We are paying the bill. Or did you think those companies magically print money to pay their shareholders? ROI has to come from someone not on the shareholder list, and those paying aren't liking what they are seeing.

Companies think they can just ignore that indefinitely, but they are in for a rude awakening if they don't reverse course. (Especially those that are firmly in the category of "disposable income" / "discretionary spending".)

Actions which one would hope that Switzerland and others will take into account the next time that the US asks for a search warrant against their companies / citizens. Malicious prosecution has it's consequences. Especially when the prosecution crosses international borders and subjects foreign officials to the ire of their own public.

Because the Gustapo wanted collars on film and was passing out bonuses for getting them and handing down pink slips for missing them. Those same Gustapo are also foregoing required training, background checks, and competency tests to get badges in the field as quickly as possible. They aren't trustworthy by a long shot, and their actions only serve to reduce that trust even further.

Which is complete BS. A hacked device is a hacked device. If that hack compromises the security chip running Play Integrity's checks, the app is fucked no matter what Google has to say about it with their BS signature token.

As always, it's those who are honest that suffer the most. Don't believe me? Go install a custom ROM or sideload /xbin/su that doesn't also employ stealth measures or workarounds and see how many of your apps suddenly stop working because your phone was "hacked." Remember: To Google, a hacked phone is one the owner controls.

I thought it was in that bag of marbles....

When the manufacturer of those trading cards, Funko POP!s, etc. can just press a button and undo the existence of those items, and / or the manufacturer can in real time control the value of said items through a monopoly on their (re)sale, feel free to come back and discuss it with us.

Until then, no. There is a value in those physical items that the loot boxes do not possess, and that can't be revoked or significantly altered on the whim of it's manufacturer. Those physical items also tend to have a stable cost and publicly known odds for specific outcomes.

The loot boxes have none of these qualities. They are targeted towards those vulnerable to manipulation, designed to extract the maximum amount of profit from each victim, and engage in odds manipulation to encourage repeat plays as much as possible.

TL;DR: If you engage in ripping off the public, you shouldn't be surprised / outraged when the public strikes back to defend itself and / or recover what they've lost to your ill-gotten gains.

Here let me fix this for you:

Sure, I just did. Now it's your turn: Why are you so upset about this? Do you feel that you are being threatened by this action? Why are you so quick to dismiss this as a personal fault of those affected by these "ADULT MEN"?

If that does happen, then yes. Anything where accuracy or accountability is required (legally) will switch back to pen and paper. At least until the software houses get their acts back together, some government mandate happens, or the more likely outcome, the companies will just get buggy software declared a negative externality to be paid by the taxpayers without compensation.

Next up: The slaves return, and those without access to them perish.

Brought to you by your corpo masters. They never gave up on the ideal of slavery.

DirectStorage means bypassing the OS and having the GPU access the game's storage device on it's own (DMA like). Presumably those tweaks are about mandating what data formats their creation tools must support, so that GPUs have a standard list of compression algorithms to use / implement support for.

Downloading pre-compiled shaders is something almost everyone does already. Even Valve does it for example. If for nothing more than to decrease loading times by removing the need for the end-user's device to compile the shaders itself. The end-user's hardware can still do so if the shaders are missing or a newer format is used that the existing shaders don't support.

"XBox" may want to "lock in" developers per the M$ MO, and the dumb part is that Microsoft already admitted victory on that part in court filings. (That great thing of theirs called the "Windows API".)

1) Valve's version is only installed if you install Steam.
2) Valve's version doesn't mandate it's use.
3) Steam is an optional program installed as a third party component.

None of that applies to the Microsoft version. In fact I'd wager that most of it will be the exact opposite: Mandatory, part of the OS, and non-removable without crippling something else. I also wouldn't be surprised if it "accidentally" conflicted with Steam's version at some point. (After all Microsoft making PCs == Xbox, means that Valve is now a direct competitor, and we all know the "accidental" / annoying things that occur to Microsoft's big name competitors on their platform....)

And the reason you'd want them to? Doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not, if Microsoft is deleting your data, there's problems with that alone. Never mind that you just violated your assumption of "Microsoft doesn't know what's in your SQL database." They know the entries in question are older than the given criteria. Every single operation performed is revealing more metadata about the contents of the database, creating more and more violations through side-channels. Make enough of those violations, and suddenly it doesn't matter if the data is encrypted or not anymore. They have enough side-channel info to reconstruct it from scratch.

Hell, with AI, being very good at statistical modeling, it's even easier than ever to study that side-channel and extract potentially useful information from it. Especially if there are no poison pills to pollute the data and frustrate efforts.

Here we go with the smug mainframe rent-seekers claiming victory again. Don't worry, we've kept the "Mission Accomplished" banner safe for you.

That's called blind faith, not trust. And these kinds of "secure" chips have had serious implementation bugs before. Not being able to audit it is just asking to get owned.

Aka an accountability nightmare for anyone concerned with such things, and a gift from god for those with ill-intent. Of course it will be deployed everywhere in a few years under mandate.

Or at least it would be, if unlike all other forms of "use other people's resources with impunity" it actually worked long term. The reality is that analytics will be get better and those pushing this will quickly move on to the next "secure" chip that they can sell you to "protect" your data from the prying eyes of the system's owner.

Nope, you still need to trust the system. It doesn't know the exact data, but it does know the decision process for generating output based on the encrypted data. That means that just like unmasking people using TLS to connect to websites, the metadata (what decisions are possible / which ones are taken / when they are taken / who is doing the processing / the time in which it takes to process that data / the time the data was queued for processing / etc.) is important and can be used to defeat the encryption even without decrypting it.

Worse, assuming the data is unique enough, it may even be possible for a compromised host using FHE to corrupt the data in a way that is beneficial to an attacker. Due to the increased processing time requirements, (and associated charges that go along with it), those using FHE are unlikely to be inserting poison pills to frustrate such attacks. (As it would have to be done on the data owner's side, because the host processing the data can't be aware that the data it's working on is fabricated for the poison pill to have the desired effect.)

All FHE is really useful for is hiding the generics, or those adjacent enough, during the early days of deployment. Before more sophisticated analytics are developed. That and convincing bean counters and C-Levels that they can "safely" continue using read: paying these cloud companies for a few more years, before they'll be forced by the pendulum to take stuff back on-prem.