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.

Yeah, but the new guy’s gonna be cheaper than the one with experience!

I mean, think about the next quarter benefits! Stop searching for stuff like ‘reliability’ or ‘long term’. That doesn’t mean anything to the shareholders who’ll jump ship the next month.

(It’s definitely an hyperbole, but it does raise a good point over hyper short-termism leading to mass layoffs for ‘profitability’. The sick days are just the excuse needed to part the employes that will support their hyper toxic management structures from the ones who aren’t ‘team players’)

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.

I think the issue is the same as Apple being anti-competitive about the AppStore. Sure, techically, both Steam and the PSN are platforms for selling games, but they’re each restricted to specific non-overlapping platforms (respictively PC and PlayStation) where there they have a (near for Steam, absolute for PSN) monopoly. Hence, anticompetitive behavior.

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).

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.

In which case the ban should have happened upon sharing not recording. I mean if it isn’t clear that the records you make of singleplayer offline games are published online, then banning someone for what they record feels more like moral policing than anything else tbh.

(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)

The only mitm that can be done is at the server itself or in a website pretending to be the requested server. But for this to work, you need to have the private and public keys of the server you want to act like.

Maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying, but since the wide majority of EU citizens use their ISP’s DNS, it’s trivial for them to mandate a domain redirection to another server which would act as a proxy of the original (and thus only need the original server’s public key).

So far, the only protection we have against that are:

1. Changing DNS (WAY too complicated for the average user, also brings the DNS’ own contry’s censorship)
2. The fact that they wouldn’t have a valid certificate for it because any sensible CA would see it for what it is: a MITM.

That’s why, to my understanding, this is such a big deal. At any point, ANY EU gov (and I want to emphasis that part because ot’s important in the context of tjhs law) can request a change of DNS from their ISP’s DNS (many already do right now) and emit a fully trusted certificate for the domain they want to MITM.

… until the EU and maybe even the US rolls around and slaps Microsoft with an antitrust lawsuit. Sounds like a best case scenario :D

Lineage is the oldest one (Divest and /e/ are forks of it). Calyx has a focus on security and privacy (comes with a free VPN with no signup requires). Currzntly Calyx is based on Android 13, even on the Fairphone 4 which doesn’t have it supportes. I son’t know enough about iodé to comment about it though.