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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • This is correct, as long as the copy was produced lawfully, which is only possible if no copy protection was circumvented.

    Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states: No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

    This law was created to limit the rights from 17 USC 117, and yes exceptions to section 103 exist, but those are very specific and some of them even exclude games specifically from the exceptions.

    But I am no lawyer, and as a European I only have a very limited view and knowledge of US laws, so yes it is only my understanding of those laws and I could be wrong, so don’t take my words as a legal advice or anything like that. I am only a normal human with some experience with laws and jurisdictions, but far away from a specialist.



  • You may have the right to make a backup, but playing that backup on a non sectioned device or via non sectioned means is still a breach of the TOS and breaking the license terms of the game and/or console. Oh and it is in violation of the DMCA as far as I know, because to make the backup it is needed to circumvent copy protection, which is forbidden by the rules of the DMCA (and equal laws in other jurisdictions like Europe). You may own the cartridge, but you still only have a license (with very specific terms and rules) to use the software on it.




  • There are not much possibilities to legally own games left. Physical releases are nearly full gone on PC (physical boxes only containing Steam Keys), and even on Consoles they become less and less common (or turned into something like the Switch 2 Game cards). On the digital release front only GOG comes to mind as as store where one could say that one owns the game after purchase and download. Everything else only sell licenses that can be revoked or removed any moment.








  • Well… Yes, Steam has a (very stupid in my eyes) policy of “if the developer puts up an update, then everyone must update” but that is not (fully) invalidating my point.

    The content of the update and the time of release of the update is still outside of Steams responsibility. If the developer decides to push an update that uses some crazy stuff that works fine in Windows but would need some obscure codepath that are not available in Wine/Proton and by that rendering a game with a “Great on Deck” rating to “unplayable” then there is nothing Steam can do about it. Or if the developer patches in some DRM that will not run on Linux. Well, yes they could put up some lines in the terms of contracts for the developers to disallow this kind of changes but i am sure this would not end well at all.

    Another thing, that most likely could even less be regulated, would be if the developer pushes an update that changes the UI to something that looks great on a huge screen but is unreadable on the SteamDeck.

    Yes, all this would be way less an issue if Steam would make updates optional or would allow (an easy way) to choose the version. So i am totally on your side with that point.





  • A new homepage for the business of my wife.

    I plan to use Hugo for it, I just wish the documentation would be better.

    For the homepage I need a few additional “non-blog” pages and from the documentation I am not sure how to do that the best way.

    But to be honest, I have not really looked deeper into that, so it is very possible that I just missed something.


  • I only bind applications to ports on the Internet facing network interfaces that need to be reachable from outside, and have all other ports closed because nothing is listening on them. A firewall in this case would bring me no further protection from external threats, because all those ports have to be open in the firewall too.

    But Linux comes with a firewall build in, so I use it even if it is not strictly needed with my strict port management regime for my services. And a firewall has the added benefit to limit outgoing network traffic to only allowed ports/applications.