The problem is that people are so used to the notion that everything is “free” that many are convinced that online services should always be free and balk at the idea of paying for anything.

A huge part of that is that most people don’t consider privacy concerns to be a cost. All they factor into their evaluation is whether it costs them actual money.

Honestly, if it was a union of indie developers making this argument, it would hold a lot more weight than Tim Fucking Sweeney making it. “Valve’s cut is too big, smaller developers get screwed” isn’t an invalid argument in and of itself; if Epic put all the money they’re pouring into exclusivity agreements with developers and shit into trying to make EGS have some level of feature parity (for end users) with Steam, they might have more success. As it stands, they’re just trying to strong-arm players into using their (much shittier) platform and it’s turned a lot of folks, me included, vehemently against giving them the slightest chance.

I always love these release notes. “Fixed a few modern games, and also a random title from 2004.” The fact that there was someone who still cares about Warlords Battlecry III enough to verify that this fix works for it is beautiful. Old games rock.

Jesus, it’d be easier to list the parts you don’t have to remove.

See, you could have just said “Oh, silly me! Thanks!”, and nobody would have thought less of you, but now, everyone thinks you’re a prick.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.

It also has a neat kind of crowd-sourced verification attached to it.

If someone asks a question, and someone else gives an incorrect answer, chances are good that someone will see that and correct them. If, on the other hand, everyone goes and looks up the answer, some people might get an incorrect answer and have no one to correct it, further disseminating false information.

Obviously this isn’t perfect, and requires that the information is fact-based in the first place, but it’s interesting to think about any time you see someone correct someone else on the internet.

This seems like an insane price. I’m generally not opposed to ad-based services offering an optional subscription to remove ads, but holy shit. $13 / mo. for social media? Fuck the hell off.

I think it was right about the time you chose an Apple product, from the look of it.

Trying a few different browsers I have installed:

• Firefox in Strict mode with LocalCDN: 42% (eww)
• Brave (stock): 72%
• Brave w/ stock uBlock Origin: 78%
  • 100% w/ custom filters enabled
• Opera w/ uBlock: 75%
• Vivaldi (stock): 55%
• LibreWolf w/ uBlock and LocalCDN: 70%

Your article link is broken, so I haven’t read it, and can’t comment on it directly if it answers these questions, but…

I think it really will depend on how it’s written. If it’s only banning the “sale” of user location data, it might be possible to get around by selling unrelated data that just happens to come with location-identifiable data as an extra ‘free’ include, or something stupid like that… It’s really going to come down to how it’s enforced, and what kind of penalties there are for violating it. If it’s enforced intermittently, and the fines are too low, nobody’s going to care.

That said, it’s a great step in a good direction. I’m from MA; the government here is occasionally somewhat sane when it comes to protections like this, so I’ve got hope that this will have some teeth. (Maybe unlike the right-to-repair legislation that passed years ago and still has yet to be enforced…)

Edit after the new link was posted:

The most exciting thing in here to me is:

Requiring law enforcement to provide a warrant to access user location data could also help curtail the rising trend of law enforcement buying that information commercially.

Law enforcement is quickly moving from “Mostly neutral” to “Outright hostile” to the general population and anything that curbs their abuses of the system is a net positive in my book.