Hmmm, I never really thought about it. Not sure if it would be worth the effort or just me screaming into the digital void in a slightly more organized format.
I just like digging into weird corners of digital/hacker/pirating history and tossing it out there.
And I figure there's probably a lot of younger Lemmy's around here who never got to see the wild shit from yesteryear that this whole scene is built on. :)
AI slop guided by my loving and gentle embrace.
Great points! The government always seems to conflate stuff to make what they are doing seem more logical. But let's face it, the government was working for capitalist interests in this prosecution.
I haven't found much info, but if he hasn't been released early and had to do full sentence, then yeah, June this year. And he's supposed to be deported to China immediately after release.
Me too! In that article there is a cover of BYTE mag with the pirate ship on it, and I remember reading that in my best friend's basement while listening to the radio and drinking Pepsi out of a glass bottle! I shot him a text just now with the pic of that magazine.
Fuck those times were awesome!
My biggest regret tho, is that even tho I was fairly interested in computers then, I was more interested in girls. So I fucked around with girls all my teens and 20's instead of riding the tech wave and having it for a career. Got my gf pregnant at 17, and had to start working a factory job butchering turkeys and chickens. (Obviously I don't regret having my children, just saying I could have been smarter about it.)
Now I'm retired and making up for lost time by becoming the biggest tech nerd ever, and fucking embracing all of it all day: AI, Lemmy, PieFed, Mastadon, Linux, Racket, Python, Java, Lua, etc... LMAO
It's either that or pickelball all day! But fuck that noise, I wanna be an old computer punk pirate, shitposting and annoying the hell out of young Lemmys for the rest of my days. Considering the number of bans I have, all because I'm a socialist anarchist, my plan seems to be working! :)
In 1981, Robert Tripp, editor and publisher of MICRO: The 6502 Journal, likened the copying of software to the photocopying of a magazine and acknowledged that MICRO would have no livelihood if readers could simply get the content free or at minimal cost.
Thus began the drama of copy protection, an industrial loss prevention practice wherein companies used a combination of hardware and software techniques to scramble the data on software media formats, typically 5.25-inch floppy disks, so that copying the disk was no longer possible by conventional means. While the goal of this subtle bit of friction was to throttle piracy, it also prevented users from creating backup copies of software they legally owned, or otherwise accessing the code itself.
So I wanted to test it myself. I went to that community and posted something that’s only offensive to zionists.
What I wasn’t expecting is Ada’s response. She said in the modlogs she also felt the post was rage bait.
But you actually did post to rage bait. I’m not usually one to defend Ada, but in this case, you went there intentionally to stir things up, and you got exactly what you were looking for.
Posting in a place you don’t like, just to see what happens, is the definition of trolling. It’s not like how Lemmy uses the word now to describe anyone they disagree with. The real definition is posting something just to get a reaction.
In this situation, I'm saying YDI.
Article from 2012, but still fun. And I loved this part: This is the fundamental difference between capitalists and pirates. Capitalists accumulate. Pirates archive. A capitalist wants profit from the sale of every commodity and will enforce scarcity to get it. Pirates work to create vast common spaces, amassing huge troves of content, much of it too obscure to be of much use to very many people. Piracy destroys exchange value, and pays little heed to use value.
Reddit gets worse every day.
Thus computer owners can exchange thousands of dollars worth of software as easily as children trade bubble-gum cards.
lol
Kaufman Research Manufacturing Inc., a small company in Mountain View, Calif., recently received patent approval for a ROM that will execute a program but will not disclose the full structure of the program, the prerequisite to copying. ‘‘The only way to replicate it,’’ said Marc T. Kaufman, inventor of the device, ‘‘is to put it under an electron microscope.’’
Bigger lol
Technology; Piracy in Era Of Computers
Feb. 24, 1983 - The New York Times
AFTER a number of false starts against the black market in computer software and hardware, efforts are under way to protect future computer products by making each one as distinctive as the person who uses it and thus harder to copy.
As a result, there may be gradual erosion of the difference between hardware and software and a significant change in the way ordinary users purchase and operate their computers.
Over the short run, manufacturers acknowledge privately, the battle against software pirates is already lost. Most software comes packaged on floppy disks, record-like pieces of plastic that store information. And most computers include utility programs making it possible for even a novice to make an exact electronic back-up copy of almost any commercially available program.
Thus computer owners can exchange thousands of dollars worth of software as easily as children trade bubble-gum cards.
Some mail-order houses sell pirated copies of software for half the cost of the original.
Efforts by legitimate manufacturers to encode their programs to prevent copying have merely led to an expensive cat-and mouse game, in which determined hobbyists and pirates break the codes as fast as manufacturers create them.
Manufacturers hope for better luck with the next generation of computers. Seymour Rubinstein, president of the Micropro International Corporation, a leading software house, said, ''Eventually each machine and program will have a specific identity, and they will only run together.''
In the most widely suggested plan, every computer in the country would be sold with an electronic ''serial number'' in the computer's central processing unit. The machine would compare its own number with one embossed on the software sold to the machine's owner. Users could make unlimited back-up copies but could not pass them on because neither the machine nor the software could operate unless the numbers matched.
But a problem, according to Mr. Rubenstein, arises if the computer is repaired or replaced. Users would find that their old software would not operate with the new machine. ''There are ways around that, but we're still working on it,'' said Mr. Rubenstein, who is studying copy-protection methods with a committee of the Association for Data Processing Service Organizations.
In a variation of the serial-number plan, the first use of new software would prompt a message from the computer showing the identification numbers of the program and of the machine itself. The user would make a telephone call to the manufacturer, giving his credit card number and the two serial numbers, and would receive a code to make the software function on that machine.
More radical plans envision the elimination of floppy disks, which many people already regard as an inefficient way to store information.
Instead of a disk, a computer program would be stored on a ROM, meaning ''Read Only Memory.'' This is a computer chip engraved with unalterable computer instructions. When purchased, the computer would already include chips containing popular software, such as word processing programs, spreadsheets for financial planning or graphics packages. But access to the programs would be limited to users paying the price for the key to unlock the full powers of their machine.
Some people advocate building the software into the hardware. They cite home arcade games as their model. Game cartridges are essentially ROM's that are plugged into the side of the machine. While they can be copied, doing so is difficult and expensive. Kaufman Research Manufacturing Inc., a small company in Mountain View, Calif., recently received patent approval for a ROM that will execute a program but will not disclose the full structure of the program, the prerequisite to copying. ''The only way to replicate it,'' said Marc T. Kaufman, inventor of the device, ''is to put it under an electron microscope.''
But merging hardware and software has its problems. Unlike a simple Pac-Man game, a sophisticated program cannot just be plugged into the machine. And permanently installed chips limit consumers to using the programs provided by the manufacturer of the computer.
''If this industry has learned anything in the past year,'' said Rick Magnuson, director of retail marketing for Digital Research, ''it should be that consumers like to select their own software.'' Programs embedded in the machine are also impossible to update without changing chips. Mr. Rubenstein likens the problem to ''buying a video cassette recorder with all the movies already built in.''
Fighting the software pirates means headaches for ordinary users. ''Any system of locks and preventive measures makes everyone's life more difficult,'' said Edward Currie, president of Lifeboat Associates, a New York software producer. ''The last thing a manufacturer should want to do today is traumatize his customers.''
You deserved it! Way too much crying going on in comment sections lately.
Why do so many of you go to communities that you disagree with, start shit, get banned, then come here to continue the shit stirring in the comments?!
Guys if you don't like a fucking community, just block it or avoid it. WTF?! lmao
Thanks! I just like posting my shit on Lemmy. Everyone around Lemmy (and before that, Reddit) kept bitching that every time I'd reply, that I wrote a "fucking essay."
So now I'm writing fucking essays.
(Quick shout-out to my serial downvoting stalkers. haha)