Call that tin foil hat syndrome or whatever.

Racism. It’s racism and xenophobia.

ISPs coming out and bothering you cause you pirate stuff? Never heard of it.

You must have the distinct privilege of not living in the USA or several other Western countries.

I’d jump ship immediately if I got one such letter.

If you mean jump ship off that ISP, there’s nothing you can do. You can go to another ISP (if there even is one in your area), who will do the exact same thing. You can jump ship entirely and not have internet, I guess.

Oh that’s interesting. That makes sense. Like I said I’m using the Kindle 4 from 2011 and it has a slightly different form factor and no way to use a magnetic case.

Huh. Yeah that must be a thing with newer models. Mine doesn’t have any magnets, and its not in a shape a case would even make sense. I do press a button to dismiss the “screensaver” (the thing that keeps you from accidentaly turning pages with side buttons when not in use), but I don’t see an ad on that screensaver. It’s pencils laying on a book, and has been for about a decade now.

I don’t follow. When you say magnetic cover, do you mean some of the newer models? Also, what does pressing the button to unlock it do? Does that turn on wifi or something? I have to press a button to turn my Kindle 4 “on” (aka remove the screensaver and show my book) but that doesn’t cause an issue.

I have a Kindle paperwhite without ads, worth paying extra imo.

Pro tip: if you leave off wifi for long enough, the ads seem to expire and they’re permanently replaced by some generic pencils image or something. And, since having wifi on can cause the kindle to overwrite your cover images, I sync with calibre over USB anyway. I have the ad-supported Kindle 4 from 2011 and haven’t had ads on it since 2012.

Ah interesting. That is unfortunate.

Isn’t there another person who knows how, but just restricts themselves to very specific games? I wonder if there’s any way to convince them to help replace the too-far-gone Empress. I understand they probably also don’t want to just make the cracking info public, as it would presumably just accelerate the cat-and-mouse game, but perhaps they could be convinced to help bring a new person up to speed? I wonder if they could be convinced by donations to mentor an Empress replacement?

Well I’m sorry you can’t fathom that there is potential future value in old games. I even said that we can’t know the future value of something like this, so the safest thing to do is to just preserve them as well as we can.

Do you disagree with all of the explicit examples of ways it can be valuable that I laid out? Or do you simply want to assert the games are “meaningless” and ignore every way in which value can still be derived, or could be derived in the future, from them?

I suspect you haven’t actually thought this through and are just being antagonistic for fun; that’s how it comes off, anyway.

So why should the Library of Congress exist? Why should the Internet Archive exist?

“They’re books, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.” “They’re web pages, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.”

There’s value in record-keeping. People can analyze it on a technical perspective (like a literary analysis). People can enjoy old games (like reading a book from the 1500s). People can analyze trends in the industry. There are endless reasons why record-keeping could be useful, and you can never plan for all of them ahead of time.

If we’re going to do this whole “your source is unreliable” nonsense, can we at least get some consistency? Attack the BBC for outright lies and misinformation and siding with moneyed interests at the expense of the rest of humanity; attack CNN for the same; attack The Economist for the same; attack NYT for the same; attack the Washington Post for the same.

Also, just because their editorial opinion differs from yours doesn’t mean they’re unreliable. Just because they “defended Bashar Al-Assad” doesn’t mean they are “fake news”. There are plenty of people in the world whose world-view does not align with yours, and they aren’t all lying and wrong. It should also be noted that if an article links out to other sources, then even if you don’t agree with the article’s editorial opinion, you can still gauge the truthfulness and form opinions on the subject by following to the sources.

Edit to add: In this specific case, we saw several news sources you are unlikely to call ‘fake news’ all report the same lie with tiny variations: NYT, CNN, and Politico, among others. What they said was so blatantly false, even the Pentagon denounced it. Cuba condemned the reports, saying:

Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said the accusation is “untrue and unfounded”, arguing that the articles were “promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization and the aggression against Cuba”.

Why would the USA do such a thing? Perhaps it’s because The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China (Because America might lose.). Have we seen similar actions from these untrustworthy news sources in the past? Absolutely, NYT published an article in 2020 that, while demonstrably false, was still cited by the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and used to extend the war in Afghanistan; the Pentagon even admitted the report was false only a couple weeks later.

Before you get all up in arms that a news outlet from another country or side of the political spectrum must be spewing 100% lies, you should ask yourself why you are willingly to blindly believe the entrenched western media outlets, who have proven time and again that they are used to manipulate world events, manipulate public opinion, and are overall a blight on the average man’s wellbeing.