IIRC, somebody tried to trace the company back to its owners, but the chain ended with a company that is likely Chinese. One of the earliest company-hosted relay servers was also located in China based on its IP address. The company now runs multiple servers on various continents.

Some people also freaked out when the company started offering paid, binary server images and services that added extra features like a management console, assuming (incorrectly) that they would replace the basic, no-cost, open-source images.

RustDesk. It works like TeamViewer: install the client on both machines, have the relative read out the client ID and one-time password over the phone, and you can connect immediately. It has self-hostable server components, but you can use the public relay servers without having to configure anything on the clients. You don’t have to open any ports on the firewall either.

An Expanse reference in the wild? Beratnaaaa!

Volkswagen sausages.

Good luck getting gamers to boycott anything.

I probably didn’t translate that properly. I meant “one of the two bodies involved in lawmaking”.

The developers themselves are often not the package maintainers. Before a package is published or updated in one of the official Arch repos, it has to be built, tested, and sometimes patched (which is why you see a -1, -2, etc. appended to the package version), in order to work correctly not just on its own but in an Arch system with Arch packages that it is likely to encounter. The process is not as thorough as Debian for example, but it’s still the responsibility of the package maintainer. If the package is still in early development, deprecated (e.g. wine32), an out-of-tree kernel module (e.g. xpadneo-dkms), or is meant to be built from the latest available commit (any number of *-git packages), the AUR is a convenient way to share PKGBUILD files rather than have the user build the software manually based on a readme, if it even includes build instructions. The PKGBUILD is then ingested by makepkg, which both configures the environment and builds the software, and outputs a package that can then be installed and managed by Pacman.

The caveat is that packages built from the AUR are not vetted by any package maintainers. They can have bugs, they might depend on outdated or no-longer-existent packages, or might contain malware.

This isn’t the end of the movement in Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoODQFrPgw&t=734s

tl;dw: This was unfortunate, but not unexpected. There is a much broader support for SKG in the European Parliament, the other legislative body besides the EC. Only the EC can introduce new legislation, but the EP has the authority to modify existing legislation without involving the EC. In this case, SKG intends to extend the Digital Fairness Act to protecting video game preservation.

This isn’t the end of the movement in Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoODQFrPgw&t=734s

tl;dw: There is a much broader support for SKG in the European Parliament, the other legislative body besides the EC. Only the EC can introduce new legislation, but the EP has the authority to modify existing legislation. In this case, SKG intends to modify the Digital Fairness Act to extend it to protecting video game preservation.

Uh, they are not. It’s like saying the entire US government consists of only the members of congress.

The European Commission is one of two legislative bodies. It’s the one that can introduce new legislation. The European Parliament is where SKG has a much broader support, and they are aiming to modify the Digital Fairness Act.

I see a lot of defeatist commenters are content to lie down and let this be the end result. I’ll let the man himself explain why this isn’t the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgoODQFrPgw&t=734s

tl;dw: There is a much broader support for SKG in the European Parliament, the other legislative body besides the EC. They can’t introduce new legislation, but they can modify existing legislation; specifically, SKG is targeting the Digital Fairness Act.

It was the first battle royale that anyone actually gave a shit about.

During development, PUBG’s developers worked closely with Epic for technical support of the Unreal Engine. At the time, Epic was developing a multiplayer sandbox game that focused on building fortifications and area defense. It was a little-known title called Fortnite.

PUBG launched into early access in March of 2017 and was an immediate massive success. Only half a year later, Epic launched Fortnite Battle Royale, which was a massive departure from the original Fortnite concept. It had the same genre as PUBG, it had the same game rules, the gameplay was nearly identical; and it retained barely anything from the original core gameplay loop of fortification-building. You’d have to be willfully ignorant on the level of flat earthers to think it’s all just an innocent coincidence.

I don’t think Epic directly stole any of PUBG’s works, but I am absolutely certain beyond doubt that they took “inspiration” from PUBG the same way Richard Wagner took inspiration from Germanic mythology when writing his opera. Whatever abhorrent eldritch abomination Fortnite may be today, it started its life as a complete rip-off.

It’s been adjudicated before: you can’t. It’s the reason PUBG and Fortnite can coexist even though Epic completely ripped off PUBG after helping develop the game. It’s also why the “DOOM clone” genre was allowed to proliferate into the FPS genre, why there are so many FNAF-inspired games, and why Nintendo recently lost one of its Pokémon patents. You don’t own the concept of the Milgram experiment, you don’t own the trademark for the name, and the overall gameplay concept is not subject to copyright. Unless you can prove that the other developer stole code or art assets from you, or that it violated a trademark or patent that you own, there’s nothing you can do but hope that the better product wins in the end.

I can’t wait to see gamers at large fail to boycott this.

It sure feels like I’m the only person on the planet who actually, positively enjoyed Contrast.

Archive link without the “let us sell your data or else” banner

The AUR is still safer. One, it is at least minimally moderated. If a malicious package is detected, it can be reported and removed. Two, the installer is usually not just a black box executable. Three, most of the build and runtime dependencies are from the official Arch repos, which provides some protection against supply chain attacks. For Windows installers, you have to trust the distributor to bundle clean DLLs (for that matter, the same applies to AppImages).

But if it starts downloading anything from NPM… ^C and run.

When you make a reddit clone as a reddit alternative, inevitably you get redditors.

OP asked for pizzeria suggestions and you offered a Chinese restaurant.