference. It had the right box art though. Tried it on the PlayStation, and indeed, it did not work.

Next Saturday, I went to the comic book guy to buy the kit to jailbreak the PlayStation. He did not believe me that I had bought the game. I showed him the error message that popped up on the screen because I wrote it down in my notebook. He eventually relented and sold me the kit. Another $7! (But I’d brought $10 because I had learned this bullshit was expensive, so I got more comics and cards too.)

After class, we ran home. We were martial arts kids, that was practically a cooldown.

THE KIT WORKED. I added a spring to the mechanism to keep the lid open, started with a disk that tricks the regional DRM, then switched the disk at prompting to start the game. We had no idea what any of it said, but it was a simple fighting game, and all the characters had portraits anyway. Button mashing paradise. I was the coolest kid at TKD classes because I was the only one anyone knew with this DBZ game.

I charged kids a quarter each to come with us after class to play my regionally jailbroken Japanese (or maybe Chinese) DBZ PlayStation fighter game. I made my money back by Christmas.

>:)

I was 9.

[beesmygod]

The way I see it, there are 3 relevant segments of the market.

People who will give you money for the art/product/whatever regardless of whether or not your shit is available somewhere else for free. This includes people who want to support the arts, people who don't want to fuck around trying to find free shit, and people who don't know how to pirate/don't know piracy is an option.

People who will never give you money. If they can't get it for free, then they aren't going to get it. Some of them will go out of their way to try and get it for free, but others won't.

People who are willing to pirate if the price is too high. These are people who have a price they're willing to pay, but if the cost is too high then they'll gladly raise the jolly roger and find it for free.

The trick here is that segment 2 is not your market. There might be members of your audience in there, but you should not be making business decisions based on their existence. Nothing you can do is going to change their mind, and all you're doing is aping Sony's bullshit CD DRM in an attempt to reduce personal privacy. It just kinda makes you an asshole and usually interferes with segments 1 and 3.

succinct and well said. you managed to categorize this thought really well. the question to the artist is also "which audience would you prefer to have"? like, who solicits a reluctant audience and expects it to go smoothly? why not do your best to appeal to the people who DO want to be there, actively, openly?

[snek-panini]

It's a quiet night at work so I'm doing Binderary planning. For anyone not in the know, this is bookbinding's counter to Inktober or NaNoWriMo, run by the Renegade Bindery discord. It runs in February and I'm pre-gaming.

The first year I did the event I made 4 books, and last year I did 11. Which was insane and I'm not doing that again even though I succeeded. This year's goals mostly involve finishing wips and learning new techniques.

Goals:

Finish my six existing naked text blocks. They need covers and titles, and four of them need to be mailed to the recipients. Two are for me.

Finish typesetting my two existing fic files. I have one I'm actively working on and one I started months ago but got distracted from. I don't have to print these, just finish formatting the documents and do the front matter.

Print and bind the one finished typeset I have. It's ready to go and I have spoken to the author, it's just waiting for the other wips to be cleared out.

Fully typeset, print, and bind one totally new fic. This involves learning a new binding method (secret Belgian/crisscross) and possibly a new endband technique (braided leather). Don't know if those will combine well in reality but in my head it looks good.

Pull the trigger and buy a new printer. I'm tired of the bullshit my hp inkjet keeps pulling, I want to do higher volume and I want to print legal size without pre-cutting it. I'm debating between two models but it's time to commit.

Research the Manga Problem. I want to print out-of-print and digital-only manga but I'm not sure about the logistics (stripping drm, formatting so it reads right to left, margins etc.) Actually printing it requires the laser printer but formatting does not.

I'm not prepared for an intense grind like I did last year. I'm just not, I don't have the energy. And some of this is ongoing right now, I'm not waiting till February for all of it. But this is where I'd like to be at the end of next month.

[bridgertonphd]

and i don't wanna pay the $5 for the VPN on the off-chance that i will be able to get all the episodes bc like. i just know i won't.

ughhhhhhhh i have to do it the long way... god i won't be able to actually do it though there will be precisely zero seeders. and i can't even take screenshots either! cramping my style.

[tigerbalmfan]

Bullshit bullshit bullshit such horseshit

tigerbalm seal of authenticity is not present

drm measures will make pain worse

Drm antipiracy makes bones bend over like a stretch

Dont do this bullshit fellow tigerbalm users it is lies not real. tigerbalm #tigerbalm #baumdutigre #painrelief

[hermajestytak]

In the year 2024 it's a crime that we still don't have a blu-ray release of Invader Zim, not even a limited collector's release. I love this series and I love my dvds of it, but I'd love to own it in a format higher than 480p without any iTunes DRM bullshit