|
A sibling claims he's 18 years old; it's also just possible that he and his parents are well off enough that he doesn't want for anything, and that paying for everything is reasonable for them to do. Also consider that streaming (music, TV, movies) has been decently plentiful and cheap for the entirety of his teen years. He may not have had a need to pirate anything just because his parents paid for Netflix and Spotify accounts. For games, most have an online component and are more difficult to pirate, as he points out in his article. Certainly it's not impossible (there are many single-player/offline games that just want to do a license check, which can often be hacked, and others where the server components have been reverse-engineered and clones), but it was a lot easier to pirate games when you just had a CD or floppy that you could disassemble and poke at to create a patch. And again, maybe he and his parents have been able to afford to buy whatever games he's wanted to play. But I also see this as a result of the newest generation of computer users being raised in restrictive computing environments. iOS and Android don't encourage you to tinker; their security and product model tries to preclude that. Desktop macOS is more and more locked down with every release. Windows is... well, Windows. Desktop Linux still has yet to develop any kind of traction (and I say this as someone who has been using Linux on the desktop, nearly exclusively, for 20 years). Even many people I know who grew up in the 80s and 90s like I did, who used to have desktop or laptop computers, have shelved them and replaced them with iOS/Android/iPad OS. In many ways, I think this is really a crappy time for computing. Sure, we have all this cheap computing power, but for the most part we're using it just to consume mainstream media. I say this even with the explosion of easy creation tools like digital cameras, and things like Instagram and TikTok. Fortunately there are still a lot of healthy hacker/maker communities, but I think their percentage of the whole of computing has been steadily dropping over the past 15 years. |