Arbitrary code execution is tricky to pull off without an existing exploit (or a zero day exploit).

It’s smart that you didn’t open the file, but I suspect it’s probably nothing because it would have required you opening the file for any virus contained within to execute.

Still, worth just running your standard Windows Defender virus scan on it and on your computer in general, if nothing else.

This is what most companies seem to be aiming for these days as well, along with business-to-business sales as opposed to business-to-consumer sales.

For a long time now, many companies have stopped trying to increase profits by increasing the customer base, but rather are shrinking the customer base with intent to make up the difference and then some with increased costs.

I did some back of the napkin math on the price increases for Xbox Game Pass the last time around, and the numbers were basically that they could lose about a third of their customers for Game Pass and still break even, so as long as they lost less than a third of their customer base, they were still creating more profit than before. They would need to be pushing losing fully half of all subscribers for it to make a negative dent on their profits.

This is late stage capitalism. This is rent extraction where they are indeed happier to make $0 because their customer base was already so vast that they can afford to have a significant portion of those customers bail and they will still make money.

Sometimes all we really want or need is the equivalent of comfort food in television format.

All of this is so on the nose except the updates bit.

Sorry, mate, but if you skip an update because you don’t feel like keeping up and it’s because there’s a massive security flaw that leaves your PC up to easy compromise, that’s genuinely a bad thing.

Yeah, most times updates are just new features but if you’re not paying attention you have no idea if it’s a feature update or a security update, do you?

If only you have physical access to your computers and they’re firewalled properly sure, maybe it’s safe enough, but the vast majority of people don’t have things firewalled properly at the very least.

I don’t know, that’s the only bit that seems a bit short-sighted to me, especially when it comes to more casual users.

12345

That’s amazing. I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!

Nobody:

Absolutely No One:

EMH:

No Farts, Just Sharts

#bloblife

It can be both, you’re rejecting it because you fail to understand it. Dude, in a rationally organized world we wouldn’t need fucking charities, because things would just be funded by reasonable tax structures and governments that care more about taking care of their own people instead of bombing foreign nations. Why would we need charities if things were funded well enough as it is? You’re deliberately missing the point.

That wooshing sound you hear is the point going over your head.

Why? It’s still bad. He still isn’t taking societal input on whether the projects he invests his money into are actually the most wise and sound investments to help the future of all living humans. It’s a distinction without a difference.

Then why praise one for having a pet project just because it might help the environment? If it’s not a good thing that they exist, why does there need to be a caveat of “but he’s doing good things with his money.”

Erik Wolpaw, who wrote Portal, was absolutely a Valve employee by that time already though, and very arguably the writing is what made the game so special. The team developing it wouldn’t have had Wolpaw as a pull for a writer without being acquired by Valve.

Exactly. Valve might have a “flat” management structure, but Newell hasn’t exactly re-organized Valve into a worker-owned co-op either.

If I recall correctly Newell himself has made comments on how scary brain interfaces become when the interfaces can start influencing the mind as well as reading it. Giving it positive signals in association with certain ideas or products, essentially a shortcut to what traditional advertising tried to exploit about human cognition, except now it could be forced directly, where you can essentially “force” people’s brains to be happy with a certain situation, idea, or product. He is at least cognizant of the dangers, but who knows how cognizant or how he plans to address those dangers.

It’s quite true, for example, they were one of the first companies to make successful inroads in selling video games in Russia back in the day. Other companies avoided it due to rampant piracy of games in Russia, but Valve successfully (at the time) provided a service and price point that made it more attractive to many Russians than piracy. Being decent to customers is indeed a viable business strategy, and up until the 1970’s was sort of the norm for business (not entirely, but far more than now). It wasn’t until then that businesses became far more extractive from their customer base than trying to build better products for customers.

However, they were also pioneers in certain aspects of gaming that have become detrimental to consumers, such as loot boxes and digital marketplaces. They have done their best to manage and regulate those within their own walled garden, but they have taken a hands-off approach to gambling on Steam marketplace items that takes place on websites outside of Steam (which to an extent is fair since many of them exist in countries where Valve would have very little success in taking them down in any way).

While all that is indeed good, we shouldn’t have to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy to be able to have a better world. No offense, but that kind of stuff should be paid for by taxation. He is doing some good here, but it’s also his pet project, his choice where the money goes, no one else, no input from society at large. It’s still overall not a real great thing, because it means that we have to just hope that billionaires have pet projects that help society and the earth at large. The majority of them don’t. Hell, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk think the future is for digital-post-humans and the things they are trying to do “for the future” are revolving around a plan where humans as we know them effectively become an extinct species, which is inherently elitist and definitely not beneficial to overall society since it means they effectively don’t care if any of us die to achieve it. Just because Newell has better values than the rest doesn’t mean the situation doesn’t still suck ass.

People need to remember a lot of the pro-consumer things that Valve has ever done were things they were forced to by regulation.

Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.

I like Valve more than most companies, but exactly, they are not Saints by any measure.

The best solution, imho. Been around for a long time and so notorious it got removed for DMCA violations on github and gitlab so it had to move to a service outside US copyright cabal jurisdictions.

I feel like this headline is misleading because I don’t think there is a way to convince privacy experts this is a good idea.

Like, the entire idea is antithetical to privacy experts understanding of the issue. You aren’t going to get them to suddenly turn tail and go “gosh you’re right, I wasn’t thinking of the children!”