That does nothing.

Doing nothing is already far better than 99% of the population, who feeds oppressors. Not being part of the harm is in itself an important minimal baseline for me.

From there, it’s an oversight to neglect the fact that living offline makes the battleground visible. It shows me where I need to fight battles. It’s how I know where to fight. When I force the gov to partake in analog transactions, it’s being offline that enabled me to gather the intel for what fights to bring to them.

Concrete example: if I were online, I would visit the website that shows my city’s newsletter and view it on the website. But because I am offline, I pop into a cafe and try to download it instead, for later offline reading. They have some shitty web app that blocks saving a PDF. It actually breaks the law AFAIK, so I can harass them about it and force them to stop imposing a shitty app that impedes downloading the newsletter as a PDF. I would not know that or think deep enough to give a shit if I simply had always-on cloud access from my residence.

There are mandated transactions with the gov that have no offline means. When the gov drags me into court for not filling out an online form, being able to truthfully state that I don’t have cloud access or required info for the web form (like email address) gives me a defense that the court cannot ignore. When I play that card, it’s effectively a push back that overcomes oppression.

companies dgaf about negative publicity anymore

Since when do corprorations not care about money? We’re talking about money, which publicity affects. Can you explain in more detail how financing a lawsuit against someone who “pirates” Fujitsu’s drivers (needed to support their hardware) is good for their profits?

Anti-piracy actions normally boost profits by showing the shareholders that they are enforcing their intellectual property (publicity indeed). That does not seem to apply here – unlikely has the effect that you seem to think it does.

It’s a culmination of several goals.

• I am trying to live as unbanked as possible. Local ISPs do not accept cash payments. I do not want to feed anti-cash suppliers. I boycott them. So the only way I can get online from home is over GPRS using a prepaid sim card. Those prices are not competitive. I can get online for ~¾ the cost of a big mac per month, but that’s with a ~4-5gb cap. Sometimes I do that on rare occasions.
• I oppose the forced use of the cloud by gov public services. Being offline is the only real way to test and experiment with public services to know when to protest the exclusion of offline people. It also ensures that I can take my protest to court and truthfully testify that I have no residential Internet.
• In the context of gaming, it’s fine if a game inherently needs the cloud for the experience. But when a game artificially but needlessly demands cloud access as a precondition to installation, it’s somewhat of a human rights violation because it’s people’s human right to access and experience culture. It’s wrong for game makers to exclude offline people if a game does not strictly need it.
• I believe the right to boycott is fundamentally the single most important consumer right. It is the only consumer protection that consumers can give themselves without depending on others for protection. It should be practiced and tested constantly.
• Apps have taken a shitty direction that assumes non-stop cloud access. This is a kind of vulnerability that weakens civilization. The fact that no Lemmy client apps store data locally and support offline reading and queued responses is a weakness that promotes the elitism of excluding offline people. The circumstance exacerbates pressure to buy an Internet subscription. I should be able to pop into a cafe periodically and sync with Lemmy servers, go home, and do my reading there. My offline experiment enables me to see what most people do not.

If any of those CDs require internet to install, they must have been later releases during the dying era of CD game installs. I have original CD copies of all AOE games and they dont need any internet at all.

I’ll have to get back to you on exactly which one I have and how it reacted offline. I just discovered that AoE is still making new releases every year. You must be spending a fortune if you have every single AoE game ever released. Or if you have dodgy versions, then those could be internet-independent due to crackers.

Using dd is important as you can flat dump every single bit out of the CD, including the hidden license information.

The fact that dd has no smarts about the media is exactly why it’s a problem. The copy protections are designed to ensure that bit-by-bit copies fail to work. They insert some kind of optical ”defects” which force drives to do some kind of error correction. A copy (image or physical CD-R) has a copy of the bits but not the defects, so there is no error dection/correction activity, and that’s how the game knows it’s not a factory disc.