David B It's a fact that they are changing over to iLok, but it's also a fact that you'll still need to use an iLok dongle unless you have constant internet access (license in the cloud) when you use their libraries.
QuasiUnaFantasia That's horrible! Why does VSL feel the need to be so gothic about it? Just terrible, and it strikes them entirely off my list.
Does anyone besides me suspect that Google, or other internet spying organisms, are behind this push to keep us continuously and perpetually connected to the internet?
I am increasingly coming to believe that there is already a similar push underway to channel consumer internet purchases away from personal computers and onto the smart phone/cellular networks. I suspect that those cellular networks are more accommodating to Google type spying, since there is already a robust and growing, anti-spying public sentiment and privacy protecting tools hampering spying along the personal computer pathway to the internet.
I have noticed, on several occasions that doing business via a vendors' websites through personal computer connection has become increasingly difficult due to failure of the website to perform what it purports to perform. Increasingly, somewhere along the course of the transaction, the website will fail to accept the purchaser's address, credit card number, or other data that it considers critical to completion of the transaction. Also, purchases by phone are likewise becoming nearly impossible.
Yet, if one attempts a purchase from those same vendors using their smartphone app, the transactions are instantly successful and smooth. History tells that these vendors are not incapable of maintaining functional telephonic and internet-via-personal computer channels. Their recent, and growing, inability to do so must be the result of some other cause.
Google's stranglehold over all businesses that dare to traverse the internet, is well known. Its comprehensive control of search results nets untold sums of money from the sales of Google products designed to counter that control over internet dependent businesses (ransom). I'm sure it has other nefarious tentacles that are yet to be discovered.
So, I wonder if VSL feels any pressure from Google to keep its customers perpetually connected to the internet in service to its quest to monitor consumers' every move, thought, and action. I suspect exactly that. Digital pianists not connected to the internet is antithetical to Google's aspirations.
I know a lot of you are much more aware of the internet and all of its intricacies than I am. What are your thoughts on this?