TL;DR:
My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs. An iPhone 15 Pro runs the same code perfectly. A MacBook Pro also runs the same code perfectly.
According to Statcounter, Windows 11 held a 55.18% market share in October 2025. That share dropped to 53.7% in November and dropped again in December. Now, Windows 11 holds a 50.73% market share.
French IT giant Capgemini said Sunday it was selling its subsidiary working for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency amid international controversy over the deaths of two people in ICE operations.
'Call of Duty' players are voicing their distress after stumbling upon specific correspondence in the recently released Epstein Files. Despite the convicted sex offender having no direct public ties to the gaming industry, and famously being banned from Xbox Live, it appears Jeffrey Epstein may have been a vocal proponent of introducing paid content to Activision's flagship franchise.
1984, Jet Set Willy was released. A great game that every kid at school wanted. Of course we all wanted a copy, but it cost £8 here in the UK, which was several weeks' pocket money.
Copying games then involved finding a kid whose Dad was seriously into Hifi and had a stackable stereo system, then we'd copy it with their tape to tape system. But JSW had this as the cassette inlay.
How this works? When the game loaded after about 10-15 minutes, it would ask what colours were in Grid square A5, or H9 etc. Get it wrong twice and the game would exit and you'd need to start over.
(If you're wondering what happens if you're colour blind - you could write to the publishers and if they accepted your complaint, they would ask you to send them the game and would give you a cheque to cover the refund)
Of course, kids are determined and inventive, and this was well before photocopiers or digital cameras, so we would spend our lunchtimes with pencil and paper writing down every single combination...
It was a good game, with some great music, but really really
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1984, Jet Set Willy was released. A great game that every kid at school wanted. Of course we all wanted a copy, but it cost £8 here in the UK, which was several weeks' pocket money.
Copying games then involved finding a kid whose Dad was seriously into Hifi and had a stackable stereo system, then we'd copy it with their tape to tape system. But JSW had this as the cassette inlay.
How this works? When the game loaded after about 10-15 minutes, it would ask what colours were in Grid square A5, or H9 etc. Get it wrong twice and the game would exit and you'd need to start over.
(If you're wondering what happens if you're colour blind - you could write to the publishers and if they accepted your complaint, they would ask you to send them the game and would give you a cheque to cover the refund)
Of course, kids are determined and inventive, and this was well before photocopiers or digital cameras, so we would spend our lunchtimes with pencil and paper writing down every single combination...
It was a good game, with some great music, but really really hard.
The Secret of Monkey Island - Online Interactive Code Wheel. Dial-A-Pirate Code Wheel is form of copy protection from original The Secret of Monkey Island Retail boxed game developed by LucasFilm Games in 1990...
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Amiga I think it was which came with a photocopy proof translation table that you used with a red piece of translucent plastic overlay, which would reveal the codes underneath.
Or maybe that was Zak McKracken.
Both amazing games. I remember the Monkey Island 2 one also, but I think we had cracked versions for all of those games anyway tbh. :)
A simpler, objectively better, time. We really were lucky as fuck to be born to live through that age, because what came before it was kind of not so great, and the way shit looks today still ain't great. But there was a time sandwiched in the middle that was almost peak society.
We had a copy of indy 500 on our 3.1 PC that barely ran and made oh such lovely noises via the PC speaker but to play you had to answer trivia questions that were in the manual.
It's understandable that companies wanted to protect their software, but this method was a bit feeble. On the ZX Spectrum at least, it could be overcome by a single POKE!
Still, at least it wasn't the horrible, user-hostile LensLok system...
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More like "before easily available color photocopiers". Most copiers could only do black and white copies, which this scheme was probably specifically designed to make useless.
The inks used couldn't be faithfully scanned/replicated. So even color copiers were useless.
My father had a friend from his childhood who ended up owning a graphic design studio, and sometimes he would have to have these replicated using classic photography.
When I think back, we jumped through a lot of hoops to get a free game when we could have just spent a couple dollars lol
Yeah, it wasn't. I was copying entire AD&D manuals in 1984. Color photocopiers were a different matter. I don't remember if Kinko's had color copiers back þen.
It wasn't. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn't see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.
It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that's assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn't take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.
It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn't understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I'd genuinely be suprised if they're even breaking even with the operating/maint
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It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that's assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn't take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.
It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn't understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I'd genuinely be suprised if they're even breaking even with the operating/maintenance costs vs whatever few unintentional fare dodgers they manage to stop. Most likely they're losing money, while making the transit system less efficient by introducing a bottleneck, while discouraging drivers from trying out transit, just because they can't stand the idea that people can just walk on the train without paying (even though they haven't actually stopped them).
At that time I had bought a computer game (I guess it was "Elite") that always asked me about the word in the manual on some specific page. I was so upset about that, that I patched the random generator so that it returned a fix value. Then I changed the prompt so that it told me, which word to enter.
Dungeon Master was distributed on a floppy disk that had a specific weak sector that would randomly return 1 or 0 when read. The game would periodically read that sector and, if it returned the same bit x times in a row, it would kill your entire party. When copying the disk, the original would read either 1 or 0 and then write that value in that specific sector, meaning the copy would always return 1 or 0.
The check was random, hidden in graphics files, and this, combined with some obfuscation and some more copy protection, meant it took over a year for the game to get cracked. A record at the time.
The dev claimed that the time and effort spent on the protection scheme was worth it as it allowed the game to keep selling through typical sales channels for much longer than usual.
All of these oold copy protections were so annoying. Some would just give you a page number from the manual and ask for the fifth word. Some AD&D games came with a decoder wheel with elvish runes n shit (looking at your Pool of Radiance!). At least the decoder wheel was fun to throw around at your friends.
Was worried they'd use it as a walled garden or a monitoring system. MIT license iirc allows forking, so at least if things go downhill, there are ways to mitigate it.
MIT is the “do whatever you want” software license, as long as you include the original copyright and license, and don’t hold the authors liable for damages.
Firefox is a massive piece of code and following modern browser standards is so difficult that it's a feat for big teams of developers and no small team seems to be able to pick the pace needed.
Yeah, one of the largest pieces of software humanity has created, next to Google Chrome and the Linux kernel, which are all around 30 million lines of code.
To give a frame of reference: With a team of 5 full-time devs at my dayjob, we can dish out a codebase of about 20 thousand lines over the course of two years.
A browser might be somewhat quicker to build, because the requirements are relatively clear at this point and you can start implementing many standards in parallel. But yeah, it's still just an insane amount of code.
I couldn't find any particular justification going through their website and other communication, it's not perfect but it's probably not that big a deal for an open source project to host their code their? If I remember I'll try to send them a message asking about it
Because it's free, convenient, and works. And it's a git project so the code is already distributed, so if Trump has another tantrum and decides the EU can't use any American tech, the deleted PRs and issues would be annoying but we'll still have the code.
Well, the point is that GitHub is owned by Microsoft, so if they're already developing an alternative to a Microsoft service, they would probably want to also use an alternative to a Microsoft service for their source code hosting.
They want to be less dependent on US tech. Using something whose code is hosted on US tech is far less dependent than using something whose entire everything is American.
I was hosting it 5 years ago in a 2gb or 4gb VPS. We were able to run 1440p@120hz, if not higher, streams of our games. The server didn't seem to care much about the load.
My guess would be that its because La Suite tries to replace all of Microsoft Office and having all the moving parts under your organisations control makes it easier to create a fully integrated office suite that offers the same UX throughout. Also Jitsi is owned by 8x8, a US company, which might have factored into the decision to create something new.
The development is quite transparent. The team is looking at reduced development and more integration, so instead of "pouring money on a project", they tried various solutions, and picked the "best one".
One criteria was an integration with their internal communication system: Tchap, essentially a Matrix server. The Matrix video call group didn't cut it because it requires ElementX, and apparently there are unresolved issue there (no idea if it's the app itself or due to customization of their Matrix server). They ended up with Visio, that is not a "new" solution: it's based on LiveKit.
Dans le cadre des priorités de la suite numérique : gros besoin d'intégrer la visio à Tchap en prio 2024 Plusieurs options semblent s'ouvrir à nous et nous avons besoin d'une investigation ops pour...
W is a SWEDISH startup funded by private entities.
It has absolutely nothing to do with France, and the only link you could make here is it's owned at 25% by a media that received subsidies from the EU, like a lot of media do, and France is part of the EU.
The startup has not been endorsed by any public entity at any level.
Why? Benelux and Scandinavia are completely dependent software from technofascist pedophiles and some even let these technofascists store the sensitive data of their own citizens in the US.
Well, I wish you could just say that, but "the French" is not a consistent body of people.
While we have this team working on a sovereign suite, Macron is rushing a law to ban <15 years old on social network, so… they will soon require all users to provide an ID. It will have to go through a "trusted third-party", not directly to Meta/Twitter/etc., and not to the gov directly, but we all know how much corporates and governments have been trustworthy historically. And once the data is collected, you're just one law away from all abuse.
Needless to say that the teen will rush to VPN, so they also mentioned a potential ban on VPNs! (France would then join the short-list of great democratic VPN-banning countries: North Korea, China, Iran…)
Deciphering control: Explore the global landscape of encryption laws to find out which governments impose the strictest regulations on data privacy and security.
Yeah, it was definitely that and not all the web browsing and searching you and your colleague did before, during, and after the meeting, and the meeting notes you sent over gmail/microsoft mail. 🙄
Shouldn't it be the other way around? I'd expect e2ee to be a requirement for anything for the administration even if their laws are a little funky (rules for thee not for me, etc).
We like to think EU abandoning tech companies will create a new privacy FOSS ecosystem, when in reality they will likely just recreate their own Tech corps like China and US now that they have skin in the game
Its FOSS (or I guess FLOSS for this case since they are French lol), meaning it doesn't matter if the people creating the app are "good" or "bad" actors. A "good" actor can always create a fork or host their own instance.
openDesk bietet kollaborative Office-Anwendungen für die Öffentliche Verwaltung: Textverarbeitung, Chat, Dateifreigabe, Videokonferenzen und Projektmanagement.
Apache License 2.0 A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
Permissions Commercial use Modification Distribution Patent use Private use Limitations Trademark use Liability Warranty Conditions License and copyright notice State changes
You know that they could just fork it, right? Saying that "it's american", just causes FUD for opensource.
Seems pretty neat. Hopefully it's somewhat simple to compile and set up. It's kind of weird that livekit is VC funded though. Not necessarily the best, since they might have to relicense it to make investors happy at some point.
I get that government use needs to be stringently tested for security, and so things take a little longer. But really, there are PLENTY of good FOSS products in existence that can be used as a base framework and a head-start to things like this.
You don't have to re-invent the wheel when you could easily fork Jitsi-meet and harden it/secure it to your needs in the government.
Jitsi is one of my top 5 FOSS projects that are basically already mature enough to be used in a professional setting
Care to elaborate? I know many people who use Teams at work, and they aren't complaining. Quite the opposite actually. Various announcements are no longer emails since they have been migrated to relevant Teams channels. This means that it's way faster to scroll past announcements that are not particularly relevant to your work, and none of them clog up your inbox any more.
The only real problem is CPU and RAM usage, but as long as your IT department is reasonably funded, that's not a problem either.
Folks, you won't believe how yuge these discounts are. The biggliest discounts ever. Many people are saying they've never seen one as big as this. Also, new 500% tarrifs on anyone who doesn't buy office365.
Look, no offense, but had you check the github Readme, or the previous comments, as it is mentioned several times, and you would have found that it is just an integration of LiveKit in their internal communication system, called Tchap, and Tchap is just a customized non-federated Matrix server.
🇵🇸 Many assume the war is over and everything is fine now. That’s not our reality. Gunfire has decreased, but it hasn’t stopped, and daily life is still tight and uncertain. Our calls may be quieter, but the struggle continues. Any support or solidarity still means a lot. gofund.me/1d3ea05b6
🇵🇸 Many assume the war is over and everything is fine now. That’s not our reality. Gunfire has decreased, but it hasn’t stopped, and daily life is still tight and uncertain. Our calls may be quieter, but the struggle continues. Any support or solidarity still means a lot. gofund.me/1d3ea05b6
🇵🇸 Many assume the war is over and everything is fine now. That’s not our reality. Gunfire has decreased, but it hasn’t stopped, and daily life is still tight and uncertain. Our calls may be quieter, but the struggle continues. Any support or solidarity still means a lot. gofund.me/1d3ea05b6
🇵🇸 Many assume the war is over and everything is fine now. That’s not our reality. Gunfire has decreased, but it hasn’t stopped, and daily life is still tight and uncertain. Our calls may be quieter, but the struggle continues. Any support or solidarity still means a lot. gofund.me/1d3ea05b6
🇵🇸 Many assume the war is over and everything is fine now. That’s not our reality. Gunfire has decreased, but it hasn’t stopped, and daily life is still tight and uncertain. Our calls may be quieter, but the struggle continues. Any support or solidarity still means a lot. gofund.me/1d3ea05b6
🇵🇸 Many assume the war is over and everything is fine now. That’s not our reality. Gunfire has decreased, but it hasn’t stopped, and daily life is still tight and uncertain. Our calls may be quieter, but the struggle continues. Any support or solidarity still means a lot. gofund.me/1d3ea05b6
🇵🇸 Many assume the war is over and everything is fine now. That’s not our reality. Gunfire has decreased, but it hasn’t stopped, and daily life is still tight and uncertain. Our calls may be quieter, but the struggle continues. Any support or solidarity still means a lot. gofund.me/1d3ea05b6
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It's funny if you know that it is parody, but it's so widespead in this day and ago so I tend to unconsciously filter it out. Tbh I probably wouldn't have clicked the link if I hadn't seen your comment, since I thought this was the original title of the video
While Western governments continue to provide political and military cover for Israel, within Western societies themselves, there are growing spaces for challenging the official narrative, led by independent artistic and cultural initiatives that redefine the victim and break down their reduction to numbers. In this context, art is no longer merely a symbolic expression, but a tool for moral questioning, bringing the tragedy of Gaza from the margins of the news to the heart of public consciousness. In New York City, one of the world’s most influential cultural capitals, a huge artwork entitled ‘Wall of Tears’ has emerged, documenting the names of thousands of Palestinian children Isr
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While Western governments continue to provide political and military cover for Israel, within Western societies themselves, there are growing spaces for challenging the official narrative, led by independent artistic and cultural initiatives that redefine the victim and break down their reduction to numbers. In this context, art is no longer merely a symbolic expression, but a tool for moral questioning, bringing the tragedy of Gaza from the margins of the news to the heart of public consciousness. In New York City, one of the world’s most influential cultural capitals, a huge artwork entitled ‘Wall of Tears’ has emerged, documenting the names of thousands of Palestinian children Israel has killed in the Gaza Strip, transforming them from numbers in military reports into an indelible human memory.
Names instead of numbers from Gaza on the Wall of Tears
On Grattan Street in Brooklyn, the wall was built approximately 15 metres long and three metres high, made of weather-resistant vinyl in a sandy colour that mimics the besieged land of Gaza. On its surface are written the names of 18,457 Palestinian children who were killed between 7 October 2023 and 19 July 2025, according to data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
The list begins with the name of 14-year-old Wissam Iyad Mohammed Abu Faisaf and ends with eight-year-old Sabah Omar Saad Al-Masri, arranged chronologically according to the date of their martyrdom, in a visual documentation that restores each child’s name and age and refutes the description of ‘collateral damage’ promoted by the occupation machine.
The work is by American artist Phil Buehler, known for his politically charged art projects. In a statement to the Guardian, he said that from a distance, the wall ‘looks like an abstract painting,’ but it draws passers-by closer, before they discover that they are looking at the names of children killed in Gaza.
Art as a tool for accountability
The artist points out that reading the names, accompanied by selected photos and stories taken from press reports, forces the viewer to make comparisons and imagine their own children or family members in the same place, creating a human shock that transcends traditional political and media language.
The Wall of Tears is not an isolated initiative, but part of a clear artistic trajectory in Buehler’s work, who has previously carried out projects such as The Wall of Lies, documenting false statements by US President Donald Trump, and The Wall of Shame about the 2021 storming of the US Capitol, as well as Empty Beds, which highlighted the abduction of Ukrainian children.
In this context, Buehler treats art as a tool for political and moral accountability, rather than as an aesthetic act detached from reality.
The work was carried out in collaboration with the non-profit organisation Radio Free Brooklyn. Buehler emphasises that the project was ‘behind the times’ even before its opening, as it documents the names of children only up to July 2025, while Israel continued to kill hundreds of children after that date, including during the period following the ceasefire agreement last October.
Hind Rajab: the memory that opens the wall
The opening of the wall coincided with the second anniversary of the martyrdom of the child Hind Rajab, who was shot dead by occupation soldiers inside a car carrying her and her relatives as they tried to reach a safe place on 29 January 2024. Her final cries for help became documented testimony, forming the basis of the film ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ by Tunisian director Kawthar Ben Hania, which has been nominated for prestigious international awards, including the Oscars and BAFTA.
The work comes amid heated political debate in New York, home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel. In this context, Buehler emphasised his rejection of the deliberate conflation of opposition to genocide in Gaza with anti-Semitism, arguing that this conflation is used to silence moral criticism and shut down any public discussion of the crimes committed.
Testimony on the Wall of Tears
The ‘Wall of Tears’ was not the only event in Brooklyn. Over the past few months, the city has witnessed other artistic initiatives in support of Gaza, most notably the non-profit exhibition space Recess hosting the American debut of the ‘Gaza Biennial’ under the title ‘From Gaza to the World,’ with the participation of 25 Palestinian artists.
The works on display documented life under bombardment, famine and displacement, affirming that Palestinian art continues despite war and siege.
The Gaza Biennial is an international art project that was launched in April 2024 on the initiative of artists from Gaza and the West Bank, with the participation of more than 50 artists, to transform art into an act of survival and resistance, and to redefine the artistic space in a time of extermination.
Thus, dismantling the Israeli narrative is no longer the exclusive domain of human rights reports or political statements. In the streets and on the walls of Western cities, art stands as a moral witness to a crime that the official world is trying to overlook, while the human conscience insists on fixing it in memory… name after name.
As if AI weren't enough of a security concern, now researchers have discovered that open-source AI deployments may be an even bigger problem than those from commercial providers.
Threat researchers at SentinelLABS teamed up with internet mappers from Censys to take a look at the footprint of Ollama deployments exposed to the internet, and what they found was a global network of largely homogenous, open-source AI deployments just waiting for the right zero-day to come along.
175,108 unique Ollama hosts in 130 countries were found exposed to the public internet, with the vast majority of instances found to be running Llama, Qwen2, and Gemma2 models, most of those relying on the same compression choices and packaging regimes. That, says the pair, suggests open-source AI deployments have become a monoculture ripe for exploitation.
I am interested in the state of the Linux drivers for their graphics cards. Are they open or closed? Is it possible to update the kernel and continue using their driver, or do I have to wait for a new version from the manufacturer for a new kernel version every time(if it closed source)?
I usually used AMD GPU all the time because of the open source driver and the convenience associated with it. Maybe someone knows something about it.
I'd expect they will be Linux friendly just because there's a big push towards using Linux in China now since they want to decouple from western proprietary tech. I guess we'll have to wait to see once they become generally available though.
depending entirely on ONE (quite violent at that) country for the world's compute is insane in the first place. i'm not well read into the decade long chinese effort to make these chips, but i'm rooting for at least some modest success.
from a quick search it seems their previous iteration, the MTT S90 already supports all modern apis and is already comparable to mid-range nvidia/amd chips from a few gens ago.
which is impressive and it'd probably already cover most usecases, but it seems to be of limited production/availability so far.
They've made substantial progress in the past 10 years. Sadly, the lack of access to EUVL machines is what's really holding them back from making higher end and more competitive technologies.
They are actively working on making EUVL machines domestically, which would be incredible given ASML is the only organization in the world that currently makes them. Still, it'll probably not be till the 2030s that they actually can get into production with that.
If this is a topic that interests you, GamersNexus did an awesome hour-long deep dive into a couple Chinese chip companies and what they've been making and how they are being unfairly handicapped by the west, and the incredible progress they are making despite that. This is sort of perfect timing for Chinese players to enter the market given Western companies are gouging consumers and losing the good will, pretty much every PC enthusiast in the world would be happy to buy Chinese products over Western ones based strictly on price of performance is up to par.
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Stockholm has a long history of illuminated signs and ads, for obvious reasons, we have long dark nights in the autumn/winter.
It is interesting to see a picture like this from Stockholm the year WWII ended, it is not what you would expect from a European capital at the end of a devastating war involving almost all of Europe.
It can be seen in three ways.
Artistically, it is a beautiful photo, the neon, the mist and the still not completely darkened sky, it all makes the photo quite beautiful.
It shows that the Swedish government had the skill to avoid being drawn into the conflict.
It makes one question about how the Swedish government actually managed it, and that my friends is a much darker story than most people want to hear about....
So let's talk about the big dark reason why we were spared, what made us special.
Stockholm has a long history of illuminated signs and ads, for obvious reasons, we have long dark nights in the autumn/winter.
It is interesting to see a picture like this from Stockholm the year WWII ended, it is not what you would expect from a European capital at the end of a devastating war involving almost all of Europe.
It can be seen in three ways.
Artistically, it is a beautiful photo, the neon, the mist and the still not completely darkened sky, it all makes the photo quite beautiful.
It shows that the Swedish government had the skill to avoid being drawn into the conflict.
It makes one question about how the Swedish government actually managed it, and that my friends is a much darker story than most people want to hear about....
So let's talk about the big dark reason why we were spared, what made us special.
Nazi trade and cooperation.
It is no secret that we were far from neutral during WWII, we collaborated with both sides as the war developed.
We sold iron to the Nazis, we sold a lot of iron to the Nazis, the Nazis bought so much iron from Sweden that the UK made plans to seize the port of Narvik in Norway through which most iron was exported.
We were paid in gold, and the wealth we were paid made it possible to ride out the war in relative comfort.
The truly bad shit we did was however, was to let the Nazis send troop replacements on our railways, we alsoffacilitated Hitler's sending troops for leave and new fresh troops were sent up through Sweden to the the front.
Stockholm has a long history of illuminated signs and ads, for obvious reasons, we have long dark nights in the autumn/winter.
It is interesting to see a picture like this from Stockholm the year WWII ended, it is not what you would expect from a European capital at the end of a devastating war involving almost all of Europe.
It can be seen in three ways.
Artistically, it is a beautiful photo, the neon, the mist and the still not completely darkened sky, it all makes the photo quite beautiful.
It shows that the Swedish government had the skill to avoid being drawn into the conflict.
It makes one question about how the Swedish government actually managed it, and that my friends is a much darker story than most people want to hear about....
So let's talk about the big dark reason why we were spared, what made us special.
Nazi trade and cooperation.
It is no secret that we were far from neutral during WWII, we collaborated with both sides as the war developed.
We sold iron to the Nazis, we sold a lot of iron to the Nazis, the Nazis bought so much iron from Sweden that the UK made plans to seize the port of Narvik in Norway through which most iron was exported.
We were paid in gold, and the wealth we were paid made it possible to ride out the war in relative comfort.
The truly bad shit we did was however, was to let the Nazis send troop replacements on our railways, we alsoffacilitated Hitler's sending troops for leave and new fresh troops were sent up through Sweden to the the front.
db0
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •The Secret of Monkey Island - Dial A Pirate
www.oldgames.sktomiant
in reply to db0 • • •Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Amiga I think it was which came with a photocopy proof translation table that you used with a red piece of translucent plastic overlay, which would reveal the codes underneath.
Or maybe that was Zak McKracken.
Both amazing games. I remember the Monkey Island 2 one also, but I think we had cracked versions for all of those games anyway tbh. :)
db0
in reply to tomiant • • •ye Monkey Island was easy to photocopy :D
I remember in my local PC shop, they had a whole binder of copy-protection mechanisms they would photocopy from when they sold you a pirated game :D
tomiant
in reply to db0 • • •Cherry
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •muhyb
in reply to Cherry • • •Pipster
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •purpleprophy
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •It's understandable that companies wanted to protect their software, but this method was a bit feeble. On the ZX Spectrum at least, it could be overcome by a single POKE!
Still, at least it wasn't the horrible, user-hostile LensLok system...
- YouTube
youtu.bepiyuv
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •Jesus_666
in reply to piyuv • • •MetalSlugX
in reply to Jesus_666 • • •The inks used couldn't be faithfully scanned/replicated. So even color copiers were useless.
My father had a friend from his childhood who ended up owning a graphic design studio, and sometimes he would have to have these replicated using classic photography.
When I think back, we jumped through a lot of hoops to get a free game when we could have just spent a couple dollars lol
Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ
in reply to piyuv • • •uienia
in reply to piyuv • • •It wasn't. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn't see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
I guess the colour thing was probably a method of circumventing the photocopier, because colour photocopiers were not really generally available back then.
DigitalDilemma
in reply to piyuv • • •TechnoCat
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •locuester
in reply to TechnoCat • • •HiTekRedNek
in reply to locuester • • •Kraven_the_Hunter
in reply to TechnoCat • • •HubertManne
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •maccentric
in reply to HubertManne • • •Attack-Axe-Swing!
Anyone remember Dan Patcher?
HubertManne
in reply to maccentric • • •meejle
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •My dad had some old games for his Amstrad computer that needed a Lenslok, to decode the characters displayed on the screen.
IIRC it didn't work very well at all.
Copy protection mechanism
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)strongarm
in reply to meejle • • •HiddenLayer555
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that's assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn't take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.
It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn't understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I'd genuinely be suprised if they're even breaking even with the operating/maint
... show moreIt always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that's assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn't take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.
It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn't understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I'd genuinely be suprised if they're even breaking even with the operating/maintenance costs vs whatever few unintentional fare dodgers they manage to stop. Most likely they're losing money, while making the transit system less efficient by introducing a bottleneck, while discouraging drivers from trying out transit, just because they can't stand the idea that people can just walk on the train without paying (even though they haven't actually stopped them).
Michael 🇺🇦
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •flango
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •AceOnTrack
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •Dungeon Master was distributed on a floppy disk that had a specific weak sector that would randomly return 1 or 0 when read. The game would periodically read that sector and, if it returned the same bit x times in a row, it would kill your entire party. When copying the disk, the original would read either 1 or 0 and then write that value in that specific sector, meaning the copy would always return 1 or 0.
The check was random, hidden in graphics files, and this, combined with some obfuscation and some more copy protection, meant it took over a year for the game to get cracked. A record at the time.
The dev claimed that the time and effort spent on the protection scheme was worth it as it allowed the game to keep selling through typical sales channels for much longer than usual.
zod000
in reply to DigitalDilemma • • •