this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Piracy is becoming the safe option, think about that.
Yeah, in some cases piracy feels more straightforward and honest than having to sign away all my rights and data so I can do something as simple as reading a book.
It used to be you worried about getting a virus from pirated books, now the corpo options are provably malware
Not just probably, they've literally done it. Look up the Sony rootkit scandal.
They said "provably", not "probably", so the good news is we all already agree :)
Well politic'd, friend
You don't even need to go back to the early 2000s Bertelsman-Sony copy protection scandal.
Millions of people install rootkits on their PCs today in the form of anti-cheat software that has a greater level of system access than Bertelsman/Sony ever had.
Ring 0 level kernel access. Code that can be executed with above admin level privileges and do anything it wants to with your system. Shit, it could reflash firmware on your PC if it wanted to, allowing malicious code to survive OS reinstalls.
And not only that - it's not even effective as an anti-cheat solution, leading to the question of why they bother with it anyway? Data harvesting? Security theatre?
Yeah that's spooky. Could we even tell if data is being harvested?
I know there's also secret op codes and hardware. Real spooky shit. We really need open source hardware.
👨🚀🏴☠️🔫👩🚀🏴☠️
Oh no... I've believed the propaganda uncritically for most of my life and am just now realising how absurd it was to ever trust the establishment's narrative.
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Idk, I think it's normal to believe proaganda. We all do, and sometimes it's even true. I'm just commenting on it because I'm so used to automatically criticising the mainstream message, so I'm usually on the other side of this discussion. But for a long time I worried about viruses from piracy, but it only just dawned on me that I am now far less afraid of that than of corporate proprietary spyware.
It never occurred to me before that of course the pirates are more trustworthy, they always have been. The mainstream propaganda is so pervasive that it's going to leave little bits stuck in your mind for a long time.
I'm still wary of some pirated content, but when using the right trackers, that fear basically disappears.