Grab the ScriptSafe extension. It's the Chrome equivalent to Firefox's NoScript. Every JS script starts out blocked and you can whitelist domains as you go, avoiding those that have the suspicious names that don't actually add content to the page.

Chrome has optimizations for that, so it's likely whoever built the site either used some weird TheDailyWTF worthy method of rendering their page with JavaScript, or otherwise did not properly test their page with Chrome to ensure this Chrome feature could properly handle their page.

Umm ALL browsers allow ads and tracking cookies by default.

Well, IE10 asks nicely for servers to not track you, but we have yet to see how well that will work in the long run.

Steam still needs to be online to activate new purchases, even if you buy them in a brick and mortar store AFAIK.

Of course there's nothing saying Valve can't change this if they want to make Steambox more attractive to the internet-less.

If neither vaccine was effective, there would have been no change. However, there was an observed uptick, indicating that the previous vaccine was definitely having an effect.

Well Chrome has one if you want to use it, just doesn't come with Chromium. I am sure they want Chromium instead of Chrome for the whole "pure open-source" thing it has going for it, though.

Windows 7 is 6.1 for compatibility reasons. When Vista went to 6.0 it broke a lot of applications that were incorrectly checking the Windows version, like so:

if (MajorVersion >= 5 && MinorVersion >= 1) {

Back when the latest version of Windows was XP, this code worked fine 100% of the time. Of course it fails to pass this check on Vista, where MinorVersion is 0. Windows 7 and Windows 8 are 6.1 and 6.2 respectively since they will pass this check. At least, that's what I've heard.

Steam only asks for admin when performing installation steps, as installers often require admin privileges. And this is stuff like DirectX, C++ runtimes, etc so it's understandable since that stuff goes into system32.

The game itself is not run as admin.

Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 purposefully comes with IE6 so you can use it for situations just like this if you need to. You can of course upgrade it to IE7/8 if you want to.

Also, All IEs after 6 can switch to 6's rendering engine using the IIE Dev Tools (IE7 requires them to be installed, IE8 and up bundles them) which may be sufficient to use the site.

Well you can try it in Chrome, but right now Chrome crashes when you do.

They also don't prevent you from trying it in any browser (AFAIK) except pre-23 versions of Firefox.

Exactly. Perhaps even it could be used by F2P model games ("Enable our bitcoin miner tool and we will credit you for in-game purchases periodically!") as an alternative to paying in cash.

Teachers were presented with a display that looked "exactly like" it does when prompted for a software update, but instead it was a request for administrative access, according to district technology supervisor Jurgen Johannsen.

Reading in between the lines I suspect it could have looked wildly different, but the teachers were trained to look for some specific text string which the students got to appear in the elevation dialog.

The UAC dialog is designed to look different if a executable is digitally signed to prevent just this sort of phishing attack. Either the school IT screwed up by not using signed tools, or the teachers were not trained on the differences between the dialogs for signed and unsigned elevations.

Well I don't think the simulation of piracy is supposed to be 100% accurate. Obviously if that was how it worked in the real world nobody would make games. And I assume that's the lesson they wanted to teach: we're afraid one day this will happen to us, now you see why, maybe you should sympathise a bit and buy our game.

There are flaws with your actual argument too, but I will just say that there's nothing preventing me from seeing a game I like, say, Bioshock Infinite, downloading it, playing it, and then never buying it. Without the pirated copy I could not download it, and I would be forced to buy it (incidentally I haven't done any of that and plan to buy it on Steam when they put it on sale). So I can definitely say it is possible for piracy to do financial harm.

Let's say the majority of pirates would never buy the game anyway, as you claim. If I was a dev, I would not care about this group since if I implement DRM nothing changes. So I am going to ignore them. Whether they really exist or not or how many of them are doesn't matter, it's a moot point.

So now we have one more group: pirates that might help sales. IIRC I read a bit about music pirates actually being good for music sales as they tended to buy more music than other customers. So let's say DRM makes these guys more wary about purchasing music and they prefer to "try before they buy". Devs have to weight how much money they'd gain from those guys based on how much they'd lose from the first group (the group that would buy if there was no pirated version) to determine whether or not they try to implement some form of DRM to delay the release of a cracked copy as long as possible.

You skipped the second half of TFS.

The game is a game about game development, right? In the pirated copy, the games you develop will have a chance of getting pirated (!) which goes up as time goes on, eventually causing you to lose as you are then unable to make enough money to continue. It's delicious irony.

There is hardware called "Remote Access Servers" that allow you to forward serial connections over a network connection via SSH or whatever.