Thanks to COPPA, American kids under 13 actually have very good protections online. To the point companies like Google and Valve will forego profits so they don’t have to comply.

Perhaps they should’ve asked for a sliver of a percentage rather than a large amount upfront, but based on their counter-offer they weren’t interested in percentual royalties.

Until the game is launched, Rockstar is operating on investment money and every component of the game is expressed in cost. Spending 1/85th of 11 years of revenue (or about a third on top of development cost) on songs upfront is hard to sell to executives. Especially when the rate is set by a small band like this.

Asking Beatles money for a Heaven 17 song was worth a try, but I don’t think they get to feel incredulous after their counter-offer was refused. Don’t high-ball offers you can’t afford to lose!

The offer was for $22.5k ($7.5k per member). Their counter-offer of $75k per member ($225k) was rejected and that’s why they went public. GTA V has 441 licensed songs, and there’s no way Rockstar is going to be paying $99 million dollars for just songs.

I’m not surprised they rejected a 10x counter offer, and looking for sympathy on social media is kind of silly. Pretty crazy that this band thought they had the negotiating power to get a 10x deal out of this.

I understand that. But those rules are also making people give up on contributing to the kernel. When I put code out in the open for others to take advantage of as they wish, I don’t feel like adjusting my work to other people’s standards so that they can use my code.

Valve contributed to Linux before, so the fact that they don’t have any direct upstreaming plans right now indicates that something is causing friction.

Don’t underestimate the political/administrative hurdles for contributing code to projects like Linux. I doubt the technical challenges of the platform driver are keeping Valve from mainline.

Code quality can be a reason to get your code rejected, but often the problem is also getting the right people to look at things before the next conflicts, and formatting the code in the peculiar ways the Linux project likes to format their code. There are tons of patches containing perfectly correct and bug free code abandoned in the mail archives that’ll never get merged because attempts to upstream code were abandoned after back and forths with the team. There’s a wealth of code to be discovered in the mail archives that abandoned their efforts after being told to alter their mail client not to send HTML email alone.

To me, the abandoned effort to mainline code indicates a loss of interest, and that’s rarely caused by technical challenges.

On the upside, because the code is open source, anyone is free to submit the driver again and put in the work to adjust it to the requirements of the Linux kernel project. The Linux maintainers themselves can also step up and apply the necessary corrections, that I’m sure Valve would appreciate, to mainline the code.

Writing working, finished code and changing that code to please the Linux kernel people are two very different things. I’m not surprised the Deck is still running a fork.

Apple and Google turn a blind eye to large apps. App stores need Facebook more than Facebook needs the app stores.

That said, they need some pretty complicated bypasses to not show a microphone icon every time they try to listen in.

I believe these apps will listen in on calls and maybe voice messages, but they’re not enabling the microphone 24/7.

As long as everyone has access to the key bindings, I don’t see how that’s cheating. Both my keyboard and mouse came with software that’ll let me program macros, and I believe some Xbox controllers do this as well. I don’t see why having Deck players at a disadvantage against normal desktop players would be fair.

I suspect it’s less about cheating, and more about this kind of input programming being rather annoying (what if you release a key before the sequence ends? What if you press two keys that hold down the same key?) if you want to program it without introducing weird errors.

When you get and hire a plumber, do you check their criminal history? It’s ridiculous to expect Microsoft to act like the police or government to choose who does and doesn’t comply with laws. They’re not going to hire private investigators to check for crimes, that’s not their job.

Microsoft did pick the location, and as far as I can read, the permits have been signed. Attempts to block construction didn’t pass court, implying that either the local council doesn’t decide over what gets built there or the paperwork is in place.

it just perpetuates colonialism, and Bill Gates+Microsoft have always been in lock step in this regard.

You’re right, Bill Gates is spending billions on fighting malaria because deep in his heart he wants to bring the Congo back under white control. Lmao. Rich people giving away money for tax and image purposes is mostly just that, with a bit of a “I’m helping the world” mindset attached to it. As long as we acknowledge that, I can only see net positives in the charity work. This isn’t the “let’s dump a bunch of money near corrupt warlords” or “let’s kill the local fabric industry by sending our old clothes to a poor country” charity, this is R&D and free mass produced measures, available for cheap in any western country but unaffordable for poor nations, that could never have been produced locally.

The point is the true villain here is colonialism

Ridiculous. India is no longer a colony and even before that it wasn’t an American colony. Making Microsoft responsible for Indian politics, environmental agencies, and law enforcement is literally pulling the power away from the people and placing it with a foreign corporation. Microsoft taking on governmental responsibilities is the closest thing to colonialism they can possibly pull.

India should show that they don’t need a colonial power to instruct them how to control their country and figure this shit out, from local councils to the national government. Infantilisation of ex-colonies is part of the colonial mindset.

Microsoft pulled the same shit here. They lobbied at the national and provincial government, the locals protested but lost, they tried to block construction through environmental concerns (some kind of rare bird or beetle I believe), and this all failed. The reason? The previous elected local and provincial council agreed and signed all the paperwork before people found out what was happening. Does this mean Bill Gates is trying to colonise the Netherlands? No, this just means our politicians are corrupt and the legal instruments to protect the people are lacking. If it weren’t Microsoft, it could’ve been a supermarket distribution center, or a greenhouse, or anything else. The problem is systemic and the solution lies within the political system, not by being angry at the first company that figures out there’s some affordable land somewhere.

They’re it going to be dumping servers in the river. They’ll get moved to whatever recycling infrastructure is nearest, or maybe resold on the second hand market. From what the article says, the local economy and farming industry has been in decline since long before Microsoft bought land for a data center. A picture of a stack of pipes, with no verification that they’re even hooked up, aren’t exactly proof of anything either.

It seems to me that this isn’t about Microsoft or data centers, but about the local government versus the wider government. The locals don’t want a data center but the government above their local representation doesn’t care, and has the power to give out permits for this kind of stuff.

I’m sure there’s illegal waste dumping by the construction companies as locals say (which heavy fines or even prison sentences should be handed to), but data centers aren’t exactly chemical plants. There are many other downsides to data centers (such as fresh water consumption during hot summers, which India has plenty of, orthe impact on the local power grid) but as far as I can tell this is a political disagreement/power imbalance spun into an environmentalist story against a Big Bad Foreign Company to gain sympathy.

I don’t think Microsoft owns a construction company. Surely the shady construction company is to blame in that case? It’s not like Microsoft told them 4k dump their construction waste.

Also, Bill Gates isn’t head of Microsoft anymore, and hasn’t been for years now, maybe even decades at this point. The obsession with Gates doesn’t make much sense when there have been way worse people who have replaced him over the years.

Microsoft actually recently announced modifying their game bar to be more mobile friendly. MS clearly wants handheld manufacturers to use the Xbox bar which isn’t going to happen, but they’re trying. The problem with Windows for handhelds is that the launchers are the unique selling points for most of these manufacturers, so any official Microsoft toolkit would be hidden completely if the manufacturers could have their way.

All of those extra daemons to make Linux usable is exactly what I was wondering about. SteamOS for the Ally means nothing if they don’t build all of that stuff into their distro, preferably by fixing the drivers rather than user mode proxies patching over lacking driver support.

How’s Linux support for the Ally? I know Valve has been doing a lot to make Linux work well on the Deck, so I kind of wonder how much extra work they need to put in to get a similar experience.

As any Linux user with Nvidia hardware probably knows, driver support makes all the difference. Just getting the GUI on screen isn’t enough.

Google clearly shows their intent by not providing an alternative API for content filtering, but that doesn’t mean there are no security concerns. Malicious extensions have become so prevalent that Mozilla had to switch to only permitting signed extensions (despite community outroar) because shitty companies were inserting their extensions into the users’ profile directory without permission and breaking websites and even Firefox itself in some cases.

Secure Boot requires the user to be able to turn it off, so if it gets in the way of anyone, it’s implemented wrong. Microsoft has a weird certification system for “super duper secure” laptops or whatever they call it where only their private key is loaded, but that’s a small amount of expensive business laptops.

If anything, Secure Boot is an example of the “just let me turn it off if I want to” crowd making computers less secure for the majority because Microsoft allows booting a whole bunch of Linux distros on supposedly locked-down systems, which has been proven to make other attacks possible (like that recent one on Lenovo laptops where a Linux boot disk could insert a fingerprint into the fingerprint reader that would unlock TPM-based encryption).

Nobody is preventing you from installing Linux through secure boot. In fact, you can take control of your secure boot settings and prevent anyone from installing Windows on your computer without your password.

Personally, I would’ve lowered the size of this was about security. Make it a nice, round number, like 1024.

I think it must’ve been based on something like “the declarative layout is x KB per entry so if we assume the file can be 10MB at most we get about 30k entries”. Maybe they documented it somewhere, I don’t know.

I think it’s clear that a security concern has been hijacked by the ad people. If it was just about security, some other content blocking API would’ve been set up. Safari on iOS has content blockers and that doesn’t even use web extensions, so clearly there are software design models that allow blocking without the “read any website data any time” risk that WebExtensions pose.

But these features don’t just target ad blockers. It also affects other extensions, like Stylus for user CSS, or TamperMonkey for user scripts. It also affects other content blockers, of course. The big difference is that most extensions that require permanent access to every resource on every page are either ad blockers, malware, or power user scripts.

But they’re not blocking ad blockers. They’re restricting a huge attack surface which has the side effect of making it harder to build ad blockers. With this change, extensions can “only” alter/inspect/redirect/block 30,000 domains if they use the webRequest API. That’s not enough to build uBlock Origin with, but at least there’s limit now.

Google should add a specific ad blocking API (though I suppose that name would run afoul of market competition laws, so maybe they’d need to workshop that stuff info “content enhancers” or whatever) before removing the ability for extensions to hide/block/redirect/alter arbitrary requests, but the way extension’s currently work is pretty terrible.

It’s all fun and games if uBlock Origin uses this API, but if one of your other extensions get bought out by a Chinese malware company, you’d be wondering why “save downloads to Nextcloud” and “remove Google search bar from the browser home page” were able to steal all the money out of your checking account and open several credit cards in your name.

Google’s approach sucks, but in my opinion other browsers should show stronger warnings when installing extensions with access to everything you do in a browser (and outside it, if you screen share).

I don’t really care about Chrome, Chrome users can just download another browser if they don’t like ads. I do care about the risks in other browsers, and browsers need to do a lot better communicating and compartmentalising this risk to end users.

Most motherboards I’ve seen come in two versions: one with WiFi and Bluetooth, and one that doesn’t have wireless but is a few dollars cheaper.

I don’t think it makes sense to cheap out on the motherboard only to spend twice the difference on a USB adapter. I only have a dongle because Bluetooth motherboards weren’t quite so ubiquitous when I bought my current machine.

For prebuilts, the cheapest office PCs seem to come with Bluetooth now. Maybe there’s some kind of ultra barebones office PC stock out there, but I think you need to go out of your way to get those.

What I think matters is how terrible the consumer GPU market has become in the past five years. Decent GPU tiers doubles or tripled in price. Many gamers are probably rocking older hardware than they would’ve if it weren’t for cryptocurrency and AI eating up the consumer GPU market.

Other browser vendors like Microsoft and Brave and Opera could’ve added XL support if they wanted to. It’s not just Google, none of the browser makers want to deal with yet another image format. Only Safari supports the protocol, and even then they don’t support animated images.

IE and pre-Chromium Edge implemented JPEG XR and nobody followed. Safari implemented JPEG 2000 and nobody followed. Implementing an image codec is a lot of work and adds attack surface for hackers, nobody really wants to do that unless they have to.

We have JPEG, we have WebP if you need smaller images than JPEG, and we have AVIF if you want something smaller than PNG for photographs. Unless all of the competition implements JPEG XL again, I don’t think they have any reason to bother. Especially with the whole patent vagueness.

Google could always donate the money to Mozilla and let Mozilla make the right choice, though I’m not sure if legislators will accept that. It’s not like Google would even notice a traffic drop if Mozilla stopped shipping Google as a default. Hell, with Firefox’s tracking protection, they may be glad to lose the extra load that doesn’t help revenue streams.

Luckily, Firefox has such a tiny sliver of market share that rarely anyone will notice. Bigger browsers, like Safari, are more likely. To catch the regulators’ eyes.

They’re generally sold in bulk to supermarkets. You can get them in the usual Chinese supplier websites for a few dollars each, or scour ebay for old ones that stores may sell when they switch systems or whatever.

Someone has already made a home assistant integration for a few types of labels: https://openepaperlink.de/