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They have a battleeye proton build that devs can choose to ship with if you use that, but for some reason most (including GTA V online) just… Decide not to use it.

(Apologies for not otherwise contributing to the discussion, you want “paid” instead of the nautical rope-handling term “payed”.)

I understand that you aren’t interested in responding, the only point I felt I wanted to clarify my own thinking about “is it justified just because they have the same service as any big company has?”

I would happily and readily say that I don’t know of any other single *gaming company that provides the same amount of services to the general population and to, if we follow the tenets of OSS, humanity as a whole. They provide code and money to KDE, Arch, the Linux kernel, they work directly with AMD on Linux drivers, they are working on accelerating what I believe are common-sense additions to Wayland, they’ve pushed VR on PC from being a futuristic wishlist item to having a section dedicated to games for their headsets and the countless others (including Metas, whom they also directly support) on their store and helping maintain and develop the open source frameworks needed to make them.

In my mind, Steam the storefront is how Valve does everything else that they’re doing, and I haven’t heard of anything that they do that I find reasonably objectable. I mean, maybe the TF2 stuff could count against them, and also given that there are 17 year old people who weren’t alive when that game came out any amount of work they keep putting into it is just wild from my perspective.

I’ll give my own experience as a Steam customer and aspiring game dev:

I’ve never had a problem with Steam that wasn’t quickly and satisfactorily resolved. Usually, in ways that go above and beyond Valve’s stated responsibilities. They have been quick to respond to the two hardware tickets I’ve raised over the years of owning a Steam controller, two Steam Links, a Valve Index, and my own Steam Deck.

In the many years that I’ve used all flavors of Linux and installed all manner of native games and non-native games, it has only been in the last 4 or 5 years that the process has become, in my own experience, painless enough for me to not only consider suggesting other less technical people I know to try Linux, but to enthusiastically recommend it. They were the strongest single driving force I am aware of in bringing day-one mass-market release games to Linux.

I have, over the years of my dealing with them, come to believe that money spent towards Valve is materially making my life better in ways that just playing games through Steam doesn’t fully encapsulate.

They provide development assistance and funds for open source projects in a way that truly gives back to the projects they work with, their company is run in a way that I find personally satisfying and aspirational, their leadership feels like they’re maintaining their relevance in the industry instead of being disconnected money-men…

I respect their decisions enough to consider their cut reasonable as compared to the services they provide both directly and indirectly to the PC gaming industry as a whole.

Do you have actionable advice

If we’re talking about Digital Rights Management, steam is acting in that role to manage your digital rights on the steam platform. They could allow you to download games without requiring an account login or client download, and they instead do not. They could allow you to download free games from the client or the website without requiring a login, and they do not.

GOG’s website is also DRM for the same reason. It won’t allow you to download games that aren’t licensed digitally to your account, including free games. GOG has DRM-free games and installers fairly universally beyond that first check, and that means you can download them from alternative sources, but downloading from GOG 100% requires interacting with DRM.

To be direct: I don’t care that Steam is DRM because it’s minimally invasive and I currently trust Valve enough to use an operating system made by them as a daily driver. There are very few companies I’d say that about.

The Steam client is DRM at its core, even if it’s acceptable DRM. I think it’s important not to allow your thinking to shift from the reality that it is DRM just because it’s personally acceptable.

I don’t mind it, I will simp for Valve all day long, and if a company requires you to log in to an account with their server to check whether your account has the digital entitlement to then allow you to access a file or not, that’s digital rights management.

I want to give the perspective that from a technical standpoint, even free games on steam require the steam client to install and while the license to play the game is free steam is licensing your account to own the game. The game doesn’t require steam after that and usually this means the game is available elsewhere, but for the specific case of “free games on steam”, steam is still acting to manage digital rights.

It’s the Handset Protocol/Handsfree Protocol that was developed for simultaneous sending and receiving of voice data. They’re the only protocols that support sending and receiving voice at the same time, and they do that by sending mono telephone quality audio and receiving mono telephone quality audio.

It’s why most gaming headsets, even ones with Bluetooth, include a small RF dongle separately. Bluetooth is technically incapable of high-quality audio when recording.

Well, the Starlink could be connected by an admin to a computer that is connected to SIPRNet, right? It exposes itself as just a router.

I mean, assuming the Starlink was brought on board by someone with authorization to be on board, any possible adversarial situation would necessarily be an internal issue to begin with.

Personally, I think the most likely answer involves an Xbox.

Until we can finally kill HSP/HFP, I’m never gonna be happy with Bluetooth. Using a headset mic shouldn’t blast you back to the telephone era.

You can’t connect a star link to siprnet.

Can you connect a computer? Because if so, that same computer can then be connected to the starlink, no?

I know absolutely nothing about secure government networking, I’m just kind of assuming that something has to be able to connect to both individually and also simultaneously.

I apologize, because I was assuming and did delete the comment after checking myself. It was unfair to you for me to have done it that way.

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I am no longer interested in continuing a conversation with you, as you’ve convinced me that you’re not interested in engaging with what I am saying. Thank you for your time and perspective to this point.

You are misunderstanding me.

I am not disagreeing with you, but it’s intellectually dishonest to not acknowledge the context of the reality we live in: it used to require genuine talent and skill to use a paid tool to fake images, and now is as easy as entering text on your phone in a free app just describing what you want to see.

This is an exponential escalation of existing problems and technologies.

I never said I was just now worried about fake images. To say it myself: I’m worried about the now non-existent barrier that bad actors no longer need to clear to do whatever they want to do here.

You said “but” like it invalidated what I said, instead of being a true statement and a non sequitur.

You aren’t wrong, and I don’t think that changes what I said either.

Photoshop requires time and talent to make a believable image.

This requires neither.

Holy shit, you made Priiloader?

Kickass, thank you so much for helping 11 year old me not completely destroy his Wii in the name of boredom.

Last time I got Papa Johns, a literal child delivered my order alone while her DoorDashing mom watched from her car. I didn’t order through DoorDash. I left feedback informing them that I would not be buying pizza from somewhere that makes me question whether I’m contributing to breaking child labor laws.

I would order local takeout if it were cheaper and wasn’t consistently soggy.

Domino’s is the most consistently “worth the money” pizza near me, with Little Caesars coming in a distant second.

Life support for a monster set aside as insurance against the day that the monster needs it.

Agreed entirely, Mozilla doing nothing would be far preferable to me here then them helping extend our current experience with advertising by working towards a future with a minimal set of meaningless concessions that Meta’s involvement with suggests would not meaningfully negatively impact their business in any way.

To my mind, fixing advertising means making advertising a much less lucrative business. Doing anything else is only making the already dire problem worse.