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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.







  • You can add your own signing keys to the UEFI and boot an modified bootloader and Kernel that you have signed yourself. So yes, it is possible to “lie”

    For such a locked down system, akin to game consoles or smartphones, would be needed. And even those get jail broken and manipulated, so “total security” on there is not complete but easier to check and ensure. Another way to make sure that the code is not manipulated would be to put all those games into the cloud and have every player only play via streaming. All the code would then run on secured, locked down and verified machines.







  • There was a major focus shift maybe 5 or 10 years ago towards security in Linux design, especially with the development of Wayland, pipewire and systemd. The problem is that accessibility software behaves in many ways like spyware or malware. It reads all windows, it hooks themselves in programs, it redirects output and input. The security focused (even security first) approach of many developers broke all the accessibility workflows and proper API to do it the new and safe way have low priority. A few exist but it is still far away from feature parity.

    That’s why I am against the Wayland default or even worse Wayland only approach that many distributions have nowadays, Wayland is still barely useable for many people who need working accessibility solutions and that should be seen as a major stopper issue for a wide release like that.