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Revenue is not the same thing as profit. Storing nearly two decades of videos with global CDNs costs a lot of money.

Whether or not the exclusivity deal is between the publisher and the store or just the publisher doesn’t make a difference for the consumer. There’s no functional difference between Counter Strike 2 requiring Steam and Fortnite requiring the Epic launcher except that gamers are used to Steam.

No exclusivity for games

Valve doesn’t need to pay for exclusivity because it already dominates the market. There are many games that are effectively Steam exclusives because they are not available through other methods on PC. Half-Life 2 received a lot of criticism at launch for requiring Steam.

They purposefully made SteamOS open source so that other companies can easily release portable PC gaming products

SteamOS is open source, but you need a license to use the Steam brand, and Valve doesn’t allow that. One company tried to make a handheld console with SteamOS, but it can’t be legally bundled with the hardware: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033161/ayaneo-next-lite-steam-deck-competitor-steamos

That said, who knows what happens when he dies?

Yes, that’s the point of the article. If you need one specific person to stay alive for something to continue functioning well, you don’t have a business, you have the British monarchy.

Valve has avoided many of the same anti-consumer moves as other tech and gaming giants, likely due to its smaller size, status as a non-public company, and the long-time leadership of Gabe Newell and other executives. Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.

Valve is not immune to enshittification, and it has already happened on some level with minimal current Mac support, facilitating gambling through item trades, etc.

I mean, even those old iPhones have better software support than a lot of low-end/budget Android phones. The iPhone 11 still has iOS 17 and will probably get security patches for another year or two (assuming it gets dropped with iOS 18, maybe Apple will try pushing it another year).

I would like to see more collective action, but it’s also incredibly difficult to put your housing situation on the line when the US (and most states) does not give you a functional backup. As you said, it’s capitalism at work.

I mentioned in the article that 5G home internet is not a solution for everyone. The reliability varies significantly by location and network quality—some people have no issues, for others it’s unusable. It’s not a perfect solution that will fix the US’ infrastructure problems, but in the meantime it is making a difference for some people.

I mean, yeah, just leaving it at “china bad” is still xenophobia. Tech companies in the US and other countries can be just as shady.

I have 2FA through Authy on my Microsoft account.

It does all those things because you explicitly agree to it before getting the TV. Not the same as paying outright for a TV that somehow needs a constant connection.

No it’s not, AirTags are just Bluetooth beacons. When an iPhone or other apple device picks them up, the location data is uploaded to Apple’s servers and then sent to whoever owns the AirTag. There’s no two-way communication and the owner of the AirTag doesn’t get any personal ñinfo from the devices picking it up.

Yep, most of them won’t complain if you just never connect them to Wi-Fi during setup.

I did say the element zapper was missing. uBO Lite is using the same default filterlists as uBO, which includes some trackers: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets

There are malicious extensions found in the chrome web store pretty frequently, and if I was making one, I would definitely use the API that lets me man-in-the-middle all network requests. So google’s statement that 40% or whatever of malicious extensions use that API seems plausible to me.

You could definitely make the argument that Google should just do a better job of reviewing extensions, but that alone also wouldn’t be a 100% solution. Google definitely messed up with the original rule limits, though. If chrome is more optimized then surely it must be able to handle just as many (if not more) rules than uBO.

uBlock Origin has a Manifest V3 version, it’s not going anywhere. I swear there are more people not reading anything here than Facebook.

This is actually about Daylight Savings Time

Right, my point was just that the article is wrong/clickbait. The changes won’t “disable uBlock Origin” or “essentially kill off uBlock Origin”.

This article is really wrong, wow. There is already a Manifest V3-compliant version of uBlock Origin, it’s discussed in this thread: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

I don’t know if it’s stated definitively anywhere, but I’m pretty sure the plan is to roll out that different version to Chrome users as an update to the existing extension. It’s going to be slightly worse because MV3 is still missing some API features.