#Software and Licensing Fees | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

treasure-mimic · 2 years ago

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So, let me try and put everything together here, because I really do think it needs to be talked about.

Today, Unity announced that it intends to apply a fee to use its software. Then it got worse.

For those not in the know, Unity is the most popular free to use video game development tool, offering a basic version for individuals who want to learn how to create games or create independently alongside paid versions for corporations or people who want more features. It's decent enough at this job, has issues but for the price point I can't complain, and is the idea entry point into creating in this medium, it's a very important piece of software.

But speaking of tools, the CEO is a massive one. When he was the COO of EA, he advocated for using, what out and out sounds like emotional manipulation to coerce players into microtransactions.

"A consumer gets engaged in a property, they might spend 10, 20, 30, 50 hours on the game and then when they're deep into the game they're well invested in it. We're not gouging, but we're charging and at that point in time the commitment can be pretty high."

He also called game developers who don't discuss monetization early in the planning stages of development, quote, "fucking idiots".

So that sets the stage for what might be one of the most bald-faced greediest moves I've seen from a corporation in a minute. Most at least have the sense of self-preservation to hide it.

A few hours ago, Unity posted this announcement on the official blog.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will introduce a new Unity Runtime Fee that’s based on game installs. We will also add cloud-based asset storage, Unity DevOps tools, and AI at runtime at no extra cost to Unity subscription plans this November. We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed. Also we believe that an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share.

Now there are a few red flags to note in this pitch immediately.

Unity is planning on charging a fee on all games which use its engine.

This is a flat fee per number of installs.

They are using an always online runtime function to determine whether a game is downloaded.

There is just so many things wrong with this that it's hard to know where to start, not helped by this FAQ which doubled down on a lot of the major issues people had.

I guess let's start with what people noticed first. Because it's using a system baked into the software itself, Unity would not be differentiating between a "purchase" and a "download". If someone uninstalls and reinstalls a game, that's two downloads. If someone gets a new computer or a new console and downloads a game already purchased from their account, that's two download. If someone pirates the game, the studio will be asked to pay for that download.

Q: How are you going to collect installs? A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project. Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses? A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes. Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs? A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data. Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games? A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

This is potentially related to a new system that will require Unity Personal developers to go online at least once every three days.

Starting in November, Unity Personal users will get a new sign-in and online user experience. Users will need to be signed into the Hub with their Unity ID and connect to the internet to use Unity. If the internet connection is lost, users can continue using Unity for up to 3 days while offline. More details to come, when this change takes effect.

It's unclear whether this requirement will be attached to any and all Unity games, though it would explain how they're theoretically able to track "the number of installs", and why the methodology for tracking these installs is so shit, as we'll discuss later.

Unity claims that it will only leverage this fee to games which surpass a certain threshold of downloads and yearly revenue.

Only games that meet the following thresholds qualify for the Unity Runtime Fee: Unity Personal and Unity Plus: Those that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 lifetime game installs. Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise: Those that have made $1,000,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 1,000,000 lifetime game installs.

They don't say how they're going to collect information on a game's revenue, likely this is just to say that they're only interested in squeezing larger products (games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, Fate Grand Order, Among Us, and Fall Guys) and not every 2 dollar puzzle platformer that drops on Steam. But also, these larger products have the easiest time porting off of Unity and the most incentives to, meaning realistically those heaviest impacted are going to be the ones who just barely meet this threshold, most of them indie developers.

Aggro Crab Games, one of the first to properly break this story, points out that systems like the Xbox Game Pass, which is already pretty predatory towards smaller developers, will quickly inflate their "lifetime game installs" meaning even skimming the threshold of that 200k revenue, will be asked to pay a fee per install, not a percentage on said revenue.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Hey Gamers!

Today, Unity (the engine we use to make our games) announced that they'll soon be taking a fee from developers for every copy of the game installed over a certain threshold - regardless of how that copy was obtained.

Guess who has a somewhat highly anticipated game coming to Xbox Game Pass in 2024? That's right, it's us and a lot of other developers.

That means Another Crab's Treasure will be free to install for the 25 million Game Pass subscribers. If a fraction of those users download our game, Unity could take a fee that puts an enormous dent in our income and threatens the sustainability of our business.

And that's before we even think about sales on other platforms, or pirated installs of our game, or even multiple installs by the same user!!!

This decision puts us and countless other studios in a position where we might not be able to justify using Unity for our future titles. If these changes aren't rolled back, we'll be heavily considering abandoning our wealth of Unity expertise we've accumulated over the years and starting from scratch in a new engine. Which is really something we'd rather not do.

On behalf of the dev community, we're calling on Unity to reverse the latest in a string of shortsighted decisions that seem to prioritize shareholders over their product's actual users.

I fucking hate it here.

-Aggro Crab - END DESCRIPTION]

That fee, by the way, is a flat fee. Not a percentage, not a royalty. This means that any games made in Unity expecting any kind of success are heavily incentivized to cost as much as possible.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A table listing the various fees by number of Installs over the Install Threshold vs. version of Unity used, ranging from $0.01 to $0.20 per install. END DESCRIPTION]

Basic elementary school math tells us that if a game comes out for $1.99, they will be paying, at maximum, 10% of their revenue to Unity, whereas jacking the price up to $59.99 lowers that percentage to something closer to 0.3%. Obviously any company, especially any company in financial desperation, which a sudden anchor on all your revenue is going to create, is going to choose the latter.

Furthermore, and following the trend of "fuck anyone who doesn't ask for money", Unity helpfully defines what an install is on their main site.

While I'm looking at this page as it exists now, it currently says

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

However, I saw a screenshot saying something different, and utilizing the Wayback Machine we can see that this phrasing was changed at some point in the few hours since this announcement went up. Instead, it reads:

The installation and initialization of a game or app on an end user’s device as well as distribution via streaming or web browser is considered an “install.” Games or apps with substantially similar content may be counted as one project, with installs then aggregated to calculate the Unity Runtime Fee.

Screenshot for posterity:

That would mean web browser games made in Unity would count towards this install threshold. You could legitimately drive the count up simply by continuously refreshing the page. The FAQ, again, doubles down.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games? A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

And, what I personally consider to be the most suspect claim in this entire debacle, they claim that "lifetime installs" includes installs prior to this change going into effect.

Will this fee apply to games using Unity Runtime that are already on the market on January 1, 2024? Yes, the fee applies to eligible games currently in market that continue to distribute the runtime. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Again, again, doubled down in the FAQ.

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones. A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

That would involve billing companies for using their software before telling them of the existence of a bill. Holding their actions to a contract that they performed before the contract existed!

Okay. I think that's everything. So far.

There is one thing that I want to mention before ending this post, unfortunately it's a little conspiratorial, but it's so hard to believe that anyone genuinely thought this was a good idea that it's stuck in my brain as a significant possibility.

A few days ago it was reported that Unity's CEO sold 2,000 shares of his own company.

On September 6, 2023, John Riccitiello, President and CEO of Unity Software Inc (NYSE:U), sold 2,000 shares of the company. This move is part of a larger trend for the insider, who over the past year has sold a total of 50,610 shares and purchased none.

I would not be surprised if this decision gets reversed tomorrow, that it was literally only made for the CEO to short his own goddamn company, because I would sooner believe that this whole thing is some idiotic attempt at committing fraud than a real monetization strategy, even knowing how unfathomably greedy these people can be.

So, with all that said, what do we do now?

Well, in all likelihood you won't need to do anything. As I said, some of the biggest names in the industry would be directly affected by this change, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're not just going to take it lying down. After all, the only way to stop a greedy CEO is with a greedier CEO, right?

(I fucking hate it here.)

And that's not mentioning the indie devs who are already talking about abandoning the engine.

[Links display tweets from the lead developer of Among Us saying it'd be less costly to hire people to move the game off of Unity and Cult of the Lamb's official twitter saying the game won't be available after January 1st in response to the news.]

That being said, I'm still shaken by all this. The fact that Unity is openly willing to go back and punish its developers for ever having used the engine in the past makes me question my relationship to it.

The news has given rise to the visibility of free, open source alternative Godot, which, if you're interested, is likely a better option than Unity at this point. Mostly, though, I just hope we can get out of this whole, fucking, environment where creatives are treated as an endless mill of free profits that's going to be continuously ratcheted up and up to drive unsustainable infinite corporate growth that our entire economy is based on for some fuckin reason.

Anyways, that's that, I find having these big posts that break everything down to be helpful.

#Unity #Unity3D #Video Games #Game Development #Game Developers #fuckshit #I don't know what to tag news like this

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months ago

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Cars bricked by bankrupt EV company will stay bricked

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

There are few phrases in the modern lexicon more accursed than "software-based car," and yet, this is how the failed EV maker Fisker billed its products, which retailed for $40-70k in the few short years before the company collapsed, shut down its servers, and degraded all those "software-based cars":

https://insideevs.com/news/723669/fisker-inc-bankruptcy-chapter-11-official/

Fisker billed itself as a "capital light" manufacturer, meaning that it didn't particularly make anything – rather, it "designed" cars that other companies built, allowing Fisker to focus on "experience," which is where the "software-based car" comes in. Virtually every subsystem in a Fisker car needs (or rather, needed) to periodically connect with its servers, either for regular operations or diagnostics and repair, creating frequent problems with brakes, airbags, shifting, battery management, locking and unlocking the doors:

https://www.businessinsider.com/fisker-owners-worry-about-vehicles-working-bankruptcy-2024-4

Since Fisker's bankruptcy, people with even minor problems with their Fisker EVs have found themselves owning expensive, inert lumps of conflict minerals and auto-loan debt; as one Fisker owner described it, "It's literally a lawn ornament right now":

https://www.businessinsider.com/fisker-owners-describe-chaos-to-keep-cars-running-after-bankruptcy-2024-7

This is, in many ways, typical Internet-of-Shit nonsense, but it's compounded by Fisker's capital light, all-outsource model, which led to extremely unreliable vehicles that have been plagued by recalls. The bankrupt company has proposed that vehicle owners should have to pay cash for these recalls, in order to reserve the company's capital for its creditors – a plan that is clearly illegal:

https://www.veritaglobal.net/fisker/document/2411390241007000000000005

This isn't even the first time Fisker has done this! Ten years ago, founder Henrik Fisker started another EV company called Fisker Automotive, which went bankrupt in 2014, leaving the company's "Karma" (no, really) long-range EVs (which were unreliable and prone to bursting into flames) in limbo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Karma

Which raises the question: why did investors reward Fisker's initial incompetence by piling in for a second attempt? I think the answer lies in the very factor that has made Fisker's failure so hard on its customers: the "software-based car." Investors love the sound of a "software-based car" because they understand that a gadget that is connected to the cloud is ripe for rent-extraction, because with software comes a bundle of "IP rights" that let the company control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A "software-based car" gets to mobilize the state to enforce its "IP," which allows it to force its customers to use authorized mechanics (who can, in turn, be price-gouged for licensing and diagnostic tools). "IP" can be used to shut down manufacturers of third party parts. "IP" allows manufacturers to revoke features that came with your car and charge you a monthly subscription fee for them. All sorts of features can be sold as downloadable content, and clawed back when title to the car changes hands, so that the new owners have to buy them again. "Software based cars" are easier to repo, making them perfect for the subprime auto-lending industry. And of course, "software-based cars" can gather much more surveillance data on drivers, which can be sold to sleazy, unregulated data-brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Unsurprisingly, there's a large number of Fisker cars that never sold, which the bankruptcy estate is seeking a buyer for. For a minute there, it looked like they'd found one: American Lease, which was looking to acquire the deadstock Fiskers for use as leased fleet cars. But now that deal seems dead, because no one can figure out how to restart Fisker's servers, and these vehicles are bricks without server access:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/08/fisker-bankruptcy-hits-major-speed-bump-as-fleet-sale-is-now-in-question/

It's hard to say why the company's servers are so intransigent, but there's a clue in the chaotic way that the company wound down its affairs. The company's final days sound like a scene from the last days of the German Democratic Republic, with apparats from the failing state charging about in chaos, without any plans for keeping things running:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/07/east-germany-stasi-surveillance-documents/

As it imploded, Fisker cycled through a string of Chief Financial officers, losing track of millions of dollars at a time:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/31/fisker-collapse-investigation-ev-ocean-suv-henrik-geeta/

When Fisker's landlord regained possession of its HQ, they found "complete disarray," including improperly stored drums of toxic waste:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/05/fiskers-hq-abandoned-in-complete-disarray-with-apparent-hazardous-waste-clay-models-left-behind/

And while Fisker's implosion is particularly messy, the fact that it landed in bankruptcy is entirely unexceptional. Most businesses fail (eventually) and most startups fail (quickly). Despite this, businesses – even those in heavily regulated sectors like automotive regulation – are allowed to design products and undertake operations that are not designed to outlast the (likely short-lived) company.

After the 2008 crisis and the collapse of financial institutions like Lehman Brothers, finance regulators acquired a renewed interest in succession planning. Lehman consisted of over 6,000 separate corporate entities, each one representing a bid to evade regulation and/or taxation. Unwinding that complex hairball took years, during which the entities that entrusted Lehman with their funds – pensions, charitable institutions, etc – were unable to access their money.

To avoid repeats of this catastrophe, regulators began to insist that banks produce "living wills" – plans for unwinding their affairs in the event of catastrophe. They had to undertake "stress tests" that simulated a wind-down as planned, both to make sure the plan worked and to estimate how long it would take to execute. Then banks were required to set aside sufficient capital to keep the lights on while the plan ran on.

This regulation has been indifferently enforced. Banks spent the intervening years insisting that they are capable of prudently self-regulating without all this interference, something they continue to insist upon even after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

The fact that the rules haven't been enforced tells us nothing about whether the rules would work if they were enforced. A string of high-profile bankruptcies of companies who had no succession plans and whose collapse stands to materially harm large numbers of people tells us that something has to be done about this.

Take 23andme, the creepy genomics company that enticed millions of people into sending them their genetic material (even if you aren't a 23andme customer, they probably have most of your genome, thanks to relatives who sent in cheek-swabs). 23andme is now bankrupt, and its bankruptcy estate is shopping for a buyer who'd like to commercially exploit all that juicy genetic data, even if that is to the detriment of the people it came from. What's more, the bankruptcy estate is refusing to destroy samples from people who want to opt out of this future sale:

https://bourniquelaw.com/2024/10/09/data-23-and-me/

On a smaller scale, there's Juicebox, a company that makes EV chargers, who are exiting the North American market and shutting down their servers, killing the advanced functionality that customers paid extra for when they chose a Juicebox product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/2/24260316/juicebox-ev-chargers-enel-x-way-closing-discontinued-app

I actually owned a Juicebox, which ultimately caught fire and melted down, either due to a manufacturing defect or to the criminal ineptitude of Treeium, the worst solar installers in Southern California (or both):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/#sign-here

Projects like Juice Rescue are trying to reverse-engineer the Juicebox server infrastructure and build an alternative:

https://juice-rescue.org/

This would be much simpler if Juicebox's manufacturer, Enel X Way, had been required to file a living will that explained how its customers would go on enjoying their property when and if the company discontinued support, exited the market, or went bankrupt.

That might be a big lift for every little tech startup (though it would be superior than trying to get justice after the company fails). But in regulated sectors like automotive manufacture or genomic analysis, a regulation that says, "Either design your products and services to fail safely, or escrow enough cash to keep the lights on for the duration of an orderly wind-down in the event that you shut down" would be perfectly reasonable. Companies could make "software based cars" but the more "software based" the car was, the more funds they'd have to escrow to transition their servers when they shut down (and the lest capital they'd have to build the car).

Such a rule should be in addition to more muscular rules simply banning the most abusive practices, like the Oregon state Right to Repair bill, which bans the "parts pairing" that makes repairing a Fisker car so onerous:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/27/24097042/right-to-repair-law-oregon-sb1596-parts-pairing-tina-kotek-signed

Or the Illinois state biometric privacy law, which strictly limits the use of the kind of genomic data that 23andme collected:

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004

Failing to take action on these abusive practices is dangerous – and not just to the people who get burned by them. Every time a genomics research project turns into a privacy nightmare, that salts the earth for future medical research, making it much harder to conduct population-scale research, which can be carried out in privacy-preserving ways, and which pays huge scientific dividends that we all benefit from:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

Just as Fisker's outrageous ripoff will make life harder for good cleantech companies:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

If people are convinced that new, climate-friendly tech is a cesspool of grift and extraction, it will punish those firms that are making routine, breathtaking, exciting (and extremely vital) breakthroughs:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/10/08/norways-national-football-stadium-has-the-worlds-largest-vertical-solar-roof-how-does-it-w

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/10/software-based-car/#based

#pluralistic #enshittification #evs #automotive #bricked #fisker #ocean #cleantech #iot #internet of shit #autoenshittification

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probablyasocialecologist · 3 months ago

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Amazon’s recent decision to stop allowing people to download copies of their Kindle e-books to a computer has vindicated some of my longstanding beliefs about digital media. Specifically, that it doesn’t exist and you don’t own it unless you can copy and access it without being connected to the internet. The recent move by the megacorp and its shiny-headed billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos is another large brick in the digital wall that tech companies have been building for years to separate consumers from the things they buy—or from their perspective, obtain “licenses” to. Starting Wednesday, Kindle users will no longer be able to download purchased books to a computer, where they can more easily be freed of DRM restrictions and copied to e-reader devices via USB. You can still send ebooks to other devices over WiFi for now, but the message the company is sending is one tech companies have been telegraphing for years: You don’t “own” anything digital, even if you paid us for it. The Kindle terms of service now say this, explicitly. “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you,” meaning you don’t “buy a book,” you obtain a “digital content license.”

[...]

Amazon is far from alone in this long-running trend towards eliminating digital ownership. For many people, digital distribution and streaming services have already practically ended the concept of owning and controlling your own media files. Spotify is now almost synonymous with music for some younger generations, having strip-mined the music industry from both ends by demonetizing more than 60% of the artists on its platform and pushing algorithmic slop while simultaneously raising subscription fees. Of course, surrendering this control means being at the complete mercy of Amazon and other platforms to determine what we can watch, read, and listen to—and we’ve already seen that these services frequently remove content for all sorts of reasons. Last October, one year after the Israeli military began its campaign of genocide in Gaza, Netflix removed “Palestinian Stories,” a collection of 19 films featuring Palestinian filmmakers and characters, saying it declined to renew its distribution license. Amazon also once famously deleted copies of 1984 off of people’s Kindles. Fearing piracy, many software companies have moved from the days of “Don’t Copy That Floppy” to the cloud-based software-as-a-service model, which requires an internet connection and charges users monthly subscription fees to use apps like Photoshop. No matter how you look at it, digital platforms have put us on a path to losing control of any media that we can’t physically touch. How did we get here?

28 February 2025

#media #drm #big tech #data #streaming

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autolenaphilia · 7 months ago

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God, the end of support for Windows 10 will be such a fucking bloodbath. It’s coming a year from now, 14 october 2025 and it will be a disaster. The one Windows version supported by Microsoft will be Windows 11, and its hardware requirements are like the rent, too damn high.

Literally most computers running Windows 10 can’t upgrade to Windows 11. 55% of working computers aren’t able to run windows 11 according to an analysis. A man quoted in the article argues even that is too optimistic considering how many older computers are still used. He thinks even an estimate of 25% of win10 machines being able to upgrade to win11 is too high an estimate, and frankly he sounds reasonable.

This will probably lead to two things.

Number one is a mountain of e-waste as people get rid of old computers unsupported by microsoft despite the hardware working fin ,and buy new windows 11 machines. It’s the great Windows 11 computer extinction experiment, as writer Jenny List called it. And when you buy a new computer with windows pre-installed, the windows license fee is baked into the price. So a windfall in license money for Microsoft, and the real reason why they are doing this.

Number two is a cybersecurity crisis. A lot of people will keep on using Windows 10 because “end of support” doesn’t mean it will stop working on that date. But the end of support means the end of security updates for the operating system. That will make those systems very unsafe, if they are connected to the internet. Security flaws and exploits for windows 10 will be discovered, problems that will never be patched because win10 isn’t supported anymore and they will be used against systems still running it.

Apparently a lot of people don’t understand this so I’ll try to explain this again as simply as I can. No human being is perfect, and accordingly nobody can write the perfect software that is safe from all cybersecurity threats forever. Security flaws and exploits will always be found, if the computer running that software is connected to the internet, which means it can be attacked by every bad actor out there. This is especially true if that software is as complex and important as an operating system, and it’s also widely used, which is true of Windows. But if the software is supported, the people who design and distribute that software can write patches and send out security updates that will patch the exploits that are found, minimizing the risks inherent to software, computers and the internet. It’s a constant race between well-meaning developers and bad actors, but if the developers are good about it, they will stay ahead.

But when support for the software is dropped, that means the developers will no longer patch the software. And that’s what happening to Windows 10 in october 2025. Any new exploits for the operating system that are found, and they will inevitably be found, won’t be patched by Microsoft. The exploits will stay unpatched, the system will be old and full of holes and anyone using it will be unsafe.

We already have this problem with people who are still using Windows 7 and Windows 8, years after Microsoft dropped support, often because their computers can’t upgrade even to windows 10. They are probably a disproportionate amount of the people getting hacked and their data stolen. From reading what they write to justify themselves online, my impression is that these people are frankly ignorant about technology and the dangers of what they are doing. And they are filled with the absurd self-confidence the ignorant often have, as they believe themselves to be too careful and tech-savvy to be hacked.

The problem will however explode with windows 10 ending support, because the gap in hardware requirements between win10 and win11 is so large, as already explained.

(sidenote, running unsupported operating systems can be safe, as long as you don’t connect the computer to the internet. You can even run windows 3.1 in perfect safety as long as its kept off the ‘net. But that’s a different story, I’m talking here about people who connect their computers to the internet)

So let’s imagine this very common scenario: you have a computer running Windows 10. You can’t upgrade it to windows 11 because most win10 computers literally can’t. You want to keep the computer connected to the internet for obvious reasons. You don’t have the money to get a new windows 11 computer, and you don’t want to throw your old perfectly useable hardware away. So what do you do?

The answer is install linux. Go to a reputable distro’s website like linuxmint.com, read and follow their documentation on how to install and use it. Just do it. If you are running windows 10, you have until October 14 2025 to figure it out. And if you are running windows 7 or 8, do it now.

There are good reasons for not using Linux and sticking with windows, linux has serious downsides. But when the choice is literally between an old unsupported version of windows and Linux, linux wins everytime. Every reason for not installing linux, every downside to the switch, all those are irrelevant when your alternative is literally running old unsupported windows on a machine connected to the internet. Sure linux might not be user-friendly enough for you, but that’s kinda irrelevant when the other alternatives presented is either throwing the computer away or sacrificing it to a botnet. And if you believe yourself to be too tech-savvy and careful to ever get pwned (as some present-day windows 7 users clearly believe themselves to be), that’s bullshit. If you really were careful and tech-savvy you would take the basic precaution of installing a supported operating and know how to do it.

I don’t think everyone can just switch to linux, at least not full time. If you need windows because your work requires it, frankly your only realistic option is to have a computer that supports win11 when october 2025 rolls around. If you don’t, either you have to pay for it yourself or ask your employer to supply a work computer with win11. Just don’t use Windows 10 for work stuff past that date, I doubt your co-workers, your employer or your customers will appreciate you putting their data at risk by doing so.

The rest of you, please don’t contribute to the growing problem of e-waste by throwing away perfectly useable hardware or put yourself at risk by using unspported versions of Windows. Try Linux instead.

#windows 10 eol #my posts #linux

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wumblr · 7 months ago

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irresponsible, baseless allegation wednesday: i think those incorrect quotes blogs you always see on the trending page even though they never break 1k are matt mullenweg sideblogs. i know it sounds preposterous but hear me out: he has no taste, he can't write, and he doesn't know what's funny, but he desperately wants to be well-liked, so he has to copy and paste jokes and hamhandle them into being related to some fandom thing. it may sound like a lot of effort, perhaps a prohibitive amount of effort, to build out a whole second dash for "popular" posts just to put your own posts on it -- except that's basically the exact thing he just did singlehandedly pushing a news update to the wordpress dash to slander a so-called competitor who won't pay him licensing fees to use an untrademarked phrase in an open source software community. stealing jokes is somewhat reminiscent of stealing overtime hours from his mom's personal assistant by misclassifying her as a contractor and then lying to her about salary vs hourly. and also call of duty REALLY fucking sucks. if it was n64 goldeneye or tomb raider or doom or something i wouldn't have said anything

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kcamberart · 2 years ago

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Development going forward

So in case anyone hasn't heard, Unity announced this morning that they're going to be making some pretty major (baffling) changes to their licensing plans and monetization. TLDR regarding the pertinent info (from what I understand. The company hasn't made another statement at the time of writing, and the FAQ is very vague):

They've removed the cheapest paid subscription tier (Unity Plus) completely, and are altering Unity Personal (the free one) so that the editor needs an internet connection in order to function. If you're offline for 3 days, it kicks you out until you reconnect to the internet again for the software to phone home. This is apparently not an issue if you subscribe to Unity Pro, the $2,000/yr plan.

If you publish a game made using the Unity engine, once it passes a certain threshold of installations and revenue, Unity will charge you a fee for every subsequent installation of your game on a per-month basis (and it's not per-purchase, it's per-installation. So (allegedly) if someone on Steam buys, installs, uninstalls and then reinstalls your game, or if they need to update the game, that's considered multiple different instances of installation and Unity will (allegedly) charge the developer as such). This will go into effect in January of 2024, but will seemingly retroactively apply to all games published before then as well.

If I've misunderstood any of this, please feel free to correct me.

I would not be surprised if they heavily walk back some of this (i.e., "the last time we announced something bad everyone got mad about it, so this time we'll announce something unbelievable and then say that we changed our minds so people will be more willing to accept the slightly less bad thing we wanted to do in the first place"), but it's setting a very bad precedent for using Unity for any future projects.

I'm currently weighing my options on whether to finish Vollema in Unity and then migrate to a new engine for future projects (Godot gets better every day, from what I've heard), or to just take what I've made so far and start over using different software. Honestly, it's early enough in development that the vast majority of what I have finished and ready to implement is visual assets, dialogue, narrative stuff and audio, so I'm leaning heavily towards testing the waters with a different engine. I likely also will not be able to work on or release any smaller games in the coming months for the time being (RIP 2023 Halloween Game, I'll make it up to you) while I make some decisions. Regardless, I'll keep you all in the loop.

TLDR: I'm likely going to be changing game engines, which will definitely set Vollema's development time back a bit (along with my other projects), but development in general will continue regardless.

Hopefully I'll have more positive news to share with you soon! I'm gonna miss my add-ons, though. Oh man, am I gonna miss my add-ons.

#not art #vollema #gamedev #i'll have to update my software recommendations list to remove Unity regardless because I'm not about to pretend this is a good thing lmao #long post

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machine-saint · 3 months ago

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licensing all my posts under the GPL from now on

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mariacallous · 9 days ago

Text

These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multi-step background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based non-profit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.

If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current non-profit role, Yelland says she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.

Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms, social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.

On LinkedIn, it can be hard to distinguish a slightly touched-up headshot of a real person from a too-polished, AI-generated facsimile. Deepfake videos are getting so good that longtime email scammers are pivoting to impersonating people on live video calls. According to the US Federal Trade Commission, reports of job and employment related scams nearly tripled from 2020 to 2024, and actual losses from those scams have increased from $90 million to $500 million.

Yelland says the scammers that approached her back in January were impersonating a real company, one with a legitimate product. The “hiring manager” she corresponded with over email also seemed legit, even sharing a slide deck outlining the responsibilities of the role they were advertising. But during the first video interview, Yelland says, the scammers refused to turn their cameras on during a Microsoft Teams meeting and made unusual requests for detailed personal information, including her driver’s license number. Realizing she’d been duped, Yelland slammed her laptop shut.

These kinds of schemes have become so widespread that AI startups have emerged promising to detect other AI-enabled deepfakes, including GetReal Labs, and Reality Defender. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also runs an identity-verification startup called Tools for Humanity, which makes eye-scanning devices that capture a person’s biometric data, create a unique identifier for their identity, and store that information on the blockchain. The whole idea behind it is proving “personhood,” or that someone is a real human. (Lots of people working on blockchain technology say that blockchain is the solution for identity verification.)

But some corporate professionals are turning instead to old-fashioned social engineering techniques to verify every fishy-seeming interaction they have. Welcome to the Age of Paranoia, when someone might ask you to send them an email while you’re mid-conversation on the phone, slide into your Instagram DMs to ensure the LinkedIn message you sent was really from you, or request you text a selfie with a timestamp, proving you are who you claim to be. Some colleagues say they even share code words with each other, so they have a way to ensure they’re not being misled if an encounter feels off.

“What’s funny is, the low-fi approach works,” says Daniel Goldman, a blockchain software engineer and former startup founder. Goldman says he began changing his own behavior after he heard a prominent figure in the crypto world had been convincingly deepfaked on a video call. “It put the fear of god in me,” he says. Afterwards, he warned his family and friends that even if they hear what they believe is his voice or see him on a video call asking for something concrete—like money or an internet password—they should hang up and email him first before doing anything.

Ken Schumacher, founder of the recruitment verification service Ropes, says he’s worked with hiring managers who ask job candidates rapid-fire questions about the city where they claim to live on their resume, such as their favorite coffee shops and places to hang out. If the applicant is actually based in that geographic region, Schumacher says, they should be able to respond quickly with accurate details.

Another verification tactic some people use, Schumacher says, is what he calls the “phone camera trick.” If someone suspects the person they’re talking to over video chat is being deceitful, they can ask them to hold up their phone camera to their laptop. The idea is to verify whether the individual may be running deepfake technology on their computer, obscuring their true identity or surroundings. But it’s safe to say this approach can also be off-putting: Honest job candidates may be hesitant to show off the inside of their homes or offices, or worry a hiring manager is trying to learn details about their personal lives.

“Everyone is on edge and wary of each other now,” Schumacher says.

While turning yourself into a human captcha may be a fairly effective approach to operational security, even the most paranoid admit these checks create an atmosphere of distrust before two parties have even had the chance to really connect. They can also be a huge time suck. “I feel like something’s gotta give,” Yelland says. “I’m wasting so much time at work just trying to figure out if people are real.”

Jessica Eise, an assistant professor studying climate change and social behavior at Indiana University-Bloomington, says that her research team has been forced to essentially become digital forensics experts, due to the amount of fraudsters who respond to ads for paid virtual surveys. (Scammers aren’t as interested in the unpaid surveys, unsurprisingly.) If the research project is federally funded, all of the online participants have to be over the age of 18 and living in the US.

“My team would check time stamps for when participants answered emails, and if the timing was suspicious, we could guess they might be in a different time zone,” Eise says. “Then we’d look for other clues we came to recognize, like certain formats of email address or incoherent demographic data.”

Eise says the amount of time her team spent screening people was “exorbitant,” and that they’ve now shrunk the size of the cohort for each study and have turned to “snowball sampling” or having recruiting people they know personally to join their studies. The researchers are also handing out more physical flyers to solicit participants in person. “We care a lot about making sure that our data has integrity, that we’re studying who we say we’re trying to study,” she says. “I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this.”

Barring any widespread technical solution, a little common sense can go a long way in spotting bad actors. Yelland shared with me the slide deck that she received as part of the fake job pitch. At first glance, it seemed like legit pitch, but when she looked at it again, a few details stood out. The job promised to pay substantially more than the average salary for a similar role in her location, and offered unlimited vacation time, generous paid parental leave, and fully-covered health care benefits. In today’s job environment, that might have been the biggest tipoff of all that it was a scam.

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galaxygolfergirl · 1 year ago

Text

Watcher's Expenses

I didn't major in accounting: I took three classes and it grinded my brain to a fine powder. However, after graduating with a business admin degree, being a former eager fan of their videos, and from a cursory glance over their socials, there's a lot to consider in their spending behavior that really could start racking up costs. Some of these things we've already noticed, but there are other things I'd like to highlight, and I'll try to break it down into the different categories of accounting expenses (if I get something wrong, let me know. I was more concentrated in marketing 🤷‍♀️). I'm not going to hypothesize numbers either, as that would take out more time than I'm willing to afford-- you can assume how much everything costs. Anyways, here's my attempt at being a layman forensic accountant:

Note: All of this is assuming they're operating above board and not engaging in any illegal practices such as money laundering, tax evasion, not paying rent, etc.

Operating Expenses

Payroll: 25+ staff salaries and insurance

Overhead Expenses

CEO/founder salaries

Office space leasing or rent (In L.A, one of the most expensive cities in the US)

Utilities (water, electricity, heating, sanitation, etc.)

Insurance

Advertising Costs

Telephone & Internet service

Cloud Storage or mainframe

Office equipment (furniture, computers, printers, etc.)

Office supplies (paper, pens, printer ink, etc.)

Marketing costs (Social media marketing on Instagram, Youtube, SEO for search engines, Twitter, etc. Designing merchandise and posters, art, etc. )

Human Resources (not sure how equipped they are)

Accounting fees

Property taxes

Legal fees

Licensing fees

Website maintenance (For Watchertv.com, Watcherstuff.com, & Watcherentertainment.com)

Expenses regarding merchandising (whoever they contract or outsource for that)

Inventory costs

Potentially maintenance of company vehicles

Subsequent gas mileage for road trips

Depreciation (pertains to tangible assets like buildings and equipment)

Amortization (intangible assets such as patents and trademarks)

Overhead Travel and Entertainment Costs (I think one of the biggest culprits, evident in their videos and posts)

The travel expenses (flights, train trips, rental cars, etc. For main team and scouts)

Hotel expenses for 7-8 people at least, or potentially more

Breakfasts, lunches and dinners with the crew (whether that's fully on their dime or not, I don't know; Ryan stated they like to cover that for the most part)

Recreational activities (vacation destinations, amusement parks, sporting activities etc.)

The location fees

Extraneous Overhead costs (not sure exactly where these fall under, but another culprit, evident in videos and posts)

Paying for guest appearances

Expensive filming & recording equipment (Cameras, sound equipment, editing software subscriptions, etc.)

The overelaborate sets for Ghost files, Mystery Files, Puppet History, Podcasts etc. (Set dressing: Vintage memorabilia, antiquated tech, vintage furniture, props, etc.)

Kitchen & Cooking supplies/equipment

Office food supply; expensive food and drink purchases for videos

Novelty items or miscellaneous purchases (ex. Ghost hunting equipment, outfits, toys, etc.)

Non-Operating Expenses

These are those expenses that cannot be linked back to operating revenue. One of the most common examples of non-operating expenses is interest expense. This is because while interest is the cost of borrowing money from a creditor or a bank, they are not generating any operating income. This makes interest payments a part of non-operating expenses.

Financial Expenses

Potential loan payments, borrowing from creditors or lenders, bank loans, etc.

Variable Expenses

Hiring a large amount of freelancers, overtime expenditure, commissions, etc.

PR consultations (Not sure if they had this before the scandal)

Extraordinary Expenses

Expenses incurred outside your company’s regular business activities and during a large one-time event or transactions. For example, selling land, disposal of a significant asset, laying off of your employees, unexpected machine repairing or replacement, etc.

Accrued Expenses

When your business has incurred an expense but not yet paid for it.

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(If there's anything else I'm missing, please feel free to add or correct things)

To a novice or a young entrepreneur, this can be very intimidating if you don't have the education or the support to manage it properly. I know it intimidates the hell out of me and I'm still having to fill in the gaps (again, if I've mislabeled or gotten anything wrong here, please let me know). For the artistic or creative entrepreneur, it can be even harder to reconcile the extent of your creative passions with your ability to operate and scale your business at a sustainable rate. That can lead to irresponsible, selfish, and impulsive decisions that could irreparably harm your brand, which is a whole other beast of its own.

My guess at this point is that their overhead and operation expenses are woefully mismanaged; they've made way too many extraneous purchases, and that they had too much confidence in their audience of formerly 2.93 million to make up for the expenses they failed to cover.

It almost seems as if their internal logic was, "If we make more money, we can keep living the expensive lifestyle that we want and make whatever we want without anyone telling us we can't, and we want to do it NOW, sooner rather than later because we don't want wait and compromise our vision." But as you can see, the reality of fulfilling those ambitions is already compromised by the responsibility of running a business.

And I wrote this in another post here, but I'll state it again: Running a business means you need to be educated on how a business can successfully and efficiently operate. Accounting, marketing, social media marketing, public relations, production, etc; these resources and internet of things is available and at your disposal. If they had invested more time in educating themselves on those aspects and not made this decision based on artistic passion (and/or greed), they would have not gotten the response they got.

Being a graphic designer, I know the creative/passionate side of things but I also got a degree/got educated in business because I wanted to understand how to start a company and run it successfully. If they’re having trouble handling the responsibility of doing that, managing production costs, managing overhead expenses, and especially with compensating their 25+ employees, then they should hire professionals that are sympathetic to their creative interests, but have the education and experience to reign in bad decisions like these.

Anyways, thanks for coming to my TedTalk. What a shitshow this has been.

#watcher #watcher entertainment #ryan bergara #shane madej #steven lim #watcher tv #watchergate #accounting

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