Sailing to other countries and rob their gold.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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More broadly, I would say public P2P stuff - at least in its current forms. I'm not sure it can survive some of the generational shifts that have been occurring in society, since it relies so heavily on community and sharing and demands general technological literacy (not just touchscreen/smartphone/app literacy). Those that do actually have the literacy seem increasingly interested in the instant gratification direct download or torrent streaming stuff, to the detriment of traditional methods of P2P file sharing.
That is absolutely the trend I’m seeing with younger people. I work hard to curate and maintain a high quality media library, but they’re happy to stream something in low quality from a sketchy site and move on.
Netflix's short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.
In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.
But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that's a problem.
Netflix’s short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.
Add to that the fact that a lot of these types of non-standard content have low engagement and interest. Which is what ultimately makes preservation and piracy harder. If you had a lot of interest it would be difficult but not impossible to recreate some of the interactive elements around them, and extract/decrypt the video content. But without interest it's more difficult. Also ironically the lack of interest is why these things are being sunsetted in the first place. It's kind of a perfect storm in that they are hard to preserve and there is also low interest in preserving them as well.
piracy didn't start with the internet and won't end on it. like with porn, it always finds a way.
It's always niche stuff. Music by non-headliners. Indie films.
I honestly think text/pdfs will actually stay easy. Text, even manga I suspect, is lightweight to host, so it's easier to keep online. By contrast a flac rip of a band that's never gone gold will be too heavy to host on a web page, but too niche to keep dedicated seeders on a torrent.
Maritime.
I think as the atmosphere thickens and satellite images get more difficult, maritime piracy is gonna get a lot easier.
And if war breaks out and many countries are crippled (think post-nuclear apocalypse) that'll help that case too. Not saying it will happen but it could.
In general, perhaps, but in keeping with OP's implication of "harder to do" (from an individual standpoint), maritime piracy will become increasingly more challenging to engage in as (/if) it rises in prominence once again, culturally, as civilization falters in maintaining itself globally. 🤷🏼♂️ More people doing it, more people taking measures against it, more risk to one's person/lifespan, etc. I mean, by that metric on a larger scale: fucking everything's gonna get harder to do. 😅😶
Well yes, but relative to, like, baking a cake, i think that old fashioned maritime good-good is going to become much easier.
On a scale of "baking a cake" and "ruffneck boarding party", how's your post-apoc future going? 🤣🤌🏼
Oh, pirates cant have cake? I call bullshit. How the fuck do you afford cocoa powder in 2035?
I don't, but the guy two tents over did. I made sure to thank him like a good neighbor, before closing our bartering session with a large rock.
Tents? Fancy. What corporation are you contracted with? Nestle? Blackwater? Walmart-yutani?
Fair point, but this tarp over the hole I defend as my own "home" isn't a far cry from what us poors were expected to bow & scrape for the privilege of before the Last Day changed everything everywhere for everyone. 🤷🏼♂️ It's just hope seeping into common parlance again, I guess.
I still have a few mg of hope, the good stuff, uncut neurotransmitter prodrug. If you really want to feel it. I also, and i know this is kind of black market, but i have half an inhaler of vasopresin. This is the good shit. I wouldn't be willing to part with it, but i got full stapled as a job requirement back in '31, so it's no good to me anymore.
I hear ya, choom. The whole rock's fucked and we're just the last few koyo to slide off it. Though, I used to know a scrappy olblood from way back. Not even ink on 'im, much less any shine. Last I heard, though: one of his homemade bunker betties glitched and fried him instead. It's almost worth a stroll up the hill, to see if he's still kickin', but I prefer my face attached as it is.
Wait, you're getting synthetic parts? Im getting 'efficiencies' and 'weight reductions' every few months. Had to give uo a kidney for my last gig, so they could 'be sure i wouldnt drink on the job'.
Nah, that's so you wouldn't drink the bat juice & live for insurance to pay out. That'd get logged and flagged for review up top, but some clocker flatlines & froths out before medi even pings? That's just another on the pile. Next.
Responses ITT have focused on legal and technical roadblocks. But if you can imagine a world where cultural production is even slightly less consolidated and corporate, where we start doing more of it for ourselves and our social circles, a cultural roadblock starts to emerge. How do I copy illicitly if the output is specialized and uniquely calibrated to the personal tastes of a hyper-small audience? Another way of asking the question might be: if mass markets don't mean much anymore and it's easy to make and propagate things ourselves, does piracy still exist? Or do we recognize that copying is a fundamental mechanism of culture, and there's no longer any point in encumbering it for the sake of the profit motive?
I think the remarks of Denuvo hardly mattering for Ubisoft titles because they're shitty games to start with, or jokes about Disney succeeding in making a film that will never get pirated (Snow White), start to get at this question
But isnt a world with more genuine art we make ourselves a good thing? I don't think anything of stealing from a corporation as stealing. Its reclaimation
If its someone I know who is putting in labor to make a living... like isnt that the point?
Yes it is, that's what I'm getting at - independent output's share of total output increasing significantly
Traditional. I mean when was the last time you even saw an armed sloop, much less a galleon?
I really think we're at a momentary historical nadir of maritime piracy. One of the big things that's going to happen as climate change fucks us is that satellite images are going to get less reliable.
Things like not-super-deep submarines are going to get easier, unmanned drones are already feasible at a municipal scale, and the technologies that have allowed statist navies to dominate the seas are already falling out of the meta in modern war.
I think the pirates've got this.
Personally, I'd have moved onto submarines. Just sneak up underneath a ship, cut a hole in the bottom and steal the containers without anyone ever noticing you. 😌
That's...
That's not how buoyancy works at all. 😅
Are you suggesting they would be more worried about the containers being stolen than their boat sinking from the giant hole in the bottom?
If this is a serious question... There is an infinitesimal chance of puncturing a vessel of that size while underneath it to plunder its hold's contents via the same hole — especially at the aforementioned tech level of the time.
Even if you could avoid detection in the process of completing the hole, anyone sent through to retrieve the loot would be crushed in transit and arrive aboard as some variation of a frothed bio jam — with or without the membrane that otherwise held them more or less together up until that point in their presumably harebrained life.
I'm talking about pirating goods with a submarine that can cut holes in the bottom of ships.
Of course I am 100% serious. /s
Hey, the exodus from that other place brought sufficient halfwits with it to promote an SOP of clarification, etc , if only for their effect on the overall atmosphere here. Minor as it may be, it's a risk worth considering — and the ol' benefit of the doubt is a viable tool, per yoozj. 🫠
I always appreciate actual facts, regardless of whether or not it goes with the joking around. As long as it's not presented in a dickish manner. 😊
Predator-handshake.gif
Anything that requires an online service. Specifically, I'm talking about games that need a server to run and permanently shut down once it's offline -- these are becoming more common even among games with single player modes.
I don't see manga becoming harder, at all, even with all the crackdowns. Smaller files, and it's the type of stuff you can't reliably DRM. Denuvo is mostly a problem with companies like SEGA, honestly. Most publishers these days remove it after a while.
Anything requiring a server isn't going to become harder, because it's already impossible.
online-fix.me?
Exactly, the issue here is that online services for games are becoming a lot more common these days. Back then, it was mostly a thing for MMOs, for good reason.
If people let it be, it's really likely more and more games will require some sort of server, even if online play isn't necessary for one to enjoy it or if it's a mostly single player game with a few multiplayer functionalities. For now, most examples of this kind of thing are gatchas, but if people start accepting the idea that you don't "own" the games you buy (and believe me, some already do), I can see companies pushing that kind of thing into normal games, too. It's already starting, aint it?
Would make them more money, too, since they can pull the plug on a game and then 10 years later resell the same thing, and people will be forced to buy it again if they want to replay it. We do see this to lesser extend already.
Plus physical media on consoles is effectively worthless now, even on the Switch 2 with most of its library set to be downloads with literal license dongles ala the Game-Key Card which is targeted at third parties as a cheaper option than putting the whole game on a cart.
That Game-Key Card format will effectively render most of the Switch 2 library impossible to emulate assuming they need online access to run.
And even on PC, there's nothing stopping publishers from getting smart and using kernel-level anticheat as a DRM substitute for single-player games, EA already set a precedent internally within their operations for doing that with EAAC on the latest WRC installment, for example.
As for the Switch 2, I wouldn't put it above Nintendo to completely axe the cart slot for the Switch 3, if there even is a Switch 3 and the games industry doesn't collapse again before that has a chance to happen, and make it a digital-exclusive console.
there are more single player games out there than you could ever play and you can own them forever.
the move to always online is an attempt to compete with their biggest competition, their entire back catalogue.
if I still gave a shit about new consoles an empty box with a game code or anything with always online would be deal breakers.
PSA: PS3 has a ton of great games you likely never played and shops literally can't give them away right now. why pay over $100 for the remaster that you don't own when you can own the original for $1
The PS3 is such a nice console. There is something special about using a device with such unorthodox CPU (Cell BE), especially when you see it running graphics intensive games in (relatively) high fidelity, like The Last Of Us. The console only has 512Mb RAM and 256Mb VRAM, and the GPU equivalent of the 8600GT! But due to the architecture of the Cell BE, a lot of the graphics processing was performed on the SPEs, so basically on the CPU instead of the GPU.
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