I doubt that the product is actually getting worse, and I have good reason for my doubt.

Nearly all of the things like this that Google does have one real purpose: Combating abuse. During my ~15 years at Google I never worked on counter-abuse, but I spend about a decade doing stuff that led me to work pretty closely with the counter-abuse teams, and the inventiveness of the people abusing Google's products and systems never ceased to amaze me. And it isn't trivial abuse that is ignorable, because not preventing the abuse would actually make the product offerings worse.

I don't know what the storage abuse might be, but I can think of a lot of things that could be done, and my experience touching on counter-abuse at Google taught me that for every thing I can think of, there are people out there who can think of a hundred more, and will then invest serious amounts of time and money in implementing them.

One of my favorite examples was related to Android GPS location. It's a favorite mostly because of how trivial it was, but the vast resources abusers poured into it, and I'm sure they only did it because they got even more out of it -- this large-scale abuse is all for-profit. For a long time it was easy to spoof your location without giving any evidence of the fact. This caused problems for location-based games like Pokemon Go or Ingres, who lost players because it screwed up the game[*]. So, the games started checking if the device was in developer mode, which allowed "legitimate" location spoofing. So cheaters started using bootloader-unlocked devices which they could configure to lie about being in developer mode. So games started using Android Keystore attestation (I wrote Keystore, hence why I got pulled in) to make it difficult to impossible to do that. Except that some number of official attestation keys leaked out of factories and people found they could get those and fake out the games. Also, there were some crappy devices that didn't do the Keystore security right. If you bought one of those cheap devices and modified the software, you could cheat

To this point, it's fine. Just normal security cat-and-mouse, and it keeps the number of cheaters small enough not to matter, so it's fine. But someone decided to scale it, for a fee. Someone (or some ones) set up massive device farms. One organization made some mistakes that leaked a bit of device information and allowed us to count the devices in the farm and there were tens of thousands. What did they do? They arranged to help Pokemon Go players spoof their location. If you played Pokemon Go and wanted to cheat, you could pay $5 per month and they'd give you a customized version of the game that would let you spoof your location but whenever the game asked for an attestation it would get one from one of the farm devices, all of which were hacked to be able to lie about their configuration.

That's just one example, and there are an unbelievable number of others. I recently chatted with a friend on the counter-abuse team and they are really tearing their hair out over some of the incredibly clever attacks people are mounting with AI. She couldn't give me details (and if she had, I couldn't share them).

Anyway, what's really going on here, I'm sure, is that there's some large-scale, systematic abuse of GMail storage that is to a degree that it's costing Google hundreds of millions of dollars. What exactly, I have no idea. And they think that they can address it by reducing storage for people who won't take a simple step to prove that they're real people (phone number verification). Obviously, phone number verification doesn't prove that you're a real person... but it increases the cost of large-scale abuse, and that's the point. I'm sure there will be other I'm-a-person verification schemes so those without phones have an option, but all of them will aim to inconvenience abusers and increase their costs, without too-greatly inconveniencing legitimate users.

[*] My personal experience: I played Ingres quite a lot for a couple of years, but quit it completely after one cheating event, and never went back. I spent a whole day climbing a 10,000-foot mountain peak, covered in deep snow, in the dead of winter, to capture a key portal, only to have it taken away from me 30 minutes later by someone who definitely didn't climb the mountain. I know because if they'd been there, I'd have seen them. Pissed me off so bad I deleted the app and never installed it again.

We have long distance transmission lines. The Chinese are covering whole mountains and valleys in solar panels, deployed by drones.

Unless you're cooking brisket every day, and so are a lot of your neighbors, it's not likely to be a problem.

Where it becomes an issue is when a non-trivial number of people are using it for heating their homes... which is not that uncommon in the Mountain West.

It used to be very common where I live (northern Utah), and likely would be still, but the density of woodsmoke was enough that when combined with common winter weather conditions ("temperature inversions" that trap a layer of air 2-3 thousand feet deep in the bowl created by surrounding mountains), it became a health hazard. To combat that, the government instituted "no burn days" when using a wood-burning stove in your home was prohibited. Those became common enough that most people eventually found burning wood (and coal) for home heating was annoying.

When I was a kid, my home was primarily heated with wood, plus a bit of coal at night. The house had a gas furnace, but we could cut several cords of wood from the mountains for a permit that cost about $10, plus another $30 in gas -- and our time and sweat, of course, but given the family finances, labor was cheap. That ended in the mid-90s because there were so many no-burn days that my dad gave up.

However, it's still quite common in less densely-populated areas of the Mountain West. This information may change the calculation of how dense is too dense to allow heating with wood.

Remove it to where? Most plants end up back in the same soil.

That will significantly reduce your habitat, you may actually need to move to another planet.

Apparently, the elite also own all the newline characters.

Pica FTW!

A large mass of cryogenic fuel/oxidizer right up against the other side of a thermally-conductive dome also makes a great heat sink. Warming the fuel will cause it to expand, but after burning a lot to get up there, tankage is not a problem.

LOL.

The Obama deal is back on the menu, hasbara bro.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/...

That's what your propaganda industry says.

True but at that point you just build the maps. The logic is complex but honestly people who can reverse engineer a complete protocol for a game can and do handle the rest. Also most of those games will still cache the data locally.

You are correct there have been a few cases where things are done on the server side like heroes of might and magic 6. But most of that was DRM.

I'm not saying that because people can bypass DRM it's okay for publishers to break the game you paid the money for. But what I am saying is that it's possible to meet in the middle where if a publisher abandons a game then it should go into a abandoned where state where owners can patch the game themselves without fear of lawsuits.

I suppose more consumer protections would be nice but I mean, who the fuck is going to vote for that? I can't get people in my country to vote to feed hungry children when we have more food than we know what to do with. Here in America we like keeping children starving because we think it builds character. Or that's what we tell people. Honestly I think it's just sadism.

First that is only true if you are charging at home. And we have priced anyone under 50 out of home ownership.

The bigger issue is AI data centers. Utah for example is about to put one online that uses more electricity than the entire state. You cannot double the demand for a product overnight and not have costs shoot up. Especially with nobody actually building out new infrastructure because we are too busy grabbing every single dime we can get our hands on and giving them to Elon Musk so that he can be the world's first trillionaire and own space.

There are consequences for your actions and while you have probably managed to evade them for a long time it's not going to last.

You can say old gpus but the fact of the matter is AMD is manufacturing these chips and selling them in multiple markets.

You can go out right now and buy a brand new 6700. So it's kind of messed up to yank support if you're actively selling the gpus.

Actually technically if you install Windows XP right now you can't activate it. So even Windows XP doesn't meet the strict demands of the stop killing games movement.

This has nothing to do with support. It has to do with function. I still have a Windows XP machine here and it still works just fine without issue. Microsoft doesn't support it, and critically it *hasn't* been killed by Microsoft.

This is the bar you want to set? Let's set it. The entire stop killing games movement would have 99% of the goals achieved with a Windows XP style software cycle at this point.

Why 99%? Well technically Microsoft did kill their activation server. So ever 30 days you need to boot into safe mode and type a command to reset the activation grace period. To get to 100% Microsoft would have had to either open source the activation server or issue a permanent activation bypass so that users could install Windows XP without having to resort to dodgy patches to keep it running. But at no point is Microsoft required to provide any support.

If you restrict your idea of "games" to the 5 or so massive AAA titles released by a few mega studios each year then sure, it's on life support. You'd have to ignore many many hundreds of games which are released each year not only free of any server control, but also available DRM free, but you do you.

The "elites" control only a tiny tiny portion of your life. You'll continue to own nearly everything you have and they have no say in the matter. Please just look around you. *Takes a sip of tea from a DRM free mug*.

Not sure if you don't know anything about game development or just completely misunderstood what this entire movement is about. Reverse engineering a protocol won't do shit. These live service games usually have quite complex server side software in some cases being exclusively responsible for things like map creation. You won't get very far even if you did know how the computers spoke to each other.

Yes, because they don't rely on server side features.