I think that’s a fair point.

A lot of my favorite games are indie titles or from small dev teams.

You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…

Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.

Cut to a younger me looking at HDDs in Walmart, and wondering why the fuck they were using much higher numbers than what the drive actually had. That’s when I learned the difference, and started grow my hate for advertising bullshit.

From Wikipedia:

Dabie bandavirus, also called SFTS virus, is a tick-borne virus in the genus Bandavirus in the family Phenuiviridae, order Bunyavirales.[2] The clinical condition it caused is known as severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS).[2] SFTS is an emerging infectious disease that was first described in northeast and central China 2009 and now has also been discovered in Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan in 2015. SFTS has a fatality rate of 12% and as high as over 30% in some areas. The major clinical symptoms of SFTS are fever, vomiting, diarrhea, multiple organ failure, thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), leukopenia (low white blood cell count) and elevated liver enzyme levels. Another outbreak occurred in East China in the early half of 2020.

When companies tell you they respect your privacy and you should give them your data, you tell them it doesn’t matter. Because policies can change, and at the end of the day, your privacy isn’t always up to an single company.

Wait. This was last year, so not the capitol riot. What happened in January last year? I’m in a decent mood today. Just going to skip looking deeper into this one. I have Factorio to play!

Oh! I think I see what you mean now. I think I get it.

I hope so. It’s more likely something infected Firefox itself, and didn’t get into the OS. But when I checked the modem logs, it happened up to a couple of months after the fact. That’s worrying.

What’s even more worrying is that a couple of websites told me I had an IP address that didn’t match my home IP, but would provide the correct one if I refreshed the page a couple of times. So some kind of covert proxy or VPN type of thing was happening.

I ended up just wiping everything, to be safe. Still a bit paranoid though.

You’re not wrong. But also keep in mind that headlines prime readers to think in a certain way before they even get a chance to read the context. No one will admit it, because headlines make money, but all it takes is one carefully worded headline to change how people interpret, feel about, and react to a story. Even when you’re aware of this trick, it’s impossible to avoid all the time. That’s just how our brains work.

I know this story is more-so about a trojan in a trusted place, and not general security, but I have an anecdote to share.

So, time to fess up here. I previously complained about Google trapping me in captcha-hell for enabling Ublock Origin.

I was wrong.

Turns out that I had visited a movie streaming site a while before to watch a season of some show, I forget which. Without any downloads or noticeable input on my part. My Linux box apparently got hacked/malware. All I did was click the occasional “I am a human” box on the website, and sit back with popcorn.

I found out when my ISP starting blocking IP addresses some time later. I checked my modem’s logs, and they showed some unexplained traffic to impossible “unassigned” IP addresses afterward. I didn’t notice for a while.

I was stupid. Even worse, my phone also started behaving badly after that. I think I watched the last few episodes in bed, so must have infected that too.

Don’t assume any system is automatically safe.

Context. People seemed to be complaining about Mozilla’s CEO. That’s why I wanted to clarify for anyone reading the comments first.

People. This is talking about the CEO for Onerep, not the CEO for Mozilla.

The headline is ambiguous here. The CEO in question is from Onerep, not Mozilla.

As an autistic gay person, I disagree that weather is the only determining factor in choosing a rural home. Plenty of amazing an fulfilling rural places to live, but certainly not all of them.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/

“I would advise against playing any games protected by EAC or any EA titles”, they went on to say.

Easy. I specifically blocked all titles with the tags “EA” and “EA Play” on Steam. Never have to worry about it.

Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there’s no alternative.

To be fair, a lot of monopolies are great in the beginning. It’s the inevitable power-tripping downslide that sucks.

I still love Steam and Valve though.

Pretty simple, actually. Content farms push as much media out as possible to get as much attention and views as they can. This generates ad revenue. Advertisers pay Google for the ads, Google pays content creators.

😍

Well fuck.