Pirating as a 'demo'. Your opinions?

[therapist]

Maybe mislead is the wrong word, maybe you actually want to see the game for yourself before you buy it, like trying on a coat. I can show you pictures of a coat, show you forum discussion about a coat, coat-in-action trailers etc, but actually trying it on is still nice.

There is one problem in your argumentation. You do not have the right to try the coat before you buy it per se. It is a permission given by the seller. It is absolutly legit -as a seller- to say: Nope, you cannot try it before buying, so take it or leave it. And I cannot remember that I saw any kind of permission like this for games...

Like i said before, we don't care if it's legal or not. Legality =/= Morality. We will try out games first, in spite of the fact it is illegal. If tomorrow they decide that I cannot try on a coat first, I'm gonna pop my damn arms into that coat anyway. You have a better chance of stopping me with the coat, but it doesn't mean you'll successfully stop all of us coat pirates. Especially when the "Cmon let people try on coats" party gets elected memebers into the EU.

[DarkenDragon]

The problem with your reply is your trying on the coat in their presence, not taking it home leaving it in your closet or throwing it out afterwards and then saying you don‘t like it and not paying for it. the bottom line is you took their work and didnt compensate them for it. It is the company's choice to decide what they are willing to give away for free, not the customer. This is why a demo is created cuz they chose to do so. This right should only be in the hands of the company because it is sad to say that the majority of the world does not share the same truthfulness to be willing to pay for others hard work after hey have obtained it. So is it moral to pirate the game if you use it as a demo? Absolutly not. Because you should always pay for someone's hard work weither you liked it or not because it is their work after all

[CobraA1]

Maybe mislead is the wrong word, maybe you actually want to see the game for yourself before you buy it, like trying on a coat. I can show you pictures of a coat, show you forum discussion about a coat, coat-in-action trailers etc, but actually trying it on is still nice.

. . . except that the metaphor breaks down, because in the case of piracy you've made an exact duplicate of the coat and bought it home, with only your say-so that you'll pay for it.

Physical items are a lot easier for businesses to protect, because it's so difficult to create an exact duplicate. Digital items, not so much.

. . . which is why you're seeing a big push towards services in the digital realm, because it's a lot easier to continue to profit if you offer your software as a service.

Do you really think that attempting to require always-online to single player games is because they somehow hate their customers?

Nah, it's largely because they want to turn their products into services. Because making a digital product act as a physical product is nearly impossible.

As a side note: It may be interesting to see how things develop with 3D printers, as even physical products may start seeing some of the same problems . . .

but I can't believe you don't see any benefit in actually trying the real game first to see if you like it.

My claim was never that "it doesn't have any benefits" to begin with.

I don't think we break that agreement if we end up buying it

You can't guarantee that most people end up buying it. Most businesses want the transaction to be something they can guarantee.

and we don't break that agreement when we try a game at a friend's house

Assuming your friend has a licensed copy, there's no piracy in this example, because there's no unlicensed copies being made.

Copyright law is about making copies. Businesses can't claim copyright violation in examples where no copies have been made.

I disagree, anyone with monies who pirates, usually ends up buying the games they like so they can support the developer.

Evidence needed.

It is very tempting to simply keep the pirated copy and not pay for it, because the pirated copy was free. Regardless of financial status, most people like free things.

Same goes with capitalism.

Say what? Haven't seen that word in this conversation before. We're not talking about whether businesses are owned privately or not. Heck, even China has problems with piracy.

Regular people don;'t have access to the backbone of the internet

Well, maybe someday we can guarantee that email always goes through pipes that are clearly labelled "backbone," and maybe someday we can guarantee that bad actors are never on pipes labelled "backbone."

. . . I wouldn't count on it, though.

Botnets can create absurd amounts of money, I wouldn't be surprised if some of their owners have access to what you call a "backbone."

Well, I think your hypothesis that locally run email servers are more secure is equally baseless.

Being that there is no evidence being passed around, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this. I've seen plenty of evidence that this simply raises the stakes, and concentrates the hackers' efforts on cloud providers. How many times have I seen some report of some large database being stolen (often exposing embarrassing practices, like having plain text passwords), with the provider scrambling to get everybody to change their passwords?

This whole idea of "oh, we can hire dedicated security teams and experts" has pretty much fallen flat on its face. I find it laughable, sorry.

How many times do I have to read about these failures?

Right now - we've got no guarantees that these businesses are actually practicing what you preach. Sure, that's the hypothesis - but where is the evidence?

[SeanOfTheDed]

I read the first page of the post and TLRD after that. Anyone can see where this is going. I'm just throwing in my opinion.

I did EXACTLY what the OP did. Pirated it, played it for a few weeks off and on, then purchased the top package. I've been a gamer for over 28 years and have been burned pretty bad by the hype surrounding most games. Now, I pirate just about everything minus a select few trusted developers. I play the game a while then ask myself one simple question, "Do I want to see more games like this?"

If yes, I pay for the game outright. Good job and thank you! I don't wait for it to go on sale, just give them the money they deserve.

If the game was just, "OK", and I feel they are asking to much, I wait till the price drops to what I think is fair. $60 for 5 hours of play. Not gonna happen.

If the game is trash, I select the game folder and press SHIFT+DELETE. Bullet dodged!

I'm an adult and I work hard for what I have. The game developers who make good games are no different and deserve to be compensated. If you do not work for a living, I don't see how you can truly have a balanced opinion on what is fair. What is Legal and what is Moral are often not the same. Pirating everything and paying for nothing will only result in seeing less and less of the games you love.

And piracy isn't just about stealing. I pirate games I have purchased just to ditch the terrible DRM games come with now. Steam has what I consider a fair DRM practice. You only have to connect every 30 days. Give $60 to an EA title and then tell me you are getting fair treatment. And have any of you resold a PC game in the past ten years? How is that fair? What's right, and what's legal are not the same.

I will continue to "Try before you buy". I'll give good game developers their well earned moneys and bad developers a reason to look for a new job. Just my opinion.

[muzzy]

Pirating everything and paying for nothing will only result in seeing less and less of the games you love.

Only if that money is the only way these developers can make a living. All this talk about starving artists, if only some sort of social security plan (welfare) allowed people to keep doing what they love while taking time to figure out how to turn it into a business...

[DarkenDragon]

I read the first page of the post and TLRD after that. Anyone can see where this is going. I'm just throwing in my opinion.

I did EXACTLY what the OP did. Pirated it, played it for a few weeks off and on, then purchased the top package. I've been a gamer for over 28 years and have been burned pretty bad by the hype surrounding most games. Now, I pirate just about everything minus a select few trusted developers. I play the game a while then ask myself one simple question, "Do I want to see more games like this?"

If yes, I pay for the game outright. Good job and thank you! I don't wait for it to go on sale, just give them the money they deserve.

If the game was just, "OK", and I feel they are asking to much, I wait till the price drops to what I think is fair. $60 for 5 hours of play. Not gonna happen.

If the game is trash, I select the game folder and press SHIFT+DELETE. Bullet dodged!

I'm an adult and I work hard for what I have. The game developers who make good games are no different and deserve to be compensated. If you do not work for a living, I don't see how you can truly have a balanced opinion on what is fair. What is Legal and what is Moral are often not the same. Pirating everything and paying for nothing will only result in seeing less and less of the games you love.

And piracy isn't just about stealing. I pirate games I have purchased just to ditch the terrible DRM games come with now. Steam has what I consider a fair DRM practice. You only have to connect every 30 days. Give $60 to an EA title and then tell me you are getting fair treatment. And have any of you resold a PC game in the past ten years? How is that fair? What's right, and what's legal are not the same.

I will continue to "Try before you buy". I'll give good game developers their well earned moneys and bad developers a reason to look for a new job. Just my opinion.

And this is why demos are created. Because the company feels the same way as you do. But you dont give the whole damn thing away for free and then work based on a tip system where you only get what the customer thinks you deserve. Because everyone values are different and thus there is no stability init. Also who says you have the right to determine what your entitled to? Its the company's choice on how to do it.

Also lets be honest, we've all pirated something in our lives because its just so easy to do. But dont go lying to yourself that it can be justified by doing the right thing after. Its no different than stealing from a bank to pay them back a month later. No one is going to care that you intend to do it later. All they know is what you've done now and they have nothing to say you will return. Instead you should have asked them for their permission first if you want to be morally correct

[therapist]

And this is why demos are created. Because the company feels the same way as you do. But you dont give the whole damn thing away for free and then work based on a tip system where you only get what the customer thinks you deserve. Because everyone values are different and thus there is no stability init. Also who says you have the right to determine what your entitled to? Its the company's choice on how to do it.

We don't advocate a tip system, we advocate being able to try all games before you buy them. No pirate is trying to advocate a tip system, or advocate that someone with alot of money should be able to create a huge database of games and not pay for any of them. Also, You mention some capitalist ideals that not everyone really agrees with. "Also who says you have the right to determine what your entitled to? Its the company's choice on how to do it." People say this about labor wages all the time, they say that minimum wage is unfair to business owners, and that only the company decides what is fair to pay workers. I disagree with this, just because the company says a game is worth $60, doesn't mean it is worth $60. I don't have the legal right to try a game out and decide if its worth my purchase, but I do it anyway because I don't find it to be some morally reprehensible action, just like you likely don't find it morally reprehensible to try out the latest call of duty at a friend's house before you decide to buy it or not.

Also lets be honest, we've all pirated something in our lives because its just so easy to do.

No, the easiest thing in the world to do is to pull out my credit card and comply with DRM, seriously, I'm terrible with that thing. Alot of the games with more complicated DRM schemes are very difficult to crack and require you tactically unplug the internet during specific phases of the install, download multiple torrents with updates to the first torrent just to make the game work, risk malware by running a suspect "keygen generator" with the most terrible techno music you've ever heard, and other annoying hoops to jump thru.

But dont go lying to yourself that it can be justified by doing the right thing after.

Well, I think you shouldn't go lying to yourself by thinking it DOESN'T justify trying it first. Doing what the law says doesn't justify an action, doing what a company wants you to doesn't justify an action. Obedience =/= Respect, The Law =/= Morality

Its no different than stealing from a bank to pay them back a month later. No one is going to care that you intend to do it later. All they know is what you've done now and they have nothing to say you will return. Instead you should have asked them for their permission first if you want to be morally correct

XD, hilarious comparison. When you steal that money from the bank, it denies the bank or the owner of that money the use or possession of that money. If I walked into a bank and "magically cloned" some money, then burned it a month later, maybe the action of cloning is suspect, but your actions become completely justified and any moral concerns evaporate by destroying the money in it's entirety.

[RMJ]

The game has a demo.

[therapist]

The problem with your reply is your trying on the coat in their presence, not taking it home leaving it in your closet or throwing it out afterwards and then saying you don‘t like it and not paying for it. the bottom line is you took their work and didnt compensate them for it. It is the company's choice to decide what they are willing to give away for free, not the customer. This is why a demo is created cuz they chose to do so. This right should only be in the hands of the company because it is sad to say that the majority of the world does not share the same truthfulness to be willing to pay for others hard work after hey have obtained it. So is it moral to pirate the game if you use it as a demo? Absolutly not. Because you should always pay for someone's hard work weither you liked it or not because it is their work after all

You prove my point rather than dispelling it, if I tryed on a "coat clone" took it home, and throw it away, or come back and buy the original, I think it is a stretch to say I've done anything immoral or wrong. Illegal, sure, against the will of the company, definitely, but wrong? I don't think so.

You assume I believe that I don't have to pay someone for their hard work, and I don't know where your getting this from. If you enjoy their work and want to use it, of course you have to pay for it, but I'm not going to pay a company just for playing the new Blops at a friend's house, trying before you buy is widely accepted by everyone, just not the way I'm trying things.

. . . except that the metaphor breaks down, because in the case of piracy you've made an exact duplicate of the coat and bought it home, with only your say-so that you'll pay for it.

Yup, I'v set up a system where I'm not at the mercy to do whatever the creator and distributors of a product want me to do. I get to decide what I want to do. If I downloaded the game and played it forever without paying, that would be wrong, but I think you still have all your work ahead of you if you intend to imply or even prove that trying the game first is somehow "wrong".

Physical items are a lot easier for businesses to protect, because it's so difficult to create an exact duplicate. Digital items, not so much.

. . . which is why you're seeing a big push towards services in the digital realm, because it's a lot easier to continue to profit if you offer your software as a service.

Do you really think that attempting to require always-online to single player games is because they somehow hate their customers?

Didn't say it's because they hate their customers, I said they are willing to annoy inconvenience and restrict their customers who actually payed to make a failed attempt to combat piracy. I find this to be very disrespectful, especially in the case of starcraft 2 where people were crying out and even the news was having a field day complaining about how ridiculous Blizzard's "always online for single player" scheme was. When your customers are that inconvenienced, and you don't care, and the single player gets pirated anyway, I find that to be a total lack of respect.

Nah, it's largely because they want to turn their products into services. Because making a digital product act as a physical product is nearly impossible.

A piece of software is a product, even if the company streams the content to the customer and tries to keep the content hidden on their own server's. They are switching to making their game a service as a way of implementing DRM and trying to remain in control of their product.

As a side note: It may be interesting to see how things develop with 3D printers, as even physical products may start seeing some of the same problems . . .

Now you might have pushed me to the limit of my pro-piracy platform. Using a 3D printer to break copyright is a terribly immoral thing to do. It destroys the livelihoods of inventors and product producers. However, if you printed out 1 copy of something copyrighted on a 3d printer, just to try it, and used that to inform your decision to buy that product or not for yourself or your company, suddenly the immoral quandary disappears.

My claim was never that "it doesn't have any benefits" to begin with.

Excuse me for not being specific, my point is, you must understand why we prefer to use a whole game as a demo, instead of feature-light crippleware as a demo.

I don't think we break that agreement if we end up buying it

You can't guarantee that most people end up buying it. Most businesses want the transaction to be something they can guarantee.

What they want is irrelevant to me, of course I can't guarantee everyone will pay, and I don't think it should be guaranteed that everyone that tries the game for 5 minutes is forced to pay. Thats kinda the whole point of piracy for me.

and we don't break that agreement when we try a game at a friend's house

Assuming your friend has a licensed copy, there's no piracy in this example, because there's no unlicensed copies being made.

Copyright law is about making copies. Businesses can't claim copyright violation in examples where no copies have been made.

It isn't just about making copies, if my friend wants to stream copyrighted materials to me or others this is illegal. technically, if you read your terms of service, only members of your household are allowed to play your games. I'm glad license holders have unwritten permission to let visitors of their households play their games, in fact, Steam actually added the ability to "loan" your games to other people's accounts, but both of these things are given by the company and can be taken away by the company by your policy of obedience.

Let me ask you frankly, if a company flipped their decision, and said "You can never let members of your household or visitors play the game" would you respect this and abstain or would you do it anyway? The reason companies don;t make this policy is because it is almost impossible to enforce, much like how it is impossible to stop the pirates.

I disagree, anyone with monies who pirates, usually ends up buying the games they like so they can support the developer.

Evidence needed.

You asserted the opposite was true, where is your evidence for this claim? We both make an assumption, yours is based on the cynical view that pirates just steal stuff and say "fudge them", and mine is based on the fact that, as an adult, I have some extra money to spend, so sometimes I like to give it to the game companies that I love. One of these scenarios is more commonplace than the other.

It is very tempting to simply keep the pirated copy and not pay for it, because the pirated copy was free. Regardless of financial status, most people like free things.

It's also very childish and irresponsible. Personally, I find it hard to do when I really like a game or the company that produces it. Maybe others have no heart or conscience, but I think if you have money, and you love a game, that love is enough to push a person to buy that game.

Same goes with capitalism.

Say what? Haven't seen that word in this conversation before. We're not talking about whether businesses are owned privately or not. Heck, even China has problems with piracy.

I posted the comment on capitalism in response to this:

I don't really consider piracy to be a high, almighty, and ultimately good thing. I've yet to see anybody really hold it up as a moral ideal that everybody should strive for. Most of the time, I just see people barely squeaking out a thin justification for it.

The capitalist ideals of letting a company do whatever they want and control their products long after they have already sold said product to a customer is not "a high, almighty, and ultimately good thing". In fact, I think if you sell a product, your right to own and control that product ENDS and the customer now gets to do anything they want without damaging others, I am aware the law says otherwise, but I find this to be quite immoral.

Regular people don;'t have access to the backbone of the internet

Well, maybe someday we can guarantee that email always goes through pipes that are clearly labelled "backbone," and maybe someday we can guarantee that bad actors are never on pipes labelled "backbone."

. . . I wouldn't count on it, though.

Botnets can create absurd amounts of money, I wouldn't be surprised if some of their owners have access to what you call a "backbone."

Well, I disagree. I don't think that even the very rich have access to the "backbone" lines of the internet that run between large email companies and ISPs (the Gmail mailserver -> Yahoo mailserver part of the email trip) enough to steal the secrets of the companies I am trying to protect. Only the NSA and other governmental organizations really have that type of unfettered access.

Well, I think your hypothesis that locally run email servers are more secure is equally baseless.

Being that there is no evidence being passed around, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this. I've seen plenty of evidence that this simply raises the stakes, and concentrates the hackers' efforts on cloud providers. How many times have I seen some report of some large database being stolen (often exposing embarrassing practices, like having plain text passwords), with the provider scrambling to get everybody to change their passwords?

Literally this happened once with HeartBleed, and it was POSSIBLE not very likely that all passwords were compromised. Other than that, gmail has never lost it's entire password base and asked all user's to change password. Has yahoo or microsoft lost every password for email before? That would be news to me, and I'm tempted to give you the old "evidence needed" thing you keep doing.

Hacker's focusing on the cloud rather than the local email server is EXACTLY the evidence I submit that my scheme is more secure. I can provide you news articles that big companies like Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft are informed of security vulnerabilities before the general public (although I don't have absolute proof the reporters and large companies aren't lying). If they get to patch vulnerabilities before you even become aware of them, I don't understand how you can claim your security is better than theirs.

This whole idea of "oh, we can hire dedicated security teams and experts" has pretty much fallen flat on its face. I find it laughable, sorry.

How many times do I have to read about these failures?

I never asserted they are perfect, what I said is they have access to better resources than you or I do, and thus have a better chance of stopping hackers. Do you really think small companies advertise when their security is busted to the news? Saying you don't hear about these breaches, does not somehow imply that small companies get hacked LESS than large companies.

Right now - we've got no guarantees that these businesses are actually practicing what you preach. Sure, that's the hypothesis - but where is the evidence?

I can only speak from personal experience. Almost every company that I do a "penetration test" style of security audit on has a small list of vulnerabilities that their IT/IS team has missed and these vulnerabilities are well documented, if I did that same security audit on google, none of the known vulnerabilities will work, because they have security auditors like me running pen tests constantly.

Can you prove with evidence your security is better? If not, I guess we're both making hypotheses? Except common sense tells you that having faster access to the knowledge of security vulnerabilities in your software or hardware obviously means a better chance to fix said vulnerabilities. Not a guarantee they will fix it mind you (IE: the widespread vulnerability of SQL was a crazy few years of large company insecurity), but unless your small company writes its own patches for security vulnerabilities, it would be impossible for them to patch said vulnerabilities until the parent company of those pieces of software/firmware release some kind of patch.

[ssilk]

tl;dr. sorry.

[muzzy]

tl;dr. sorry.

not to mention how badly this thread derailed too

[therapist]

tl;dr. sorry.

It's okay, reading is hard work.

[CobraA1]

Yup, I'v set up a system where I'm not at the mercy to do whatever the creator and distributors of a product want me to do. I get to decide what I want to do.

Because it's all about you, right? The entire world revolves around you personally.

Unfortunately, all I see coming from an attitude like this is even more dysfunction coming from the their end, because you're basically demonstrating to them that they can't trust you . . .

We're at a point right now where it's gonna be really difficult to satisfy both the buyer and the seller. I know that on the business side of things right now " . . . as a service" is one of the big catch phrases.

Using a 3D printer to break copyright is a terribly immoral thing to do. It destroys the livelihoods of inventors and product producers.

Curious: What makes software developers, artists, and businessmen exempt?

After all, the people who write software have their own livelihoods to be concerned about as well . . .

You asserted the opposite was true, where is your evidence for this claim?

Guess we'll agree to disagree then.

The capitalist ideals of letting a company do whatever they want and control their products long after they have already sold said product to a customer is not "a high, almighty, and ultimately good thing". In fact, I think if you sell a product, your right to own and control that product ENDS and the customer now gets to do anything they want without damaging others, I am aware the law says otherwise, but I find this to be quite immoral.

I'm not certain that I agree with "letting a company do whatever they want and control their products long after they have already sold said product to a customer" is an ideal of capitalism. In fact, that's probably against the idea of a free market, where you should be able to interact with a market free of intervention by some other party.

Has yahoo or microsoft lost every password for email before? That would be news to me

Yup.
Yup.
It gets better, it's not just them.
More!
More!

It's pretty regular that I see a new news report of stuff getting stolen from some big provider. Passwords are sometimes safer because sometimes they are hashed, but even things that aren't passwords can be pretty valuable info.

I see no evidence of your claims, sorry.

Do you really think small companies advertise when their security is busted to the news?

No, and I don't expect it. Although when a large provider is breached - well, it's a vastly larger scale than when a small business is breached. The impact is far more catostrophic.

Sure, it's horrible either way, I know the small business and its customers are severely impacted, but it's a total difference in scale when a large provider is hit.

Can you prove with evidence your security is better?

I don't work at an IT position currently, but I can say with confidence that my personal PC hasn't been hacked in over 10 years.

Can you prove with evidence that my security is worse?

not to mention how badly this thread derailed too

Sigh . . . sorry. But I think I'm at a point where I'm just gonna agree to disagree. The only evidence I see is articles (that I'm linking to in this message) saying large providers have been hacked, something I see on a fairly regular basis.

. . . and from that evidence, I have no reason to believe him, no matter how noble or ideal his hypotheses about the cloud are.

Sorry: This is simply a case of reality not matching the ideal. Ideally, he should be correct. Realistically - it didn't work out that way.

[muzzy]

tl;dr. sorry.

It's okay, reading is hard work.

and that's why everyone should take the time to write as short messages as possible.

[therapist]

Yup, I'v set up a system where I'm not at the mercy to do whatever the creator and distributors of a product want me to do. I get to decide what I want to do.

Because it's all about you, right? The entire world revolves around you personally.

Thats what freedom is, doing whatever you want as long as you don't infringe the rights of others. You get to do anything you want, as long as you don't damage others. Obviously stealing a game affects the developer, but do you mean to assert that somehow trying games before you buy them damages the developer? You act as though both of these concept are exactly morally the same, and they aren't.

Unfortunately, all I see coming from an attitude like this is even more dysfunction coming from the their end, because you're basically demonstrating to them that they can't trust you . . .

When did I demonstrate that? I buy the games that I end up playing and delete those that I don't intend to play. Don't really see where I broke any "trust" or damaged the developer's ability to get paid by people that ant to buy his/her products.

We're at a point right now where it's gonna be really difficult to satisfy both the buyer and the seller. I know that on the business side of things right now " . . . as a service" is one of the big catch phrases.

I'm of the opinion that the seller should be at the mercy of the customer. What the customer wants is important, what the seller wants is irrelevant. If he doesn't give in to the desires of his customers, then he should be replaced by a seller that does.

Using a 3D printer to break copyright is a terribly immoral thing to do. It destroys the livelihoods of inventors and product producers.

Curious: What makes software developers, artists, and businessmen exempt?

After all, the people who write software have their own livelihoods to be concerned about as well . . .

Continue my quote so you don't accidentally take me out of context, I said: if you use a 3d printer to try a copyrighted product just to try that product and inform whether you want to buy that copyrighted product, then you haven't done anything wrong.

THAT is the difference between robbing a person of their livelihood, and not robbing them of anything AT ALL.

You asserted the opposite was true, where is your evidence for this claim?

Guess we'll agree to disagree then.

Wait, so you demand evidence for my claims but have none of your own? Are we agreeing to disagree or are you accepting my assertion that we are both making assumptions in opposite directions, one of which is true and one of which is false.

The capitalist ideals of letting a company do whatever they want and control their products long after they have already sold said product to a customer is not "a high, almighty, and ultimately good thing". In fact, I think if you sell a product, your right to own and control that product ENDS and the customer now gets to do anything they want without damaging others, I am aware the law says otherwise, but I find this to be quite immoral.

I'm not certain that I agree with "letting a company do whatever they want and control their products long after they have already sold said product to a customer" is an ideal of capitalism. In fact, that's probably against the idea of a free market, where you should be able to interact with a market free of intervention by some other party.

Of course it's not a classic ideal of capitalism, but one that all the modern capitalist countries (including china) are all embracing and enforcing on their peoples. If you agree with the idea that a company should lose all rights to a product when they sell it to the customer, how can you respect the enforcement of laws that make breaking DRM illegal, even for paying customers?

Yup.
Yup.
It gets better, it's not just them.
More!
More!

It's pretty regular that I see a new news report of stuff getting stolen from some big provider. Passwords are sometimes safer because sometimes they are hashed, but even things that aren't passwords can be pretty valuable info.

Yeah, only ebay had its entire login base stolen, and this was because they made the mistake of not treating their user info at the same level as their financial information (which was not compromised) but you're right, ebay is a big company and messed up on their security scheme. Most of the rest of these articles show some of the passwords for sites were stolen, I could explain each case for you if you need me to, but just to explain a few to you: the instance of the botnet was a case of individual computers having their passwords stolen from them for a few particular sites (do you really protect your users from downloading malware on their personal computers? if so how?), the giant list of passwords from different sites was a compilation of already compromised passwords (most of which were already changed years ago), the india passwords was a smaller company within MS who weren't given access to microsoft's resources (this is why the india company was hacked, but not the rest of microsoft), one of the articles is about how the passwords were acquired thru phishing and others are instances of finding lists of usernames by using search engines to find every *@yahoo.com account and then trying the most common passwords in the world on every account they could find. (small companies also have vulnerabilities like these)

I see no evidence of your claims, sorry.

You really still wish to assert that large company's servers are less secure than the servers of smaller companies? Still waiting for evidence of your claims if you expect me to believe that.

Do you really think small companies advertise when their security is busted to the news?

No, and I don't expect it. Although when a large provider is breached - well, it's a vastly larger scale than when a small business is breached. The impact is far more catostrophic.

Sure, it's horrible either way, I know the small business and its customers are severely impacted, but it's a total difference in scale when a large provider is hit.

So you agree with my point that small companies dont have news articles when their security is blown, but you still used news articles as evidence to support your argument that large companies have worse security? The point is, you know darn well smaller companies suffer these same problems, but we can't just compare the number of news articles we can find and call that equal evidence.

Can you prove with evidence your security is better?

I don't work at an IT position currently, but I can say with confidence that my personal PC hasn't been hacked in over 10 years.

Not really the same thing as a company server. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

Can you prove with evidence that my security is worse?

I can prove google and yahoo and other large tech firms get informed FIRST about security flaws before the public does, and logic dictates that this means they have better OPPORTUNITY to fix those problem before anyone else has a chance, but I suppose your right that it is possible that they just sit on their hands and dwiddle their thumbs and treat their servers EXACTLY the same as you do your home PC.

I just find that kind of completely unbelievable.

Sigh . . . sorry. But I think I'm at a point where I'm just gonna agree to disagree. The only evidence I see is articles (that I'm linking to in this message) saying large providers have been hacked, something I see on a fairly regular basis.

Okay, you almost proved your argument, now prove smaller companies have less of these instances and my argument is TOASTED.

. . . and from that evidence, I have no reason to believe him, no matter how noble or ideal his hypotheses about the cloud are.

Sorry: This is simply a case of reality not matching the ideal. Ideally, he should be correct. Realistically - it didn't work out that way.

You almost proved it, just post that article about how smaller companies are more secure and you got me. Realistically, the servers of google yahoo etc ARE more hardened than those of small companies whether you want to admit it or not.

[therapist]

tl;dr. sorry.

It's okay, reading is hard work.

and that's why everyone should take the time to write as short messages as possible.

Making an assertion takes a single line, disputing it thoroughly and explaining the specifics of why it isn't true might take an entire book.

In debate, their is a technique where if you know you don't have evidence or you can't prove your point, you make alot of small assertions all over the place. Start many small fires all over the forest, and your opponent will have a very very hard time running all over putting all these fires out before the time limit runs out. Most likely, they will run out of time before they can dispute every assertion you have made, and you'll end up with many undisputed points.

On a forum, you can type as much as you want and be thorough although this does upset the "book on tape" crowd who don't enjoy reading and demand all answers be reduced to slogans.

Edit: the "reading is hard" comment was sarcasm, but I can appreciate that not everyone wants to process that much information without pay or glory or something like that to make it :worth it" to you.

Do what you feel, no one will ever make you read.

[muzzy]

In debate, their is a technique where if you know you don't have evidence or you can't prove your point, you make alot of small assertions all over the place. Start many small fires all over the forest, and your opponent will have a very very hard time running all over putting all these fires out before the time limit runs out. Most likely, they will run out of time before they can dispute every assertion you have made, and you'll end up with many undisputed points.

... Intimidating other people with verbosity? That's not a legitimate debating technique. That's a trolling/flaming technique.

Are you saying you're using this "technique", or are you accusing others of using it, or was this just a completely random meaningless comment that had nothing to do with the discussion at hand?

[therapist]

In debate, their is a technique where if you know you don't have evidence or you can't prove your point, you make alot of small assertions all over the place. Start many small fires all over the forest, and your opponent will have a very very hard time running all over putting all these fires out before the time limit runs out. Most likely, they will run out of time before they can dispute every assertion you have made, and you'll end up with many undisputed points.

... Intimidating other people with verbosity? That's not a legitimate debating technique. That's a trolling/flaming technique.

Are you saying you're using this "technique", or are you accusing others of using it, or was this just a completely random meaningless comment that had nothing to do with the discussion at hand?

Intimidating? What? I said some people use the technique of making many assertions, then it is almost impossible to address these many assertions in the same time it takes to make those assertions.

My point is, a small post makes an assertion, an enormous wall of text is needed to completely shut down that assertion. If you can't read a long post, you will only see the "many small fires" and in a debate (in real debates in real life, time is limited for both sides) people with bad arguments make a large list of bad assertions, and their opponent has no time to address all those bad assertions before the buzzer rings.

Edit: I agree it isn't a "legitimate" technique but it makes it easy to win a debate (a classically formatted debate where both sides are given equal time) even if you are wrong because you can make 30 assertions in 10 minutes, and you can only address and explain the flaws in 5 assertions in 10 minutes.
I'm defending the idea that a long post is a good idea, or even asserting a long post is necessary to reply or respond to a small post that makes many undue assertions.
Example: ssilk asks me "What is LOVE?" in a very small post, then I have to give him a huge wall of text ust to explain why that question isnt valid and doesn't compare to making a moral argument for something that has a definitive, yet undiscovered answer.

[ssilk]

tl;dr. sorry.

It's okay, reading is hard work.

and that's why everyone should take the time to write as short messages as possible.

I find it much more difficult to shorten my postings, than to elongate them. Coming to the point. Removing useless sentences or even words. Make it easier to read.

Much to learn here, how to make it wrong.

In debate, their is a technique where if you know you don't have evidence or you can't prove your point, you make alot of small assertions all over the place. Start many small fires all over the forest, and your opponent will have a very very hard time running all over putting all these fires out before the time limit runs out. Most likely, they will run out of time before they can dispute every assertion you have made, and you'll end up with many undisputed points.
On a forum, you can type as much as you want and be thorough although this does upset the "book on tape" crowd who don't enjoy reading and demand all answers be reduced to slogans.

Well, even on a forum time goes out. You don't need to answer to every single point. You have to find THE point and answer it, because the others are not stupid and can and want follow or they wont. You have to make it somehow interesting. It is not interesting, if I write a sentence and three coming back. That is just stupid.
Hm. This belongs now to a meta-meta-discussion. I'm not sure, but as moderator I should have to stop this, but my personal feeling is ... indifferent.

[muzzy]

This belongs now to a meta-meta-discussion. I'm not sure, but as moderator I should have to stop this, but my personal feeling is ... indifferent.

I feel guilty for participating in the meta-meta too. This thread went bad pretty early and turned into completely random chat thread somehow. And the whole "discussion" about what various technical terms mean and other nonsense...

In context of Factorio, the developers have made a statement that they aren't going to do anything about the piracy, and they hope it might help them. That's, like, end of the discussion. The devs have stated their opinion and I don't think many people disagree about that. Are there actually people who believe the developers should be stricter about enforcing their copyrights?