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We Don't Really Own the Digital Possessions That We Buy Online

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 01 2020, @02:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the gone-with-the-wind dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.iafrikan.com/2020/06/30/do-we-really-own-our-digital-possessions/

During 2019, Microsoft announced that it will close the books category of its digital store. While other software and apps will still be available via the virtual shop front, and on purchasers' consoles and devices, the closure of the eBook store takes with it customers' eBook libraries. Any digital books bought through the service – even those bought many years ago – will no longer be readable after July 2019. While the company has promised to provide a full refund for all eBook purchases, this decision raises important questions of ownership.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:04AM (3 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday July 02 2020, @07:04AM (#1015298) Journal

    I ran into a not quite so expensive but more egregious example. A VCR with some probably minor mechanical failure so that it didn't correctly load/unload a tape. I took the cover off and tried to put it through it's motions to see what looked wrong, and damned if it didn't have a hidden light sensor to detect the cover off condition and perform a PLANNED malfunction so I couldn't see how it was supposed to work!

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:08AM (2 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Thursday July 02 2020, @08:08AM (#1015317) Homepage

    Holy crap! the Mac was just poor design -- didn't look so much nyah-nyah-try-and-fix-this as what's the fastest and cheapest way to fasten it? (whole thing was made cheap as could be) but that VCR... yeah, that's just evil!!

    Oh, speaking of evil... a tale I was told from back when software ran off floppy disks: if dBase (then thousands of dollars) thought you were making a move to pirate it, it would erase itself. And doing something like accidentally removing the wrong disk or in the wrong order would trigger it (I forget the details but it was way too easy to do by accident). Someone at a friend's former work managed to set it off... ouch.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:26PM (1 child)

      by sjames (2882) on Thursday July 02 2020, @09:26PM (#1015529) Journal

      Yeah, that dBase copy prevention was way over the line. Active and possibly irreversible retribution triggered by a hyper sensitive tilt switch.

      DRM and other copy prevention is necessarily against any principle of robust software. Rather than trying to find a way to go on and just dealing with probably harmless quirks, DRM and copy prevention actively look for a reason to hard fail. Imagine if going to a 404 page caused the browser to just exit without saving state.

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:31PM

        by Reziac (2489) on Thursday July 02 2020, @10:31PM (#1015553) Homepage

        Good analogy!

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.