this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
64 points (80.2% liked)

Technology

33611 readers
333 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Seems like the next logical step. Most big games are always-online Games as a Service where your local storage is useless if the company server doesn't handshake. A lot of business and productivity software already requires subscriptions and is partially online. Every single fucking company wants to have an app on your phone so they can watch you in the bathroom. And there's talk that MSFT might start moving Windows off the PC entirely and in to the cloud.

I figure at some point it's in the shareholder's best interests to prohibit users from actually storing anything locally. Storage is really just stolen subscription revenue, when you think about it. Every time a user accesses something on a local drive they're stealing the chance for you to extort them in to paying a subscription fee.

What do think, too distopian? Back when tapes, CDs, MiniDiscs, all the old generations of data storage that you could write to at home were first circulating the media industries tried real, real hard to make them illegal to privately own. We've been fighting an escalating battle against digital (and analog I guess) IP regimes ever since then. Streaming has pretty much killed physical media afaik. I have no idea if blu-rays or DVDs are still printed for sale.

Idk, just a thought. Let me know what you think.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Yeah, that's a good analysis. I've gotten in to it with friends over "consumer choice", where they tell me "Oh, the customers didn't want x thing that's why you can't get x thing" and I'll hit back with "The manufacturers decided they didn't want to support x thing for whatever reason, or that they could squeeze people for more money without x thing, and they have hegemonic control over the market share for that kind of product, so they can force the consumers to do what they tell the consumers to do" and they look at me like I have three heads. : p

Makes me think of the guy who, afaik, is the only guy in the world who is a reliable source for working floppy disks. The little ones, the big ones, the really big ones that are from before even my time. He works really hard to track down any intact ones he can get, then re-sell them to people who have ancient, ancient systems running key infrastructure.

Dammit someone turned on accessibility features and now there's confetti on my screen whenever I click. fedposting Ted stop messing with my machine! fedposting