Also called bikeshedding.

So that means they are just supporting it as long as it is easy to do, and that they are not brave enough to fork chromium.

The only way I ever used passkeys is with bitwarden, and there you are sharing them between all bitwarden clients.

From my very limited experience, pass key allows to login faster and more reliable compared to letting bitwarden enter passwords and 2fa keys into the forms, but I still have the password and 2fa key stored in bitwarden as a backup in case passkey breaks.

To me, hardware tokens or passkeys are not there to replace passwords, but to offer a faster and more convenient login alternative. I do not want to rely on specific hardware (hardware token, mobile phone, etc.), because those can get stolen or lost.

I am thinking of OpenMW for instance. Through reverse engineering, they where able to create an open source engine that runs the game with modern features. You still have to own those games in order to play the original levels/content.

Sure for games, which are game mechanic driven there is difficulty in separating if from the content, but in many content heavy games, it is more about the world, explorations, the story, characters etc, than the just the runtime, rendering, physics etc.

In many games the big chunks of the engine is sort of source available already, because they are written in a scripting or managed language (.Net or Java).

Making the stuff that isn’t written in such a language available to the player as well, would be great. Because that would lessen the reverse engineering burden of modders. And the next step would be to open source parts of it.

The reasons for this are the same for many commercial products to use open source lower levels of their software stack and open source their common code as well. Improving your own product by cooperating with others would be great in gaming as well.

Sure, depends on the engine, but very often there is a “scripting” part, be it quests, dialog, etc. and the where those scripting functions/library and language is implemented. The first are part of content, while the latter is part of the engine.

Also games have data tables, where the individual value for each record are part of content and the implementation of what each attribute does is implemented in the engine or some specific scripting.

Engines tent to have a clear split, because different kind of developers have different processes, and engines are often reused for multiple games.

IMO, that means that the whole game would be sources available (for the end user), while the central engine is open source.

This is just somewhat of a wishful thinking, not a requirement or whatever.

And sure, game devs releasing an engine/game as open source after they are done with it, would be great too. But I like to dream big ;)

I think for many content heavy games, an open source engine and copyrighted content could work financially. Someone would still have to buy the game, but the game mechanics and platform support can be enhanced and engine bugs fixed by the community.

You where talking about “system wide AdGuard”, which is not the browser addon, but an app that uses DNS blocking, be it by either letting people set DNS servers manually, or automatically through VPN. Their VPN does not break TLS connection by inserting custom certificates and MITM proxies, so they cannot read/modifiy content.

It might be possible to use TLS breaking proxies for systemwide ad blocking, but even that wouldn’t help, because nowadays a lot of content and ads are loaded dynamically via javascript. So a browser is required to filter ads.

DNS ad blockers are not sufficient to block all ads and often overly broad. So they have much higher rate of false positives and negatives compared to in-browser ad blockers. Differentiating between ads and useful content based on domain names will become more and more difficult. Both might use some url from the same cloud provider, and blocking those breaks a lot of stuff.

I dislike the narrative that something is “unfixable”, everything is fixable if there is a will to do so.

I don’t know why game developers seem to have inhibitions of changing the game too much after release. For instance reworking and extending the main story in a game seems to be a big red line for them.

For instance I would have wished in Cyberpunk 2077 to actually play Vs introduction into Night City and the individual fixers myself, instead of just watching a cut scene. A DLC could have extended the start of the game a bit.

The same for Starfield, they could extend and improve the main story, characters and locations in an update, but seem hesitant to do so. Something like directors cut, that adds cut content as well as tons of side quests into the game.

If people still want to play the original game, they can make the extended story optional, like sleecting what version you want to play at the game start.

For bugs, they could work together with the community and the “unofficial patch” and engine fixer modders, instead just ignoring them. In Skyrim SSE for instance they still had many of the same bugs that Oldrim had and where fixed by thr community.

Bethesda could improve, and even fix their games, if they would decide to do so. Their DLC just doesn’t seem to be worth what they ask for, it could have been just part of a free update, so that some more people buy the base game.

An interesting concept would be if all hand on the 12 clocks would work, but the hands of the clock in the middle are stuck at 12 position, this way the hands in the middle would point to the clock showing the correct time.

BTW, thank you for this discussion!

The crux of the matter for me is the question wherever “the selection process” alone is enough to create art or not, and depending on my mood I fall to one side or another on that question. Not specifically if it is under copyright or not, because that sort of follows from that.

Artists often use randomness in various parts of their creation process, what is really required is the human element. Is a picture of a cloud, that speaks to the photographer in some way art or just a picture of a random cloud?

I guess this has to be decided on a case by case basis, therefore I cannot completely exclude it.

Yes, and you have copyright on the photo - not the layout of the plants and trees in it, nor even the angle of the subject. Someone else can go with a camera and take their own photo without touching your copyright.

A work is original if it is independently created and is sufficiently creative. Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing. As a copyright owner, you have the right to make, sell or otherwise distribute copies, adapt the work, and publicly display your work.

https://www.copyright.gov/engage/photographers/

So if someone intentionally reproduces a picture, they violate copyright, IIUC.

In the case of minecraft, I think a case can be made, where the “picture” is the minecraft world, and the creativity is the selection process by the artist. The artist chooses their angle, position, lighting, etc, in this case they choose properties of the world, maybe by visiting thousands of them, using seed search machines, or other reverse engineering tools etc.

I all depends on if the artist can raise their work above just the random noise they get as an input in a creative way. I am not saying that all minecraft worlds (or save games for that matter) are subject to copyright, but since we are dealing with blurry lines of copyright, it is possible.

IANAL, but I think if I would look into case law, I would find examples for both options, in some cases the “selection process” was enough to demonstrate creativity, and in other cases it wasn’t.

You are correct it isn’t about the numbers, it is about the artistic and creative product that is copyrightable, which, in case of digital art, is represented as numbers, and distribution of those might be punished by law.

I am just saying that digital art can be more that just still or moving pictures and sound. It can be a world space the artist prepared for you where you can move around.

About the section on the law, I would read it just as stating what is covered under copyright, and not what isn’t. I also just mentioned what original work is, not describing derived work.

Nature is often random and unpredictable, but the process of selecting a interesting POV and taking a picture of it is still copyrightable.

I wouldn’t be so sure that if you discover a seed, that can be transformed using minecraft into a world with very interesting and specific properties, could not be under copyright protection.

In fact movies, pictures and books are specific numbers on a digital storage medium as well, that are transformed using a codec. That isn’t something that can be easily replicated without that codec.

I am not a copyright lawyer, but I think there are precedences where just the selection process from a stream of (semi-) random number, pictures, sound or events alone can produce copyrightable products.

I meant minecraft world file which stores the chunks the player explored and potentially modified. And I said “could” not “must”, it depends on if hits a certain creative threshold.

If the player decides to teleport around while creating a dickbud or whatever by just the explored chunks, that could meet it.

If someone selectivly openes quests to use the open quest markers on a map in an RPG to create a dickbud, that cloud meet it as well.

The save game could tell your individual story through the game, that cloud meet the threshold as well.

Also, because the unmodified minecraft world is randomly generated, it would not be under anyones copyright.

With AI, there could also be made an argument that the selection process might make it copyrightable. Like if you take a picture of a interesting looking cloud. The clouds might be semi-random, but you selecting a specific one reaches the threshold.

Well, I think both are human creation, you are using the machine and the game to create something new. In that sense, a save game file could also be under the players copyright. Lets say a Minecraft world for instance.

When the current copyright comes from books, wouldn’t plugins or transient changes/cheats be like taking side notes with a pencil on their individual copy?

Are side notes and annotations copyright infringements?

I would love to see them argue that taking snarky side notes, which change the tone of their words, is copyright infringement.

Who was that developer? Where are those numbers from? Any sources?

I remember ~9 years ago the Blizzard CEO said this: “[…] I would assume most of those people also have access to a Windows or Mac device capable of playing Blizzard games.” https://www.change.org/p/blizzard-entertainment-support-please-release-native-linux-clients/u/9982826

Which is pretty disrespectful, but just one part of these arguments.

If a game offers multiplayer, they should also offer a dedicated server that people can setup for themselves.

For MMOs, they can make the servers optionally federated.

Yes they are, UX designers are not asked to make more efficient or usable designs, they are asked to make designs that “look good” in marketing, support ad integration, hook people into others services provided by that same company, make it more difficult to incorporate with workflows that include third-party applications, etc.

This is deliberate UX design, which is part of the enshittification process.

People spend lots of money to buy big screens, only for apps/websites to use a fraction of it.

I cannot control how every application or website I have to use looks, but where I can, I try to find solutions.

When I am occasionally on reddit, I use old.reddit. I use addons for youtube, to remove unecessary stuff, or open videos directly in mpv.

I use reader mode to make many sites easier to navigate.

Mastodon and Lemmy have a much better design than Twitter or new Reddit.

On the one windows machine I still have, I use the classic shell, to replace the start menu with something more usable.

I use Libreoffice, and many other Software with sane functional UI.

I don’t want to use old software, because the older software gets, the more hostile the environment becomes for it.

A lot of UI decisions on the Internet seem driven by the need to create empty spaces to put advertising into, and with adblocker it looks just bad.