It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts (like Epic) for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used to download the game unless the dev has properly paid them for the key”…

Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.

It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.

Yeah, I bought my own domain specifically so I could set up a catch-all email service. Everything sent to my domain hits the same inbox, but I can easily see who has sold my info. If I start getting spam addressed to “[email protected]” then I know Walmart sold my info. And I can easily set a rule to automatically mark anything addressed to that burned account as spam.

Lots of websites quickly caught onto the “just add a + after your regular email” trick, and set up an internal rule to remove any of the + tags. So that old trick is largely useless.

Yup. Privatize profits, socialize losses. It’s the way the capitalist machine is able to keep grinding up orphans for the 1%.

More Epstein stuff. A document mentioned he was going to get his wife to start taking antibiotics because of an STI he picked up. The joke is that he wouldn’t want to tell her it was an STI, so he’d have to find some other way to justify the antibiotics.

My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.

Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.

Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.

Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:

Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:

And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:

The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.

I mean, it’s charted #1 on social media on the app stores. It’s an explosive rise in popularity, but that’s not unheard of. If anything, I suspect that the popularity is manufactured. It’s likely some company running an astroturf campaign to capitalize on the fact that people are tired of TikTok’s censorship BS.

Yeah, I gave it a shot. I opened the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews are secretly ruling the world” conspiracy theory post from a user named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews… Okay, maybe a fluke. Not a great first impression, but let’s see what else the app has to offer. Then a few posts later there was a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post.

So yeah, it has definitely fallen prey to the Nazi Bar problem.

Saw “no censorship” in the description, and had suspicions because it’s a common dogwhistle for “we’ll allow the most vile people as long as they’re not technically breaking the law”. Got the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews secretly run the world” post followed shortly by a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post. Yeah, the problem with “no censorship” is that it inevitably falls prey to the Nazi bar problem.

Make it more than they earned, plus a large percentage, and factor in how likely they were to get caught. At the size of Google, companies are essentially just big statistics machines, doing risk/reward calculations. Imagine you have an illegal business opportunity that could make you $100M in profit per week. Your risk of getting caught is estimated at ~25% per week. And your fine for getting caught is $150M per week. Even though the fine is higher than the expected profit, your net profit per week averages out to +$62.5M.

That is the original $100M, minus the $150M*25% (or $37.5M total). Yes, some weeks will be a loss. But if the numbers stay consistent, you’ll make more in the long term simply due to the fact that you don’t get caught every time. As long as you manage to avoid getting caught for at least two weeks, (which shouldn’t be difficult, considering the 25% estimated chance of regulators catching on) you’ve already made enough money to cover the fine.

Of course the company will do the illegal thing, because the math says it will likely be profitable. And even if they’re caught, it was just the price of doing business. As long as they made more than the expected fine over the given time period, they have profited.

My buddy’s parents used to own a comic book store, and they regularly had to turn away Magic The Gathering players for smelling too bad. They even had a sign that they’d put up on the door on Fridays (Friday was MTG night) that said something along the lines of “we reserve the right to refuse service if you smell like you haven’t showered all week”

Yeah, mods on proton get weird sometimes, especially if they require things like Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable packages/runtimes. I think ProtonTricks allows you to install those directly in the prefix, but I personally haven’t had any success with that. Every time I try something that involves stuff like that, I end up getting white screens, black screens, or just full CTDs.

Yeah, the sad reality is that there are some critical pieces of software that just outright refuse to support other OSes. Personally, I’m forced to use Macs at work because QLab is the industry standard for my line of work, and that software is only available on Mac.

I already had you tagged as “MAGA chode” for this and it always manages to prove true.

Ratcheting taxes for unoccupied houses and apartment units. Allow a grace period of one year, to allow for flips. But after that, every home you own after the first is considered unoccupied if it is vacant for more than three months of the year. And taxes on vacant homes become increasingly expensive as you own more and more of them.

Like the first vacant house you own may be near a normal tax rate, the second makes both more expensive, the third makes all three super expensive, etc… And these tax penalties should get expensive fast. Like up to (or even over) 100% if you’re sitting on more than like five or six properties. Then take the proceeds of these higher taxes, and put them towards first time homebuyer assistance programs. I’d even go so far as to say that renting a single family home shouldn’t totally eliminate the tax, only reduce it. This would solve the three largest issues with the housing market right now.

First, it solves the “sitting on vacant houses to drive up the price of rent” problem. Actively force landlords to keep their apartments and houses full, driving down the price of rent. If the unit is occupied, the tax is lower. And again, even the most expensive landlords should only be able to feasibly own three or four extra properties before the taxes get prohibitively expensive, even after being mitigated by occupation.

Second, it solves the “buying a dozen houses and only selling one of them” problem. Corporations do this to be able to game the market and drive up prices on the few they do sell. But by making it prohibitively expensive to sit on vacant houses, you preemptively wreck any kinds of profits they would make by sitting on them.

Third, it would allow for more low interest loans for first time home buyers, and could even be used to offset the potential downpayment costs.

But of course, this will basically never be implemented, because the lawmakers are all bribed by the corporations that own thousands of vacant homes.

Which is a concern, but can largely be mitigated by encouraging work-from-home jobs. If people are able to reliably WFH, (and COVID proved that many jobs can be done entirely from home), then the local job market doesn’t tend to matter as much.

Final_FINAL_Project_V3_Master_Rev4_DAVEUSETHISONE.doc

Yup. The reverse proxy takes http/https requests from the WAN, and forwards them to the appropriate services on your LAN. It will also do things like automatically maintain TLS certificates, so https requests can be validated. Lastly, it can usually do some basic authentication or group access stuff. This is useful to ensure that only valid users or devices are able to reach services that otherwise don’t support authentication.

So for example, let’s say you have a service called ExampServ running on 192.168.1.50:12345. This port is not forwarded, and the service is not externally available on the WAN without the reverse proxy.

Now you also have your reverse proxy service, listening on 192.168.1.50:80 and 192.168.1.50:443… Port 80 (standard for http requests) and 443 (standard for https requests) are forwarded to it from the WAN. Your reverse proxy is designed to take requests from your various subdomains, ensure they are valid, upgrade them from http to https (if they originated as http), and then forward them to your various services.

So maybe you create a subdomain of exampserv.example.com, with an A-NAME rule to forward to your WAN IPv4 address. So any requests for that subdomain will hit ports 80 (for http) or 443 (for https) on your WAN. These http and https requests will be forwarded to your reverse proxy, because those ports are forwarded. Your reverse proxy takes these requests. It validates them (by upgrading to https if it was originally an http request, verifying that the https request isn’t malformed, that it came from a valid subdomain, prompting the user to enter a username and password if that is configured, etc.)… After validating the request, it forwards the traffic to 192.168.1.50:12345 where your ExampServ service is running.

Now your ExampServ service is available internally via the IP address, and externally via the subdomain. And as far as the ExampServ service is concerned, all of the traffic is LAN, because it’s simply communicating with the reverse proxy that is on the same network. The service’s port is not forwarded directly (which is a security risk in and of itself), it is properly gated behind an authentication wall, and the reverse proxy is ensuring that all requests are valid https requests, with a proper TLS handshake. And (most importantly for your use case), you can have multiple services running on the same device, and each one simply uses a different subdomain in your DNS and reverse proxy rules.

Yup. Either eliminating a competitor, or getting ahold of some obscure patent that they don’t want to be stuck leasing indefinitely. Or they want to be the ones to lease the patent for exorbitant amounts, and they’re willing to write off a short term loss for longer term profits.

That disclaimer was actually a result of the lawsuit. It didn’t always say that. Google was sued for intentionally misleading users, by tacitly encouraging their misheld beliefs that it made them invisible. Basically, Google wanted to track users. And Google knew that some users trusted incognito mode way too much. And instead of correcting that, they actively misled users into believing that incognito mode was more secure. Because if users believed they were invisible, Google could continue to track them when they thought they weren’t being watched.

They got sued for those misleading statements, and lost. And now the splash screen specifically says that Incognito Mode doesn’t make you invisible.

Well yeah, that’s all it ever was. The lawsuit was because of misleading/deceptive statements made by Google, which led some (intentionally misinformed) users to believe that Incognito Mode was more private than reality.

Basically, the company knew some users believed Incognito Mode hid their browsing activity. Not just from their local machine (via no logged site history, clearing cookies, etc), but also by hiding it from prying eyes like Google. Some users genuinely believed Incognito Mode was basically some sort of combination of Tor, degoogling, VPN, tracker-blocker, etc… And Google actively encouraged this incorrect belief, because they could continue to siphon off users’ data when they thought they weren’t being watched. The active encouragement of incorrect beliefs is what the lawsuit was about, not the data collection.