The pandemic was very clearly the initiator.
Being conservative about forcing people back (because most have wanted people back long before now) doesn’t change anything legally. You were hired for an in person job, they were forced to have you work from home by actual government orders, and they moved slowly on forcing you back because it was an extended period of time where there was an actual meaningful health risk to a big enough portion of employees.
They’re a good actual mechanism for spyware, because they see all your traffic.
Https means that they can’t see the actual contents without installing a root certificate, but they can see all the sites you visit and for how long. Reputable providers (at least the good ones) do not log any of this, but you should have a high level of trust in a provider to use their VPN, because they see a lot still.
That doesn’t mean that they didn’t ban legit VPNs. I don’t know. But it doesn’t really qualify as “reporting news” without at least a list of the apps that were banned, because they’re providing no information at all about the legitimacy of the apps, and it’s a category appealing to bad actors.
Like I said, I’m all for it. And I think the current state is definitely too much wasted edible food.
But I think they should also focus on requiring labeling that gives some standardized indicators of spoilage relevant to that specific food.
Most packaged stuff like chips is so full of preservatives it’s pretty unlikely to be unsafe without clear visual indications.
I’m all for clearer labeling, but those dates are still inherently guesses.
This is stupid as hell.
What do you think emulation is?
Copying your own copy of a game and using tools for compatibility is what we’re talking about, is protected, and already has the case law demonstrating so.
Cuphead.
I suck.
Easy. YouTube doesn’t want to deal with actual DMCA more than they have to, so they have their own system that lets big companies do whatever they want, whether the content is legal or not.
If you were hired as remote you have a pretty strong case for constructive dismissal.
I think you’re going to have an uphill battle if you were hired to work in a building and they allowed work from home due to a pandemic. I don’t think being slow getting back to the office is going to win you your case.
Allow user hosted servers or fuck off.
No company in history has ever not done so because of technical limitations. It’s literally always exclusively about control.
Seriously, the Last of Us had a really fun multiplayer mode. They didn’t have to make it some shitty treadmill of garbage for people to engage with it.
I see no mention of what they actually removed or how reputable they are. “VPN apps” are a reasonably common approach to spyware. (Common enough that literally Facebook has done it.)
There are Android ereaders. They’re mostly Chinese manufacturers, and I’ve heard more than one doesn’t follow the GPL properly with their modifications to Android, but the end result is freedom to use a variety of sources of books (including Libby and Hoopla from the library, among others).
I haven’t played with parental controls to know if they’re easy to access, but my most current Boox came with the play store installed and it’s pretty easy to learn how to adjust the display settings for different apps with different types of content.
Libation (add audible to your search to find it)
The interface is 100% of the reason I won’t use it. It’s by far the worst experience for navigating a library I’ve ever seen. It’s just access to your filesystem, except with effectively no files on the screen at a time.
There’s no tags, no ability to choose between by author, series, publisher, genre, etc, just a really bad presentation of your filesystem.
Take-2 has bullied mods that don’t connect to their servers claiming it’s an illegal derivative work or violates the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. If Larian actually wanted to be assholes, they could make life annoying for people who want to make mods.
Again, I don’t think there’s any actual legal merit behind harassment for mods, but lack of merit isn’t always enough for community projects to be comfortable standing up and fighting against well funded harassment.
I do think the lack of merit makes it significantly harder for WOTC to compel Larian into any nonsense like that though.
I don’t know that PR would be a sufficient barrier. They seem perfectly willing to be raging jackasses.
I think the bigger question is whether their contract with Larian is sufficient that they actually have the juice to compel them to take legally questionable action to restrict mods. There are a couple companies that use DMCA shit to harass mods into shutting down, but there really isn’t a strong basis behind it. It’s just them having a big enough checkbook to not be worth the fight. And even the sketchy “bypassing copy protection” method they usually use isn’t relevant to a game that’s DRM free. The strongest actual precedent against mods is stuff like Bungie getting judgements against cheat distributors, but that isn’t the same, because it’s actively degrading the service for others.
My guess is that it won’t get shut down because WOTC can’t make Larian bully people into shutting it down.
There is a pretty substantial community around designing and playing custom stories in DnD. They (presumably because of contracts) didn’t make that possible out of the box with BG3/official tools, but the fact that people figured out how to bypass the restrictions means that there’s a lot of pre-existing material that really doesn’t need to be tailored much to fit into the experience.
It’s not no work, because the nature of a human Dungeon Master gives you a lot more flexibility, but there’s definitely potential for a big community unless Larian is pushed into doing whack-a-mole bullshit to harass modders.
I have a Boox go color 7 that I have in my pocket a lot. I made a little leather sleeve for it and am frequently tempted to add a couple pockets to the flap and make it my permanent “wallet”. It’s better for reading, anyways, but there’s a lot of software I use that’s only on iOS without an acceptable Android substitute, and it’s also not a phone. (I’d also be perfectly happy with the watch as my “phone” and to carry two small tablets).
But you just can’t fit much on a phone screen.
There’s also a huge amount of bad will.
VR/AR are still (yes, even years later) in the tech enthusiast niche, because the actual tech is hard. But a sizable chunk of tech enthusiasts know enough to hate Facebook, hate them specifically in VR because of how they handled their purchase of Oculus, or both.