It's a defence mechanism against account hijacking if someone has access to your phone number, linked to your account. Went through the same procedure to recover an account I haven't been using for a few years.
Most likely stolen cards. Stolen credit cards are used to purchase gift cards which are then resold to unsuspecting buyers. Think of it as stolen money laundering.
The one very visible trend in the last 30 years of game development was about reducing input complexity. It has nothing to do with complexity of games themselves. Now instead of fighting clunky controls like in good old times you fight game challenges, where the input tries hard to be as transparent as possible
With the 2 options you have left because those are all the buttons :)
And autoaim because those sticks aren't precise enough.
But it's not first person shooters I worry about, because those have devolved into competitive multiplayer IAP fests that create toxic communities.
I worry about strategy games and anything with a whiff of complexity. Reduce options because going through menus with a controller is slow and clunky. Reduce options because when playing at TV distance you can't read a serious list of properties like wargames have.
I genuinely think you're hallucinating this threat to keyboard/mouse gaming input for anything other than AAA console-first releases and for specific genres like action/fighting games. Keyboard/mouse is still by far the dominant input scheme for PC gaming and PC gamers are broadly quite firmly set on this choice.
Depends entirely on the genre of the game, the resources available to the developer, and the pressures they're facing from management. Most of the games in my library either have controller support as an afterthought or not at all. Controllers have been the minority choice in PC gaming since about forever and I haven't noticed that changing. What has changed is the gaming industry has created de facto standards and idioms for how PC games should handle. Play early shooters with their default setting and you'll get to experience all kinds of key mapping that send modern gamers looking for mods to fix it or another game to play. These days you can pretty much count on WASD for movement, the mouse for looking. Nobody ships a game with movement bound to the arrow keys or modal mouse look. Game developers now meet gamers where they are, and for PC games that is almost always mouse and keyboard, except in those genres where gamers expect controllers.
I'm not sure what you are referring to, but I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now, and way worse working WINE. No, there was never time when we could run whatever software we want on a machine of our choice.
> I remember way less cross-platform software than we have now
Really? Outside Electron apps and PWAs, I'm seeing fewer apps than ever support macOS as a native target. Additionally, cross-platform packaging feels much more fragile than it used to, especially if you're using Brew over Nix. And cross-platform games... just forget about it.
Modern macOS simply feels abandoned by cross-platform efforts. Upstream Wine runs worse than it did in 2010, depreciated 32-bit libraries annihilated my Mac-native Steam catalog and AU plugins, Vulkan is ignored and CUDA compute drivers work but Apple refuses to sign them. The professional experience that I attributed to macOS is gone in the new releases. All Apple can innovate in is petty politicking.
For contrast, you can imagine how this debate between a private OS developer and the government would go in a non-democratic country. Or, you don't even have to imagine, because examples are not hard to find.
But really, the point GP was trying to make (IMO) is that all western democracies are very obviously sliding towards authoritarianism. They are building tools which, even _if_ they don't abuse them now, will be available to any future government and with time, the probability of one of them being non-democratic is 1.
A large and important piece, but not the final. If it will remain web-only codec, that is no Android and iOS support for taking photos in JPEG XL, then the web media will still be dominated with JPEGs.
Case in point: recently, some Russian mobile service providers started blocking registration SMS for popular messengers, Signal included.
In earlier years there were also cases of mobile number spoofing in the country, where the control over the number was given to law enforcement who then use it as second factor authentication to break into different accounts.
That's how easy it is. The word "secure" and "mobile phone number" are the opposites of each other.
I mostly agree with your points, but there’s one form of censorship that exists in Germany today: internet censorship driven by the commercial interests of right holders and implemented by the major internet service providers. In short: illegal streaming sites can be blocked for access.
Some people might disagree that it isn’t a form of censorship, but it fits the bill: blocking access to information on the sole discretion of 3rd party pursuing its own interests.
I am not sure this counts as censorship. But I agree that copyright violations are likely policed (through copyright holders and their lawyers) more strictly in Germany than hate speech.
basically idea is "go after trolls". who likes trolls? nobody. at a glance should upset no-one. Okay.. now ask.. what does a troll mean to you, mean to me, mean to the people in power. It's a slippery slope you see, the definition of troll inevitably growing broader with time to cover all forms of wrongthink.
Then there's the other part of it, severity of punishment in ratio to a few words typed. Now the interesting thing here is it would be very easy to crack open a neighbor's wifi crypto, forge a MAC address, use a clean system/browser fingerprint such as a thrift store laptop, and now that neighbor you don't like is in hot water. The problem with such rules is ironically, with the intent to stop trolls, in fact supercharge trolling potential
Germany does have piracy policing for torrents, for instance. Access is not blocked though, and thus I don't consider fines for torrenting to be an act of censorship.
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