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Comment by morgan814 | Hacker News Reader

> never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove

I take this to mean to sail the seas but I have apprehension over running modified binaries from random people. Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this worry?

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the same way you should run _all_ proprietary binaries. restricted inside a sandbox. linux makes that easy with flatpaks.

That only goes so far though. A lot of games need internet access, so essentially you are running potentially modified binaries running on your hardware/network, that gets access to the outside. Sure, blast radius becomes somewhat limited, but you still have a potential problem.

The only games that need a network connection are online games. With those you can use a application firewall (which you should anyways) like opensnitch to only allow connections to sites that make sense and block anything else e.g. internal connection.

Unless you get your cracks from google.com it will be fine.

Flatpaks would make it easy, if they ever worked when you needed them to.

Sounds like a issue with your system. I have used hundreds of them on all kinds of systems.

I'm glad it works on your machine.

It's not a great solution, but you can vote with your wallet and simply not partake in that form of entertainment. I can't say it's fun to be not up on current games, or to find indie/non-drm games to play. But piracy is just an end-around a terribly policy of non-ownership that manages to both not remunerate the folks who do the work and make no impact on the actual problem which is that we don't like the non-ownership clause in modern games.

So yeah, TLDR, vote with your wallet and give up the entertainment this time.

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