They get that same location data with or without maps. As long as you are using stock android, Google knows exactly where you’ve been even if you enable airplane mode. They get your position with WiFi networks and other phones around you and store that data with timestamps. Maps doesn’t give them any extra data, it simply binds you into their ecosystem.

Not really, it still doesn’t answer the question as the main thing is still unclear.

Is the first chicken egg the one the chicken hatched from or the first egg a chicken laid.

Both can be argued as correct.

I’d be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.

But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that’s it. They don’t care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.

The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google “valorant cheat .exe” and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.

Live service and always online are two entirely different things, and the former isn’t inherently malicious, unlike the latter.

I’d, for example, consider all Paradox grand strategy games as live service with major updates dropping once or twice a year (followed by like twenty bugfix patches cause they fuck up every time, but that’s besides the point). Sure, every major update comes with a new dlc that isn’t exactly cheap, but you also get a lot of free content with each release. All their major titles are entirely different games now than they were at the 1.0 release.

What ubisoft does is just a tacked on battle pass that gets a few worthless items/skins so they can call it live service and have a justification for their always online verification model. That’s purely an anti piracy measure that fucks legitimate players more than pirates.

Even then the snippets you can find in the replies are more usefull than most forums ever were.

If you are comfortable editing the registry then you can get the old context menu back without the extra clicks. Searching online for the right key was pretty easy.

Emulators are legal

In general yes, but Yuzu itself probably never was legal in the first place.

At least in the EU and US there are anti-circumvention laws that make circumventing anti-piracy/copy-protection measures illegal in itself even if its done on games you own. Since Yuzu used the prod.keys to decrypt the games, it most likely already broke these laws.

Pictures like these warrant a NSFW tag to make them blurry. Spiders alone are pretty questionable and can make some people freak out, but this is nightmare fuel for someone with even minor arachnophobia.

Most games suffering from cheaters are at least partially free. LOL, Valorant, COD, CSGO, Fortnite, Overwatch, Various MMOs.

Getting a new bot-leveled account for any of these games costs somewhere from 0.30€ to 5€. Ban one account and they just use the next one for pretty much free.

Most of these games do account ban waves every few weeks to months, but if its this easy to create new accounts that’s useless. IP bans aren’t possible anymore since public IPs are dynamic and change every few days to weeks. Hardware bans, while technically possible, can still be circumvented easily by spoofing your mac-address and serial numbers.

The only way to minimise cheating would be linking your Social security number (or the equivalent for your Country) with your account, which leads to a lot of privacy issues. And even that isn’t foolproof. LoL in Korea already uses this system and still has issues with a lot of trolls, scripters and wintraders.

Meh, Windows itself, even with all the bloat still active, doesn’t need more than 2 Gigs. That’s one of the few issues microsoft isn’t responsible for.

They are improving a few percent every other year, but never in big jumps like these headlines would suggest

Games that are sold on GOG are usually also DRM free on steam. Sometimes the steamworks DRM is required, but that’s so easy to trick that the games can still be considered DRM free.

The only thing GOG does is pre-filtering for DRM free only.

Other posts about this topic have similar claims. No idea who started the idea, but it gets mentioned a lot that ticking a box is all that’s required

We are headed for a more extreme climate thats on average a few degrees warmer. While the heating period may get shorter, the peak load due to heating in extreme winters will increase. Thats the exact opposite of what you want in an all renewable grid.