Drm - Tumblr Posts

Microsoft announces it will shut down ebook program and confiscate its customers' libraries

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1.

Customers will receive refunds.

This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.

When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn’t get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.

People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon’s Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

https://boingboing.net/2019/04/02/burning-libraries.html

Thinking out loud but good lord was it disturbing or was it disturbing that the only reason really that Sly survived the events of what went down on Kaine Island was because Dr.M was sadistically vindictive enough to torture him to death rather than play the cold, calculating villain that clockwerk was (I.e. stop messing around and kill the bastard who’s in your way to victory already)?

That thing he was plugged into was more than strong enough to just spike him into the shore rocks to get it over with, or swiftly crinkle him in like a soda can,

hell, if you fail the rescue as Carmelita, you’re punished with a cutscene of the monster literally devouring Sly, still conscious, in one gulp.

The setup originally kind of implied that the MO was going to be getting the life crushed out of him, but the funny thing is that broken ribs or limbs were “miraculously” not even on the list of injuries they found on the poor guy after he was let go. A concussion was, though.

That concussion was probably both… not intentional, and it might have deadass been what saved his life.

I kept wondering as a kid how squeezing the body = head injury and figured it was a suspension of belief sort of deal, and then today I realized that Sly most likely got the concussion during the face-off that started when Carmelita showed up- the beast was violently swinging him around for the majority of that mess, and it’s actually fortune in disguise that it rendered him unconscious. Any other incapacitating injury and M would have finished him off himself rather than turning his attention elsewhere and allowing the gang to retrieve him.

The crushing was only a cat playing with its meal. M didn’t just want Sly to suffer. He wanted to watch him fight against the inevitable, writhing on full display for the entire gang like the helpless worm he truly reduced Conner’s son to. It was probably the most joy the madman had gotten a taste of in decades and he was going to savor every second of it he could wring out. That’s seriously how deep his resentment for the Coopers had become. And he would have kept that up for as long as Sly had that tenaciously stubborn will and strength in him to keep struggling.

So,

I have to

notice,

the timing/connection between

dying in the rescue mission as Carmelita, and then immediately watching M’s play come to an end.

Doctor M(andril), A Villainous Demonstration of Crafting the Perfect Sequel

I’ll cut right to the chase, there is no baddie in the Sly franchise (to me) that has before and will ever again top the writing of this monke right here. That’s not to put down Clockwerk in any capacity. In fact, the majority of what makes M so amazing is not what he is in a vacuum, but what he serves to build upon the events that preceded him. Clockwerk is the giant who’s shoulders he stands on, the two games before him the backdrop that makes him shine so brightly. I’ve always been a strong believer that stories are in large part only as good as their antagonists, and this is what Dr.M has contributed to make Honor Among Thieves the narrative peak of the Sly Cooper franchise.

For minor starters, everything about this freak is downright unsettling.

A mandrill monkey was a great pick for a scary looking, vicious little mastermind. Even with a fresh coat of purple and his short stature, he looks about as repulsive and menacing as he is on the inside. He’s completely obsessed to the point of being consumed metaphorically by his envy and resentment of Connor. He gave us a lot of interesting insight into the life and relationships of Sly’s father while leaving us with even more mystery and questions to ponder. He’s meticulous and intellectually gifted in his ways, but it doesn’t do anything to overshadow the fact that he’s also an utterly deranged madman.

Clockwerk’s hatred for the cooper line, as genuine and strong as it was, had this almost detached element to it, being more like a means to an end and fueled by superiority and rivalry competition. It was kinda hard to get your head around it, and the second game keeps him in your thoughts more like a slumbering eldritch horror waiting to rise again or a pure, immortal force of evil itself, rather than a person. He isn’t even really “anthro” in his design. Clockwerk is a monster, a robotic husk of a former individual.

Dr.M’s hatred for the Coopers on the other hand is… uncomfortably humanized. He’s narcissistic, yet he’s also paranoid and motivated by a rage that’s responding to his sense of inferiority and victimhood. He’ll use his warped justifications to stoop to the most heinous acts- not just because he wants to prove himself better- but because he wants to destroy/take everything Conner loves and accomplished. Clockwerk’s hate was cold and mechanic. M’s hatred is personal and boiling over with venom. Both of them were defined by little more than their loathing of Coopers, but while Clockwerk kept himself alive with his vendetta, M’s was the very thing that led to his demise.

Clockwork was “the enemy of all Coopers”, but he left the final member of the bloodline to wither and then bloom more vibrantly than ever to return and defeat him. He underestimated Sly, and was content to live on and continue his own work with the overconfidence that he had already won. I wonder in my head sometimes if maybe his power was actually starting to fade in the light of seeing that vendetta finally resolved. Or if that time-worn weariness and frustration was part of why Sly, barely an adult, was able to accomplish what generations of his most skilled family had failed to. He never knew Clockwerk during his prime, the great monstrous owl that his clan used to live in constant terror of.

Doctor M feels like he was really Sly’s own Clockwerk. A fresh and unfamiliar threat to truly test every skill he had spent a whole career of thieving to master, and someone who’s own history was far more entangled with Sly’s blood than he could have imagined. Clockwerk condemned him to death (or destitution) for no other reason than being a Cooper, but Dr.M actually wanted to watch the life leave his eyes because he was Sly Cooper, son of Connor.

And he’s not just fitting to compare to the old bird, but he’s more overtly a direct foil to Bentley’s character too. He’s a dark prophecy of the worst possible result of what would happen if the Cooper gang fell out with each other in a similar manner, or if some of Bentley’s foreshadowed insecurities (that started presenting after he became wheelchair bound) were allowed to fester instead of him finding support from others. That turtle is also the only character that Dr.M is able to speak to like an equal, because he sees himself in Bentley despite being on opposite sides.

He’s a really, really well-written main antagonist that does not try to take a whole new direction like Neyla; instead, he’s like a revamped version of Clockwerk’s “idea” done without milking out any more references or revivals of the bird and his role, which by this point was well-concluded and moved on from… The past of Sly’s family coming back to haunt him, the weight of honoring the legacy of his ancestors, and the struggle of exploring who he is both as a Cooper and the leader of his own found family, and Honor Among Thieves checked those boxes without ruining the closure he got back in Paris. Band of Theives will always be my personal favorite to return to, but all of what M represents, along with many other reasons, is why I consider the third to narratively be the best game out of the series.

“We watched as Dr.M just stood there, unwilling to leave as the walls caved in on the vault.

He’d spent his life lusting over the Cooper Fortune, and he wasn’t going to give it up, no matter what the cost…”

Blu-ray DRM is really devilish. I use a program called makemkv to rip them, because there is no other way to play them on my laptop, and there are no legit linux options for blu-ray playback, you have to crack the drm to play them. The easiest solution is makemkv to rip the movies into files, it works out of the box.

But if the level of drm (aacs) on a particular blu-ray is higher than what Makemkv can handle, the disk will update the firmware on your drive to revoke access to makemkv, so it can't access any blu-rays.

"One famous “feature” of AACS is a so-called host revocation. It was designed to ensure that only “approved” software can use your drive. Every Blu-ray disc contains a file that has a list of host keys known to be used by "unauthorized" software. This list has a version number. The moment you insert the disc into your drive, the drive checks if the list is newer than the one it knows about, and if it is, the drive re-flashes itself (updates firmware)."

And that happened to me. It was a blu-ray of the 1972 Hammer horror movie Fear in the Night that did it. The one program that works with my blu-ray player now couldn't access any discs, including ones it had ripped before. And there are absolutely zero linux programs that are authorized to playback blu-ray discs.

I had to flash my drive's firmware to allow something called libredrive, which allows direct access to files and bypasses the aacs drm firmware.

And that was quite the journey. I had makemkv installed as a flatpak via my distro's software manager. and I needed to use the command line. Flatpaks are a great packaging format. but they are primarily for gui apps. So i had to build makemkv from source. And then I had to figure out the commandline for the firmware flashing tool included with makemkv, which was hard because the instructions linked flat out lie. There is no "flash" command for sdftools, there is only "rawflash", you have to read the thread carefully to find that out. This page helped. I had to download new patched libredrive firmware.

And finally i figured out the command I needed ""sdftool -d [drive name] rawflash main,enc -i [new firmware flen name].bin. And now I can use my blu-ray drive again. It's now libredrive.

So much work to finally be able to use the drive I paid for, and the blu-ray discs I also paid for. I'm not running some major piracy operation, I just want to be able to watch movies I legally own on my laptop. And drm stopped me, and I had to break it.

This is why DRM is so bad, and anyone who uses it deserves all the piracy they are trying to stop with it. It's scummy to take someone's money and then interfere with their ability to use the copy of the products they own and paid for. It's such atrocious treatment of the customer that anyone who does it deserves to have their stuff pirated.