resketreke

Big Boss playing on easy mode, I see.

incube8games has a few, you might want to check it out.

better revenue shares for developers?
Money bonuses for exclusivity is great for developers?

It actually goes to publishers, so the only way devs see that extra cut is by self-publishing. So I guess for smaller indie devs it can be a good deal.

There’s a way to bypass the blockade. swap “www” with “old” in the web address and you’re good to go.

‘There’s nothing there’: Said Marsupial after drilling several holes in the worker’s head.

Their next crucial meeting is scheduled for Friday, December 15, during which the EU brokers are hoping to strike a deal. Behind closed doors, negotiators for the Parliament and the Council have presented two fundamentally different positions on a central requirement for independent journalism: the protection of whistleblowers and confidential sources. This “is one of the basic conditions for press freedom”, the European Court of Human Rights declared in 2022. Without this protection, “the vital public-watchdog role of the press as guardian of the public sphere may be undermined”.
The European Media Freedom Act

The European Media Freedom Act was proposed by the Commission following outrage over reports of spying on journalists and members of civil society. In July 2021, the “Pegasus Papers” investigation revealed that the government of Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán had used the Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of journalists who had produced reporting critical of the government. The European Parliament set up a special committee of enquiry into the issue and called for the sale of spyware to be banned until the exceptional cases in which the state is authorised to use it are clearly defined in law.

Subsequently, journalists in Poland, Greece, Spain and Bulgaria were also found to have been targeted by intrusive spyware – in most cases, the protection of “national security” was invoked as reason.

Meanwhile, the Commission’s proposal, published in September 2022, goes beyond addressing surveillance against journalists. It is meant to safeguard editorial independence of public service media, ensure fairness in state advertising and help to safeguard media pluralism. According to negotiators, the Parliament and member states are still struggling to reconcile their positions on most major points. As an investigation by Follow the Money revealed, the publisher’s lobby had a huge influence especially on member states’ positions.

In October, a large majority of EU lawmakers passed a text in Parliament that would set strict limits on the surveillance of journalists. According to Article 4 of the draft law, journalists could only be wire-tapped or investigated using spyware if this

is unrelated to the journalists’ professional activities;
doesn’t affect or disclose access to journalists’ sources;
is justified on a case-by-case basis to prevent or prosecute a serio

The European Media Freedom Act is meant to protect the press from government overreach. But behind closed doors, a group of EU member states are threatening to block the new law over their demands for a blank check to use spyware for the purposes of “national security”.

When Rosa Moussaoui found out her phone had been targeted by the infamous Pegasus spyware, she felt a sense of violence and intrusion. “It’s like being robbed or just finding that somebody has taken your possessions”, she said.

For Moussaoui, a journalist for French newspaper L’Humanité who investigates human rights abuses by the Moroccan government, the surveillance, though invisible and very hard to trace, created a tangible loss of trust by sources with whom “in most cases I’ve lost contact,” she told members of the European Parliament in March this year. While she continues to work as investigative journalist, being targeted by Pegasus has taken a toll. She felt more on edge during her work, and was worried about the people she spoke with.

But Moussaoui’s testimony, and that of other journalists from across Europe, seems to have done little to move the needle in convincing some EU players that journalists need more protection from abusive authorities.

Instead, EU countries are pushing to weaken rules meant to protect journalists from surveillance, a cross-border investigation shows.

“It’s like being robbed or just finding that somebody has taken your possessions."

Internal documents obtained by Investigate Europe, Disclose and Follow the Money show that a group of governments – those of France, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, Sweden and Cyprus – have threatened to block talks with the European Parliament in a bid to justify the use of spyware on their computers and phones if their security authorities declare this to be a measure to “safeguard national security”.

The law aims to protect the independence of journalists from interference by governments and media owners – but now, countries and EU lawmakers are fighting over whether the regulation shall limit the use of spyware and other forms of surveillance by intelligence services.

“This is the most difficult part of the fight for this legislative text,” said Ramona Strugariu, a lawmaker from the liberal Renew Group and co-lead lawmaker for the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). After 15 months of negotiations between the member states in the Council of the EU, the European Commission, and the Parliament, the institutions must now agree on a joint text in the so-called trilogue negotiations.

You’re right, I mixed dates and numbers. It was ~40% turnout, and then in 2019 a poll showed that ~40% of Catalans wanted independence. That’s where I got my numbers wrong I think.

Maybe I didn’t phrase it correctly, let me try again. Of all the people who voted, only a bit above 40% voted yes.

The government didn’t claim the vote invalid, the vote was illegal from the beginning. And even then, they barely got past 40% positive votes, what would you do with the other almost 60% of the population? And that’s assuming everyone took it seriously and voted.

Geno comes from ancient Greek.

Out of 394 games, I’ve only paid 53,50€ or more for 3 of them. What a cheap bastard LMAO

Besides the IRS who could give them that info?

The users themselves, in their stupidity, like every single time in the past.

Didn’t Yoko Ono do something similar?

You can reply to your own comments, that way you can split the text in chunks that Kbin can handle.

Very reddit of them?

Another new type of phishing I’ve been seeing in my junk mail uses links to Bing. Not sure what it does because, as you can understand, I haven’t clicked any of those.

By the way, if you use Firefox, there’s this little add-on called “Redirect AMP to HTML” that might be useful to prevent this (or maybe not, I don’t know).

“As social software has become more probabilistic and personalized, the more important thing is to have ‘shots on goal’ to keep people engaged and prevent churn,” Messina says. “And so Instagram does limited, progressive feature rollouts.”

Masha Liberman, a tech investor who previously built 3D bitmoji for Snapchat, believes that social media is experiencing a “crisis of ideas,” but she says that’s not a new thing. “It’s always been tough to invent something new,” she says. “What’s happening with social media companies is that they want to see themselves as media networks that offer everything inside the app. That’s the competitive advantage right now. And at some point we will probably view some of these things as new formats rather than copycat features.”

Social media as a category is probably overdue for a serious rethink, both in the usability sense and the regulatory sense. The time-suck it has become for some people, its potential mental health harms, and its fire-to-gasoline spread of misinformation are all reasons enough to question it.
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It has also, over the past 20-plus years, offered connection, community, entertainment, and access to information unlike anything humanity has ever experienced before. And a new group of apps is now promising a decentralized social media experience instead of the founder-driven model of the past two decades.

But this era of platform identity crises, brand pivots, and frenetic feature reinvention isn’t necessarily in service of users, either. “My experience working at a social media company during turbulent times, especially when there’s a separate app or even a separate page, is that these are huge internal political projects,” Liberman says. “They’re not for users directly, and users sometimes feel this.”

It’s hard not to feel it, to have a persistent sense of déjà vu after another new app feature is announced, or to feel like you never really asked for the thing to begin with. It’s hard not to feel like it’s getting a little late at the social media party, and that there has to be some other reason to stay.

Social media is having its quarter-life crisis, if a quarter-life crisis is a thing, if we can even put a lifespan on social media, which might in fact play a role in our society from now until the end of time. After 25 years of status updates, news feeds, clever tweets, performative photos, and endless scrolls, the US social media companies that have commandeered our attention and monetized it so successfully have run out of fresh ideas and are looking to reinvent themselves.

Lucky us?

Some 18 months ago, 3D immersion via face computers was going to reinvigorate our online social experience. Facebook believed in this vision so firmly that it changed its name to Meta to reflect it. Having determined more recently that something a little simpler might jack up engagement, Meta launched Threads—basically, Twitter for Instagram.

Now the video app TikTok is introducing a way to compose text-based posts—its own version of the Create feature found in Instagram Stories. Accessed through the app’s camera, where users typically go to post videos or photos, the new text option is billed by TikTok as “the latest addition to options for content creation, allowing creators to share their stories, poems, recipes, and other written content on TikTok.” Text: It’s the future. This comes right on the heels of Twitter rebranding itself as X, part of the company’s broader strategy for becoming an everything-app, like China’s WeChat.

TikTok’s new text feature, which feels mostly additive, and Twitter’s brand pivot, which feels mostly superfluous, are not by themselves causes for existential angst. But they’re part of an evolution in the social media landscape, where the polite “borrowing” of features has turned into a full-fledged land grab for our frayed attention spans. Whether through subscriptions, shopping, payments, or AI-infused products, social media companies are throwing everything at the wall to counter both an unpredictable ad market and people’s limited capacity for using a dozen different social apps.

“If we evaluate these apps from the legacy technology-innovation lens, then yes—they’re copying each other and there are no new ideas,” says Chris Messina, a software product designer who is credited with introducing the hashtag to Twitter. “But the better way to understand it is that social media is now a fashion industry, so as a product manager, you’re evaluating success based on engagement and retention, not innovation.”

Messina also adds that he believes X (née Twitter) is now “incredibly vulnerable, and the most competitive teams, like Meta and TikTok, aren’t going to sit idly by if they can carve up Twitter’s former advertising base.”

Meta’s early success with Instagram Threads—over 100 million sign-ups in under a week—has largely been credited to its platform advantage; over a billion people already use Instagram, and porting one’s Instagram identity over to Threads is frictionless. But that’s success in metrics only—quantitative, not qualitative. (In any case, daily active users on Threads have reportedly fallen off.) Threads still doesn’t have a web or desktop app, hasn’t yet rolled out its promised chronological feed, and doesn’t yet support a more open-source protocol that the company has said it will support.

Fair enough lol. Just for the record, I’ve had this problem once in 6 months.