MC and Visa go, oh, hey, you’re violating our guidelines

No, that is not how that would work. People cannot buy games that violate MasterCard’s and Visa’s policies using MasterCard or Visa. If someone buys the game using a different payment method, crypto or a direct bank link, it would not violate MasterCard or Visa’s policies because they had no part of the transaction.

Being mad at Valve is shooting the messenger.

Being mad at Valve is reasonable, because they did not have to ban all games that their payment processors disagree with. They would need to remove the option to pay with those for certain games, and the process of filtering them out and deciding would take a lot of time, money, and labor. It’s easier for valve to just ban it outright, but it is not the right thing to do. Valve is not the reason it started, but there is reason to be mad at Valve as well.

As of July 16, Steam’s new guidelines state that game publishers should avoid releasing titles that may violate the terms and conditions of its payment processors. In other words, the storefront is asking creators to not only follow the platform’s rules but also submit to potential oversight from companies like MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal.

and from the petition

MasterCard and Visa have increasingly used their financial control to pressure platforms into censoring legal fictional content

Steam is enforcing MasterCard’s, Visa’s, and PayPal’s policies. From Steam’s Rules and Policies:

What you shouldn’t publish on Steam: … 15. Content that may violate the rules and standards set forth by Steam’s payment processors and related card networks and banks, or internet network providers. In particular, certain kinds of adult only content.

Point number 15 was not there in a Snapshot from February on the wayback machine. If anything, the solution should just be to remove the payment method for those games (which would still hurt the creators substantially).

There is a line that is confusing:

In response to this censorship, some fans have launched a petition on Change.org urging Valve to revert its policies

There may be petitions about reverting Valve’s policy, but it’s not the main petition against Visa and MasterCard (which is the one they linked).

Why? It’s been much easier for me

I stopped with Signal. Getting coworkers/family to move to signal was enough work, but I also trust the signal protocol enough to use a centralized service

Do you mean the android apk?

Bluesky is a for profit company. Not the way to go.

It’s not federated, but it is an open source secure texting alternative.

Facebook and twitter are not the same as signal. The signal protocol is a free open source project, that WhatsApp, Signal, and many other use. It secures the data so that whatever servers they are stored on, the company storing it does not know what the texts say. Facebook and Twitter are all about getting as much data as possible. Even though WhatsApp uses the signal protocol, they still collect all metadata with the texts (which is really what they want anyway). Moving to open source project is absolutely the long term goal to get out of this shit hole.

Signal is open source. They absolutely do always comply with US warrants. They have never provided any information to US law enforcement, because they can’t access it. They literally have no way of accessing the information contained inside the texts. The most they could provide is metadata, but they currently aren’t collecting that. I also think if they started, it would not work well for their user base. You can see all their requests for information, and the responses they gave, here: https://signal.org/bigbrother/

A social media platform to keep up with friends/family, while arguable not great (for comparison reasons), it not at all the same as what Facebook is right now. Facebook is no longer what it was originally created to be, it is just a dopamine slow drip.

That also applies to FB marketplace

300 million AWS api calls costs $1.00. If they lost even 2 sales because people could just use HA instead, they 100% lost more money in subscriptions than the cost of AWS api calls

lol, I have no idea why someone down voted you.

But yea, the plural of code in the context of programming scripts is just code, but if you were to talk about codes like a code to get into a door pin-pad, it has an “s” at the end for plural. To be honest, I’m sure there’s plenty of native English speakers not in the tech world that would likely also call it “codes” when talking about programming.

When you said “I highly doubt it” in response to the first comment, what were you doubting? You comment does not seem to make sense in response to the comment. They said that the open source project has likely cost more money in lost subscription fee’s than in AWS API calls, and you said you doubt it?

Then the person replying to you said “The general population is very much influenced by the Home Assistant community” not that everyone knows about it. But your comment talks strictly about how commonly known things in the tech world are not commonly known in the general population (which I think is pretty commonly known in the tech world as well).

This comment chain does not seem to be talking about the same things.

I think it could definitely be possible to do locally, and I wouldn’t want a car where I have to connect to servers to connect to it. But I am also not sure I want a car that can be opened with a command on the car itself. The code to access your CAR being stored locally on the car itself, with no server side validation, does seem kinda scary. It’s one thing for someone to manage to get into your online login where you can change the password, it’s another for someone to literally be able to steal your car because they found a vulnerability. It being stored locally would mean people would reverse engineer it, they could potentially install a virus on your car to be able to gain access. Honestly, as a tech guy, I don’t trust computers enough to have it control my car.

Generally, an engineer wants their product to work well and work efficiently. They put effort into a product, and it feels good to see people benefit from that work. The ones making the decisions have money on their mind. If a FOSS version of their paid platform costs them too much money, they will shut it down. Not because it was the engineers decision, but because the one’s making the decision likely don’t even know what github is and just know it’s taking away that sweet subscription money.

Not all of us are so lucky. I was hospitalized for 3 weeks until I was able to get my PiHole back up. I was nearly a goner.