orclev
@orclev@lemmy.world
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 13 hours ago:
Bitcoin is sadly a failed experiment and you’re not a luddite for pointing out its various shortcomings. I was an early adopter back when you could get an entire coin for a buck or two, but never invested much in it and lost most of what I had when one of the early exchanges imploded.
The concept of bitcoin was great, a decentralized currency not under the control of any government or institution, but that was still reliable and pseudo-anonymous. The execution however was beyond disappointing. It was quickly commandeered by “investors” looking to gamble on something even more volatile than forex markets and ceased being able to function as an actual currency due to the wild swings in value. In order to be a useful currency something must have a relatively stable value. Additionally scammers and criminals also gravitated to bitcoin further driving legitimate businesses away from it not wanting the guilt by association. Finally it turned out that the anonymity was even easier to break than initially thought and the tax headaches involved in buying, selling, or trading in bitcoin or any cryptocurrency make it too annoying to actually use (massively compounded by its wildly fluctuating exchange rates).
- Comment on Microsoft CFO calls for 'intensity' in an internal memo, after blowout earnings 14 hours ago:
It’s because they’re concentrating all the wealth. The wealth in the US used to be far more distributed, with the majority existing in the large middle class. Reagan started the policy by Republicans to pass laws and regulations designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and then Clinton got the Democrats on board with the same strategy. We’re approaching the end game now where the middle and lower classes are nearly bled dry and the rich will start cannibalizing each other to be the last fattest rat in the garbage pile while the entire US economy collapses around them. Be on the lookout for the smarter rats to start fleeing the ship by transferring as much wealth as they can into foreign assets that will survive the collapse of America.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 23 hours ago:
So that’s kind of missing the point. First as I pointed out you don’t actually have to buy anything to see the explicit preview images, so Steam is arguably in violation of those laws. Secondly the issue is that the Visa and Mastercard contracts require companies to be in compliance with local laws. It doesn’t matter whether someone is using a Visa or Mastercard to make the actual payment if the purchase would technically be considered illegal (which it arguably could be in some states/countries under the new super strict porn laws).
At the end of the day this boils down to a) terms of the Visa/Mastercard contracts, and possibly b) new anti-porn laws that are putting an onerous burden on services to collect customers IDs in order to prove age. This isn’t a question of common sense, in contract law (and law in general) it’s about the letter of it and not so much the spirit. Yes, it stands to reason that if you legally own a credit card, and you must be at least 18 to own a card, then you are obviously 18 or older. However that doesn’t matter at all when the laws are written such that services must validate age using a photo ID. It also does not account for stolen credit cards (never mind that that’s a far more serious situation than the possibility of under age kids seeing some naughty pixels).
This whole situation is stupid and Visa and Mastercard clearly need to make some changes to their terms and conditions, but until they do from a legal standpoint businesses like Valve and Itch.io have their hands tied.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
You would think, but I believe the law(s) require verification of a photo ID. I haven’t looked too closely into the UK one, but the way the laws are written for a couple of the US states a credit card doesn’t meet the requirements. There’s also the fact that many of the preview images and videos for porn games on Steam show nudity and/or sex and you can access those without needing to purchase the game (just the birthday question to “verify” your age).
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
I don’t know that anyone has put together a complete list of games taken down specifically because of this, but you can look at steam-tracker.com and sort by date to see what has been removed recently. It doesn’t show why a game was removed, but you can usually infer a lot from the title and cover art.
Also I should clarify it wasn’t specifically multiple large waves, there was a large initial group, but the remainder have been slowly trickling in. I’d guess there’s someone going through Steams catalog slowly flagging games to remove. The first group was likely an easy keyword search, while the rest are being evaluated on a case by case basis most likely.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
That’s what it started with but it seems to have quickly expanded to include a lot of more mundane things. Initial reporting was only on the first wave of censored games and didn’t include the stuff that was removed later on.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
It’s a catch 22. You need a phenomenal amount of capital to stand up a payment network with all those criteria, but anyone with that amount of capital can’t actually be trusted not to abuse their position in exactly the same way the existing banking networks have.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
They’re trying with GNU Taler, but it’s pretty much a pipe dream at this point.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
The main reason is that the credit industry isn’t in the business of running an intelligence service or part of law enforcement. That said, what they are connected to is almost the same as an intelligence service, that being the advertising industry, and there’s literally nothing stopping them from selling or even being forced to give their data to law enforcement. The only reason it doesn’t happen more I’d say is just the optics of it.
Ultimately what’s needed is a digital payment system that’s at least somewhat anonymous, but that’s an incredibly hard nut to crack. Bitcoin tried it, but largely failed to do so (and immediately got corrupted by speculators that wanted to use it as a forex instead of currency). A couple of the other crypto currencies that have come out since then have claimed to be better but I’m still incredibly skeptical that there’s any real anonymity there.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
Nobody on any side has cited any sections of any agreement specifically. The closest we’ve got is the statement from Stripe who is the payment processor who recently had to turn down business with a womens sexual education charity (despite spending months trying to get to an agreement) and the reason they cited was contractual obligations with banking networks including Visa and Mastercard. They stated they want to be able to process payments for porn companies, and that they’re exploring other options, but they couldn’t at this time.
- Comment on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down, but Valve says payment processors 'specifically cited' a Mastercard rule about damaging the brand 1 day ago:
Valves statement also matches with the claims of Itch.io, Stripe, and what Collective Shout themselves have claimed. So we’ve got two different claims, on one side are Visa and Mastercard, and on the other we’ve got literally everyone else. I feel pretty confident about which one is a load of bullshit.
It’s also worth noting that Visa and Mastercard are playing semantic games with their statements. Nobody ever claimed they were “refusing legal transactions”, rather what they’re doing is threatening to stop working with any business that doesn’t implement censorship that they’re happy with. It’s a subtle but important difference and they’ve never denied that’s what they’re doing.
- Comment on "Tea cup" app - user database leaked today (incl. drivers license & IDs). Daily reminder not to give your ID to online services [THEY DO NOT PROTECT YOUR INFORMATION] 1 week ago:
Uh… What’s the tea app?
- Comment on New youtube web video player interface...? 1 week ago:
It looks a lot like their smart TV interface which has always been less functional than their web or mobile app interface. They’re probably trying to cut the UI down to just the bare minimum that the majority of casual users regularly use. In part I’d assume to reduce the maintenance overhead, but I’m sure it likely will also make things harder for ad blockers.
- Comment on Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps 3 weeks ago:
Looks awesome, but unfortunately seems to only be for the UK and EU. I wish the US market would get something similar.
- Comment on Unless users take action, Android will let Gemini access third-party apps 3 weeks ago:
That is literally the only thing keeping me from installing Graphene on my phone.
- Comment on Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10 4 weeks ago:
Same difference. If someone has a Windows 10 device and got rid of it, but didn’t purchase a Windows 11 device to replace it, they’re no longer a Windows user. Sure they could have had multiple Windows devices for some reason, but it’s rare for someone to own more computers than they have potential users to operate them (barring things like schools or companies that maintain a fixed pool of devices, although even they try to avoid having significant excess inventory). So yes, fewer Windows devices is to within a certain margin of error fewer Windows users.
- Comment on Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10 4 weeks ago:
Yes, as I said, most went to mobile or tablet, so Android or iOS. Basically Windows users went to one of Android, iOS, OS X, or Linux. Some OS X users meanwhile went to iOS or Android.
- Comment on Windows 11 finally overtakes Windows 10 4 weeks ago:
MS also recently shared that they lost 400 million Windows users. I bet most of them were Windows 10 users. This isn’t “people finally moved from 10 to 11”, this is “people finally got so fed up with Windows that they abandoned it for other options” (mostly mobile/tablet but also some Linux and OS X).
- Comment on Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker 4 weeks ago:
The problem is that the biggest service Cloudflare provides is DDoS protection, and doing that requires that you have more bandwidth available than your attacker. Having enough bandwidth to withstand modern botnet powered DDoS attacks is ridiculously expensive (and it’s also a finite resource, there’s only so much backbone infrastructure). Basically it’s economically infeasible to have multiple companies providing the service Cloudflare does. You might be able to get away with two companies doing so, but it’s unlikely you could manage more than that without some of them starting to go bankrupt.
- Comment on Session Messenger 4 weeks ago:
I dove into their FAQ which explains it. I don’t agree with their logic, but the core idea seems to be that in order to run their equivalent of a TOR relay you have to stake a certain amount of their crypto, and you periodically receive some of the crypto as a reward for running the node. The theory is that the more nodes there are, the less crypto is available on the market and the more expensive it will become to acquire enough crypto to create new nodes. It’s all supposed to make it prohibitively expensive to control a significant amount of the network.
The fatal flaw in the reasoning is the assumption that anyone will actually care enough about their crypto to drive the price up. With no central authority setting a price for the crypto the price becomes whatever anyone is willing to buy or sell it for. Their fatal assumption is that scarcity automatically generates value. It does not. A thing needs some kind of value in addition to scarcity to become valuable.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
You’re technically right but only because Taiwan (despite what China fervently wants) is a separate country from China. If you follow the official Chinese party line that they aren’t then yes you could make a modern phone entirely from parts made in “China”. It would at a minimum be more “made in China” than anything Trump is peddling as “made in USA”.
- Comment on Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts 5 weeks ago:
That’s certainly part of it, but I’d use any mobile payment app, not just Googles one, but there’s basically zero competition there. Some banks apparently had their own mobile payment support briefly, but it seems like just about every single one of them has removed that feature and replaced it with a wrapper around Google Pay.
- Comment on Fairphone announces the €599 Fairphone 6, with a 6.31" 120Hz LTPO OLED display, a Snapdragon 7s Gen 3 chip, and enhanced modularity with 12 swappable parts 5 weeks ago:
This is nice for Europe I guess, and I want to like the fairphone, but unfortunately it’s not viable for me.
Besides basic phone features and the ability to run Android apps I have 3 requirements, 2 of which the fairphone fails at. I need it to be usable in the US on my phone carrier. I need to be able to use Google Pay or another mobile payment alternative (that’s accepted in most stores). Finally it needs to have at least a 48 hour battery life.
Fairphone unfortunately doesn’t work in the US with most carriers, and the one that kills not only it but all the de-googled phones, it doesn’t support mobile payment of any kind. I’ve done a ton of research trying to find some kind of fix for that second point because I’d gladly use something like GrapheneOS if I could, but every time the answer I come to is it’s just not possible.
- Comment on Tesla's European car sales nosedive for fifth month as customers switch to Chinese EVs 5 weeks ago:
That is not even remotely why they added a tax on EVs. The reason they added the extra tax is because they make a ton of money by taxing gas and as EVs are gaining popularity they’re starting to see their tax revenues plummet. There is a nugget of truth in that some of those tax revenues are used to pay for maintaining the roads and that EVs do still put wear and tear on the roads, but it’s not that they’re destroying roads any more than any other car does.
If you’re seeing a drop in road quality it’s because your government isn’t paying to have the roads maintained like they have in the past, not because there are more EVs driving around.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
Pretty sure he meant intentional.
- Comment on How can websites verify unique (IRL) identities? 1 month ago:
Safe and private? Nope absolutely impossible. If you don’t care about privacy at all pretty much the only way to do it is to have your government issue you a unique hardware token and require that to access the internet and it shares your unique ID with the website. It’s not 100% impossible to spoof an identity as you could borrow/steal someone elses token, but if they were secured with a pin/password or basic biometric it would become significantly harder.
- Comment on AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic 1 month ago:
So I had this joke idea of “they’ll just start showing the ads to the AIs”, but the more I thought about it the more it started to sound less like a joke. Imagine if someone figured out how to cram ads into the AI training models and it skewed the outputs. Why astroturf when you can train the AIs to astroturf for you. This is some black mirror shit and now I’ve made myself a bit depressed.
- Comment on AI search finds publishers starved of referral traffic 1 month ago:
Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I’m too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn’t working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.
- Comment on Mastodon: New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content 1 month ago:
So CAP theorem says you can have a distributed system with at most two of Consistent, Available, or Partition tolerant. I haven’t looked too closely into the federation implementation of Mastodon but I suspect they opted for Available and Partition tolerant (as Consistent and Partition tolerant would mean the entire network goes down when one node does, while Consistent and Available would mean once any node lost contact with the network it could never again rejoin). Since consistency is not guaranteed (and provably can’t be) there is absolutely no way to guarantee that deleting something from one instance will remove it from all instances even allowing for a very generous time span.
TL;DR: You’re not just right, you’re mathematically right.
- Comment on 16 Billion Apple, Facebook, Google And Other Passwords Leaked — Act Now 1 month ago:
Kind of both. The modern way of brute forcing is to just hash the 100,000 most common passwords, previously leaked passwords, and minor permutations of all of the above. It’s computationally and space intensive, but for a determined attacker entirely doable on modern hardware. That’s why complexity matters, because it’s not a simple iteration through every possible permutation, but a targeted search through a known password list.