Nope. :(

Bump? We need more info about the reason, GOG. :(

I would like more information as well. I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a response on the forum to this change, considering the usual reactions we normally see and how privacy factors into being DRM-free.

Bump.

Is gog-statics.com's owner a reason why Devotion release was canceled?

So I take it there was never any explanation of this either? Why in order to log in to GOG does one have to allow third-party scripts from a domain owned by Tencent?

As far as I see, there is no mention of this anywhere in the privacy policy.

Bit of a necro, but my hard drive with archived GOG games crashed, so need to log-in to re-download everything again. Might as well bring this again to people's attention.

Just like GOG decided to cash in on "Facebook integration" right around the time Zuck's bestest got caught with pants down helping turn datamining into a political weapon, GOG now happily shares whatever hash they generate on login (and it's a big 'un, matey, enough to encode major hardware/software fingerprints) with Tencent. Oh, and your IP. And whomever knows what else, since they don't want to disclose it, either.

Think I'm joking? Your login script is hosted here:

Domain Information
Domain: gog-statics.com
Registrar: DNSPod, Inc. (this is a company Tencent bought out years ago, by the by)
Registered On: 2019-10-09
Expires On: 2021-10-09
Updated On: 2020-07-17
Status: ok
Name Servers:
ns-1163.awsdns-17.org
ns-1569.awsdns-04.co.uk
ns-298.awsdns-37.com
ns-663.awsdns-18.net
Registrant Contact
State: shang hai shi
Country: CN
Email:
Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://whois.cloud.tencent.com/domain?domain=gog-statics.com
Administrative Contact
Email:
Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://whois.cloud.tencent.com/domain?domain=gog-statics.com
Technical Contact
Email:
Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://whois.cloud.tencent.com/domain?domain=gog-statics.com
Billing Contact
Email:
Select Contact Domain Holder link at https://whois.cloud.tencent.com/domain?domain=gog-statics.com
Raw Whois Data

Domain Name: gog-statics.com
Registry Domain ID: 2441716182_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.dnspod.com
Registrar URL: https://www.dnspod.com
Updated Date: 2021-04-13 11:37:53
Creation Date: 2019-10-09 02:10:49
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-10-09 02:10:49
Registrar: DNSPod, Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 1697

Welp, gotta get my games again, then so long, GOG.

Could've turned user privacy into a genuine way to differentiate yourself from other stores, but I guess it's less profitable in the short run. At this point, I'll personally just stick to Steam and buy as cheap as possible. Most of the games I'm interested in run outside Steam anyway, and I'd rather be datamined by Google than the Chinese government.

TBH, the key thing people should take from your post here is this, one hard drive backup is not secure. Always have several, preferably at least one “offsite”. This mitigates hdd crashes, fires at the house etc.

Sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooo

Have any of you contacted support via any of the valid channels over this, or have you decided that just braying loudly about it is the solution to your issues?

Yes, I have.

I was refused an alternative way to access my library (or even suggestion to offer a side-page for login based on scripts hosted by gog.com). I was refused any explanation as to why they moved the scripts to gog-statics.com, because it was "internal decision" and they don't need to disclose that to random scrub, never mind the implications for my privacy. I was not offered any recourse toward accessing the thousands of dollars I invested into building the library without any prior notification data-mining by third parties will become a requirement to access them.

Despite being EU citizen, and supposedly under protection of GDPR, I was denied details on what information is being shared with the third party hosting the login scripts on gog-statics.com, or even identification of said owner (it's likely one of Tencent's CDNs).

In short, GOG thinks they don't have to adhere even to the letter of GDPR, and considering the political support they have in Poland, I didn't bother filing a complaint with the appropriate officer (also, COVID happened and I had other priorities).

Can't even use the GOG Downloader anymore to download the backups, but I'll live. Though won't spend a single penny more on GOG, because if that's the way they treat me as a customer, I get better prices from Steam, which at least doesn't pretend to have some "core values," and certainly doesn't make claims to "protect user's privacy" the way original GOG terms of service stated.

Once I'm sufficiently bored (and things get back to normal after COVID), I'll probably contact my state's Attorney General or just throw some money for a consultation with a corporate law specialist, considering they basically forced post-sale contract change that I did not agree to. And, frankly, the whole experience pissed me off enough to do it.

In the meantime, Pooh on you.

Why not throw the book at them via filing a complaint though the EU? There's forms you can fill out, no attorney needed. The EU will happily enforce things of this nature. With a vengeance, if needed. And with all the pressure and necks breathing down them, another spotlight will only help.

Yeah. At least a 3 disk RAID is necessary. Unfortunately for most people, that's not tenable.

Actually no. If you only have money for two individual drives, then buy two drives and duplicate one to the other (freefilesync for instance) then keep them apart. RAID can be useful (particularly when drives are up all the time), but they are not backups on their own, and for the money just buy an extra hard drive.

But over time bit rot, disk rot, etc will occur. The reason you need 3 disk raid is because if any of these happen, you might not necessarily be able to figure out what a good sector is. This is why 3 are necessary. RAID just simplifies the process for you.

No, a backup is a copy of something. Raid is a method of combining disks, which can include various levels of failsafe if one or more of the drives fail. Whilst you can of course use raid drives as backups, and I have five different raid boxes now, it is the number of backups which is vital, not the methodology. 3 external drives is just as good as 3 raid setups when discussing backups and is far cheaper. In terms of bitrot, and general practice, I recommend time point backups in addition to regular backups. So you could have two or 3 drives which you regularly update on a cycle, and then 1 or 2 drives which you only update every other year or so, and are used very minimal. I have this also, I have backups way back to 2005 which have only been written to once. I can always go back then. Also, different locations is key, don’t stick all your eggs in one house, offsite ones (maybe one or the other timepoint?) cover serious issues like house fire.

While the average gog user is more likely to experience bitrot than a fire (and if you deal with a fire you also are mot likely to have more important concerns than your gog library), your points are valid, except the point against methodology. The important part with methodology is that you have to have a reliable recovery method in the event that "something goes wrong," because not only can you end up with corruption or a sector or two, but the same files can each end up corrupted. Thus you want to be able to more or less democratize the data, since the likelihood of the same bytes being corrupted is near zero. Ideally, not just a different house, but several miles/kilometers away, due to natural disasters that can affect multiple houses at once (floods, surges[if in use], explosions [more likely than you would expect, these days, but less likely than a fire, obviously], EMPs [not likely at all], tornados [very likely for some people], etc).

At the same time, to be practical, one has to be able to bring them together again to actaully do the comparisons.

Another alternative is 2 separate drives with triple redundancy (3 copies of the same folder) within the drives themselves if you don't need that much space.If someone nukes your house, you still have the triple redundancy hiding out in Dyatlov Pass.