It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.

You should really spend some time learning about WiFi signals. Tracking down rogue Access Points is a pretty common thing and having the SSID turned off does fuck all to prevent it. On the easy end, many enterprise wireless network controllers have rogue AP detection built right in and will show you a map of the location of the rogue AP. Harder, but still entirely possible, is running around with a setup just detecting the signal and triangulating it.

LA will be “car-free” for the Olympics. For definitions of “car-free” which include crippling car traffic everywhere except tiny islands around a few select locations. Said locations being strategically placed to make the crippling traffic worse everywhere else. And once it’s all over, everything which was built out will be allowed to fall into disuse and disrepair. As is the Olympic Tradition. But, at least, a bunch of large companies will make a lot of money, with all of the expenses covered by California and LA tax payers. Again, in the best Olympic Tradition.

On the NES, I always enjoyed Base Wars. It was baseball, except not boring. Instead of a player being “out” when you got the ball to the base ahead of him, you fought for the base.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. – Gabe Newell, 2011

Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.

And, so long as Steam continues to treat it’s customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that’s the problem with Pitchford’s whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you’ll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it’s probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large “first mover” advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.

I would add the admittance of China to the WTO as another proximate cause. And one which probably had more of a material effect than NAFTA; but, NAFTA had already become a GOP talking point and it just stuck. China’s entry to the WTO was also moved over the finish line by Bush II, though most of the ground work was laid by Clinton. So, it wouldn’t have had the same clean narrative as NAFTA. US Employment in manufacturing went into freefall in late 2000 and early 2001. This was also during a recession, so that is intermixed with the effects of those changes in international trade. But, even as the recession receded and the US entered an economic boom, leading up to the 2008 crash, manufacturing employment in the US either held steady or decreased slightly. It’s unsurprising that the same period saw a lot of offshoring of manufacturing to China. And this was also the period of Neoliberal economists pushing “comparative advantage” and how the US losing all those manufacturing jobs was a good thing.

So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
– Barack Obama, 2008

At time of writing, it’s unclear what systems these hypothetical titles will release for, given King’s status as a mobile studio.
Building out bigger series like Overwatch and Diablo would be a boon, too.

You guys have phones, don’t you?

Huh and here I was complaining about the new episode of Futurama focusing on NFTs as being “out of date”. Guess everything old is new.

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

The Crypto Wars have never ended. Governments dream of a world without public access to encryption and privacy. And many government attacks on encryption are done “for the children”.

Does this mean that the main dashboard will go back to the original XBox 360 dashboard and not the ad laden abomination it quickly became?

“The cloud” continues to be someone else’s computer. If you put your data up there, it’s no longer your data.

Reddit is (no longer) Fun.
Like others, the API change was the final straw. I used Reddit is Fun (RIF) for years, even paid for the full version, because both the official Reddit app and the mobile web interface were terrible. I was also using the old web interface with the Reddit Enhancement Suite, and that went on “maintenance mode”. Overall, Reddit just reached a point that the enshitification was getting to be too much for me to stomach. So, here I am.

Alcohol, a common cause of and response to children.

Ya, the “hey, pay a bunch of real money to unlock this quest” is a shitty way to monetize expansions. If they want to have a paid DLC, just have a paid DLC. Also, this shit:

It’s instead being sold via the Creation Club storefront that’s also been added to the game as part of this update, for a price of 700 credits.
For a bit of context, purchasing a pack of 1000 Creation Club credits - which is what you’d need to be able to buy this quest…

The execs of any company which has made up “coins” which cannot be bought in exact amount to cover exact items should be dragged out into the street, and have molten gold poured down their throats.

They just want to Reach Out, Hug and Smother. What’s so horrible about that?

Russia could do that. But, they are kinda busy trying to keep up with demand from their own forces. And that’s only going to get worse as they run out of mothballed Soviet shitboxes to reactivate.

Probably looking to make more money by convincing people on KickStarter to back another VR headset, only to sell the whole thing to a large corp.

Why is this being added to the browser and not as an extension? At the very least, I would assume it’s pretty easy to turn off; but, this looks like feature creep causing the browser to bloat up again.

Jokes on them, I rarely buy a game at release anyway. An extra year of console players beta-testing the game just means I am more likely to know a game is a dud that much sooner.

Not really. Fallout 76 is the same sort of bland grind-fest you can find in any MMO. The main storyline is ok, but the world, crafting and just everything else about the game is designed to push you towards the normal MMO “grind this quest 10,000 times to improve your gearscore” gameplay. It also leans heavily on punishing you for not subscribing to “Plus”; so, imagine the weight problems you have in a normal Bethesda game, except now you also have weight limits in your one container at home. It is manageable, but it’s a pretty obvious ploy to convince you to pay for Plus.

If what you really want is “Fallout, except I get to bring a friend instead of a worthless companion”, Fallout 76 isn’t really it. It’s probably worth playing with a friend just long enough to complete most of the main quest line; but, the late game is crap. You will hit a point where all you are doing is daily quests to grind some faction’s reputation. When you hit that stage, it’s time to move on.