I thought I bought a camera, but no DJI sold me a license to use it [video]

My vote could be swayed by a policy platform making it not merely forbidden, but outright criminal, to market software and hardware that cannot function without assignment of a user id. Everything from drones to games.

In many cases this would thoroughly annoy certain authoritarian regimes that are normalised as totalitarian surveillance states. Their exports would be disrupted. What a pity.

So, world of Warcraft is illegal now?

I agree with this. I have an LG TV it basically forces you to agree to sharing data to function everytime it update.

TVs are used by multiple people too so how does that even track legally.

My partners will fly through menus agreeing to everything if I'm not there.

I'm using a universal remote that doesn't have a microphone and it complains about that too.

I find a drop of superglue in the remote microphone is very helpful for retaining a basic level of privacy.

My Pi-hole logs are filled mostly with my LG TV and my Roku box. I get literally thousands of hits a day with them trying to phone home.

I have been using a linux minipc with debian+xfce for more than 15 years and no regrets. Yes having a keyboard with touchpad looked like a bit cumbersome at first, but then when al tvs went smart using an onscreen keyboard with a rf mouse is a nightmare.

Which is a genuine shame, since LG's webos was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise monolothic android market for smart tvs. I have an older one ( never updated, never connected ), but.. it is just one of many devices ( during easter yesterday I watched in weird state of drunken realization that the gizmo under tv is a set of cameras embedded into some external speakers ). I am officially out of touch with the current zeitgeist. Like... I knew I was an outlier before, but I honestly did not think it was this crazy.

The Sony TV I have a blaring LED when the microphone is active, and you need to pair it independently of the remote itself so these parts function.

Sometimes during software updates, this pairing is broken, and it never tells me that the pairing has been removed, and never forces me to pair the remote.

What do you do about Netflix or other apps? They have reduced video quality without being on a certified device.

Wouldn’t a phone be illegal under that scheme? (Because of the phone number being required for function and being a user-id.)

No, because that is service, not hardware.

>> Everything from drones to games.

And computers. Sure it's a good idea to have a password, but that's not the same as a user ID registered with a company.

Get a firestick for those apps

I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.

If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)

They've sealed their own fate with such a poor decision.

They can add all the services they want to their drone. As long as I'm not required to use them.

I use a steam controller for controlling my media PC. Easy to type with and way more convenient than using a mouse. The only potential downside is needing steam running for keyboard capabilities but for me atleast that isn't a big deal.

The more you learn about smart TVs the worse they get. They're not cheap because TV technology got cheaper, they give away the TVs because they sell all your data. They even content match external sources over HDMI.

My next TV will be a big monitor.

This is why I've returned to the seven seas as well

You may be aware, but you can acquire and use the World of Warcraft client without signing up for anything with Blizzard. You register and pay to connect to their servers.

First, to download the world of Warcraft client, you need to log into the battlenet client, which requires an account. Second, the world of Warcraft client is completely useless without a server to connect to. Alternative world of Warcraft servers are technically possible but illegal to run.

Implementing a network protocol is not illegal. Neither is writing a server.

You have to reverse engineer the protocol encryption, which is illegal in some places. Also, lots of copyrighted material such as NPC names and quest text must be stored in the server and transmitted from the server to the client, which is piracy in plain terms.

> I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.

You should be able to use your phone and install software on it without signing up for the sellers services, I think there is no reason to not allow that except evil lockin.

See windows for what happens when you don't legally enforce that, its ridiculous windows forces you to sign up to their services.

old webos you say? https://rootmy.tv/

Even then, almost all online services are susceptible to re-imagining such that user/session identifiers are self-declared and can be rotated/discarded at any time. To this, some folks would be yelling, "that's not how my/XYZ service works", which is a proxy statement for those unwilling to say, "my/XYZ business model is abusive".

And that of course is also why this only happens via regulation.

Content matching refers to matching refresh rate and resolution on the input source to the TV, not content identification.

This is a dumb take - WoW wouldn’t “function” to a reasonable person’s interpretation of that word without a login.

there are TVs doing content recognition