I assume the malicious part is that it phones home without permission, likely tracking users without their consent or informing them.

Have they? I couldn’t find any information about that online. As for the rest, yeah, likely poached (or, like Mistral, not very pro-open source (◡︵◡) )

Nah, I’ve heard they stopped development. People use LocalCDN as a drop in replacement. However, by itself, it doesn’t change much when it comes to ads and tracking.

I’m not sure. The courts intends for Google to sell Chrome, not Chromium. Even if they gave guarentees that Chromium will become independant, the coourt’s likely to tell them to sell Chrome anyway (as they could still apply monopolistic practices like service bundling without control over Chromium, not to mention they could ‘fork’ LF’s Chromium later to make their own).

The way I see it, this is more Google being scared shitless about Chrome’s new owner being shitty, promote their own services instead of Google’s, and disrespect web standards (or depecreates the ‘standards’ Google implemented in Chromium without the approval of other browers, or standard bodies). That could cause MASSIVE issues for them, and the loss of business that could cause would be tremendous, in a way that’s far worse than giving up control on Chromium.

To me, his seems more like the nuclear option of Google saying that if they can’t own Chromiulm, then nobody can as a way to cut their losses.

Stephen Shankland’s report from 2020 notes a number of people suggesting that Chromium as a whole could be moved out of Google entirely and into an independent foundation, such as the Linux Foundation. That’s not what is happening now, but it’s another step toward larger organization outside of the web’s dominant browser and advertising provider (though Google is still one of the supporters).

One can only hope this is the first step toward a larger trend. LF stewardship of the Chromium project wouldn’t be perfect, but it’s still much better than the current situation of it being controlled by one company, be it Google or whoever they’ll forced to sell Chrome to.

Heavy recommendation for Portal: Revolutions. It’s one of those super fun storied Portal 2 mods like Stories: Mel, if you like this kind of thing!

Well, I have some good news for you!

Thank you for the link! It helped putting things into proper nuance and context (indcluding throwing away that ridiculous notion that the ‘Steam Store’ and the ‘Steam Gaming Platform’ are two completly different things in different markets).

However, reading the whole thing, it sounds to me like while the court dismissed some of the claims (1 to 4 and 7 apparently), they agreed that Wolfire and the other plaitiffs had the right to ‘plausibly allege unlawful conduct’ about the ‘Most-favored-nations restraints’ (the part where Steam forces publishers to set prices on all stores without steam keys being involved) without mentioning anything more on the subject.

I’m not americain so I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but that means the ruling isn’t over and it’ll go into an appeal court, right?

Um, I’ve read the complaint from top to bottom and it claims way more than just ‘Valve wouldn’t give them keys to resell’ if they’re not at the same price as on steam. It also claims Valve puts a ‘Price Veto’ clause which allows them to delist games from Steam if the publisher gives bigger sales on other platforms, even if they do not using steam keys, which does sound super uncompetitive to me.

Although I’ll agree the evidence listed in the complaint seem a bit on the light side. Do you know if the trial happened yet? And if so, do you know where I can find what resolution they reached?

The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.

AFAIK there’s a lot of talk about making GNU Taler the basis for the ‘digital Euro’ which is curently being debated at the EU Parliement.

I feel like that’s just a very loud minority among those who play games. As you’ve so stated, the majority of people who play these games either do not care for politics in video games, and another subset prefer it that way.

If even the greediest of companies in the video game industry keep doing that, that means they’ve analyzed the market and having politics in video games might have between no to a positive impact on sales.

AI may have its uses, but the easy counterpoint to your argument is to look at FTX at its peak and where it is now (bankrupt). The stock exchange is the exact opposite of rational, and is terrible at estimating the use one can get out of tech.

Remeber when Microsoft banned some Xbox players for screenshots they took in singleplayer, local games? Because it turns out all screenshots were uploaded to the cloud without properly informing users?

Naaah… no way they’re going to do that again.

idk most politicians are a threat to the environement like AI (if not even more so with their moronic laws)

More or less, yes.

To my knowledge, this hasn’t been the case for nearly a decade, after the backlash they received specifically for it.

Expose your subdomains as in having all of them bundled into one certificate?

AFAIK, you absolutely can request different certs for each subdomain (in fact, that’s what I’ve been doing for a while).

Well, in this case of 1 000 000 downloads, that would make a 50 000 dollar difference. Not really something ‘little’.

That’s great news! Always hated those paywalled research papers and greedy publishers who get away with freaking 100% royalty. Hopefully other organisations will follow.

(tbf that’s not a really high bar. These companies ask writers to NOT take any risk with their writing so to not “rock the boat” so to speak)