My point is that if you truly want boycott power, even when dealing with mandatory government services, then you need to minimize third-party dependencies for those government services.

That’s not necessarily true. Sure that’s the case in some situations, but in those situations it’s orthoganol to the discussion of forced-digital participation anyway. In the other cases (where an analog means successfully avoids a 3rd-party), then we get boycott power not otherwise possible in a forced-digital infra.

Let’s say the government outsourced prison food to www.pizza.com. Then those prisoners would not be able to boycott www.pizza.com.

Prisoners could boycott in that case by way of hunger strike. In less barbaric countries their human rights would prevail and the food would be sourced from elsewhere. Either way, whether the possibility exists or not, this scenario does nothing to support a forced-digital world that strips us of autonomy.

So if you recognize that boycott power has to be waived in certain cases for practical reasons,

There are obviously more such cases under a forced-digital regime. Waiving boycott power is not a good thing. Having analog mechanisms reduces the loss of boycott power.

then it is fairly reasonable that you might just have to use MS to use a government service.

But it’s not reasable. We (both the gov and the people) can function without MS. Being artificially forced to lick MS boots is a loss of important freedoms.

Offline access is very expensive to provide, and very few people want it, thus it’s not a practical alternative.

Indeed in the end forced-digital is just all about saving a buck at the expense of our freedom.

In software this is called “adding a layer of indirection”. For example, if the government wanted to hide the fact that they use MS for email, they can simply use email aliases. If you send an email to someservice@website.gov, you will have no idea what provider they are using (assuming that they take measures to hide it).

An alias would not shield them from an MX lookup (which is exactly what I do before sharing an email address).

Nonetheless, that’s just a technical nuance… your underlying point is still valid. A better example for expressing your point is the use of e-mail firewalls. I once did an MX lookup on an agency which resulted in something like “barracudanetworks.xyz”. I erroneously concluded: that’s not a surveillance advertiser so I will share my email with them. Then they later emailed me from a Microsoft server.

Email firewalls like barracuda effectively hide the role of MS, thus making MX lookups inconclusive. That opacity gives me a tangible thread of ammunition in court when the shit hits the fan because I would have no way of knowing that barracuda feeds Microsoft for that particular recipient. But then how does this play into your thesis? The gov has a choice of whether or not to use an email firewall like that. To support your position of forced-digital-transformation, you would have to mandate that a firewall like barracuda be used by all gov agencies. Of course from there who’s to say everyone trusts barracuda networks?

I was talking about minimizing third-party dependencies, not minimizing data abuse.

To be clear, I was talking about /minimization of data/, not abuse, but for the ultimate effect of mitigating data abuses. So that’s what I thought you were suggesting. As for minimizing third-party dependencies, I would certainly praise such a movement. But it’s unrealistic. There are far too many right-wing conservatives. Increasingly so. The hard-right crowd pushes for the extreme opposite. They love capitalism and want all gov services to be privitized to the full extent possible. They want everything outsourced and they are succeeding in that mission. Countless cases where privatization is abusive, inappropriate, and ineffective proliferates in the US.

So I suppose your question is: what if we could hypothetically pass a law the forces the gov to insource everything. It’s borderline crazy talk. Does that mean there should be government farms to provide food for those incarcerated in prison? It’s very unrealistic that you could ever have a minimization of outsourcing. So then the devil is in the details of where exceptions are made. Even in the digital space, surely some gov agencies would make a case for why they need MS OS on their platform because they have some specific special needs. It would be a game of exceptions… a mess by which abusive admins would make uncredible cases for why they should have MS Windows and whatever other garbage. It’s an impossible line to maintain.

So in this hypothetical world where outsourcing is banned, that would eliminate some of my problems with forced-digital-transformation. But it doesn’t wholly address the privacy issue (e.g. an insourced resource could still needlessly collect IP addresses). I doubt any of these problems would be sufficiently addressed in my lifetime to justify forced-digital engagement.

Those same creators would work just as hard to work around laws that require offline access.

Sure, but to be clear I don’t think I ever said game makers should be mandated by law to support offline gamers. I winged about a problem without prescribing a solution. The solution could be a consumer boycott. Or it could be gov action. I think a somewhat effective gov action might be to simply state that copyrights are forfeited by artificial game requirements. Game makers would then have to choose between legal protections and purely tech protections. Whatever attempt they make to “work around” the law could also be regarded as an “artificially-imposed constraint”.

There is no perfect solution. Certainly across the board abandonment of copyright would not solve this problem. Which is not to say it’s a bad idea.

I’ll just say that trying to force game companies to provide offline playability, is fairly unrealistic.

I agree. But it’s important to recognize that “force” comes in many forms. There is gov force; then there is market force (by which consumers boycott, for example). I will of course use what little force I have at my disposal, which is to never buy a game with absurd artificial constraints.

You’re not at fault if email is the only option. The lawyer would rightfully recognize that.

It’s one thing to avoid blame. It’s quite another to hold someone accountable. Avoiding blame is only ½ the problem.

So making (online) email the only option absolves you of the blame. Is that really all you want?

No, that’s insufficient. First of all, with knowledge comes responsibility. Even if email is the only option, I would be a witting participant in the abuse of my own data. Lawyers point fingers. I cannot effectively hold someone accountable for an act that I was a part of. The gov can of course argue: “you weren’t forced to do the transaction at all”. The gov can also get off the hook for wrongdoing on the basis that the people elected representatives who decided it’s okay to impose email. They point the finger back and say we did what the people elected us to do. We can bitch about their choice to use Microsoft, but the gov can rightfully argue: we cannot select an email provider that everyone will approve.

I really don’t understand this reasoning behind the idea that only “internal data abuses” are ok.

An internal fuckup is 100% outside of the people’s knowledge and control, unlike a situation where the people must directly interface with a bad player. The gov can’t argue that they were elected to internally use some shitty mechanism when in fact it’s a non-transparent operation. They were elected to do a /job/ and the fucked up in the execution of the job. As soon as it becomes transparent, we (the people) become good candidates for finger pointing.

1. government services should minimize sharing data with third-parties
2. copyright should be abolished

The first addresses your issues with interacting with government services. It would allow you to say, boycott Microsoft while still using government services. It would extend to internal data processing. And it would even cover things like allowing Tor, since Tor is used to minimize data sharing with your ISP, which is a third-party.

I thought we’ve been over this. Minimization does not work. Europe shows this. It’s not just that it’s a symbolic law that rarely gets enforced. Even under an unlikely hypothetical situation of full-blown perfect enforcement, minimisation does not imply a ban on outsourcing. Minimal processing does not restrict /who/ may do the processing, just that excessive processing is banned.

The second addresses your desire to play games offline. The main reason why games force online connection even when the game doesn’t need it, is to prevent piracy. Without copyright, there is no piracy.

Without copyright, game creators work even harder to protect their games from copying. Technological protections become far more important to creators when legal protections are gone. If you drop copyright protections, that does not ban game makers from using countless protection mechanisms. It just means they cannot take you to court for going against them. The game will still refuse to operate without Internet.

It sounds like you assume that if offline access was a fundamental right, the government would not only respect it, but the offline access would also be private by default.

For the former: we enshrine rights to assert protections. Otherwise what’s the point of governance? Like it or not we don’t have anarchy. It’s somewhat weird to talk about whether we assume the gov follows its own law as a criteria for reform. A gov may or may not respect our rights but the absence of respect for human rights would not be just cause to not create rights. Even if the gov disrespects a human right, there is still merit to being able to name & shame; to declare & publicise violations of rights. It gives transparency and exposes tyranny. Indeed human rights are disrespected plenty, but it would be foolish to sign up to scrap the rights. I would rather scrap the actors who fail to uphold rights.

Human rights were originally just symbolic. But they are increasingly upheld. In France, women won the right to abortion in 1975 when a court recognised that the human right to autonomy was valid.

The important question is: how is the presumption of disrespected rights used? Perhaps you are concerned that a presumption of respect of rights leads to inaction. However, I think the contrary. Assuming your rights are not respected leaves you with not even trying to exercise your rights. I.e. being a pushover out of hopelessness. I know quite well my rights are not always respected. I have experienced my rights being trampled 1st hand. I do not accept it. By not accepting it I continue to make demands. I insist on justice. I appeal bad decisions. Escalating the fight without quitting is the most effective approach to justice.

As for the latter, I think I explained that digital access can give privacy and it can cost privacy. Both at the same time. Privacy is multifaceted. It is senseless to speak of it as a single vague factor. Privacy is a collection of factors. Different ppl care about different privacy factors. I might be more violated if MS sees my email. You may feel more violated if your postal worker sees who you receive envelopes from. To each his own.

I just know that society tends towards efficiency, and offline methods are simply inefficient, so I expect it to go away in the future, unless there was some fundamental reason why offline access was necessary (and not indirect reasons, like the right to privacy).

To see fundamental human rights as “indirect” is to give a low priority to them. Offline access is essential to several human rights (self determinism, autonomy, dignity, and privacy, to name a few). Efficiency is not directly a human right. You could perhaps argue that efficiency is indirectly a human right if you try to argue that ineffeciency leads to fewer people getting public service. But that’s going to be a hard case to make when an exclusively digital service inherently excludes offline people.

What is the reason you want offline access to government services? Surely it’s not privacy, since you usually have to provide your government ID to interact with the service.

This touches on the idea that “privacy” is some kind of 1-dimensional concept. A public svc may need my ID for some task. That’s fair enough to the extent that it is true. But it’s unlikely that they need my IP address & realtime location. Of course such discussion could use the context of a specific situation. The abuses I frequently encounter is a gov blocking tor (thus forcing IP exposure) or pushing a precondition to service by demanding information that may not exist (phone number or email address).

My guess is that you want to avoid giving data to commercial entities, and also avoid interaction with commercial entities, like Microsoft.

You need not guess. I mentioned my boycott against MS which inherently entails not feeding data to MS. And indeed I generally demand that I minimise data supplied to commercial entities. Not only out of distrust, but I have 1st hand experience with being burnt by sloppy infosec practices. Cybercriminals have exfiltrated my personal data from commercial entities who had no just reason for having the data to begin with.

So it sounds like you don’t necessarily want offline access, you want to be able to interact with government services without any other dependencies.

In a hypothetical world, cybercriminals would not exist and data would not be abused. But we don’t live in a hypothetical world.

I’m positive most governments use Microsoft Word.

Fair assumption. Interesting as well to note that the Dutch gov financed an investigation of MS Word which revealed that MS was surreptitiously sending sensitive info to MS telemetry servers in the US. No other government in the world demonstrated that level of responsibility.

Despite the GDPR violations they discovered, I have little confidence that the leaks were fixed in MS Word. Nonetheless, the MS Word leaks are far less abusive than email passing in-the-clear via MS’s mail servers.

They’ll be using it to draft the paperwork that they send to you. They probably scan and OCR your letters for archival, and their scanning software is probably commercial and collects data. If your goal is elimination of external dependencies, then offline access is just the tip of the iceberg. And just because these dependencies are hidden, doesn’t mean one can ignore them. If that was the case you could just send your documents to a friend and ask them to send it to the government for you, and ask them not to tell you how they did it. That way you wouldn’t know if a commercial service was involved!

I know for certain that some gov agencies scan postal mail and email it. OCR is not certain but it’s a fair assumption. I prefer internal data abuses because it removes me from being at fault. If I send e-mail to a gov agency whose MX lookup leads to a Microsoft server and MS abuses the data, I have a hand in the abuse of my own data. A well-lawyered opponent would rightfully argue: “you handed your message to MS; you reap what you sow. If you did not trust MS with your message then you should not have handed your message to them.”

Real-life story: someone spotted CSAM on a Cloudflare site and reported it to CF. CF forced the whistle blower to reveal their identity as a precondition to treating the complaint. So they did. Then CF gave the whistle blower’s identity to the website owner without taking the site offline. The website owner doxxed the whistle blower publicly so their users would retaliate against the whistle blower. When the CEO (Matthew Prince) was confronted about this, he said the whistle blower “should have used a fake name”. Effectively, the whistle blower was held responsible for the trust they extended.

OK and as for offline methods to use commercial services, like games, I think in this case your goal is privacy. However I think this demand is fairly unreasonable as well. Obviously there are certain services that require online access, like real-time chat applications.

It depends on the game. If Tetris were to fail to install because the binary blob could not gather your personal details and a ton of hardware serial numbers to then send back to the mothership despite the game play not even having an online element, the connectivity requirement is unreasonable – abusively so.

The problem is that any company can construct artificial reasons for why they need online access, or even data collection. Youtube can say that they require personal data to curate your feed. You already mentioned that data minimization laws were ineffective. I don’t see how you can reasonable expect companies bend over backwards to provide offline access, when it’s far simpler for them to just make up a reason for why they need online access, or why they need your personal data.

You seem to be suggesting “it’s hopeless to expect corporations to comply with laws, so why bother?” Europe has decided for its people that data minimisation is a good idea; enough to warrant enshrining it into law. Enforcement is lax and sloppy but this is likely down to the law having quick dramatic effect. I believe enforcement diligence will gradually improve.

Of course corps will present their best excuses for why they process data abusively. The EDPB produces guidelines about what excuses are acceptable and which are not. And courts weigh-in on it and determine proportionality. If you are a company in Europe and want to avoid trouble, try not to fuck around with trying to process data in some compromising and unnecessary way.

I just want to make sure the government can’t ban encryption and anonymizing services like Tor.

That’s a low standard of privacy. Note that “ban” is vague here. I assume you mean that you merely oppose the gov legislating a prohibition on tor. But the reality is that the IT dude in the gov server room decides: “I’m tired of reviewing all these false intrusion alarms… I want my worktime to be easier going, so I’ll just block Tor at the firewall so I have more time to hang out at the coffee machine”. And just like that by someone’s off-the-cuff whim the whole public loses their privacy in the course of trying to get public service online, as there is no law explicitly stating that public services cannot block Tor.

W.r.t encryption, I don’t think any gov agencies outside of Germany even publish PGP keys for encrypted email. So the protection of encryption is effectively denied by all govs in most situations as a consequence of mere passive inaction.

I’m not forcing companies to perform certain actions, I’m preventing certain consumer actions from being criminalized.

Yet IIUC you are apparently okay with govs forcing people to engage with private companies that make reckless choices. It’s not a live-and-let-live stance. If it’s okay for companies to be reckless, then what gives? A right to avoid such companies (to boycott) is even more paramount.

The problem with offline is that it’s more expensive, and often less convenient.

We can nix convenience. There are three scenarios:

1. exclusively digital/online access
2. exclusively analog/offline access
3. ppl have a choice between digital and analog

In case 3, convenience is assured because people can choose whatever method they find most convenient. Case 1 is probably convenient to most unless CAPTCHAs and similar enshitification is in play, but the rest are marginalised or burdoned. Case 2 is unlikely because even if analog is on offer it still makes sense to deploy digital in parallel for the cost savings, as the bulk of users favor digital.

We can disregard convenience on the part of the public service workers b/c they are compensated regardless. Workers choose the gig they want to sign up for. So it boils down to cost savings w.r.t the public service side of this.

I don’t see a fundamental reason why offline communication must be available.

Consider the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Art.21-2: “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.”

Saving a buck is not great rationale for denying fundamental human rights. There should be a good reason, like for example denying someone who needs a heart transplant their right to life because the list of those needing a heart is longer than organs available.

You could say: ok, we will give free Internet and hardware to all those who are offline, assuming they can handle it. It could only still be economically sensible if all such people are walking distance from a public library. But there are still other human rights to account for: the right to privacy (Art.12) and the right to autonomy (a derivitive right from Art.1 dignity/self-determinism).

Let’s assume that your country added a fundamental rule (for example for the USA this would be a constitutional amendment) saying that all goverment services should collect the minimum amount of data necessary to function. So they would have to support things like Tor, to avoid collecting IP addresses, etc. Would this be enough for you to waive the offline requirement? Because the world is always marching towards more efficient communication, and an offline requirement could hold society back for little benefit.

“Data minimization” is an important policy which has already been implemented in Europe (2016) and a few other places that have tried to do a GDPR-like policy (California, and Australia IIRC). In Europe it’s a bit of a disaster. Even though strictly speaking GDPR Art.5 is violated when public web services block Tor, they are nonetheless blocking Tor with reckless disregard and effectively laughing at complaints. People in some countries cannot even get /read/ access to legal statutes from Tor. There is a GDPR rule requiring data controllers to be diligent with infosec and implementing protective mechanisms to ensure this. Rightfully so, but the effect is that this becomes an excuse to shrug off the Tor community. They ultimately have a legal defense of claiming anti-Tor measures are to comply with infosec mandates (though in reality it’s sloppy lazy IT admins who blocks Tor).

I have little hope for competency prevailing. In principle, data could be secured without blocking Tor. But that conversation is quite far from taking place AFAICT. I’m almost certain the courts would take the lazy way out. What judge would risk forcing a data controller to serve Tor users and then being responsible for an attacker who uses Tor when exploiting some unrelated vuln?

I fear this is unavoidable. If you depend on certain services (like interacting with the government), then you simply can’t fully boycott that service or any dependency of that service.

If your choices are send email to the gov (who selected MS for their email supplier) or to send a letter, then boycott rights are sufficiently respected.

For example, if the government only accepted post mail, you would not be able to fully boycott the postal service.

A national post service is itself a public service. When the gov depends on the gov for service, that’s about as non-controversial as it gets. Someone who opposes the government should be more focused on leaving the jurisdiction they have contempt for.

If the gov were to do something stupid like outsource the national postal service to Federal Express (a private courier service in the US who finances right-wing politics), then having an alternative would be important. If the alternative is Microsoft, then it’s a choice between two shit options; in which case I would demaned yet another option, like fax.

But I feel like your idea of boycotts is also too extreme.

I find it obnoxiously extreme to force people into the marketplace to patronize a particular corporation. It’s not the same as the gov itself internally supporting harmful corporation, which is quite rampant in the US but out of our hands. When individuals are forced to directly lick the boots of an evil corporation, it’s an extra hightened degree of abuse. It’s an assault on self-determinism. I will not feed a baddy. I insist. Nothing is more tyrannical than forcing someone to proactively take an action that goes against their beliefs.

Americans do not have a fundamental right to consumer protection. But Europeans do. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union Art.38 states: “Union policies shall ensure a high level of consumer protection.”

Despite that right, consumer protection is still a shit-show in Europe. People rely on incompetent unmotivated consumer protection agencies to take action. So for me, the most important consumer protection is that which does not rely on the action of others – the right to boycott. I don’t know if a court would agree that a right to boycott derives from the right to consumer protection, but I am running with it. I will march all the way to the supreme court if I must, to push my claim on a right to boycott.

If you want to boycott Microsoft, and all local grocery stores used Azure somewhere in their infrastructure, would you stop buying groceries?

There are countless street markets and farmer’s markets selling their produce for cash. The only thing digital is the scale. Mom and pop shops have old fashioned cash registers. I would only imagine the supermarket chains use the cloud. The giants are not transparent enough for customers to even know what they use internally. Websites of 4 of the giants around me block Tor. One of them even uses Cloudflare which masks their hosting provider but I boycott Cloudflare anyway. Indeed I boycott the 4 chains on that basis.

I see boycotting as simply doing your best to avoid a company’s products.

In some cases I patronize the lesser of evils, depending on the level of despiration or need. In other cases I boycott entire industries. There are only 3 or 4 mobile carriers and I have a problem with all of them. If I despirately needed mobile phone service I would pick the lesser of evils. But I have opted to give them all the middle finger because I don’t really need the service.

All washing machines have undocumented kill switches. So I am hand-washing my clothes until that changes.

Analog systems need to be designed too. And they can be just as tyrannical, inconvenient, and invasive.

I’d have to say not even close. Do a search on /dark patterns/. There are countless abuses digital systems can push precisely because of the efficiency of automation. Analog systems entail manual labor which inherently limits the extent of tyranny and abuses due to resource limitations. Analog systems are also hard to conceal. You can’t stick a guy in a windowless office writing code to collect and abuse data on a large scale in an analog system. The demand for more human labor in analog systems means trusting more people to keep secrets.

I also don’t know what would be the analog version of a broken CAPTCHA that cannot be solved, which would block advancing to the next step.

Lack of competency is often simply lack of incentive. What incentive does the government have, for providing privacy-friendly services?

Indeed there is insufficient direct pressure on govs to protect privacy. Which is precisely why it is critical to mitigate the data collection in the first place. They can’t get your IP address from your postal letter. But if you concede to giving up analog methods, abuse has no limits. In the US there is no concept of gov transparency… no way to confidently know what they are collecting and what they are doing with the data.

Likewise, if they have incentive to track people, why would they provide an offline option, which is both more expensive and bypasses their tracking measures.

You seem to be answering your own question. Fighting to keep an offline option on the table is the only control you have on the abuse. They are limited by budgets. So if analog processing eats up a significant amount of budget, that’s less money that can be spent on mass surveillance abuses.

Based on your entire reply, it sounds like what you mainly want is privacy.

Privacy and boycott rights have become inseparable. Boycotting used to simply be a matter of not buying something. Now with surveillance advertising in play, boycotting requires privacy. Not feeding Microsoft requires not sharing personal data with MS, thus not sending email that traverses their servers.

It’s an important distinction, because I reckon that it will be easier to ask the government to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, rather than offline access as a right, since offline access is much more expensive to provide.

Privacy has been a fundamental right in the UDHR since 1948, IIUC. From there, it barely has much effect. Snowden pretty much made it quite clear that you cannot rely on privacy as a fundamental right. Even if a privacy law could be respected in some hypthetical world, you still have CAPTCHAs, forced apps (JavaScript and/o

Sorry for necro but your ideology is fascinating. It sounds like you believe offline people deserve the same benefits as online people.

Not in the case at hand. But yes, I do believe offline ppl are entitled to the same benefits w.r.t. public services. E.g. our human right to healthcare and education is not preconditioned on being online. It’s inalienable.

W.r.t software sold on the private market, it’s more about standards. Standards of privacy, quality, functionality, and pro-consumer. With the video game, I’m not sure if I am more annoyed by the needless dependency on a WAN, or the anti-consumer way of doing business in general, which entails using the money of paying customers against them. Paying for deliberate anti-features and product crippling rewards corporations for being proactively anti-consumer… biting the hand that fed them. And so I oppose the idea of feeding enshitification.

Why do you believe this? Why shouldn’t the world move towards an expectation of online existence?

In Europe there is a battle emerging whereby some gov offices have decided it’s okay to exclude some people for being offline. Note that those same excluded people do not have a right to opt-out of taxation.

If I were to guess, your goal is not offline existence, but privacy, and doing things offline guarantees privacy, the same way that high-security environments use airgapped machines.

Privacy is one of many factors. Another factor, for example, would be that if I boycott Microsoft and the gov uses MS for email, I effectively lose my boycott privileges if email is the only means of communicating that the gov accepts.

Another factor is convenience. I find CAPTCHAs inconvenient, so I boycott them. My boycott against CAPTCHAs goes so far that I am willing to undertake a greater inconvenience in order to carry out my boycott against CAPTCHA pushers. And note that CAPTCHA is just one insideous¹ form of inconvenience. A local gov publishes their PDF community newsletter through some shitty 3rd party that animates the PDFs with JavaScript, so you can graphically see a visual of the page turning. That shitty protectionist js-forced service blocks people from simply downloading the PDF file. And I’ll be damned if I am going to support that kind of protectionism, so I insist that someone hand-delivers a paper newsletter to my door until they become competent. It’s unlikely that they will become competent in my lifetime.

Even if they manage to make the PDFs downloadable, they will fuck something else up. E.g. wget won’t work because they would arbitrarily decide to take an anti-bot posture without cause, and without realising that humans run wget.

¹ “insideous” because it puts humans to work for machines doing uncompensated labor which is potentially involuntary servitude in some cases. And performance of the labor often still results in DoS if the CAPTCHA is broken or if it discriminates against the incapability of the user.

But that’s just a means to an end. There are other ways of achieving privacy, like using vetted open source software that take privacy seriously, for example a fediverse client running in Tor browser.

Yes. In fact, well implemented tech gives more privacy than analog methods most of the time (cash payments being a notable exception).

Privacy does not necessitate being offline.

It does if the other party is too incompetent to get it right. The gov is not competent enough to publish a public key. It is not competent enough to maintain a server that allows Tor connections. It is not competent enough to design a webform that does not make email and phone number required fields.

The problem is not lack of possibilities. It’s lack of competency.

Going to a cafe to download articles to read offline, is not really offline either. It’s just an intermittent internet connection

The fetching is online (though not necessarily); the reading is offline. If I have a LAN with AP and no uplink, a friend or someone near my home could connect to the LAN and upload content, which would be an offline means of getting content. There are also ways to get info via SMS. The gov who uses a protectionist 3rd party to block PDF downloads and limit distribution to those running some proprietary JavaScript effectively blocks offline reading by someone like myself.

I suppose my ultimate thesis is that the gov should only be rewarded with digital participation if they competently deployed a service. An analog mechanism is always needed as an escape from the tyranny of poor design. Without an analog mechanism there is little incentive to implement a good design. Analog methods serve as an important quality control feedback mechanism.

I am curious how many times have you gone to court?

I’ve been to court countless times, but only twice that I recall for choosing an analog lifestyle.

You obviously have access to internet or else you would not be here,

My gaming desktop is at home where I have no Internet. I /could/ bring a gaming laptop into a public library and do gaming there, but I should not need to. It’s an absurd injustice that I cannot game from the comfort of my home on a big screen because the game makers want to snoop on people arbitrarily.

you are on one of the more private places on the internet (fediverse) sure so the likelihood of “them” finding you on here is slim.

I have no idea what motivates this comment. I would certainly object to anyone outside the fedi finding me in the fedi, but this is entirely orthoganol to anything said here. What does the fedi privacy have to do with the freedom of an offline person to play a game?

If you are concerned about your privacy on line as I am sure many of us on Lemmy are look into getting an internet connection to your home, accept that you will have to pay taxes and invest in a really solid Pihole or Adguard home setup.

“Privacy” is such a broad concept spanning countless ways to achieve countless forms of privacy, it’s really bizarre that you make this suggestion. I cannot trace this suggestion to any specific privacy scenario that I have mentioned. A general change that like you suggest simultaneously grants some forms of privacy while compromising privacy in other ways. Also no idea what taxes has to do with this.

I have not used pihole but I know it is something I need to research. Adguard does not strike me as a like-with-like comparison, but my knowledge of the two is superficial. In any case, I struggle to see how these tools relate.

Perhaps you are suggesting that forcing all connections over Tor solves the privacy problem. I would first say: no it does not. We have no idea what info is sent when a closed-source blob phones home. But more importantly, even if I could sufficiently circumvent the snooping, I shouldn’t fucking have to. Snooping cannot be justified by the existence of circumvention hacks.

That does nothing.

Doing nothing is already far better than 99% of the population, who feeds oppressors. Not being part of the harm is in itself an important minimal baseline for me.

From there, it’s an oversight to neglect the fact that living offline makes the battleground visible. It shows me where I need to fight battles. It’s how I know where to fight. When I force the gov to partake in analog transactions, it’s being offline that enabled me to gather the intel for what fights to bring to them.

Concrete example: if I were online, I would visit the website that shows my city’s newsletter and view it on the website. But because I am offline, I pop into a cafe and try to download it instead, for later offline reading. They have some shitty web app that blocks saving a PDF. It actually breaks the law AFAIK, so I can harass them about it and force them to stop imposing a shitty app that impedes downloading the newsletter as a PDF. I would not know that or think deep enough to give a shit if I simply had always-on cloud access from my residence.

There are mandated transactions with the gov that have no offline means. When the gov drags me into court for not filling out an online form, being able to truthfully state that I don’t have cloud access or required info for the web form (like email address) gives me a defense that the court cannot ignore. When I play that card, it’s effectively a push back that overcomes oppression.

companies dgaf about negative publicity anymore

Since when do corprorations not care about money? We’re talking about money, which publicity affects. Can you explain in more detail how financing a lawsuit against someone who “pirates” Fujitsu’s drivers (needed to support their hardware) is good for their profits?

Anti-piracy actions normally boost profits by showing the shareholders that they are enforcing their intellectual property (publicity indeed). That does not seem to apply here – unlikely has the effect that you seem to think it does.

It’s a culmination of several goals.

• I am trying to live as unbanked as possible. Local ISPs do not accept cash payments. I do not want to feed anti-cash suppliers. I boycott them. So the only way I can get online from home is over GPRS using a prepaid sim card. Those prices are not competitive. I can get online for ~¾ the cost of a big mac per month, but that’s with a ~4-5gb cap. Sometimes I do that on rare occasions.
• I oppose the forced use of the cloud by gov public services. Being offline is the only real way to test and experiment with public services to know when to protest the exclusion of offline people. It also ensures that I can take my protest to court and truthfully testify that I have no residential Internet.
• In the context of gaming, it’s fine if a game inherently needs the cloud for the experience. But when a game artificially but needlessly demands cloud access as a precondition to installation, it’s somewhat of a human rights violation because it’s people’s human right to access and experience culture. It’s wrong for game makers to exclude offline people if a game does not strictly need it.
• I believe the right to boycott is fundamentally the single most important consumer right. It is the only consumer protection that consumers can give themselves without depending on others for protection. It should be practiced and tested constantly.
• Apps have taken a shitty direction that assumes non-stop cloud access. This is a kind of vulnerability that weakens civilization. The fact that no Lemmy client apps store data locally and support offline reading and queued responses is a weakness that promotes the elitism of excluding offline people. The circumstance exacerbates pressure to buy an Internet subscription. I should be able to pop into a cafe periodically and sync with Lemmy servers, go home, and do my reading there. My offline experiment enables me to see what most people do not.

If any of those CDs require internet to install, they must have been later releases during the dying era of CD game installs. I have original CD copies of all AOE games and they dont need any internet at all.

I’ll have to get back to you on exactly which one I have and how it reacted offline. I just discovered that AoE is still making new releases every year. You must be spending a fortune if you have every single AoE game ever released. Or if you have dodgy versions, then those could be internet-independent due to crackers.

Using dd is important as you can flat dump every single bit out of the CD, including the hidden license information.

The fact that dd has no smarts about the media is exactly why it’s a problem. The copy protections are designed to ensure that bit-by-bit copies fail to work. They insert some kind of optical ”defects” which force drives to do some kind of error correction. A copy (image or physical CD-R) has a copy of the bits but not the defects, so there is no error dection/correction activity, and that’s how the game knows it’s not a factory disc.