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A more charitable reading might detect irony in that comment. Their intent might not have been victim-blaming.
A more charitable reading might detect irony in that comment. Their intent might not have been victim-blaming.
I see these tactics being used far more extensively by wealthy individuals and corporate interests than I do Chinese interests.
How can you so confidently distinguish one from the other?
they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages.
A machine that avoids that can be called labor-saving, in the sense that it saves the employer from having to pay for skilled labor. I get the distinction you’re making, and thanks for the article, but it really doesn’t invalidate the use of the phrase.
Still a good clarification, though, and I side with the skilled labor on this one. :)
Thank you for specifying that the collection of data is the problem, not just how it’s handled once collected.
Unfortunately, disabling the SIM or wireless module in the car isn’t enough, since collected data could still be downloaded at a shop during warranty repair, or smog check, or (if you’re unlucky) post-accident inspection, or by a mileage-tracking device from an insurance company.
Luddite…
Avoiding spyware doesn’t mean you’re opposed to labor-saving technology, much as avoiding tasers doesn’t mean you’re opposed to electronics. :)
Depending on the field, perhaps, at least at first. But the more organizations that switch, the more demand there is for support, which is how we eventually get it.
In the meantime, there is usually another way to get things done. Props to this German state for stepping up. Digital sovereignty is important.
“Good thing there are other app vendors.”
I have my criticisms of Steam, but I see no sign of it marching toward some kind of big anti-customer explosion as suggested in this article. Unlike most others, it’s run by a privately owned company, so it doesn’t have investors pressuring toward enshittification. We can see the result by looking back at the past decade or so: Steam has been operating more or less the same.
Meanwhile, the author offers for contrast Epic Games, a major source of platform exclusives and surveillance software (file-snooping store app, client-side anti-cheat, Epic Online Services “telemetry”), all of which are very much anti-customer.
AFAIK, only one of the other stores listed is actually better for customers in any significant way: GOG. (For the record, I mostly like GOG.) But it was mentioned so briefly that it feels like the author only did so in hopes of influencing GOG fans.
Overall, this post looks a lot like astroturfing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be sponsored by Epic or Microsoft.
Edit: I forgot something that has changed in the past decade:
Valve has spent the past five years investing in open platforms: At first by funding key parts (often the most difficult ones) of the open-source software stack that now makes gaming great on linux, and more recently by developing remarkably good and fairly open PC hardware for mobile gaming. No vendor lock-in. No subscription fees. No artificially crippled features. This has already freed many gamers from Microsoft’s stranglehold, and more of us are reaping the benefits every day.
This is the polar opposite of what the author would have us fear.
It’s important that we build incentives for companies to avoid harming people, and hold them accountable when they do it anyway. Profit is not a valid excuse.
Related event (perhaps even a direct example) from a few years ago: the Blitzchung incident.
EFF articles about this bill:
https://www.eff.org/search/site/kosa?sort=created&order=desc
…and their call to action:
https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-kosa-will-censor-the-internet-but-won-t-help-kids
And yet we still seem to be waiting for the standard to support high quality, low latency input and stereo output simultaneously. It’s as though the people developing the spec don’t know that gaming exists.
I understand that AptX-LL and FastStream attempt this, but they’re both proprietary hacks.
(If the spec has recently expanded to take care of it, and hardware supporting it actually exists, I would love to know about it. As far as I know, it hasn’t and doesn’t.)
Neat. I just hope it can be disabled to save power.