I do like neocities. Especially when designing KISS principle websites. (Modern web design has become RAM eating garbage...)

Ended up stumbling on bsgen-new.neocities.org hosted there last week; which is used for generating blue sphere codes in Sonic. All 128 million of them.

> I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media.

I saw a screenshot of something like this recently with the pre-orders of GTA VI.

They apparently "ran out of digital copies..." of something that doesn't exist yet.

You saw a faked screenshot, but the meme is definitely referencing the direction that the industry is going and mocking this kind of artificial scarcity.

Oh? It was fake? It was very convincing.

But yeah, it's a trend that will sadly probably happen.

It'd be responsible of them to say that they can only provide 1 million downloads on the first day, or whatever the limits of their contract with the CDN says. Evidence that it's fake!

Why can't an encrypted copy be distributed a week before launch? You would call LAUNCH DAY when you release the 2MB decryption key.

It was my understanding that this is actually something they are doing with GTA VI.

They usually do allow for pre downloading

I learned never to pre-order any game when I was still a teenager and got burned doing so. I suppose there's always new teenagers who these video game companies can do rug-pulls on

Plus GOG allow people to download games and store them on a hard drive.

UT99 can't be bought anymore (though I think Epic now allow people to share it freely), but I can still download it (for now), and access my archived copy.

I don't own a PS5, I do own a PS4 however and still buy physical copies of games - some of which of late have been secondhand from CeX - because 1. I don't like renting content, 2. I hate DRM, 3. physical copies are harder to censor.

Sony recently expunged copies of movies people had bought, so I honestly don't trust them not to do the same with games.

Also, they announced the closure of the PS3 store, so that's even less reason to trust that I won't be able to reobtain the games I've bought digitally in the future...

Though you have a physical copy of the game, I don't discount a future where a console refuses to load a physical copy of the game because DRM impedes it. Much like when short-lived TLS certificates expire on their own, even by being offline.

Physical copies of games have in their EULA that the game is licensed to you, so theoretically they could still disable it.

Precedent? BlackBerry phones refused to connect to WiFi if you didn't pay for your mobile data plan. It became a 2G brick.

They have easier options. For one, just don't put a drive in the newer ones.

Actually, thinking about this now, I tried to play PS1 games on my PSP about two years ago, but couldn't because they needed to be (re-)authenticated.

Sadly, there's NO way to authenticate PS1/PSP games on PSP anymore. Even connecting it to the PS3 via USB and trying to authenticate it didn't work.

(At least PS1 games still work on PS3 for now, though.)

I think about how much hardware and software is tied in to internet activation or fragile software like ios apps that need constant updating or they will be delisted.

All of this stuff is just starting to be shut down and deactivated now, the amount of ewaste is going to be massive. I now refuse to buy anything that requires an app or the interenet to use.

Supposedly you can still redownload your PSN purchases directly on the PSP itself (log in with a "Device Setup Password")? Unless like me you have a PSP Street, which sadly has no Wi-Fi.

Physical copies aren’t harder to censor nowadays, unfortunately. All they have to do is push a “you can’t start this game without the latest update, and the latest update is unavailable” update and it’s gonzo.

> I can ignore that too, you know. Not all laws are reasonable.

I can speak from personal experience on this one! Civil disobedience is a wonderful thing.

It has the same effect as not playing the game, but you get something for free, right? it's therefore better?

I find ReactOS interesting, but I could never get anything to work the last time I tried it - which was a few months ago.

I also have a feeling that I'll be dead for centuries long before it ever becomes a viable replacement.

On the plus side, at least it'll be finished quicker than GNU Hurd will be...

Wouldn't there be a statute of limitations on this?

> Sites that use reCAPTCHA/Turnstile/etc. have already been broken for me for years now due to neverending captcha/refresh loops.

I had this problem recently with the Indeed website. (Cloudflare Captcha)

Thanks to someone on Reddit, it was discovered that anyone using a Chromium based browser (Brave, Vivaldi, etc.) on Linux was being punished.

Awfully frustrating having to set up a Virtual Machine just to be able to access one website via Firefox since even my hardened Firefox was being punished.

Why not just change your user agent string?

That's useless, in fact it makes you stand out even more. There are SDKs that can differentiate based on an awful lot of signals if your user agent corresponds to your actual browser version.

Because the site can compare the user agent with navigator.platform, which your browser fills with great care.

That naturally implies we must patch the browser.

"Source code? We don't need no stinkin' source code!"

That's what Russian underground hackers do to create so called "anti-detect" browsers, which can emulate different browser fingerprints. But they are commercial and closed-source.

It probably fingerprints the browser via TLS fingerprinting.

Aside from watching anime, reading manga and listening to Japanese radio (which was to help me get acclimated to people talking fast), I try to play games in Japanese.

That's always a great way to learn new words.

I didn't have much interest in Mahjong originally, but after playing Yakuza 0 back in 2016(?) I really got into it.