You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…

Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.

Wasn’t “woke” originally a good term until right wing screechers took it over at an insult? They do that a lot, every time some positive phrase or idea starts to gain traction. Seems intentional.

For those who don’t know, In the US, the two political parties basically switched sides at one point. I only skimmed, but here’s an article about it:

https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html

But I’d rather look at what modern people are doing and saying, than muse about what older generations would have wanted or done.

When companies tell you they respect your privacy and you should give them your data, you tell them it doesn’t matter. Because policies can change, and at the end of the day, your privacy isn’t always up to an single company.

Wait. This was last year, so not the capitol riot. What happened in January last year? I’m in a decent mood today. Just going to skip looking deeper into this one. I have Factorio to play!

I hope so. It’s more likely something infected Firefox itself, and didn’t get into the OS. But when I checked the modem logs, it happened up to a couple of months after the fact. That’s worrying.

What’s even more worrying is that a couple of websites told me I had an IP address that didn’t match my home IP, but would provide the correct one if I refreshed the page a couple of times. So some kind of covert proxy or VPN type of thing was happening.

I ended up just wiping everything, to be safe. Still a bit paranoid though.

I know this story is more-so about a trojan in a trusted place, and not general security, but I have an anecdote to share.

So, time to fess up here. I previously complained about Google trapping me in captcha-hell for enabling Ublock Origin.

I was wrong.

Turns out that I had visited a movie streaming site a while before to watch a season of some show, I forget which. Without any downloads or noticeable input on my part. My Linux box apparently got hacked/malware. All I did was click the occasional “I am a human” box on the website, and sit back with popcorn.

I found out when my ISP starting blocking IP addresses some time later. I checked my modem’s logs, and they showed some unexplained traffic to impossible “unassigned” IP addresses afterward. I didn’t notice for a while.

I was stupid. Even worse, my phone also started behaving badly after that. I think I watched the last few episodes in bed, so must have infected that too.

Don’t assume any system is automatically safe.

Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there’s no alternative.

To be fair, a lot of monopolies are great in the beginning. It’s the inevitable power-tripping downslide that sucks.

I still love Steam and Valve though.

…squeeze your meat?

I guess that does make me happy.

It sounds more like “Oh no, someone took your files? Well, you should upload everything you have to our server. Include anything we, I mean they, might have missed the first time. We’ll keep it safe. You can totally trust us not to send your data to anyone, just like we recently got caught doing…again.”