For all the positive, pro-consumer elements of Steam, unless Steam builds some sort of generic network abstraction layer into the Steam client, I don't think that swapping out "a dependence on Gamespy" for "a dependence on Steam" is really the answer here...

Back in 2004, *everyone* had to port forward in order to host a game server. That's the alternative to "let EA host it until they don't feel like it anymore". The point is to give the control back to gamers, but responsibility comes with that - specifically, "how to do a port forward". More to your point, it probably would have been smart to see if you and the friend capable of hosting the game could get a session going with just the two of you, then invite everyone else once you had the procedures in place. Again, the logistics aren't Epic's problem.

There will always be a group who favors simplicity over capability, but it's not like, in the case of UT2004, Epic added some sort of technological barriers to actively prevent you from playing the game, because it DOES still work perfectly once the port forward is in place. Similarly, the expectation isn't that a game is going to still have millions of players after it's EOL, it's to ensure that the few-thousand who *do* still want to play it aren't limited explicitly by the absence of server-side code. "My friends and I can't port forward" isn't that limitation - "the server-side code was never publicly released and the enthusiasts who attempted to reverse engineer it got DMCA slapped" *is*,

Also, there are still some public UT2004 servers you could mostly-one-click (copy/pasting an IP address would be close-enough to what you're describing, I'd hope):
https://pwc-gaming.com/game-se...

And, if you were a bit more interested, a cheap VPS can run LinuxGSM, a Linux build explicitly designed to be a game server for dozens of games like UT2004 that have the capability of connecting to custom dedicated servers:
https://docs.linuxgsm.com/game... ...the thing is, UT2004 is kinda the textbook example of what these games *should* look like - entirely playable in single-player mode *today*, and shipping with both map creation software and dedicated server software, including a Linux build...and it was so well built, that one need not even emulate Windows XP to do it; the game runs just fine on Windows 11 and on GPUs that didn't exist at the time. The Crew was a powder keg precisely because it was the opposite of UT2004 - dependent on central servers for no technical reason.

I suspect it's a straightforward incentives problem. If you can get away with making it the grid's problem there's not much incentive to pay for more expensive facility power setups. Presumably this is why ERCOT is testing current and prospective customers and making noise about it; and why there are at least some standards for how ill-behaved a load can be while still being allowed to hook up; with some awkward interactions between very large sites that also have the ability to shut down rapidly at relatively low cost. If you are 'mining' crypto you presumably prefer the gear to be online because it is depreciating by the minute regardless; but the risk and inconvenience of shutting it down and booting it up again isn't particularly dramatic compared to having to cold start an aluminum smelter or something.

I'm sure that there are worse options, probably being actively considered since this is no longer getting them what they want; but an opaque 'public/private partnership' slush fund that spends its time slathering a thin layer of dubious military justification on random projects seems like a very, very, dodgy way of doing things.

BSA is a sock with googley eyes glues on. Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle and other software audit enthusiasts are the hand inside.

Of course they don't want Europe breaking dependency. It is like asking your dealer if you should get clean.

One strategy is, not touch any modules until they are at least, say, 72 hours old.

Until everyone else is doing that too, then you make it 168.

It is a long-standing Texas marketing campaign. I've listened to them yammering on about everyone in California moving to Texas since the 90s, when I moved to California. I'm sure they were doing it before then.

So of course they shouted from the rooftops when Oracle moved to Texas, but became remarkably coy about Oracle then moving from Texas to Tennessee. The Space Nazi also quietly moved a ton of people out after moving them there from California.

If you're actually curious and wish to align your intuition with reality, look at real numbers. You'll find the "California drain" is real - more people have been moving from California to Texas than the reverse for a while now. But California has been growing at a rate as to make that not matter. As far as their bullshit about taxes, Texas is indeed less tax-heavy on rich people, but taxes poor and middle class people significantly higher, like all southern states. And you might like the idea of their "not zoning" zoning. Unless you buy in Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, in which case I hope you can find flood insurance.

For my part, I'd encourage MAGAtypes to do their part to convince more California billionaires to move to Texas. We have too many, and they're almost all snotty, whiny, annoying little shits.

[citation needed]

Obviously the switch from "loss leader on a scale the capital markets can barely absorb" to "losing money" is going to sting; but I'm curious if we'll see sneakier knock-on effects.

So long as they were losing money hand over fist the vendor does want to throw enough tokens at you to make you feel like you are having a good time; but as few as are required to do that since they lose money on every one. If they were breaking even or turning a profit the incentive would be to sneak as much spend and upsell in as possible; and it's well known that the verbosity/cost of LLM chatter is hard to predict; harder if there are multiple models and other complications being switched around in the background.

What sort of exciting little tricks will we see from vendors who actually make more if you use more?

Given how crappy a lot of "official' upsampling and other AI slop is and other batch-processing errors, aspect ratio changes ruining editing, and IP licensing making the music vanish, pirated media is frequently simply better quality.

But their big problem is reinventing all the cable shenanigans people hate without the natural monopoly to enforce it. When you run a wire to someone's house, there's lock-in. Streaming removes that "loyalty'. Now add in all the constant media swapping that means you can't count on things staying in the catalog, and there's no reason to want to use any of them, other than convenience.

And my storage server is a lot more convenient than any offer I've seen from the streamers.

Everyone knows that 10x engineers validate inputs and carefully manage dependencies; so clearly there's no risk of unexpected behavior.

It seems worth noting that one of the items in Wyden's rather pointed inquiry is the fact that the feasibility of doing this is known to have been demonstrated for the DoD by outside people familiar with it at least as early as 2016; so while this is the first confirmed case of adversarial use it's the outcome of at least a decade of just ignoring the problem; and a significantly longer period of failing to reasonably anticipate the problem. It's not like there's No Such Agency you could ask about "how could you spy on someone with the internet even?" if you wanted to know how well or poorly readily available information matched a nation state signals intelligence apparatus.

Purely as a matter of cellphones being expensive and somewhat tepidly capable in the before times I assume that there was a period within living memory when merely telling people not to Gordon Gekko on their DynaTAC where the russians can hear you was good enough; but that would have clearly and rapidly been getting less true for at least a quarter century.

The whole 'responsible disclosure' preaching and the not-terribly-subtle threats seem particularly bad given that there's an entire industry of actively more dangerous people who are not only treated as legal but actively courted by state agents and cops(and often even less savory customers, though they tend to be cagey about those); the ones who actively seek to keep vulnerabilities quiet so that they can continue to sell exploit tools and services based on them. Throwing zero days on github isn't ideal vs. getting them fixed; but it gets them fixed faster than if Cellebrite wants to hang on to a bitlocker bypass or Trenchant, and L3Harris Technologies Company, wants to keep selling 'network investigative techniques' that can bypass default windows defender configurations or whatever the situation is.

From the outside it's hard to know whether MS actually mistreated the researcher badly enough to justify their displeasure(the consensus appears to be that MSRC was never the best to deal with and has actively gone downhill; but this person's position seems significantly angrier than average) or whether they are perhaps wound a little tight; but implying that their legal status is the same as people actively running attacks against user systems is blatantly false and totally ignores the class of researchers who do actively run attacks while being treated as respectable.

It's a particularly bad look when at least Facebook got into a public legal fight with the NSO group over their nerd-merc work against their users; not like that actually solved the problem of attacks on cellphones; but it was an all-too-rare case of industry pushing back against the 'respectable' arms dealers; and not one that MS has an analog to.

We'll all pretend that nuclear-tipped VCs will remain cool-headed and cooperative when the AI debts start to go sour.

I'm not an expert on rebuilding massively exploded launch infrastructure; but I have a suspicion that a 2026-2029 plan is now going to involve less Blue Origin than previously believed.

Tech leadership of large firms has been pretty quick to lick the orange anus.

Musk, Cook, Zuckerborg, Altman, Brin, Ellison, Catz, Brockman, Pichai, Nadella, and more that I'm forgetting all have Trump-ass on their breath.

There are a few who seem to prefer democracy, but if you can name a technology company leader of a non-trivial firm that publicly supports the goals of OWS types, please name them - I can't.