But seriously, boss—I’m tired. Are our attempts to preserve internet freedom futile?

Nah, we're fine. It's just that serious secrecy is a lot more effort and I'd rather not need that. But we do have all the tools.

That's 80% of the frustration for me. They have already lost that fight for control when they legalized encryption. Now the cat is out of the bag.

For example, encrypting things and hiding them in normal pictures and posts. Using code words in normal online interactions, woven into sentences where there is nothing to decrypt and the message only makes sense to people looking for a message.

Properly executed encryption isn't just indistinguishable from regular white noise, if it's mixed into a channel already carrying a message, an observer not looking for something will never see the difference.

How hard is it to implement email verification?

Harder, actually.

That's the point of OAuth, which is what you're seeing there.

The idea is that you're you and you have a... google account. This shitty little website doesn't want to be responsible for you login details, because those can get stolen. Maybe they contain an email address, which is a problem. Software needs to be updated, it's all a big. They don't want to touch anything in terms of security that identifies you as you.

Maybe all the website does is save your favorite pepe memes. They don't need anything else from you, but they still need to have something to get a user id and make sure nobody messes with your pepe meme collection. That's where this system comes in, because the rest of website becomes significantly easier. They don't need to store anything personally identifying, all they get is an ID and they can connect it with your pepes.

The only downside to OAuth is, as you can also see, that it's corpos you don't want to trust that are offering it.

Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.

First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.

Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.

Yeah.

Because it violates their policy. That's not a "threat", those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.

Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.

Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can't break their contract with valve in a one sided way.

edit: I forgot some context:

The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam's distribution at no cost.

What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam's price.

They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That's not what this is about.

edit2:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

"Steam Key Rules and Guidelines"

Being a personal fan of video games isn’t necessarily required to succeed in running a gaming company.

What the F***, yes it is.

(that's arstechnica saying that though, not the new xbox boss person)

If you write something that you base on your previous work, but you don't cite your previous work, that's a problem.

How is the peer reviewer supposed to know who the author is, I thought obfuscating that was the whole point...

The thing that's crazy here, and that imo clearly shows that this is a 100% political, manipulative move, is that it's a court. They don't just grab people and declare people guilty or flip coins or something. A trial can end in a "not guilty" verdict. That's the point.

There is only one reason to threaten a court: if you already know beyond any doubt that whoever is accused of something is guilty AND you don't like the outcome and consequences of a guilty verdict.

And to reward you, we’re giving you 24-hour visibility

(which is nothing special; there are 6 slots available for this visibility every day of the year for various Steam invitations).

He has no clue what he's talking about Steam in 2021 had 69 MILLION daily active users. WTF do you think is a bigger number 130.000 wishlists or getting even 1% of 69 million people to look at something in the reel?

People don't understand the size of steam or the value of that space (that one of six slots) sometimes. It's wild.

And also, THEY noticed, THEY informed him, THEY apologized, and THEY offered some form of compensation, which they legally don't have to.

I am soooooooooooooooo tired of indie devs blaming everything from the constellation of the stars to the quality of the donuts on a different continent for their game not doing well, except that maybe the game isn't that good, and also those 100.000 already sold units is the actual size of the market for that game.

Teen was third employee of city bike safety center to die in bike crash

Ah yes. It's not that A CAR crashed into her, it was a bike crash.

/s

Awful. Just awful that this keeps happening.

Mastodon dot SOCIAL did, the big public instance. Mastodon the software doesn't have these restrictions.

2025 is a banger year for open source and internet freedom.

Also, updates.

"hey computer! Update!"

"Sure thing, here is a list of 57 packages I will update, y/n?"

"y"

"ok... done!"

👌

Ah yes. Work that tracks you, not by your output, but by whether your mouse jiggles a statistically correct amount. Nice.