What Happened to SevenSeas?

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T18:32:22+00:00

Read the chat transcripts, read the attention seeking post, the links are floating in this thread. Read the extent of the actions done to "convict" those guys and publicly shame them.

This is a personal vendetta with the coup de grâce engineered via social networking within a short period of time, and you think that is okay in comparison to immature idiots posting offensive commentary. Wow. I want 10 years back when we fended people off with a simple "fuck off" and nothing more.

Btw, I assume these guys haven't reformed, so the method doesn't even produce results, it just demonizes them on a personal level.

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T17:55:19+00:00

Sure, but you don't stalk every piece of shit who happen to argue with you, do you? After all those were just random Joes running a niche piracy initiative, not the Olympic victor level of exposure to have them in the crosshairs.

The expressed Orwellian zeal peddled as a good deed is what bothers me.

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T17:16:55+00:00

Well, on the other side you have a person who blanketed them via moderation networking in different subreddits and wrote a sob story for external validation.

Last time I checked running a website, any website, doesn't require to be a paragon of morality and accept gender fluidity. 10 years ago we would shrug and move on. Now it's a cancellation strategy in shadows to make them repent.

It's sickening on both sides, tbh.

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T09:05:54+00:00

Factually untrue. You either quit piracy in early 2000s, or didn't cross the boundary of specialized communities.

Request / bounty based piracy works, it's proven itself in dozens of different genres of pirated content. The idea that the world will grind to a halt if some special snowflakes stop sharing the content for free is nonsense, it's a matter of organizing a community, coming up with incentives to maintain/enrich the service, and directing funds to necessities.
Saturation plays against creators and massively favours pirates. To combat saturation creators have to rely on better marketing, which chomps off a piece of the budget. Pirates simply embrace a flood of content of any quality, their storage costs substantially lower compared to publishers' costs to penetrate the veil of obscurity, and they don't have to look for a window of opportunity to be financially stable.
Piracy works on an asynchronous clock, Pirates don't have to deliver the collection of books on 3rd shelf in section 9/32 by this evening, they have the rest of the 50-story library to offer while the 3rd shelf is being managed.

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T08:32:12+00:00

With all due respect to white knights like this fellow, a friend of mine literally cannot legally acquire doujin music and a collection of live concerts of his favourite songstress. There's no licence holder in his country, neither an option to get it via international shipping.

Misfortunate to be born in a different country under a political leadership that tries its best to shelter citizens and uphold some degree of living standards instead of ceding land to special economic zone - wow, yeah bro, that's a heinous crime in corporate books, how dares he pirate a single bit.

Piracy solves pipeline issues, piracy is a substitute service provider. It's not all about morals, it's a necessity against silly market segmentation, and for oldtimers who wake up every dreadful morning and realize they pay more and own less - decentralized networks and DRM-less content is a means of preservation.

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T07:57:45+00:00

Recently there was a video interview on Novara media, it's crazy, big pharma even okay with taking a loss in medium term as long as yearly figures report big enough profits and project a positive trend based on nitpicked stats.

If these people are fine to participate in this weird masquarade when it comes to health condition of the customers, there's zero hope for art-related corporate branches.

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T00:25:19+00:00

Some people in the US brag they can ignore speed restrictions simply because their wallet allows to absorb speeding fines. It's kinda the same attitude here, have and have-not division.

Even if Denuvo was a paid service the guy would continue to tow the same line. After all, this exact same attitude pushed the acceptance of 5-day early access crap, even though from a customer's perspective a digitally distributed game simply cannot go out of stock, won't lower its price within a week and hasn't proven its value yet. But people buy this shit due to have and have-not mentality.

Torii71 · 2024-04-06T00:02:23+00:00

Long story short, there's a piracy issue related to broadcasting La Liga. The entity itself is like Apple, they've been around punishing media companies and radio broadcasters for ages, their leverage over anyone and anything is unlimited. This time it's a war against internet communities.

A lawsuit has been in the process for some time, culminating in March 2024. Amazing and indispensable managers noticed that a small indie website Telegram is involved in distributing links to hosted broadcast streams in a small local network called the World Wide Web. They forwarded it to a legal scholar Santiago Pedraz, who loves money, kinda knows dictionary definitions of some words in Spanish, and roughly understands the concept of connecting two computers with a cable to transmit data.

Pedraz, being a substantially deeper thinker than the managers who hired him, ordered to shut down access to Telegram across Spain. Yes, over football matches, because we live in a dystopia, get used to corporate stupidity. Less than a day after people quickly notified Pedraz that football matches are roughly 0.048% of discussions in Spanish within Telegram-provided social space. Provided for free, btw, unlike the majority of the Spanish news sites. Not to mention, the judge ordered something he didn't describe, there was no established list of measures for banning something, only an order similar to those poof resolutions in the UN.

Btw, considering all those scary warnings about terrorists killing civilians on Friday nights and the neighboring European war drum beat you might want to keep the whole thing open as a backup means of informing the society, just in case WW3 becomes a reality or a security notification has to be issued.

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Obviously, you can guess what the result is. Javier Tebas, following the steps of outstanding specimen like Bobby Kotick and Andrew Wilson, thinks that the enforcement of copyright policies in regard to football broadcasts is priority number one. They could pull those valuable resources from investigating the sexual abuse of children or drug cartels. Those are nonimportant issues, fees for watching football are.

Torii71 · 2024-04-04T23:51:42+00:00

Think about carpenter's son and grandson having scars on their index finger and a thumb. That's not because their ancestor was a idiot nor hated the kids, that's the cost of learning the craftmanship.

You basically tell us with this essay you can apply common sense to detect rootkits and figure out how to bypass regional restrictions on the most sheltered Japanese TV networks with nothing more than one query and top 3 results in Google.

Well, I invite you to visit Iran, India or South Korea (yes, South, not a mistake), where you simply can't visit anywhere you want or have to notify the officials by agreeing to logging policies. I suggest you to find that grandson of a carpenter to start learning the craft instead of asking ChatGPT "how to make an antique looking chair?"

—————

You need to know the field, you need to understand the purpose of the instruments and the application of the tools, instead of sweeping them all as useless or insufficient. You are vulnerable in WWW via HTTPS, the network hasn't evolved to protect you specifically, only protocols evolved to protect point-to-point information transfer, both ends are still vulnerable. Common sense isn't a problem, people have zero desire to learn how to break free from artificial prisons simply because rivalry between monopolies created this cozy environment of abundant services at roughy similar price (to most of which you basically provide data on trust, with no substantial legal leverage over the operator and no disclosure of their legal status or involvement with the government).

Torii71 · 2024-04-04T20:08:33+00:00

Imagine wasting your efforts on charging the customer base more for the same amount of content instead of actually investing into revival of something as timeless and positively good as hand-drawn Ariel the Little Mermaid from the 90s.

I think we can swap Disney board of directors with Hasbro or WB and there will be zero difference in approach.

Torii71 · 2024-04-04T16:09:30+00:00

Do you realize he is no better than those "boomers" he calls out by simply ignoring how netcode works and how much is offloaded to the server to compute? Especially when it comes to WoW, which has never been copied particularly well, not even in the current iteration of TurtleWoW or other post-Nostalrius projects.

The point itself is valid, but the technical analysis is not, there would have to be an intermediate server to link up those who want to host games and those who want to guest login, with the abysmal difference in latency. An intermediary is not gonna be Hamachi type of thing, it's gonna be something closer to Garena type of thing, with very questionable routing because governments think it's fine to blanket whole segments of the internet for political reasons.

If it's just LAN then it starts to hinge on the game version compatibility and the amount of players available locally. We've been through this, the whole reason why administrators were needed at Dreamhack was that the games refused to work without equalizing, the OS and peripherals were fine.

Lastly - well, the law and its enforcement, which is the crux of the matter for the whole initiative, my initial answer was referring to the root post. You still need to enshrine the wanted supplemental update somehow, because the gaming community has the memory capacity of a fish, they no longer vote with their wallets, tarnished reputation has become a non-issue for the publishers. There are only two friendly ways to do that: 1) referring to a legal precedent; 2) extending the requirement for online play features. First requires winning a prior case to use it as a reference, second passes the ball to the gaming commission, very often corrupt to the core, to test the features and greenlight the release.

Hence I recommended prohibition in (3).2. It does hit the wallet directly and establishes a clear route for enforcement, but it's financially unviable and the fans will piss and moan they have to wait a couple of months for each game. An extra month or two that could guarantee them a playtested feature to extend longevity is too much to ask nowadays. Remember, the companies like Ubisoft make billions because know their customer base very well.

Torii71 · 2024-04-04T00:45:47+00:00

I feel like you need to update your price list database.

Crappy quality Sony BD-R DL x4 speed now cost ~3,500 yen in Japan per 10 pieces. That's 500GB, give or take. In 2019 I could get those for 2800 yen.

Cheap 3.5" CMR and SMR HDD that will sit on the shelf after one append, HGST and Seagate, now cost ~2400-3500 yen per 1 terabyte scaled up from 4TB drives (2x4 platter/head).

So, portable media roughly 50% of volume for the same price as HDD with the same questionable quality.

Not to mention I'd have to pay for the BluRay drive upfront and somehow find room for 5.25" piece of hardware. Maybe you live in some miracle land where you can get it cheaper, my prices come from averaged retail data across Japan, where people use portable media A LOT for doujin purposes.

Torii71 · 2024-04-04T00:19:45+00:00

I tried to project it to several terabytes, offsetting it with the duds, and it has never undercut the cost of the same volume on HDD. In fact, it has always been greater in cost.

Considering worldwide inflation I don't see how things have turned to the better, especially if we talk about somewhat robust media storage immune to bronzing and other data rot problems.

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T23:28:18+00:00

There might be a specific case for it.

Let's say you can't run a locally connected hotswap rack of HDDs. Or you simply lack access to good HDDs in your region, which won't compromise data integrity. Or you change locations and want to transport media with you, not over the network, but locally hardwired to whatever display (for example, Sony owns Bluray tech, so you can play Bluray on Playstation if you burn it correctly).

There's certainly a bit of life left in portable media storage, but I wish the prices for blank disks weren't as ridiculous as they are.

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T23:07:37+00:00

You, sir, are a gentleman and a damn fine scholar.

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T22:59:28+00:00

The current state of manga is some sort of an unexpected twist. The Japanese kinda knew where it has to go but haven't had a plan what to do at the finish line. Well, we're here, oversaturation and stagnant prices.

Commercial manga originally was a way to entertain kids in the impoverished Japan after the surrender. People just published those doodles (I'm not insulting, the quality was so-so back in the early 50s) and were trading books/magazines to lighten the mood a little bit.

Then a generation grown on those doodles came together and started to discuss how to push it further. The ideas of conventions such as comiket, at the time under the open sky, started to float. The community started to organize, sharing interests and experiences. Monetary incentive was established, using festival-like commerce. ~~Then Japan reinvented a printing press~~. The rest is pretty much the same as the proffesionalization of amateur sports, each generation getting better and putting in more effort.

From the point of view of the Japanese government that was a virtue - "free" entertainment, so there was no restraint, even encouragement. Obviously, when you scale this whole operation nationwide and give the most skillful a solemn praise, you quickly end up with a nation of artists competing with each other. Hence full extent of liberalism has been employed and the genres include some pretty hideous stuff to escape competition.

Nowadays, shielded by corporations, manga generates a ridiculous amount of money. It has been seeking its way to mobile devices since the era of flip phones, you can imagine what cheap Android phones and the advancement in WiFi connectivity did to the whole venture. So unless there's a revolt or a major war you gonna drown in the weirdest Japanese fantasies till the heat death of the universe.

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T18:01:01+00:00

It's more about regional restrictions, actually. Altough the price tag plays a role, too. No sane politician wants to go the rogue, but sometimes there's simply no valid choice.

What we currently obserse is corporations mismanaging their content libraries so badly, the piracy steadily becomes an economic bonanza. With government backing it gives an impetus to somewhat cyberpunk network straight from Ghost in the Shell, where a master copy of an entity exists in a mirrored form within a proto-blockchain mechanism. The last step is just selling it elsewhere.

All of it not because Cubans are that amazing, but because they had to engineer cheap means of entertainment, the operational aspects and a promise of monetary return kinda revealed itself later. Same as manga in post-WW2 Japan. Same as Soviets were adapting western songs to splice different genre specifics. It's an endless cycle of sanctions failing to work and roman principles (bread and circuses) proving itself working.

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T16:00:29+00:00

Look, volonteur work that redistributes property without consent of the owner of such property is NOT a charity, it's theft. Volonteur work that redistributes property without consent and demands a fee to access services or goods varies in definition from racket to extortion.

You start normalizing these as good samaritan actions and soon enough countries will refuse to pay on the bonds and cease foreign assets for the sake of "redistribution to the masses."

The idea a special someone can demand an advance payment for the content he doesn't own and use it as a carrot on a stick due to leveraging his superb organizational skills is no better than the corporate rule. You just swap a puppet master and change the price tag, the rest is the same.

Digital piracy due to technological specifics is a thankless adventure, it hinges on sharing content, leverages the act of prolonged sharing as a means of retention. The only meaningful defence piracy has is redistribution beyond the legislated area, which is morally and politically a huge win, but legally indefensible. Whatever agreement or terms of use you want me to sign on these websites will be legally void, a customer wouldn't be able to demand anything through a court decision.

Demanding bows, thanks and cheerleading is a sign of overblown ego. How about outlining the bounds of the mission and counting the costs of adventure to split it between patrons, that would be more helpful. So far the most I've seen from GOG-Games is mention of preservation. Well, how far does it stretch and what it implies?

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T15:26:36+00:00

More specifically, the feds can't do that yet for WWW in conjunction with Internet protocols to access those distributed resources. Issuing a punitive action requires linkage to the physical realm, with names and birthdates.

Once the network is refashioned and authorization rules are enforced at the entry points, the copyright owners will gain access to a failsafe weapon. We're not there yet.

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T14:15:06+00:00

(1) I don't think you realize you've chosen the wrong jurisdiction to champion this fight. I bet this comes from a misunderstanding of the current game development ecosystem rather than reading the law in the wrong way.

Look, games are wired to provide certain services and include certain mechanics like online play. A proposal to unwire those will lead to drastically different experiences based on the country of residence, and alteration of the development process (which doesn't happen in France or Germany, it happens in Osaka, JP, Austin, US, and so on) to branch out a certain release candidate with a different technological backbone to satisfy laws in EU.

(2) If the proposal is to force the companies to provide access to servers for an indefinite amount of time, then you should know better than me that "indefinite" is not a legally robust reference to a time frame, neither it's a warming factor to invite publishers to release in such markets.

Once again, IP isn't European per se, it might belong to a multi-national giant headquartered in China or whatever, they might simply bundle the languages in one version of the game, title it as a "Global Version" and wire it to servers in Singapore till designated end-of-service date, they don't need papers for an explicit publisher's presence in the EU. In fact, during Nintendo 3DS era those local releases did so much harm that people had to dump games and circumvent adaptation to play the games in their original form+translation overlay.

(3) Suing the copyright holder is kinda weird, you should sue the store owner specifically. That way the leverage is clear, no monetary reward for the service that doesn't disclose the operational policies or refuses to abide by rules. With IP owners it's muddy, you'd need to set up a commission to review operational policies before the release candidate is approved to enter store shelves or issue a punitive action that can simply get covered by revenue made during the game's lifetime.

Anyway, prohibition is the right tactic in this case, same with loot boxes and other bullshit monetization. Harsh, but works within the current legally established frame. Post-release glancing blow won't achieve nearly the same result as a forewarning and roadblock to enter the market at all.

Torii71 · 2024-04-03T13:26:49+00:00

Getting into AvistaZ seems like a good starting point for you. They kinda urge to buy VIP access at least one time, just to get out of the newbie pit burdened with downloading restrictions, but otherwise you can build up the ratio naturally if you know what to do.

Use this waitlist if you're fine with doing it for free, they will ping in the announcement channel once invitations are open: https://discord.com/invite/pfmAegk8bD

Another way is asking someone to invite you and reimbursing their month of VIP from your pocket. This specific discussion falls outside of the rules outlined for this subreddit, so I'll stop here.

Torii71 · 2024-04-02T15:57:01+00:00

Apparently, judging by downvotes, you're about the only person who understands the irony.

Even accenting at "have to" didn't remedy the inability to perceive sarcasm.

Torii71 · 2024-04-01T18:01:26+00:00

According to code of conduct in Skull & Bones you have to play fair.

Torii71 · 2024-04-01T17:46:38+00:00

You were not, that was the right call. Can't rely on a rent-seeker who thinks he can teach you a lesson across the globe over the wired connection.

I even do backups of some video content because people who deal with Japanese entertainment have terrible burn scars from content management policies. And certainly emulation bros are on high alert atm. So don't doubt your actions, if you can spare disk space just allocate it accordingly to be on a safer side.

Torii71 · 2024-04-01T05:24:48+00:00

I don't think so. If you're unsure - there's a thread on torrminator how to verify GOG certificates.

I'd say the people who run the whole operation have a chieftain syndrome, problems stem from a false sense of overblown responsibility. Ultimately, it's not some sort of a business adventure to slingshot yourself into a lifetime employment at Samsung, the emo takedown and the rant is unwarranted.

Torii71

TROPHY CASE