Not even planned obsolescence... It's just "hey, you guys aren't buying our slightly better new version. We were talking today about how to make a little bit more money, and we decided, hey, we don't want to maintain this anymore. We also don't want to unlock it and let someone else take over, and while we're at it let's just start shutting off features until you buy a new one. Because fuck you"
theneverfox
joined 1 year ago
Oh, it's always been around. Before the Internet even... It's always been there, hell as a kid I jailbroke my PSP and loaded it up homebrew games, some of them were quite good.
And before that, there were no AAA studios, there was only indie. Doom was made by an indie studio, Minecraft was indie, flash games were indie, even the original text mmorpgs played over arpanet were indie
They've always been there, often pushing the boundaries and trailblazing. It may not have been mainstream, but it's always been at the forefront of gaming, trying new things and trailblazing
Three things are different now - it's far easier to advertise and sell indie games, powerful tools are more available to the common person than ever, and modern gaming is getting worse by the day
Which is great, but also a double edged sword. Games (even fairly simple games) take a long time to make - like years if you do it consistently in your free time, or months going full time.
Early Access was great for this - you could put up the prototype, then raise the money and support to quit your job and hire an artist to flesh it out. But if everything is early access, nothing is.
Conversely, if you go into game dev communities (haven't found any great ones since I left that site), you hear all about people dropping $1500 for marketing that does nothing, because indie gamers tend to like indie style social media, and mainstream gamers you can easily pay to reach don't really like indie games
Skill with social media is key to a successful indie game, but there's not a lot of crossover between that and making a good game
So this kind of thing is huge - if piratesoftware recommends a game I'll at least look at it, because I respect his opinion on game design. If I see an ad, store page, or random clip of a game, I'm unlikely to look at it
Indie gaming doesn't need this because indie games are rare, it needs it because it's so difficult to find the hidden gems buried in mountains of mediocre games
I mean, that sounds like it would be really hard to keep them all properly aligned - perhaps we could somehow modify the roads to keep them centered mechanically
And what's the alternative? You learn to maintain your own equipment and take operation of your powerful and dangerous tools into your own hands, like you do when operating it? You find a local mechanic, like you would with a car, plane, or boat? You keep using the same equipment without paying the manufacturer more until it deteriorates too much to repair?
That's insane. There's not even a subscription involved, it's deranged. Forget your rice, the shareholders need bigger made up numbers!
And then you have Woz, who is an engineer, who shared his own stock with employees when Jobs declined to, who sold off his investments when he had enough money to live the rest of his life in the utmost luxury. Which stopped him considerably short of being a billionaire, people who continue to hoard amounts of wealth far beyond what a person could ever use (like Bill Gates)
Woz was an engineer who figured out how to make a computer run on televisions to make it more affordable for the average person. He worked for a living - comparing him to Bill Gates is unfair.
He actually did the thing, personally with his own hands. He isn't rich because he exploited people, he's rich despite others becoming far richer by exploiting his work
He did the thing that all billionaires should have done long before they became billionaires - he realized he had more than enough, and he stopped hoarding wealth.
He's not a billionaire - I'm pretty sure he got X million, then decided that he had enough
He weighs in frequently on technology issues, his takes aren't always ideal, but he's a consistent advocate in an area he's qualified to have an opinion in. He also helped found the EFF
From Wikipedia:
Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category." He also said that he only invests in things "close to his heart". When Apple first went public in 1980, Wozniak offered $10 million of his own stock to early Apple employees, something Jobs refused to do.
I mean yeah, but with good reason
To put it another way, people don't trust Musk with anything remotely important
Oh, they got it. Just not from Apple... If you have physical device access, we have basically zero methods to stop nation state level access
I believe there was an Israeli provided crack on that issue
I think it is an interesting idea to turn libraries into a 3rd space.
I think it's both an interesting and fantastic idea. I could not be more for it
Haha, doctors? Nah, we're way past that stage fam
Private practice was largely choked out - most doctors work for healthcare systems now. They make reasonable money, but they're pushed to their limits to be just comfortably middle class these days. Remaining private practice doctors get paid a bit better if they have a lot of work, but it's not what it used to be
Healthcare systems, pharma, medical device producers, and insurance. That's where all the money goes
I took that as an implication that our political parties have stupid names
I mean, if you set up your os on an encrypted ram disk, then set it to restart when the server rack door was unlocked/opened and didn't leave a backdoor for yourself to remote in, you could have a situation where you entirely lack the capability to give them access to anything before that moment. A skilled hacker might be able to get in through an exploit or do something crazy with cryogenics to read the memory at the time of shutdown, but a quick restart would overwrite most of what's in memory and scrub that
Legally, there's not much better defense than "I'm sorry your honor, I can't provide access to the running system in the same way I can't un-shatter a smashed mug". If someone shows up with a warrant, you could explain that it'll wipe itself if they open or unplug it, and it might've done so already. Then you guide them to it, hand over the key to the server cabinet, and let them decide to open the cabinet and destroy evidence so they can take it with them. Or they can take you at your word, and give up.
Court orders can't break physics, and as a VPN your reasoning for setting up the system like this is to make your service more appealing to customers - the purpose is not to aid in a crime or destroy evidence, it's just the normal course of business.
The same way that most companies wipe their emails after 30 days - yes, it potentially destroys incriminating paper trails, but that's just a side effect of the security policy you've had all along
Granted, there's probably some sketchy sealed laws they could use to force you to backdoor your own system moving forward, but you can fight that as it's undue hardship. It requires a non-negligible amount of work and would make your product less competitive
They might win in the end if they keep pushing, and even might be able to order you to "keep up the canary paper" (meaning keep claiming not even you have access to the running system), but more likely they'd get a warrant for your customer financial records and try to find an easier path to find what they want elsewhere