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Dev of crowdfunded WW1 survival-horror game CONSCRIPT cancels Linux and macOS versions
30 May 2024 at 7:14 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: Purple Library GuyI have this feeling that there has been a shift over the years when it comes to this stuff. Some time ago, when someone cancelled their promise of a version of the game for an OS, they would just cancel the Linux version but they'd usually still do the Mac version. These days, they cancel Linux and MacOS if they're going to cancel at all. I'm not sure that's good, misery loves company maybe? but it's different.
I have a growing theory that a lot of these are actually being canceled by publishers who want deals with Microsoft or Sony... The amusing thing is that Linux users/developers have worked their way around such exclusivity with Wine based solutions. Apple on the other hand... basically depend on those same Wine-devs even to the point to incorporate Crossover into their Game Porting Tool (or whatever that thing is called).

I recently was having the conversation about Valheim, which is apparently developed on a Linux system (which explains why it supports OpenGL or Vulkan) and there is no Mac version. After Apple dropped all 32bit support and more or less killed support for vast swaths of games with that move, I can't imagine anyone else really trusts Apple to do good for gamers in general. So, it's no surprise that publishers/devs are dropping Mac support. They also figure 'Proton will let Linux users play the game' which is why some believe Proton is dangerous to the Linux ecosystem. I think Proton serves it's purpose (as older games for sure would never be ported) but I still maintain most newer games should be cross-platform.
The name of the "game porting toolkit" is literally "game porting toolkit" I thought it was ROSETTA, but that's not the name Apple uses in its announcement.
They also have a Direct3d to metal converter, a shader recompiler and a wayy to slick video trilogy.
It's actually quite funny.
They treat the developers as they would treat their users, little real information, slick interfaces, great marketing and acceptable underlying products.
Also they're a status symbol, so your game is in the marketing consistently a "high-end" game.

Over 30,000 people are clicking a picture of a Banana on Steam
30 May 2024 at 6:31 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Nic264
it does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games
So basically all the downsides of the modern usage of NFTs (speculation, dubious valuation, Ponzi scheme) without any of the upsides (decentralization, no vendor lock-in, potentially lower transaction fees).
That's where my mind went as well. Great way to waste electricity if people are leaving their computer on specifically to farm those items.
I'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.
Same is true for nfts.
The methods to generate them are free to use(blender, real crypto wallets).
The objects(nft/Item) aren't.
But in this case, the people who create the nft-like things are not charging you for them. You get the game for free, you get the item drops for free. Then, yes, apparently you can become a profiteer because some suckers are willing to buy them for some reason. But the actual game creators are not scamming you, the game user and recipient of item drops.
Convincing point.
I was thinking about how it could be treated and writing this for nfts isn't much harder, but in practice(which is the only thing that matters) this non-scammy exists for Steam items, but not on significant scale for nfts

Athena Crisis looks a lot like Advance Wars and now its code is open source
30 May 2024 at 6:24 pm UTC

Quoting: CyrilIs anybody knows if the purchase on their website is DRM-free?
What I found:
I can find no indication that they do include DRM.
They probably don't have online drm, because in the current technological/legal landscape that would make their legally sound appearing(this matters, because it indicates they at least put in effort) privacy policy illegal(no mention of sharing data with any drm provider and claiming to comply with the GDPR).
The Steam version doesn't indicate drm, which heightens the chance of no drm.
The published source code would make circumventing drm easier, so I suspect they're not doing DRM.

Over 30,000 people are clicking a picture of a Banana on Steam
30 May 2024 at 5:36 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Salvatos
Quoting: Nic264
it does drop Banana Steam Items every so often and everyone then dumps them onto the Steam Marketplace hoping to make some extra cash, which you can then use to buy Steam games
So basically all the downsides of the modern usage of NFTs (speculation, dubious valuation, Ponzi scheme) without any of the upsides (decentralization, no vendor lock-in, potentially lower transaction fees).
That's where my mind went as well. Great way to waste electricity if people are leaving their computer on specifically to farm those items.
I'd say it has an upside that the NFTs don't, though, and it's fundamental: The game is free.
Same is true for nfts.
The methods to generate them are free to use(blender, real crypto wallets).
The objects(nft/Item) aren't.

TUXEDO Stellaris Slim 15 revealed for high performance in a small package
28 May 2024 at 8:57 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Adutchman
Quoting: TheSHEEEPWon't they get into trouble with that name? Stellaris is trademarked.
Not that Paradox seems very likely to sue a PC manufacturer, but still.

Then again I am not a lawyer, so no clue if trademarks might only apply to similar things (and I'd argue a laptop and a game are not so similar).
From what I have heard, that is exactly how the law works: you can only trademark a name for a specific context (say, gaming for the game Stellaris)
It's why Apple can get away with the trademark Apple and Google can get away with Google and Alphhabet.

Racing game BlazeRush ending support for Linux, macOS and SteamVR
26 May 2024 at 10:36 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: Mambo
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: StoneColdSpider
Quoting: GuestSo, let me understand.

I've this game on native Linux on steam and after the update i will not have the possibility to download it anymore?

Does this feel right to anyone?
Welcome to the state of gaming in 2024........ Over priced DLC........ Microtransactions out the warzoo..... Out of control in game gambling........ Gaming as a service....... Changing account requirements after purchase........ And now...... Changing OS support after purchase....... What a time to be a live......

Quoting: jams3223I am blacklisting this studio, and I'll never buy a game from them.
Targem Games has made...... The list...... I will do doing the same.......
This is Valve enforcing game updates vis Steam.
Blaze Rush is a lightweight title that works on an old netbook which is unable to run Vulkan, unable to run Proton via dxvk, I don't want even imagine what would happen via wined3d.

They are reducing my possibility to play it, and I've paid for it.

Instead, people pirating games are FREE from all of that, really, this time shame on you, Valve.
Steam supports beta branches, which are often used to keep around old versions before disruptive changes. That publisher should still take the responsibility and face demands for refunds though.
Think this option is on the developers though, right?

The game is developed by Russians, maybe they are being forced to add in a rootkit, which won't work on Linux and mac, so they're just ditching those platforms?
Nah, any government enforced rootkit will support Linux and Mac, unless it is target specific.
Basically all journalists, rich businessmen and activists use Mac.
Basically all valuable servers run Linux.
The low level Iphone jailbreak bugs mostly come from discovered government malware.
Against Linux source code poisoning is popular.
"Write your first rootkit" is a training exercise for mediocre kernel developers.
Just, because ransomware writers don't have standards and are willing to settle for Windows, because it has the less capable admins and has the security of an open door doesn't mean governments don't.
Edit:
In this rant I'm assuming they can get super user permissions from their users, but with the "anti-cheat" claim for a native game this could work.
We're talking gaming here, right? There isn't any government enforced rootkits here... unless you're buying games from CCP sponsored companies... of course they're target specific.
I don't know about journalists and rich businessmen using macs. I'm sure most activists do. The first two likely use a mix of Linux/mac/Windows. A lot of proper journalists are going to be stuck on MS or be more about openness of Linux. 'Creative' types are likely to be using Macs. Not game players though.
Ha, all 'useful' servers are running some form of *nix at this point, with few exceptions running Windows.
Ha, no clue where you're getting the iphone Jailbreaks from, they're just vulnerabilities in Apple's somewhat shitty software.
Source code poisoning... has happened like once or twice ever... at least that has been found/noticed. It is far from 'popular'.
Haha, I wonder where you find info on writing your own rootkit, there have literally only been a small few of those ever found in the wild.
There aren't even that many ransomware writers. There is literally a black market where people buy said things.

I actually work 'in the industry' to know most of these things, so there is that...
On the presence of governement enfroced rootkit.
I was reacting to your:
Quoting: slaapliedjeThe game is developed by Russians, maybe they are being forced to add in a rootkit
The only situation I could see nationality mattering was if the government was the one forcing.

I'm a student in the field and I told you only about things I had found on the net, so you're probably more right, but here's where my (mis)information came from.
At a certain point I picked up an interest in syscall interception for writing a patch to Darling.
I found that :shock: that had been made harder in a semi recent Linux release, because it was very suspicious behavior(I really hadn't thought of that, I felt so stupid).
I can't find the exact article anymore, but here's a tutorial: "how to write your own rootkit" [External Link].

Qua source code poisoning:
This was my most recent source of takeover attempts(no this isn't only the xz attack) as far as I understand it, it's more common among front end stuff. [External Link]
Here's a forum post of maintainers discussing some stories. [External Link]
There was also a highly publicize one in the linux kernel where a check did UID =0 instead of UID == 0 and some javascript library that replaced the whole screen with some angry post.

On the Iphone jailbreak exploits.
Government involvement is only true for the most recent.
A.K.A I was wrong.
The KTRR bypass comes from the kaspery findings. [External Link]

About the number of ransomware writers. I didn't know that, but yeah, the amount of bottlenecks in cyber crime is always surprisingly big. You would think that a profession under permanent attack would scale down to a point with very little bottle necks, but it's nearly as bad as with normal infrastructure. For ransomware it's tool building and for game piracy it's cracking, for media piracy it's key extraction.
As far I'm aware call center scamming is quite resilient.
Ha, my comment about Russia forcing a rootkit in there was very 'tongue in cheek'.

You can blame IBM for the rootkit stuff, according to this; https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/trace/kprobes.html [External Link] :P
Really they had to add a feature for it?
I feel a lot less stupid now.
I understand that in theory wirting a rootkit should always be possible if you've root, but adding a feature specially for syscall interception is kind of over the top.

Edit:
This seems to be deeper and an actually part of the POSIX standard in the shape of ptrace.
POSIX has it there for debugging.

Atari acquires Intellivision brand and over 200 games
25 May 2024 at 5:42 pm UTC Likes: 4

Quoting: shnullhm i been wondering that about IBM too, they do even research into quantum computing which definitely costs the billions and doesnt earn one cent there can be only one answer : "old nazi gold" lol ...

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Intv_MiSTer [External Link]
Consumers have never been a priority of IBM, but that doesn't make them small.
Their last revenue report cited 62.07B.
Things that make them valuable:
They're one of the oldest trusted defense contractor of the USA military. This means in part that they can actually supply stuff for building military aircraft(Kind of old NAZI gold. Same conflict different side.)
They're the owners of SPSS(the go to statistics statistics program of many universities)
Lots of players in the financial industry are locked into their ecosystem, since 1970.
They own Red Hat.

Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do - freaky
25 May 2024 at 11:32 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: HighballDoes everybody remember the SETI project? Lots of projects like it but, they sliced up the data into chunks and then had several computers checkout and process the data. One of the first real distributed computing projects. I'm sure it saved the SETI project a boat load of money. I wonder if MSFT will be doing the same thing. Imagine MSFT casually downloading chunks of training data to your computer for processing. Surely under the guise of updating the local language model. If MSFT could harness the power of all the desktop windows machines, they would be saving a crap-ton of money.
I would advice against this, because they would've to send their proprietary training data to those pcs and I can tell you that I would've no trouble technically, ethically and/or legally starting a business that checks for copyright holders and/or sexual abuse victims or their protected material is used for training on my computer.

An illegal use case would be to start that same bussiness, but sell the data to the highest bidder.
Remember OpenAI thinks this is high quality data. Just a few passes through a real garbage filter and you got some real stuff.

Racing game BlazeRush ending support for Linux, macOS and SteamVR
25 May 2024 at 11:17 am UTC

Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: slaapliedje
Quoting: Mambo
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: StoneColdSpider
Quoting: GuestSo, let me understand.

I've this game on native Linux on steam and after the update i will not have the possibility to download it anymore?

Does this feel right to anyone?
Welcome to the state of gaming in 2024........ Over priced DLC........ Microtransactions out the warzoo..... Out of control in game gambling........ Gaming as a service....... Changing account requirements after purchase........ And now...... Changing OS support after purchase....... What a time to be a live......

Quoting: jams3223I am blacklisting this studio, and I'll never buy a game from them.
Targem Games has made...... The list...... I will do doing the same.......
This is Valve enforcing game updates vis Steam.
Blaze Rush is a lightweight title that works on an old netbook which is unable to run Vulkan, unable to run Proton via dxvk, I don't want even imagine what would happen via wined3d.

They are reducing my possibility to play it, and I've paid for it.

Instead, people pirating games are FREE from all of that, really, this time shame on you, Valve.
Steam supports beta branches, which are often used to keep around old versions before disruptive changes. That publisher should still take the responsibility and face demands for refunds though.
Think this option is on the developers though, right?

The game is developed by Russians, maybe they are being forced to add in a rootkit, which won't work on Linux and mac, so they're just ditching those platforms?
Nah, any government enforced rootkit will support Linux and Mac, unless it is target specific.
Basically all journalists, rich businessmen and activists use Mac.
Basically all valuable servers run Linux.
The low level Iphone jailbreak bugs mostly come from discovered government malware.
Against Linux source code poisoning is popular.
"Write your first rootkit" is a training exercise for mediocre kernel developers.
Just, because ransomware writers don't have standards and are willing to settle for Windows, because it has the less capable admins and has the security of an open door doesn't mean governments don't.
Edit:
In this rant I'm assuming they can get super user permissions from their users, but with the "anti-cheat" claim for a native game this could work.
We're talking gaming here, right? There isn't any government enforced rootkits here... unless you're buying games from CCP sponsored companies... of course they're target specific.
I don't know about journalists and rich businessmen using macs. I'm sure most activists do. The first two likely use a mix of Linux/mac/Windows. A lot of proper journalists are going to be stuck on MS or be more about openness of Linux. 'Creative' types are likely to be using Macs. Not game players though.
Ha, all 'useful' servers are running some form of *nix at this point, with few exceptions running Windows.
Ha, no clue where you're getting the iphone Jailbreaks from, they're just vulnerabilities in Apple's somewhat shitty software.
Source code poisoning... has happened like once or twice ever... at least that has been found/noticed. It is far from 'popular'.
Haha, I wonder where you find info on writing your own rootkit, there have literally only been a small few of those ever found in the wild.
There aren't even that many ransomware writers. There is literally a black market where people buy said things.

I actually work 'in the industry' to know most of these things, so there is that...
On the presence of governement enfroced rootkit.
I was reacting to your:
Quoting: slaapliedjeThe game is developed by Russians, maybe they are being forced to add in a rootkit
The only situation I could see nationality mattering was if the government was the one forcing.

I'm a student in the field and I told you only about things I had found on the net, so you're probably more right, but here's where my (mis)information came from.
At a certain point I picked up an interest in syscall interception for writing a patch to Darling.
I found that :shock: that had been made harder in a semi recent Linux release, because it was very suspicious behavior(I really hadn't thought of that, I felt so stupid).
I can't find the exact article anymore, but here's a tutorial: "how to write your own rootkit" [External Link].

Qua source code poisoning:
This was my most recent source of takeover attempts(no this isn't only the xz attack) as far as I understand it, it's more common among front end stuff. [External Link]
Here's a forum post of maintainers discussing some stories. [External Link]
There was also a highly publicize one in the linux kernel where a check did UID =0 instead of UID == 0 and some javascript library that replaced the whole screen with some angry post.

On the Iphone jailbreak exploits.
Government involvement is only true for the most recent.
A.K.A I was wrong.
The KTRR bypass comes from the kaspery findings. [External Link]

About the number of ransomware writers. I didn't know that, but yeah, the amount of bottlenecks in cyber crime is always surprisingly big. You would think that a profession under permanent attack would scale down to a point with very little bottle necks, but it's nearly as bad as with normal infrastructure. For ransomware it's tool building and for game piracy it's cracking, for media piracy it's key extraction.
As far I'm aware call center scamming is quite resilient.

Microsoft's new Recall AI will take screenshots of everything you do - freaky
24 May 2024 at 6:31 pm UTC

Quoting: tohur
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: tohur
Quoting: LoudTechie
Quoting: tohurI would trust such a feature if it was opensource.. for instance if a DE on Linux implemented this feature I would use it without batting an eye considering I could just go look at the source code to see what its doing and mostly likely use my OWN ai models to boot.. only way folks gona feel conforble using this from Microsoft is if they opensourced it.. To be frank it should be a LAW features such as this must be opensourced regardless if the OS is or not.
I wouldn't
The data is still stored on the computer and made readily accessible.
A malicious actor on my system(this can just be chrome looking for delicious data) can take it and run with it.
And thats on you not the DE. but fact is this is Linux if a DE did implement such a feature 1.) you wouldn't be required to use such a feature. 2 .) it would 99% be a opt in not opt out. 3.) it would most likely be encrypted
Actually I think encryption wouldn't be a feature if it were open source.
Secret management is important in open source security considerations and the secret would in this case be stored on the same place as the data.
The rest of your points are convincing and yes this's certainly on me.
I wasn't saying the feature itself would be encrypted but the end data on your device :)
The data wouldn't be encrypted either.
It could be locked behind permissions, but since the key and the data would have to be accessible by the same code secret management wouldn't work.
They would rely on full disc encryption(which is a system function) for physical protection and implement some complicated permission management for access to the data, but the "recall" code wouldn't do any encryption, since anyone with access to the encrypted data apparently has access to the encryption key.