Friendly reminder: Dotorow’s wife is a director of a Disney subsidiary highly likely to be involved with DRM.

Ms Taylor is now the Director, StudioLab at The Walt Disney Studios. In that role she is responsible for ensuring that Disney continues to invest in the intersection between online tech and content distribution.

Hell yes. The company is a good one, as far as I know. Like when an alpha build of the first game leaked, they ended up providing a safe download link for it themselves and created an official space to discuss it on their forums.

I’ve always wondered where the dividing line really lies between doxxing and just compiling publicly available info into an easy to digest format.

Clearly, tying someone’s pseudonymous online identity (like my lemmy account) to a real life identity crosses that line (except when those identities are explicitly linked by the account owner).

But like, what about a lemmy account that regularly posts links to github projects all by one github account, posted to lemmy a few hours after they go up on github, where the github has a link to the github owner’s linkedin? The lemmy account is not explicitly linked to the identity in linkedin, but it only shortcuts perhaps 3 minutes of data gathering, and all the individual pieces are public.

What about if you have someone’s full name and rough area of residence, as if you met someone at an event in your area? You can probably find their Facebook, from that a handful of info, chain that together with stuff like public yearbooks, linkedin, online white/yellpw pages, etc. Without digging into private information, just using public sources, you can get a shocking amount of info on most people.

All that rambling aside, live imagery of a person’s face being matched to public pictures attached to online profiles is clearly a leap in the wrong direction, but the bigger issue is just how much public info is floating around about people.

While it’s a privacy nightmare either way, on some level I prefer things like this being in the hands of the public instead of only available to corporations. I have this naieve hope that someday it might make people examine the overwhelming amount of data being collected all the time.

Welcome to the reality of indie game dev. Great ideas are comparatively easy, effectively dirt cheap. Like most things worth doing in life, the difficulty lies in actualizing those ideas and bringing them to reality.

The only real solution is experience. Beyond that: Learn to treat your “amazing game ideas” like cattle instead of pets. Prioritize rapid prototyping of your main gameplay loop/systems before you fall in love with the set dressing.

All of that said, by just finishing a project you are already further along than 90% of amatuer devs. The best takeaway from 4chan’s long running amatuer game dev threads: just like make game.

Creating something that exists beyond your imagination is always progress forward. Releasing a game, even one that doesn’t meet what you hoped, even one that’s objectively shit, is monumental progress.

Now toss it up on itch.io or whatever storefront and start on your next attempt.

What recent events? People being weidly offended by “woke-ot” and the unnoficial community mod who apologized for being shitty years ago, or is there something new I missed?

The linked Github doesn’t have any information on why it was forked. The readme hasn’t been updated at all to say anything about why this should be used over normal godot.

Oh my god, this particular point has been so frustrating to me. People talking about how much time it saves them with boilerplate code: If it’s that boilerplate make yourself a fucking template! Learn your IDE’s damn features, because most have code snippet features now where you can save them right in the damn IDE.

There’s vanishly little that LLMs are actually being used for that can’t be done far cheaper (computatiomally and cost-wise) with existing tools.

According to the Ryujinx (Switch emulator) Mac M1 branch maintainer, they literally did send people to the home of Ryujinx’s lead dev in Brazil.

So we might already be there.

My suggestion is that next time you play through to use the Viva New Vegas modpack, or the equivalent one for the Tale of Two Wastelands (puts Fallout 3 into New Vegas’s slightly updated engine).

Great “vanilla plus” experience. Just try to avoid getting into modding hell, spending more time tacking extra mods on top than playing.

You’re being ridiculous. It’s not a far strech to think that most people would believe that a company shouldn’t be able to take back something you bought from them. This has implications with digital content in general.

The issue is that you’re looking at group that shrinks at every step.

How many people own digital copies of things? How many of them have been through a situation where a company removes their access to that digital copy? How many of them actually noticed? How many of them had that experience with a videogame? How many of them got upset enough that it stuck with them rather than moving on? How many of them even know this movement exists?

If you get the word out, and frame it as the first step in a fight for improved digital ownership rights for all digital media, you increase your base of potential joiners.

The biggest thing is that you need to get the word out even further about it. I’m subscribed to a ton of gaming youtube channels and the only coverage of this that I’ve seen is from Ross and one other channel. Get bigger youtube names in on this.

Reach out to individual indie developers to ask them to sign a charter to support the movement and spread the word. Run a game jam on itch.io to start making it cool to support it and spread the word. For very small devs that are just putting the game files for single player games out there with no drm applied, it’s literally free to throw in behind this and could be free extra marketing for both parties.

Without a counter movement, or some way for people to register that you are against this movement, you have incomplete info and cannot assume that people not supporting this are actively against it.

It would be just as foolish to say that everyone supports it because 361,826 of 361,826 who spoke up said that they support it, right?

Movements like this live and die on awareness.

Wonderful counterpoint for one of the common defenses lately, that it cites sources.

Like holy shit this is embarassing.

This should realistically be part of every company’s disaster recovery/business continuity plan.

The knife doesn’t insist it won’t hurt you, and you can’t get cut holding the handle. Comparatively, AI insists it is correct, and you can get false information using it as intended.

You can put the script itself as the link. Shortcut to: powershell -command “Write-Host ‘Gonna pwn your shit’”

Yes, but also whoever set the defaults for the *arr tools. Why would any filename with extra shit past the extensions you’re looking for be considered an acceptable result?

Tack $ on the end of your regex, for fucks sake.

At this point we’re just anecdote vs anecdote, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised during most of my attempts.

I’m not going to try and sift through collections on abandonware sites and try to cross reference them against known copies sold. The only person who can speak to your personal white whale is you.

archive.org has many gigs worth of 90s era “900 in 1” shareware/freeware CDs on it. Games that never sold copies and were just stolen personal projects shoved onto one disc.

Recently I found multiple users on SoulSeek that collectively have nearly the whole discography of a relatively unknown japanese house music label, Far East Recordings. The main artist Soichi Terada’s work on the Ape Escape game soundtracks (only thing he’s known for in the US) is easily available as are his CD releases, but there’s a ton of vinyl only releases (he was prolific in the late 80s through mid 90s) that I could find evidence existed but couldn’t actaully find the music anywhere. On top of that he did a lot of collabs with japanese artists that just don’t exist online, and I found a ton of their stuff on SoulSeek as well.

Also, be the change. I’ve backed up all the CDs from my childhood, and put them up on the archive if I couldn’t easily find them on it already. When I find time I’ll do the same with all the old freeware games I downloaded back in the early 2000’s. Keep backups. I’ve got easily accessible backups going back to my family’s Windows XP, and I have our Win 98 drives whenever I decide to buy the right adapters.

Anyway, hope you find what you’re looking for.

Saved you a click: Exploit requires attacker to already have an account in the local administrators group, and appears to only allow local admin privileges anyway.

You can remap the C:\ drive (including the OS files in system and windows folders) to a location you already control, with exploited system files and dlls, rather than having to go through UAC and confirm you want to use admin privileges to replace them in-situ.

Microsoft doesn’t consider this an actual vuln because local admins are already defacto trusted and able to use their admin status to do all this anyway. They could just disable UAC locally anyway.

You might be surprised. Plenty of sites backing up whatever they can. Try archive.org and various abandonware sites.

Yep, Valve also normalized microtransactions significantly through TF2.

Once again, Valve started it as something reasonable: Cosmetic options, then expanded to allow shortcutting unlocking alt weapons through $1-3 charges instead of through game progression (achievements unlocked alt weapons at first). Other companies followed suite in ever increasingly predatory ways, and Valve got worse with it too over time.

I’ll tell you something you missed:

Steam’s DRM is notoriously easy to bypass, allowing that. They also don’t force DRM on their platform, it’s entirely developer/publisher opt-in (and they are also free to add additional DRM on top if they wish), and many many releases on Steam run fine directly from the executable without the launcher running.

Edit: For the record, I pirate before I buy, buy on DRM free platforms (GOG mainly) where possible, and use a third party launcher to unify my collection across multiple storefronts and many many loose executables into one spot.

Let’s also not forget how absolutely groundbreaking Steam was for digital distribution.

I really have a hard time accepting that they “pushed” the industry rather than that they offered a platform with features that were worlds beyond what was available at the time for game developers and publishers. No one was bribed. There were no shady backroom deals. No assassinations of competitors (in fact the opposite, doing experiments with cross platform purchases with the PS3 and with GOG). There was no embrace extend extinguish, as there was nothing already existing like it to embrace or extinguish.

Also saying that they are now supporting linux and open source is ignoring a long history of their work with linux. This isn’t something new for them. What’s new is yet another large step forward in their investment, not their involvement.

Look, like you, I am concerned about their level of control over digital distribution game sales for the PC market. But from a practical standpoint I find them incredibly hard to have any large amount of negative feelings about them due to their track record, and the fact that they are not a publicly traded company so they are not beholden to the normal shareholder drive for profit at any cost. I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned if any exist rather than “proprietary” and “too big”.

On top of that, Steam DRM is pretty notably easy to bypass, with what appears to be relatively little effort from Valve to eliminate the methods. They aren’t doing the normal rat race back and forth between crackers and the DRM devs that you would expect.

Anyway, again I’ll say: I’d love to hear more reasons to be concerned beyond “proprietary” and “too big”.