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For people that do not have the direct means to set up the software themselves on both ends (which is probably most people), the only real viable alternatives IMHO would be having a friend or other contact who has such a system online and can help set it all up for them and to which the person and anyone else with administrative access can be implicitly trusted 100%. That is not going to work for everyone out there either of course, but it is another option for some. The only other option would be to pay to use another company's services which may or may not be feasible either, and you still need to have the trust thing for it to work. May also need someone with technical expertise to set it all up depending on what technologies are being used.

I wouldn't use any form of VPN, proxy or other tunnel mechanisms for financial transactions over the public Internet though which are owned and/or controlled by 3rd parties that are unknown to me or that do not have bank-level of trust of the people running it and their ability to keep it strongly secured from the unwashed Internet though.

The result is that for a given person - they might not have a viable secure solution. That's unfortunate, but I merely suggest to people that having no solution is better than having and using an insecure or highly risky solution where the risk can be documented by high profile easy to access public information disclosed via the Internet security research communities over time. In the end, as a result of this, there may very well be no viable solution for an individual person. Perhaps some people will resort to using a solution that is a risky one because of that and having no other options, and they can if they wish to, but hopefully they're at least aware of the security implications of what they are doing rather than walking blindly into using something with a false sense of security.

I hope to see people stay safe though and not take unnecessary risks they may be unaware exist with things like this. Sorry I don't have a better suggestion to offer though. :o/

Thanks again for the advice - I'm generally wary (with a bit of paranoia thrown in for good measure) about using VPNs and the like, the inner workings of which I know little to nothing about, really. So, no viable secure solution it is.

I'd assume a paysafecard is as safe as you can get while doing financial transactions online, but if that doesn't work... well, there's always retail, I guess. Or convincing the government to stop babysitting their people, which I'm sure is going to happen any day now ;)
It's not that not being able to buy one game or another is actually giving me sleepless nights, and I have an impressive backlog anyway. It's mostly that feeling that you're the only kid at the party that's not allowed to drink alcohol and has his parents pick him up at 11 o'clock sharp as to not "get into trouble", while the other kids smirk and make jokes about you behind your back. It's the sheer unfairness of it all that makes you want to rebel ;)

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Yeah, I hate censorship like that. :/ Many many years ago we used to get "R" rated horror/gore movies in the 80s which had been stripped of various amounts of their content by Canadian censors. If memory serves correct, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 was like 30-45 minutes shorter than the US release, and "Dead Alive" (also known as Brain Dead in Europe) was around 20-30 minutes shorter in Canada. I'm not sure what happened but at some point in the 90s things changed and they were allowed to provide "unrated" versions of movies clearly labelled as such, and we not only got uncensored versions of things but even less censorship. I think we even ended up with movies that were uncensored here but censored lightly in the US. At any rate it was a nice win, and it is great to be able to go buy whatever the hell you want without the government sticking their damn noses in there. :)

Not sure if we've ever had problems with video games being censored in Canada however there are always crazy religious nut groups out there trying to legislate morality on the masses, blaming video games for violent crimes and other such nonsense. I think that's mostly an American phenomenon but such people are everywhere. Fortunately for the most part society is winning over here though despite the efforts of a highly vocal few morality warriors.

Hopefully such progress will happen over there some time also. Might just take a massive grass roots movement started on the Internet to kick the ball rolling perhaps. :) If something like that ever turned around over there, if I were a video game developer I would make a special new German edition of my game with extra violence etc. just for Germany and the hype it would cause would have people clamouring to get it elsewhere. :)

Yes I think so too.

I would so buy this game, even if it was pretty crappy, just to show support :)
Overall I'm not sure public interest is sufficient to warrant a change, but here's to hoping... I have, at some point, and mostly out of curiosity, checked out online petitions regarding the subject, and they all had signatures in the lower hundreds, which speaks of ridiculously little interest.
There's the "Piratenpartei", of course, but, unsurprisingly, basing your party first and foremost on internet piracy/privacy and gaming culture isn't going to make the voters flock to you by the hundreds of thousands.

Activision games IIRC usually go on sale for no more than 75% off, so that'll likely happen sooner or later. Knowing GOGites though, the reaction to 75% off will be "still too much, I'll wait until it's half that". :)

I know I held off for a long time on some, but eventually they hit the right price.

Jeez, fifteen quid for a nine year old game. I could literally buy a used copy for every system it came out for and still have some money left over for another GoG title. Maybe a couple of GoG titles.

Would love to have Timeshift DRM free but I can't justify dropping fifteen pound on it.

For some, it didn't help that the Canadian "R" ("Admittance restricted to people 18 years of age or older.") was not like the American "R" ("Under 17 Requires Accompanying Parent Or Adult Guardian.") at all; it was more like their NC-17 rating.

In some cases though, the censoring in Canada did produce some humorous results. CITY-TV in particular was known for its laggy censoring (e.g. blanking out the "mother" in "motherfucker").

Oh, I didn't look recently - had this on my wishlist on Steam for a while, now it is gone. Never mind, then... :'(

It's an issue that's been around for years. The only work around is to disable hyper-threading in the bios just for this game. I understand there are limits to what GOG can do to make games work on modern machines but I still am disappointed they haven't managed it. There should be a warning on the sale page or at least a mention in the support section.