sylver_dragon
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Microsoft’s partner portal website mysteriously said his account had been deactivated, without specifying why.
My money is on Microsoft’s AI based detections causing false positives again. I spend way too much time chasing ghosts from Defender. Their machine learning based signatures are especially egregious. You get an alert with a name like “Win32/Wacatac.b!ml”. That last “ml” bit denotes that it’s machine learning based. And then you get fuck all to help you determine why the alert fired. Sure, it might actually be a trojan. More likely, it’s a false positive. But who knows, because Microsoft won’t provide enough information to perform a reasonable analysis of the binary.
And MS has been pushing CoPilot hard. It’s in everything and it’s happy to slop up answers for you. The accuracy of those answers though can be a bit spotty. I’d certainly never turn it loose on tools which can have business impact. But, I doubt Microsoft has any such reservations about letting CoPilot slop all over third party devs.
Yup. With the ease and low likelihood of being caught, piracy has become a pressure relief valve on shitty content practices. Make things too hard to get and people will recognize that setting up a VPN and torrent client aren’t all that hard. Make the experience really bad, and you’ll get dedicated people creating entire software platforms to lower that barrier to entry for piracy even further. Sure, some of those software platforms will get knocked down, but they usually result in the code being released and other folks come along and build on them.
As consolidation and enshitification rise, I expect us to see piracy rise again as well.
Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.
Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.
It’s the return of the Glasshole.
What are you more worried about, third party, MitM interception (e.g. IMSI catcher) or Google knowing who you are communicating with? The former is technically harder for an attacker, but the use of such devices is well documented and poorly controlled. Google is, well Google. And you can expect them to monitize any bit of data they have on you. Also, that data will almost certainly be handed over to local law enforcement, especially if they have whatever the local equivalent of a warrant is.
As with most security, there are trade-offs. You have to decided what risks you are willing to accept and what you are not.
It certainly makes sense. AWS hosts infrastructure specifically for the US FedGov. That infrastructure includes systems for the US DoD. So, that makes it a valid military target. And while cyber attacks can do a lot to degrade command and control, nothing DoS’s a server farm like a few hundred kilos of high explosives.
Got about half way through the article before it became obvious that it’s just “DOOM, DOOOM, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” in prose form.
Gaming is changing, which is different from never. I mean, I could bemoan the death of 2d puzzlers ala King’s Quest because Sierra is no more, but there are still similar games being made by smaller studios. We may hit a slump, and the main actors may change, but gaming isn’t going anywhere. AAA titles will continue to mostly be money chasing shovelware, indie titles will continue to be where the real development and experimentation happens. But making games, especially PC games, has become so accessible that even the death of a major studio will amount to nothing more than some IP changing hands. And there is still a lot of money to be made in games, so companies will keep chasing that.
Magazines have been predicting the death of PC gaming for decades now. And yet, PC gaming is still incredibly vibrant. The current RAM shortage is just a hiccup. We’ve had RAM shortages before. If the demand for RAM stays at the current level manufacturers will respond by bringing new fabs online. More likely the AI bubble will pop and we’ll be flooded in used RAM and GPUs. The economy will cycle, hiring will pick back up and markets will move on to the "Next Big Thing"TM
But ya, a headline of “Markets in down cycle, RAM supply currently constrained by high demand” doesn’t motivate clicks.
This one is a mixed bag. KYC regulations are very useful in detecting and prosecuting money laundering and crimes like human trafficking. But ya, if this data needs to be kept, the regulations around secure storage need to be just as tight. This sort of thing should be required to be kept to cybersecurity standards like CMMC Level 3, audited by outside auditors and violations treated as company and executive disqualifying events (you ran a company so poorly you failed to secure data, you’re not allowed to run such a company for the next 10 years). The sort of negligence of leaving a database exposed to the web should already result in business crippling fines (think GDPR style fines listed in percentages of global annual revenue). A database which is exposed to the web and has default credentials or no access control at all should result in c-level exec seeing the inside of a jail cell. There is zero excuse for that happening in a company tasked with protecting data. And I refuse to believe it’s the result of whatever scape-goat techs they try to pin this on. This sort of failure always comes from the top. It’s caused by executives who want everything done fast and cheap and don’t care about it being done right.
Unless the romance is central to the game, that sort of focus and depth just isn’t going to be put into it. There is also the issue that the writers in video games have far less control over the main character than they do in other mediums. In a book, you don’t have to worry about your main character deciding to to fuck off for a week collecting all the boxes in a village and stacking them on the town well, just because it’s funny. That main character stays on task and on plot for the writer. There are games where that high level of control is possible, visual novels exist, but that starts to push into the question, “why not just make a book/movie instead?”
Similarly, I think it’s going to be hard for any video game romance not to come off as transactional, due to the nature of a game being a computer program. Imagine trying to tell Romeo and Juliet as a video game. At some point, Romeo and Juliet will need to interact. Romeo arrives at Juliet’s window and professes his love. How does the player interact with the game for that scene? Is it just a cutscene? Or a cutscene with quick time events (press X to woo). Trying to replicate a Jane Austin style story would be even worse. As books about people sitting about in drawing rooms drinking tea and being catty to one another, replicating that in a video game is all going to boil down to dialog trees. Perhaps the first time through it could feel fresh and interesting, but on a second playthrough it’s going to quickly be obvious that the whole thing is really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”. Maybe we could get a Jane Austin Rouge-like, in that each time you load it up the characters’ personalities change and you really do have to pay attention to verbal and social queues to get anywhere. But even that is still really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”.
Ultimately, I think video games are always going to be fairly transactional in nature. They are computer programs and are ultimately deterministic. All the interactions you have in a video game need to be planned out, scripted and maybe even voice acted. It’s what makes all the interactions in Baldur’s Gate 3 so amazing. Everything those characters do was planned for, written and recorded. Every comment, every facial expression was planned, written and coded. There is no spontaneity, because there can’t be (maybe with AI, but that’s a different can of worms). That so many little things actually did get covered is amazing. But, the trigger conditions for playing that bit of animation and voice acting will be hard coded. Whether or not a character likes the main character must be a set of numbers stored in memory, because that’s how computers work. Yes, it could be far more complex than just an easily identifiable number. And perhaps hiding those numbers from the player would make it feel less obvious, but they aren’t going to go away.
And all the work which goes into planning, writing and coding those interactions is time spent during development. Going back to Baldur’s Gate 3, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of the NPCs started pairing off with each other? If the main characters isn’t getting busy with Shadowheart, maybe she discoverers an interest in big men who can turn into bears so you come back to camp sometime to find her and Halsin sitting very close together talking softly. This could even have the whole random element where different characters have different crushes/interests each time you play through. That would be neat to see, but it’s going to require a lot of extra development. Unless that’s a feature which starts selling video games, it’s not going to happen. Perhaps this sort of thing will show up in indie games, I wouldn’t expect it in major titles anytime soon.
While it’s not a service I would use, if it helps move the needle away from Windows’ dominance of the gaming market, that’s a good thing. The more people who can ditch Windows, the better. It probably means an Eternal September for Linux. But that is ultimately a good thing. If Linux becomes the default choice for gaming PCs for the mass market, more games will be released with Linux Native versions, driving further Linux adoption. It’s the type of virtuous cycle which is needed to kill the giant that is Windows.
Rather than interact with a machine, you’ll just be walking around, sipping coffee, having thoughtful conversations with a bot laughing along with your jokes as it writes your letter and does your taxes.
So, basically the computers from Star Trek: TNG. I’d go for that, but unfortunately, what we’ll get instead is enshitified AI slop which exists to suck a subscription fee out of you every month while pushing ads.
I mean, no shit? Part of the Snowden leaks was information that the NSA had intercepted Cisco routers and backdoored them before they were shipped on to international customers. So, even without willing actions by US vendors, there is that to worry about. And the idea that a private company would install a backdoor for US Spy agencies in their infrastructure isn’t new. The fact that any Chinese company is using US hardware/software just seems incredibly stupid. And no one should be using CheckPoint.
It’s the same reason Huiwei was thrown out of US infrastructure. You cannot build trusted architecture with hardware/software from a nation which you know wants to hack you. I work for a US based company in cybersecurity, we treat WeChat as Chinese State spyware, because it is. We wouldn’t consider a router or firewall from a Chinese based company and we treat any software from China with outright suspicion. Sure that all sucks and we may be missing out on some great stuff which isn’t malicious. But, the risks far outweigh the costs. I’d expect my Chinese counterparts to be making the exact same risk calculation for US based tech.
Steam is certainly in a dominant market position. They had a large first mover advantage and have also done a lot of work to make and keep gamers happy with the platform. That said, I can understand companies being upset at the 30% Steam tax on sales. It’s a pretty large cut and other stores (e.g. Epic) have tried to compete based on that cost. The problem being that many games have massive Steam libraries and want to keep everything on one place and they aren’t really affected by the cost to the devs; so, without a significant reason to change, they won’t. It also doesn’t help that some competitors (e.g Epic) have been user hostile in the past and so don’t have a high level of trust. Steam has also built a lot of goodwill with power users for their work on Proton.
While I do think there needs to be healthy competition for storefronts, as long as Steam resists the temptation to enshitify their dominant market position, I don’t see them losing market share in any meaningful way. Perhaps it would be better if Steam were spun off from Valve, putting them Valve on equal footing with other devs. But, video games aren’t really fungible. It’s not like I’m going to say, “oh darn, Kingdom Come is too expensive, I guess I’ll buy Half Life instead”. They are just fundamentally different games and if I want to play the first one, I’m not able to get that by buying the second. So, the price of one of them isn’t really a factor in pushing me towards the other. Though, Valve might use Steam to push one game over the other, and that could be something that is a problem.
Ya, AI as a tool has it’s place. I’m currently working on documentation to meet some security compliance frameworks (I work in cybersecurity). Said documentation is going to be made to look pretty and get a check in the box from the auditors. It will then be stored in a SharePoint library to be promptly lost and ignored until the next time we need to hand it over to the auditors. It’s paperwork for the sake of paperwork. And I’m going to have AI spit out most of it and just pepper in the important details and iron out the AI hallucinations. Even with the work of fixing the AI’s work, it will still take less time than making up all the bullshit on my own. This is what AI is good for. If I actually care about the results, and certainly if I care about accuracy, AI won’t be leaned on all that much.
The technology actually it pretty amazing, when you stop and think about it. But, it also often a solution in search of a problem.
No, a game should be what the devs decide to make. That said, it can cut off a part of the market. I’m another one of those folks who tends to avoid PvPvE games, without a dedicated PvE only side. This weekend’s Arc Raiders playtest was a good example. I read through the description on Steam and just decided, “na, I have better things to do with my time.” Unfortunately, those sorts of games tend to have a problem with griefers running about directly trying to ruin other peoples’ enjoyment. I’ll freely admit that I will never be as good as someone who is willing to put the hours into gear grinding, practice and map memorization in such a game. I just don’t enjoy that and that means I will always be at a severe disadvantage. So, why sped my time and money on such a game?
This can lead to problem for such games, unless they have a very large player base. The Dark Souls series was a good example, which has the in-built forced PvP system, though you can kinda avoid it for solo play. And it still has a large player base. But, I’d also point out some of the the controversy around the Seamless Co-op mod for Elden Ring. When it released, the PvP players were howling from the walls about how long it made invasion queues. Since Seamless Co-op meant that the players using it were removed from the official servers, the number of easy targets to invade went way, way down. It seemed like a lot of folks like to have co-op, without the risks of invasion.
As a longer answer to this, let me recommend two videos from Extra Credits:
These videos provide a way to think about players and how they interact with games and each other.
Noting that EA had to take on nearly $20 billion in debt to finance the deal
A leveraged buyout, with the bought out company taking on all the debt, ya this is the death knell of EA. It’s going to suck for all the people who are employed by EA, but in the long term it is a way to get the company broken up.
And nothing of value was lost. Sure EA has published a few gems in recent years, but as a developer it’s all sports games and Battlefield. The talent isn’t at EA, it’s at the developers they have been supporting. If we’re lucky, the leveraged buyout will result in anything good owned by EA being sold off for parts and the worthless husk of EA saddled with the debt and left to go bankrupt.
Who know, maybe the license to make Star Wars games will go somewhere that isn’t dead set on fucking it up as hard as possible to meet the Christmas season deadline.
force binary choices that don’t align with household rules or with children’s maturity levels.
This has been my main experience with “parental controls”. As soon as they are turned on, I lose any ability to manage the experiences available to my children. So, in areas where I see them as mature enough to handle something, the only way I can allow them access to that experience is to completely bypass the controls. In many ecosystems, if I judge that one of my children could handle a game and the online risks associated with it, I can’t simply allow that game. Instead, I need to maintain a full adult account for them to use. You also run into a lot of situations where the reason a game is banned from children is unclear or done in an obvious “better safe than sorry” knee-jerk reaction. Ultimately, parental controls end up being far more frustrating than empowering. I’d rather just have something that just says, “this game/movie/etc your kid is asking for is restricted based on reasons X, Y and Z. Do you want to allow it?” Log my response and go with it. Like damned near any choice in software settings, quit trying to out-think me on what I want, give me a choice and respect that choice.
I think the real answer was “we wanted to charge $90 for the game, but knew we’d get our shit pushed in over that. So, we released a stripped down version at $60 and then did a $30 up-charge for the Premium edition, which is the full game”.
On the upshot, the game and it’s “DLC” will probably hit the usual Steam sales in a year or three. I can snag it then.
But have you considered, line goes up?
Sadly, there are probably a lot of developers who are burning the candle at both ends to push this out the door, on an unrealistic schedule. And who will then burn the candle in the middle as well when the release is a buggy mess. Only to finally be tossed aside like so much trash when the game fails to realize these unrealistic expectations. And all of that will squarely be the fault of management, who will wipe away crocodile tears with the profits this game will generate. Just not the profit they unrealistically promised investors; so you know, the game was actually a failure. Fuck EA’s management, the world would probably be a better place if the C-Level suite and board room got emptied out by some disaster.
Valheim.
Mistlands - Not because “whaaa, Mistalnds hard”, but because the whole area is built around verticality and the game engine most certainly is not. Combat is Valheim is generally pretty good, but after a reasonable amount of playtime, you will experience the frustration of swinging under/over enemies, because of minor variations in terrain height. Mistlands dials this problem up to 11, with the added bonus of enemies which specifically take advantage of this problem.
The Mistlands also turns exploration into a boring, grindy chore. The shorelines are a nightmare to sail around and even with the wisp, the mist is always too close to deal with said shorelines. So, you’re hoofing it through terrain which is designed to be difficult to navigate and move across. The feather cape helps, a bit. But, you’re still going to spend way too long faffing about, jumping up one side of a ridge and floating down the other, only to find that you’re in a gully with nothing useful and need to jump up the other side. Seeing dungeon entrances at any range is impossible. Enemies regularly pop out of nowhere and you’re forced into dealing with the combat verticality problems.
I’ll also throw a bit of shade at “Refined Eitr” as a resource, though I think the problem is less the resource and more the grind to get the parts for it. To start with, you need to make a Black Forge, to make that you need Black Cores, to get Black Cores, you need to spend hours in the mists hoping to stumble across one or more dungeons to get the cores. And inside the dungeons, expect lots of combat where the verticality problem is on prominent display. Now that you have the Black Table, you get to make the Eitr Refinery, which requires more Black Cores. Hope you enjoyed getting them the first time! Ok great, more cores obtained, time to go stumbling about again looking for Soft Tissue. With any luck, you’ve been mining (or at least marking) nodes along the way. Though, expect to spend more time lost in the Mists, you need a shit ton of Soft Tissue. Thankfully, this is a resource you can take through a portal, so that’s nice.
And finally, you get to raid Dverger towns for a required material to extract sap, a Sap Extractor. “What about trade? Vikings were well know traders”, you ask. Nope, fuck trade, all that gold you’ve been collecting, go spend it on some clothes which you will never actually use. You want a Sap Extractor, put on your killing pants and get raiding. Ok fine, we have our Sap Extractor covered in Dverger gore. And that gets us to the least horrible part of our Refined Eitr. Sap extraction is not terrible, find a spot with several roots in close proximity and just rotate a few extractors through them.
Right let’s get our Eitr Refinery built…and why the fuck is one of the input ports on the top? Ok whatever, I’ll build some stairs and…why the fuck is this thing tossing off damaging sparks? Yes, I know you can wrap it in iron bars, but seriously what the fuck? Why is this even a game mechanic? It’s really the perfect metaphor for all of the Mistlands. It’s needlessly annoying and doesn’t really provide anything positive for gameplay or fun. Just another pointless grind tossed in because, “players like hard things, right?”
do anticheat count as antivirus?
No. But, from the article:
Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage
The CrowdStrike fiasco was finally enough for Microsoft to look at forcing drivers out of the kernel. This is absolutely a good thing and will hopefully lead to a more stable Windows.
I’m willing to withhold judgement. But, Chosen’s website reads like bog standard vulture capital trying to pretend they are not going to ride in and enshitify anything they touch. With lots of broad claims about being “community driven” and AI art. Maybe this will work out; but, I wouldn’t be putting money on it.
That said, I don’t blame Dark0ne for wanting to step back. He’s be running this wonderful site for the community for a long time and deserves the opportunity to go do other things. I wish him the best of luck and I hope that NexusMods survives this transition.
It’s rather amazing that this one guy keeps churning out fixes for FromSoft’s complete inability to understand multiplayer.
That said, I do plan to try the vanilla setup first (finishing up Shadow of the Erdtree before we change over). I just worry about my wife and I dropping into a session and having some rando who either wants to faff about; or, we run into the type of toxic behavior which seems to inundate online games. We had pretty good luck with Vermintide 2, back in the day. But, with way too many years of playing WoW, we’ve also run into a lot of assholes. And we just don’t have the patience for that sort of thing anymore.
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LinkedIn is basically a public resume. Using it for anything more demonstrates that you do not have a basic grasp of privacy or security. As such, there shouldn’t be anything up there which is all that bad to have leaked. Sure, if the password database gets dumped, rotate your LinkedIn password (it should already be unique, so no worries about it being reused elsewhere). And having an email address get added to every spam list everywhere kinda sucks. But, what else is the attacker going to get, my name and work history, which are already public on the site?
I mean, yes LinkedIn should be raked over the coals for shit security practices. And we really need something like the GDPR here in the US to actually do that. But, I’m also not going to get terribly worked up about my public CV being leaked. The leak is kinda redundant.