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Submission + - NY AG Letitia James is suing Valve (cbsnews.com)

DesScorp writes: James is going after Valve on gambling charges, stating that loot boxes are predatory, especially for underage gamers:

"This loot box model that Valve has developed—charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone—is quintessential gambling, prohibited under New York's Constitution and Penal Law," the complaint says. In one of the games, the process even resembles a slot machine, according James. Since the prizes in the loot boxes are determined randomly in accordance with odds set by Valve, James alleges, that effectively makes Valve an online casino. "Valve, a video game developer, has made billions of dollars by letting children and adults illegally gamble for the chance to win valuable virtual prizes," James posted on social media. "These features are addictive and harmful. That's why I'm suing to stop Valve's unlawful conduct and protect New Yorkers."


Comment Re:Commies (Score 1) 189

I have no idea how you got there when I explicitly said "Trumpistas". If I meant Reaganites, I would have said that.

The fascist clownshow still wears that skinsuit, though, and needling them about it makes other Republicans uncomfortable, so I consider it useful.

Trump is basically a 1980s Democrat

Right, I can vividly remember the horror of Geraldine Ferarro shipping all those poor souls to gulags after establishing her own network of paramilitary brownshirts.

Comment Re:Which TV manufacturers are still making their o (Score 1) 36

LG, maybe...

Probably not for long. You may as well buy that no-name TV made in Vietnam now, because name brands have ceased to mean anything in this space. Just about everyone followed RCA and GE and Philco, who all stopped making sets in the 80's, and made all their TV money licensing their names to cheap Asian third parties. There hasn't been a real RCA TV since 1986.

Comment Re:Zoning (Score 1) 95

Oh the day has come when people look at vile, despicable anti-capitalist actions in cities and think "lets do the same thing in farmlands".

Zoning laws, not high taxes, are the reason people are fleeing California.

Uh, it's both, and crime too.

The lack of multifamily housing (condos and apartment buildings) is why housing got so expensive.

Housing got expensive because California become like New York City: A place where the young want to be because its "the center of it all", which creates luxury pricing conditions for everything, not just housing. As packed as LA and the Bay Area have become, you're only going to get more apartments by seizing single family homes by eminent domain and tearing them down. That's not America, and even in California, that'll get you a fucking riot. Go on, try it and see.

Comment Re:Even better: no cars at all (Score 1) 169

We need to eliminate car dependency and give people a choice of transportation. Freedom of mobility includes freedom to not travel by automobile. Side benefits include less pollution.

Bullshit. You already have that in cities. People have a variety of choices. Every big city in the US has both bus and light rail systems with very few exceptions (Cincinnati, for one). EVERY city of medium size on up has a bus system. What you really want is to force your post title on people: no cars at all. Your whole aim has nothing to do with "choice".

Comment Sure you can (Score 1) 26

If you build a dangerous theme park and I buy it from you, I take responsibility when kids get mangled.

And PE is absolutely a terrible model for any software with a security aspect. They will always strip maintenance to the bone and PE backwater shops don't exactly have the best and brightest banging on their doors anyway.

After we were bought by a massive firm, one of the (many) things that bugged me was losing control of my vendors. Instead of making our own deals, now I tell a centralized procurement department what I need. It still causes problems and bugs me, but one thing they do is evaluate vendor capabilities. And they really don't like PE-owned software, for exactly this sort of reason. SolarWinds kicked them in the nuts on that one and they're not eager for a repeat.

This isn't a fluffy hippy saying "I don't like breakers and takers", this is a Dow 50 CTO saying "PE's business model is not compatible with security-critical software".

Comment Re:Because magic (Score 1) 84

I'm not talking about Joe Random's laptop, I'm talking about systems involved in commerce that are exposed to attack. You want at least 60 bits of entropy right now; if you're monitoring competently you'll notice the attack well before there's significant risk of success. Better not to expose an access path at all, of course, but sometimes it can't be avoided.

Diceware or whatever is fine, I guess, but in our environment I don't care about typability. End user passwords only have to be entered once a week or so. Access to accounts with elevated privileges is not an everyday thing here, and is gated.

But hey, do what you want, I don't manage your machines.

Comment Re:Because magic (Score 1) 84

Password storage is the same whether or not you use a robot-poop password.

I use Hashicorp Vault at home, because I tend to dogfood the services I run at work. But that's a bit ridiculous, I don't recommend it.

We also run a local Bitwarden installation at work, that's generally for nontechnical users and the dedicated programming staff (although I repeat myself).

For normal people, I recommend some password manager with local storage not tied to a browser, and ideally not tied to your OS. But it depends on how competent the user is.

Why are you using four character passwords? I don't know what your threat model looks like, but a cat might "guess" that, bouncing on your keyboard.

Comment Because magic (Score 4, Interesting) 84

Because people don't know how things work, and treat the robots like oracles.
"But ChatGPT said..." is the new "I saw it on television, it must be true."

If you're not doing something like

< /dev/urandom tr -dc _A-A-a-z-0-9 | head -c30

or some tool that does something similar, you already have problems.

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