So, world of Warcraft is illegal now?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Get a firestick for those apps

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

there are TVs doing content recognition

Wouldn’t a phone, email service, or online forum be illegal under that scheme? (Because of the phone number/email address/username being required for function and being a user-id.)

No, because that is service, not hardware.

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

> 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.

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.

>> 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.