FMecha

I didn't have Disney Vault thing in mind when I came up with that. LRG's (and similar companies) schtick was that they're semi-upfront about pandering to collectors, especially with the extra goodies (sometimes of varying quality when they finally delivered).

EDIT: Especially for physical releases of streaming-only shows/films, since these companies mainly do that for digital-only games.

Odds of Limited Run Games-style "exploitation" of this trend? That was already concerning for games.

How is that digital wallet even going, though? Last time I heard the Digital Euro proposal still faces several hurdles - including privacy.

Have you heard of the hush-hush over Chat Control, a recurring theme on this site? It's getting to the point that they could shoehorn that with age verification push.

"...and as long it's created by a human."

(Because I feel proponents of generative AI appear to play the "info wants to be free" card as well.)

It's not just streamers - fictional characters are also increasingly engineered to be this way. Besides the loot box aspect, many East Asian gacha games are built with parasocial relationships with the characters in mind, for one.

(See community controversies surrounding Girls' Frontline 2 and Snowbreak for examples.)

Conversely, people in the UK have mentioned that they looked old enough to purchase age-restricted items at physical stores under an "does they look over 25?" protocol and still asked for ID to purchase them.

>The participation rate in politics is too low nowadays for gossip to spread.

Except if the politics is expressly populist.

CERO (the Japanese ratings board) have required some mature-rated Western console video games to be edited (either for violence or sexual aspects) for it to receive the "Z" (age-restricted) rating be sold in the country.

Also, the passage of the law that regulated the AV (adult video) industry in 2022, intending to protect their performers, was notoriously controversial that year as well and seen as steps to censorship.

Even if they do reissue said older games whenever possible for them, these are often times in altered form from the originals as well.

There was a brief attempt in late 90s Japan by game publishers to curtail used game sales by campaigning against it on back covers of games in late 90s/early 2000s. They stopped after the court said no to it.

Additionally, the market is also seeing used games as collectibles like cars and are inflating their prices that make it out of reach to actual buyers in favor of collectors. (cf. WATA Games)

Related reading: A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42611818

I also remember a PS1 warez group that was of Italian origin.

CHIPS Act also has people thinking it is some sort of Intel "bailout" act as well (compareable to 2008 GM bailout to them).

Console gaming will probably catch the strays of it, though (not that the sentiment to move to PC gaming is increasingly vocal anyway).

>Huawei even sells phones without Google Play in the west! Of course the first thing people try to do on them is get Google Play working, because the cheap hardware is all people care about.

For the devs' part, some of them did port their apps to Huawei's store (at least from my observation in Indonesia). Samsung also has their own app store on their own phones that's mostly for their built-in stuff.

>Firefox

Mozilla is dependent on Google money.

>Brave

Chromium-based (another engine monopoly on itself) and crypto connections (if you're not a fan of them).

Mid-budget mobile game devs in Asia not only relies on gacha, but also sexual/parasocial appeal (with the characters), to boot.

Which EU-based government(s), though? The implication I get is that is under your proposal, the dev(s) would have to register with almost every EU countries out there.

I almost thought you think people should be buying a web browser on retail (like Netscape or Opera back then).

EDIT: For that, see Horse - but that's still Chromium derived: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853708

>manufacturers would just be building prebuilt gaming PCs

Which, given the sentiment against the very existence of these things in PC gaming circles (as a desktop, at least) in favor of self-building, would be just laptops and handhelds (Steam Decks/ROG Allys) at best.

AMD brands it AMD Secure Technology/Platform Security Processor, and the same backdoor concern is there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

From what I heard, it was because they were tired of people posting "tbh fam". This does result in people instead posting "tbdesu" in being aware of the filter.

A note that the filter for "doublechan" was never updated to include its current name, nor the place where this current attack originated was ever filtered, afaik.

There is a reason why common people picked Bluesky instead of the fediverse.

/g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.

Nishimura for most part become a Japanese public personality - he has wrote for Japanese tabloids and has a YT channel.

4chan, ironically enough, had something similar where steganographic images were posted designed to be copied to Paint, saved as a bmp, renamed to an .hta file, and then executed. It would then spam the board with other variations of itself.

Jamie Kellner (when at Turner Broadcasting) was quoted that skipping commercials with PVRs (this was in 2002) is a form of theft (in sense of piracy).

In practice, only licensed Blu-ray players (hardware and software) implement Cinavia. While there was an idea/fear that an OS can implement Cinavia system-wide, that did not happen (yet).

Except Cinavia, which worked on audio level, exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

Although it can only trip on certain devices or media players (mainly Blu-ray players, including PS3 onwards), I did read an idea that suggested Cinavia being placed inside an OS's kernel in a secure enclave to make it system-wide.

>I don't know if that has ever been enforced in the car industry, especially for import brands.

An example involving Stellantis in Turkey: https://moparinsiders.com/stellantis-turkish-unit-sale-faces...

>It's unclear what US regulators would latch onto here as part of an anti-trust case.

You still have the EU.