No, I'm just tired of Sony fanboys lying about the quality of games on the platform because they're in love with Sony's exclusives. You people are obsessed with exclusives as if they are the only thing that matters, even though most games are actually cross-platform.
I'm happy with the selection of games I have, my only problem being that I don't have enough time to play everything I want to play. If you prefer Sony's selection that's fine, just don't spout tired bullshit at me.
"The Xbox division generated its highest ever annual revenue of $16.28 billion during the 2021 calendar year."
"Hardware revenue rose 63.3% year-over-year to $3.7 billion"
"Xbox Series X/S systems continue to sell faster than any previous generation of Microsoft consoles"
Huh.
"Oh, and one more point: PS Now has been around longer than GamePass"
So? If they're the same thing, why is Sony launching a new service to compete with it in Spring 2022?
"Make no mistake: While still with XBox, its tactics are definitely pushing a line I am not happy with."
Maybe it's because I use Game Pass, but I don't see any of the things you're whining about. I'm happy with what I have, I'm just tired of scum lying to me about what I have.
It's worth mentioning that a large part of the problem with the N64 was the hardware, not the games. They insisted on sticking with cartridges while their competitors had moved to optical drives. This meant that production costs were much higher (and thus games were more expensive), and there were resource limits that disc-based games didn't have (carts were much smaller in terms of storage space).
That doesn't detract from the point that developers like Rare really helped the company out during this phase, it's just worth noting that for many people it wasn't the mere selection of games that caused it to be trampled by Sony in that generation.
Re: Re: Re: At least be honest you tyrannical cowards
To a point, though they are tempered to some degree with having to (publicly, at least) support the NHS and other such issues that would have them called communists in the US, and religion is not something that's a regular subject of discussion (and obviously guns are a non-starter politically). On some issues, they're on the same level or even further left than the Democrats in the US (again, publicly, behind closed doors they often say something else) but on others they are like the Republicans. On things that would be considered issues of "morality" they usually swing right.
Fun facts: Fauci has never changed the name of the disease, and the reason why the current name was settled on was an attempt to prevent conspiracy-minded morons from attacking people or destroying property like they've tended to do when the name given was associated with a place, people or species. It's sad how ineffective that was...
Similarly, the reason Greek letters were chosen instead of naming variants after where they were discovered was an attempt to fend off the morons, but the conspiracies that have come out because morons have never seen enough of the alphabet to have read about omicron before is similarly depressing.
A lot of this is typical Tory stuff that I saw in the 80s. Grandstand on moral issues while not actually doing anything positive (and actually causing harm by defunding social programs), demand censorship in ways that don't really work and blame others when it fails. At some point someone with common sense will step in or party donors will point out how what they're doing is bad for their bottom line, and they'll quietly reverse or simply stop enforcing their proposals.
"XBox? They'll just buy up the competition and screw up gaming as we know it because subscriptions are more important to the company than actually making games is."
Play some of the games at some point, you'd be surprised at how wrong you are. Sony bought up a lot of competition in previous generations, so they have a head start at locking things up. Oh, and if you think Sony isn't working on subscription services to regain some of what it's losing to Game Pass, you're not paying attention.
"In the meantime, I'm buying used GameCube games."
Go ahead, there's some sorely underrated games on that platform.
So, this confuses the issue even further. The objection to accessing 3rd party content is that the IP can be used to identify someone and is thus a violation of privacy. But, if it's already written into law that it's not always possible to do that and you have to blame an account owner instead of the user for wrongdoing, isn't that proof that the user can't be identified using the IP address, and thus a 3rd party seeing the publicly transmitted address is not violating any privacy?
"With the free games on epic , cheap games on steam, Microsoft game pass, there's very little room in the market for a games streaming service"
I've said it before, but the major problem with Stadia is that the business model was torpedoed the moment competing services arrived, and they didn't have anywhere near enough for a running start for it to matter. You had to purchase each game at full retail price, no matter how old the game was. Compare that to Steam and its regular sales, or to Game Pass where you get access to hundreds of games, and Stadia was a non-starter. If they were years ahead of the pack there might have been room to build up a lead and compete on price and reputation later on when competition arrived. But they had months at best with a way less attractive option compared to what was already on the horizon...
"in most cases it makes more sense just to download the game and install it , no one wants to be experiencing delays when playing a single player game due to average broadband connection"
Basically, it all depends on how the system deals with latency issues. On xCloud my experience has been variable, from not noticing any quality drop at all from home (where I might opt to stream instead of trying to free 50GB from my XBox hard drive just to test out a new game) to occasional glitches while streaming from my laptop in a hotel, to showing a friend the system on my phone in a bar. With the latter two, some visible glitches and delays were visible. It was acceptable for most cases, you just wouldn't want to try setting up a Halo multiplayer match.
I know the fictional version of people you fight so valiantly against are evil, but did you ever consider that your life would be easier by dealing with the real ones?
With IPv6 it is of course more possible to identify a specific device and therefore the individual using it, but that's still assuming that people are directly connecting with that device and not via a router, etc. But, it still takes work to get the information to tie it to a person, and that typically requires a court order.
Copyright trolls don't actually care about identifying a specific user, they just want to know who to name in the lawsuit, who may or may not have any relationship to the person they're accusing of infringement.
With law enforcement, they have to do a lot more work to prove who did what if they're trying to pin something on an individual. For example, if you're doing something illegal from your phone via 4G then they might be able to tie you directly just by querying your provider, although even then simply identifying the device used does not necessarily translate to identifying an individual without further investigation.
But, if you're using free wifi from outside a coffee shop nowhere near when you live while using a VPN that doesn't store access logs, it's going to take a lot more work to tie you to the activity. Not impossible, but the work required would seem to suggest that it's not relevant to the things that GDPR is intended to protect against, and not without going through other legal processes that already have other types of protection.
Generally speaking, MS have changed a lot of the way they approach things since the disastrous XBox One launch, and part of that has been them openly courting cross-platform play. The holdout there has generally been Sony, and a lot's been made of them basing a lot of their strategy based on exclusivity, with in fact a major criticism of MS being that they didn't have a lot of exclusive titles apart from Forza and Halo last gen.
That's why I'm generally unconvinced by people losing their crap over MS making an upcoming Bethesda game console exclusive (at least natively, xCloud seems to be on the table still if everyone plays ball) while lauding Sony for saying they won't make Destiny 3 a console exclusive. On both sides these moves seem to be relative departures from their recent histories.
But, since the Wii all sides seem to regard Nintendo as not being a direct competitor in the same way they are with each other, so it's neither surprising to see Nintendo announce they're not taking part in this battle, nor to see that they will allow certain titles to be licensed by them.
We'll see how this plays out long term, but I suspect that Nintendo will continue to operate as a quirky outsider rather than re-enter the race as a 3rd direct competitor.
Well, citing a UK interpretation of an EU law is obviously problematic at the best of times, and fairly irrelevant under current circumstances. Even if they mostly adhere to the same rules now, there's plans to diverge from it and enforcement there is obviously going to be different from the EU.
But, if that's a real interpretation then it's even dumber than most things I've heard on the subject, and it likely to fall apart completely if it needs to be challenged. It's simply not compatible with reality.
But, who knows at this point. On the one hand the GDPR contains many things that seem to suggest that the people who wrote it have a less than firm grasp on how certain things work in the real world and what it could even achieve in terms of protection, on the other hand even official sources have been very confused at points about what it actually says.
But, if they're going to take a hard stance that processing a request from an IP address that might well be owned by someone with no relationship with the user is a violation of privacy, there's many millions of businesses who need to be informed that they're operating illegally, and that the reasons for that defy common sense.
I was saying you could make a case that an individual can be identified using metadata without needing to poll the ISP; but that has nothing to do with the record request you mentioned.
Be that as it may, you can't directly associate an IP with a person without consulting the ISP logs, so surely if there's a privacy issue it's when the interaction where the ISP confirms the association takes place, not when a 3rd party has been given the information required for it to deliver a packet that's been requested?
You could potentially make a case that collection of metadata and other types of tracking introduces a
I'll just add to that - by this measure, then surely it's illegal for services like Datadog, Splunk and New Relic to offer services in the EU, which doesn't appear to be the case. A lot of businesses would probably like to have information about how they're operating illegally by parsing their web logs.
"I find it a bit far fetched too, but it is argued that IP address + time of connection makes it possible to request precise subscriber data from ISPs"
That's possible, but ISPs generally don't give out private account information willy nilly, and doing so without a court order would likely be an actual violation of privacy laws, even in the US, from my understanding. IIRC, one of the things that the RIAA was whining about years ago was that they had to make individual subpoenas to ISPs to work out who they were suing rather than just being given carte blanche to access all their logs whenever they wanted.
I understand that having a strong case and understanding how the internet actually operates is not a prerequisite for some of these demands, but this is weak even by their normal standard. This is another case where placing the onus on a user taking action (if you're concerned about your IP being tracked, use a VPN to protect yourself or your browser's privacy capabilities) rather than breaking fundamental aspects of the internet (making 3rd party content effectively illegal) is the actual way forward.
""I didn't know your honor", i.e. incompetence, is not a defense"
No, I'm pretty such that "I didn't know it would suddenly be illegal for a browser to send the same ID string that it has sent every time it has accessed something since the web was invented" should be defence.
I't impossible for this content to be accessed without the provider knowing the IP address to send it to. There's no indication that using a 3rd party API was made illegal. So, why would a developer conclude that using the API was illegal now?
If you think that making it illegal for 3rd parties to know your IP address doesn't affect things, you may be underestimating how many websites access 3rd party content - and no, not just for tracking purposes.
On the post: Consolidation Strategies Emerge For The Big 3 In Gaming: Nintendo Looks Like It Doesn't Want To Play
Re: Re: Re:
"Another XBox fanboy living in denial."
No, I'm just tired of Sony fanboys lying about the quality of games on the platform because they're in love with Sony's exclusives. You people are obsessed with exclusives as if they are the only thing that matters, even though most games are actually cross-platform.
I'm happy with the selection of games I have, my only problem being that I don't have enough time to play everything I want to play. If you prefer Sony's selection that's fine, just don't spout tired bullshit at me.
"Sales are down. Read the financial reports, guy"
OK...
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/xbox-posts-record-annual-revenue-as-series- x-s-sales-estimated-at-over-12-million/
Huh.
"Oh, and one more point: PS Now has been around longer than GamePass"
So? If they're the same thing, why is Sony launching a new service to compete with it in Spring 2022?
"Make no mistake: While still with XBox, its tactics are definitely pushing a line I am not happy with."
Maybe it's because I use Game Pass, but I don't see any of the things you're whining about. I'm happy with what I have, I'm just tired of scum lying to me about what I have.
On the post: Consolidation Strategies Emerge For The Big 3 In Gaming: Nintendo Looks Like It Doesn't Want To Play
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"Yes, the N64 sold poorly, and?"
It's worth mentioning that a large part of the problem with the N64 was the hardware, not the games. They insisted on sticking with cartridges while their competitors had moved to optical drives. This meant that production costs were much higher (and thus games were more expensive), and there were resource limits that disc-based games didn't have (carts were much smaller in terms of storage space).
That doesn't detract from the point that developers like Rare really helped the company out during this phase, it's just worth noting that for many people it wasn't the mere selection of games that caused it to be trampled by Sony in that generation.
On the post: UK Government Refreshes Its Terrible 'Online Safety Bill,' Adds Even More Content For Platforms To Police
Re: Re: Re: At least be honest you tyrannical cowards
To a point, though they are tempered to some degree with having to (publicly, at least) support the NHS and other such issues that would have them called communists in the US, and religion is not something that's a regular subject of discussion (and obviously guns are a non-starter politically). On some issues, they're on the same level or even further left than the Democrats in the US (again, publicly, behind closed doors they often say something else) but on others they are like the Republicans. On things that would be considered issues of "morality" they usually swing right.
On the post: More Fallout For NSO And Israel: Gov't Police Illegally Deployed Malware Against Person Involved In Netanyahu Bribery Trial
Re: Proofreading is your fiend
Fun facts: Fauci has never changed the name of the disease, and the reason why the current name was settled on was an attempt to prevent conspiracy-minded morons from attacking people or destroying property like they've tended to do when the name given was associated with a place, people or species. It's sad how ineffective that was...
Similarly, the reason Greek letters were chosen instead of naming variants after where they were discovered was an attempt to fend off the morons, but the conspiracies that have come out because morons have never seen enough of the alphabet to have read about omicron before is similarly depressing.
On the post: Automakers Can't Give Up The Idea Of Turning Everyday Features Into Subscription Services With Fees
Re:
"Indicators for $15 per month"
They wouldn't get many subscriptions where I live...
On the post: UK Government Refreshes Its Terrible 'Online Safety Bill,' Adds Even More Content For Platforms To Police
Re: At least be honest you tyrannical cowards
A lot of this is typical Tory stuff that I saw in the 80s. Grandstand on moral issues while not actually doing anything positive (and actually causing harm by defunding social programs), demand censorship in ways that don't really work and blame others when it fails. At some point someone with common sense will step in or party donors will point out how what they're doing is bad for their bottom line, and they'll quietly reverse or simply stop enforcing their proposals.
On the post: Consolidation Strategies Emerge For The Big 3 In Gaming: Nintendo Looks Like It Doesn't Want To Play
Re:
"XBox? They'll just buy up the competition and screw up gaming as we know it because subscriptions are more important to the company than actually making games is."
Play some of the games at some point, you'd be surprised at how wrong you are. Sony bought up a lot of competition in previous generations, so they have a head start at locking things up. Oh, and if you think Sony isn't working on subscription services to regain some of what it's losing to Game Pass, you're not paying attention.
"In the meantime, I'm buying used GameCube games."
Go ahead, there's some sorely underrated games on that platform.
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
So, this confuses the issue even further. The objection to accessing 3rd party content is that the IP can be used to identify someone and is thus a violation of privacy. But, if it's already written into law that it's not always possible to do that and you have to blame an account owner instead of the user for wrongdoing, isn't that proof that the user can't be identified using the IP address, and thus a 3rd party seeing the publicly transmitted address is not violating any privacy?
On the post: Google Stadia's Failure Is Almost Complete
Re:
"With the free games on epic , cheap games on steam, Microsoft game pass, there's very little room in the market for a games streaming service"
I've said it before, but the major problem with Stadia is that the business model was torpedoed the moment competing services arrived, and they didn't have anywhere near enough for a running start for it to matter. You had to purchase each game at full retail price, no matter how old the game was. Compare that to Steam and its regular sales, or to Game Pass where you get access to hundreds of games, and Stadia was a non-starter. If they were years ahead of the pack there might have been room to build up a lead and compete on price and reputation later on when competition arrived. But they had months at best with a way less attractive option compared to what was already on the horizon...
"in most cases it makes more sense just to download the game and install it , no one wants to be experiencing delays when playing a single player game due to average broadband connection"
Basically, it all depends on how the system deals with latency issues. On xCloud my experience has been variable, from not noticing any quality drop at all from home (where I might opt to stream instead of trying to free 50GB from my XBox hard drive just to test out a new game) to occasional glitches while streaming from my laptop in a hotel, to showing a friend the system on my phone in a bar. With the latter two, some visible glitches and delays were visible. It was acceptable for most cases, you just wouldn't want to try setting up a Halo multiplayer match.
On the post: Explainer: The Whole Spotify / Joe Rogan Thing Has Absolutely Nothing To Do With Section 230
Re: Re: You Made A Mistake
I know the fictional version of people you fight so valiantly against are evil, but did you ever consider that your life would be easier by dealing with the real ones?
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
With IPv6 it is of course more possible to identify a specific device and therefore the individual using it, but that's still assuming that people are directly connecting with that device and not via a router, etc. But, it still takes work to get the information to tie it to a person, and that typically requires a court order.
Copyright trolls don't actually care about identifying a specific user, they just want to know who to name in the lawsuit, who may or may not have any relationship to the person they're accusing of infringement.
With law enforcement, they have to do a lot more work to prove who did what if they're trying to pin something on an individual. For example, if you're doing something illegal from your phone via 4G then they might be able to tie you directly just by querying your provider, although even then simply identifying the device used does not necessarily translate to identifying an individual without further investigation.
But, if you're using free wifi from outside a coffee shop nowhere near when you live while using a VPN that doesn't store access logs, it's going to take a lot more work to tie you to the activity. Not impossible, but the work required would seem to suggest that it's not relevant to the things that GDPR is intended to protect against, and not without going through other legal processes that already have other types of protection.
On the post: Consolidation Strategies Emerge For The Big 3 In Gaming: Nintendo Looks Like It Doesn't Want To Play
Re: Re:
Generally speaking, MS have changed a lot of the way they approach things since the disastrous XBox One launch, and part of that has been them openly courting cross-platform play. The holdout there has generally been Sony, and a lot's been made of them basing a lot of their strategy based on exclusivity, with in fact a major criticism of MS being that they didn't have a lot of exclusive titles apart from Forza and Halo last gen.
That's why I'm generally unconvinced by people losing their crap over MS making an upcoming Bethesda game console exclusive (at least natively, xCloud seems to be on the table still if everyone plays ball) while lauding Sony for saying they won't make Destiny 3 a console exclusive. On both sides these moves seem to be relative departures from their recent histories.
But, since the Wii all sides seem to regard Nintendo as not being a direct competitor in the same way they are with each other, so it's neither surprising to see Nintendo announce they're not taking part in this battle, nor to see that they will allow certain titles to be licensed by them.
We'll see how this plays out long term, but I suspect that Nintendo will continue to operate as a quirky outsider rather than re-enter the race as a 3rd direct competitor.
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Well, citing a UK interpretation of an EU law is obviously problematic at the best of times, and fairly irrelevant under current circumstances. Even if they mostly adhere to the same rules now, there's plans to diverge from it and enforcement there is obviously going to be different from the EU.
But, if that's a real interpretation then it's even dumber than most things I've heard on the subject, and it likely to fall apart completely if it needs to be challenged. It's simply not compatible with reality.
But, who knows at this point. On the one hand the GDPR contains many things that seem to suggest that the people who wrote it have a less than firm grasp on how certain things work in the real world and what it could even achieve in terms of protection, on the other hand even official sources have been very confused at points about what it actually says.
But, if they're going to take a hard stance that processing a request from an IP address that might well be owned by someone with no relationship with the user is a violation of privacy, there's many millions of businesses who need to be informed that they're operating illegally, and that the reasons for that defy common sense.
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Oops, hit submit too early.
I was saying you could make a case that an individual can be identified using metadata without needing to poll the ISP; but that has nothing to do with the record request you mentioned.
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Be that as it may, you can't directly associate an IP with a person without consulting the ISP logs, so surely if there's a privacy issue it's when the interaction where the ISP confirms the association takes place, not when a 3rd party has been given the information required for it to deliver a packet that's been requested?
You could potentially make a case that collection of metadata and other types of tracking introduces a
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'll just add to that - by this measure, then surely it's illegal for services like Datadog, Splunk and New Relic to offer services in the EU, which doesn't appear to be the case. A lot of businesses would probably like to have information about how they're operating illegally by parsing their web logs.
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Where in the GDPR is it stated that an IP address is personal information that must be protected?
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re:
"I find it a bit far fetched too, but it is argued that IP address + time of connection makes it possible to request precise subscriber data from ISPs"
That's possible, but ISPs generally don't give out private account information willy nilly, and doing so without a court order would likely be an actual violation of privacy laws, even in the US, from my understanding. IIRC, one of the things that the RIAA was whining about years ago was that they had to make individual subpoenas to ISPs to work out who they were suing rather than just being given carte blanche to access all their logs whenever they wanted.
I understand that having a strong case and understanding how the internet actually operates is not a prerequisite for some of these demands, but this is weak even by their normal standard. This is another case where placing the onus on a user taking action (if you're concerned about your IP being tracked, use a VPN to protect yourself or your browser's privacy capabilities) rather than breaking fundamental aspects of the internet (making 3rd party content effectively illegal) is the actual way forward.
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re: Re:
""I didn't know your honor", i.e. incompetence, is not a defense"
No, I'm pretty such that "I didn't know it would suddenly be illegal for a browser to send the same ID string that it has sent every time it has accessed something since the web was invented" should be defence.
I't impossible for this content to be accessed without the provider knowing the IP address to send it to. There's no indication that using a 3rd party API was made illegal. So, why would a developer conclude that using the API was illegal now?
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re: Re:
If you think that making it illegal for 3rd parties to know your IP address doesn't affect things, you may be underestimating how many websites access 3rd party content - and no, not just for tracking purposes.
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