Quoting: RichardYao

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: F.UltraThose individuals where sued because they used software that uploaded the copyrighted material to other people while they where downloading it themselves. AFAIK no one have been sued for just downloading, it's distribution that is protected under copyright, for usage to be infringing you have to go to patents.

It's not just distribution that is protected under copyright, though I'm unsure if you're making this distinction. Unauthorized transcription, translation, performance, and of course, making an unauthorized copy of copyrighted content is copyright infringement. Though transcription sometimes falls under fair use. What do you do when you're downloading something? You're making a copy.

Putting aside whether seeding qualifies as distribution, there are plenty of instances of people being sued just for downloading content. Whether they would actually win that lawsuit, I don't know, but most defendants choose to settle before it reaches the court.

Here's the RIAA, a frequent customer of the court, on what they think:

Quoting: RIAAA long series of court rulings has made it very clear that uploading and downloading copyrighted music without permission on P2P networks constitutes infringement and could be a crime.

I'll have to read the Copyright Act for my country in full one day.

Edit: The article I referenced seems to also be related to seeding.

It is all a moot point given that the file has been restored to Apex Legends in the last update. It would be ridiculous to go after people for distributing backups of a file that they are distributing to everyone.

Also, the RIAA saying “could be a crime” is rather ridiculous. Copyright infringement is a civil issue, not a criminal issue. As much as their industry would like to see capital punishment for distributing music files, it is not happening. To be clear, that is not an exaggeration. One of them actually lamented that the government in some country was not executing people for pirating music:

https://boingboing.net/2010/06/14/music-industry-lobby.html

These people have been lobbying to criminalize anything that might hurt their bottom line for decades.

I'm already well aware of how the RIAA feels about copyright infringement. I used them as an example because they're well-known to go after everybody, alive or dead, 12 years old or 80 years old, for unauthorized downloading of copyrighted content. If anyone were to go after people for downloading content, it would be them. I did not know, however, that the RIAA wanted capital punishment for infringers, though somehow I'm not surprised.

QuoteIt would be ridiculous to go after people for distributing backups of a file that they are distributing to everyone.

Maybe so, but this is copyright infringement nonetheless. Copyright is about preserving the copyright holder's monopoly over their creation. Ultimately, of course, the only entities that have the capital to pursue lawsuits for copyright infringement are corporations. I'm looking at this from a purely academic perspective because I'm interested in copyright. I don't even play Apex Legends and I probably never will.

The popular view at least in response to my comments seems to be that distribution is copyright infringement, but downloading copyrighted content is perfectly legal in the United States and everywhere. This doesn't sound correct to me, though I'm willing to be proven wrong. I have at least one source in my favor - even if it's Wikipedia.

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Quoting: F.UltraThose individuals where sued because they used software that uploaded the copyrighted material to other people while they where downloading it themselves. AFAIK no one have been sued for just downloading, it's distribution that is protected under copyright, for usage to be infringing you have to go to patents.

It's not just distribution that is protected under copyright, though I'm unsure if you're making this distinction. Unauthorized transcription, translation, performance, and of course, making an unauthorized copy of copyrighted content is copyright infringement. Though transcription sometimes falls under fair use. What do you do when you're downloading something? You're making a copy.

Putting aside whether seeding qualifies as distribution, there are plenty of instances of people being sued just for downloading content. Whether they would actually win that lawsuit, I don't know, but most defendants choose to settle before it reaches the court.

Here's the RIAA, a frequent customer of the court, on what they think:

Quoting: RIAAA long series of court rulings has made it very clear that uploading and downloading copyrighted music without permission on P2P networks constitutes infringement and could be a crime.

I'll have to read the Copyright Act for my country in full one day.

Edit: The article I referenced seems to also be related to seeding.

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Quoting: RichardYao

Quoting: avivilloz

Quoting: Xpander

Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: RichardYao

Quoting: quotI wonder if dropping in that missing `easyanticheat_x64.so` file would fix the issue. The removal seems accidental, so I'm assuming the main binary is still compatible. Of course, you're risking a ban if you try that, but I am curious.

It does fix the issue.

How did you get the correct file?

i backed up the file before the game updated :)

could you maybe share this file somehow?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/te62pa/apex_legends_eac_file/

Keep in mind that this is technically copyright infringement on the part of the person distributing the file. It would avoid copyright infringement if we figured out how to download the old depot version from Valve to get it.

It should also be classified as copyright infringement for the person obtaining/making a copy of the file. Otherwise no one would be successfully prosecuted for downloading copyrighted content from anyone aside from the copyright holder or those they've authorized.

As most sources tend to focus on the legality of sharing the content rather than obtaining it, there's not a wealth of information about it, but here's a wikipedia article.

Legality appears to vary depending on the country.

Although, on another note, anyone can be prosecuted for anything regardless of whether they did it or not, so I'm not really making a good argument there. I couldn't find any cases where such a prosecution was successful; mostly cases where the defendant settled.

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Quoting: GuestWhat's Valve's endgame here?

Seems pretty obvious. Make the Steam Deck a more attractive device by improving the ability to play games on the device outside of Steam, of which Lutris is currently the best way to do so. Given Valve's comments about not wanting exclusives and the nannying behavior from Microsoft that urged them to invest in GNU/Linux in the first place, it seems they don't want to be hypocritical and instead make it easy for users to leave Valve's own service, Steam, if they need to. The hope, I'm sure, is that it will make the Steam Deck a more attractive device to continue using in the long run and users will opt to stay with it out of affection for the experience outside of Steam, too.

When Amazon manufacturers devices like the Amazon Swindle, Echo, Firestick, Astro, Ring and whatever else, their primary concern is also getting people hooked on the Amazon ecosystem. Ebooks aren't that different from games on Steam, as whether the book is DRM-encumbered is up to the individual publisher and no one else (and in fact Amazon recommends that you don't enable DRM in the KDP publishing screen). But where Amazon has made the decision to make their GNU/Linux devices limiting for end users to improve the customer's experience with Amazon products, Valve has decided to give users better options to explore what you can really do with the device, even if that means the customer leaves Steam for a time. It doesn't even have a locked bootloader. Helping to improve Lutris just means the user can have a better experience.

Either approach will work well for different people. iOS offers a stable and consistent experience because Apple controls everything, and I'm told that Android offers a more powerful and featureful experience because the user is provided more options.

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Quoting: CFWhitmanIt's generally seemed to me that the primary reason for the slowdown of Windows over time is registry cruft (at least since Windows 2000 and its automatic defragmentation).

Be that as it may, Windows 10 deals with low powered CPUs significantly better than Windows 7 does. However, for some reason it deals with limited memory worse than 7 (for example, 7 works significantly better with 2 GB of RAM than Windows 10) and it requires more disk space than 7.

This is probably more accurate. Though I still remember defragmentation improving speeds a few years ago.

I'd guess that Windows 10 wasn't targeting older hardware and was instead making allowances for budget processors like Celeron. I don't think any modern laptops ship with less than 4GB of RAM. Of course, it could be that because Windows doesn't work well with less than 4GB, laptops don't ship with less than that.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Cerberon

Quoting: spacemonkeyI am curious about the performance difference. But no matter the results, I will never ever install Windows.

Well a lot of games already run better on Linux, and given how vale should be able to optimize the OS specifically for the hardware and that windows will not be so optimized I would be surprised if windows is noticeably faster at anything.

I'm also wondering if Windows isn't a bit "heavy" for the hardware. It will be taking up space (memory, for eg) that the Deck wants for running the games.

The space issue is certainly an important one for a device with so little of it to go around, but I don't think overall speed and responsiveness will be much of an issue on Windows. I installed Windows 10 20H1 on a ~2009 laptop for testing purposes and was surprised by how well it worked. It wasn't a particularly high-powered laptop, either; only about $500 at the time. Not that I was doing much intensive work.

I didn't get far into it, as I only did it to test whether networking worked. I know Windows has a reputation for slowing down over time—primarily due to its dated filesystem—but I wonder if this is still true. Windows as of late seems to be more well-optimized for older hardware.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Purple Library GuySo does anyone have a good grasp of why the Chinese seem to pretty much not use Linux at all?

I can only speculate that because Windows 10 is free of charge for all intents and purposes, why use Linux when less of your software works with it?

Perhaps I should rephrase. Does anyone have a good grasp of why the Chinese seem to use far less Linux than people in other countries do? I mean, most North American consumers are basically unaware that Windows costs money, so I don't see any difference there.

Well, as I said, it's only speculation that this sentiment is more widespread. I don't know myself.

I'm curious, too—it's a good question.

The Chinese government has likely switched completely over to Linux by now. The Steam survey only counts users who are using Steam, so really this is a question of, "why do Chinese gamers seem to use far less Linux than people in other countries do?"

Interesting question given that GNU/Linux has been labelled 'communist' in the past.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuySo does anyone have a good grasp of why the Chinese seem to pretty much not use Linux at all?

I can only speculate that because Windows 10 is free of charge for all intents and purposes, why use Linux when less of your software works with it?

Bill Gates was of a similar opinion as far back as 1998.

Quoting: Bill GatesGates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

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Quotein others, it means choosing to not support platforms that could provide bad actors with ways of compromising our own Bungie developed anti-cheat security systems.

This seems to read that they have some sort of anti-cheat security system outside of BattlEye.

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Quoting: SamsaiPutin and Lukashenko are solely to blame for the suffering their actions have caused on their citizens. So, if the citizens are unhappy, they should know well who to send their complaints.

This is the same logic used to justify terror bombing—or "strategic bombing" when you do it to other countries:

QuoteThe aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive ... should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany ... the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.

...

But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Arthur_Harris,_1st_Baronet#Second_World_War

Sir Arthur Harris later commented that the bombing did not have the desired effect because Nazi Germany was too well run a police state; they were already being terrorized by their current government, and they still didn't feel they could act against it. I can't find a source for it now, but from memory he still believes the bombing was justified, if only to prove that it didn't work.

Here's a more recent article explaining why strategic bombing often has the opposite effect:

QuoteRather than breaking popular morale in London, Berlin, Tokyo or Hanoi, it usually strengthened it. Confronted by a common deadly threat, civilians rally around the only leaders who can do anything to protect them, even if those leaders are widely disliked.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/why-strategic-bombing-doesnt-seem-to-work/article19928220/

Yes, these are video games, not civilian lives, but it's punishing solely civilians all the same for the actions of their government—civilians, perhaps, who are already being punished by their government. I'm sure Putin will be hit hard by not being able to play DRM-free games anymore. If this strategy actually works in Russia, it certainly wouldn't work in North Korea, which is far too well-run to allow this to happen.

The way I see it, the reason strategic bombing didn't work in Germany and Japan in the '40s is very simple: they didn't care about their citizens, and the citizens didn't feel they could overthrow the government, or perhaps even that it was the right choice. Even as cities continued to be fire bombed, there was no coup against the existing government. In fact, when the emperor wished to broker peace with the US using Nagasaki as an excuse, there was an ill-fated coup attempt to stop the emperor and his sympathizers from doing so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident

As a natural consequence of conflict, lives will be affected—especially the innocent ones. But going out of your way to target civilians instead of Putin and the government seems counter-productive from my perspective.

Of course, Russian citizens will simply torrent these games anyway.

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