DiscGuard: Offline Play Assurance

Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product,

For a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc.We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.

> Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.Microsoft stole two of my accounts.I bought Minecraft in the alpha days when all you needed was a username and password. At some point they mandated an email in the years I wasn't playing and later found out I could no longer sign in.I bought a new "copy" and lost it because I didn't migrate to a Microsoft account. I didn't migrate because I assumed it was just a scare tactic and I wasn't playing at the time anyway. When I later wanted to play they stopped allowing me to log in.When I look at the top selling games[1] and see Minecraft in second place with