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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • 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).











  • I appreciate the info, I think that’s good information that I hadn’t fully thought through (but probably could have figured out had I thought about it). I’m not too interested in a Pixel, and the unlocked bootloader is really only useful if someone has my physical phone. My hard drive is encrypted, of course, so my thought as to a way they could gain information if they modify the bootloader and let me decrypt the phone for them. I wonder if the only next best thing is to basically have an alert, or refuse to boot, if there is a change in the bootloader detected, so I can do a clean install.

    Most manufacturers don’t allow re-locking of the bootloader unless it’s official Android, so it sucks the only other option would be buy from Google.

    I’m interested in what you say about the forensics kit. What could I look for to find more info?


  • lol, honestly, just Firefox. I know there’s a lot of hubbub about Mozilla and Firefox with them changing their ToS, but you can disable all sponsored items, and anonymous. And even though they changed their ToS, I don’t think they’ve changed anything. They’ve sold anonymized data for a while. People here don’t seem to like data selling of any kind, but Firefox only collects anonymized data, and it’s a free service.

    The only two real options will be Chrome and Chromium based, and Firefox and Firefox based. For Firefox based that isn’t firefox, you’ve got:

    • Librewolf
    • Mullvad
    • Zen
    • Floorp

    If you google for other browsers, and find one you haven’t heard of, there’s a 99% chance it’s Chromium based.