My colleagues having a chat about their favourite tv shows in the operations channel at 7am have entered the chat.

Best of luck with that.

But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.

The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.

All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.

But for now… it’s pretty good.

Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.

You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.

Omg they’re going to get n-bombed by a 12 year old to death!

I am not sure how Manifest V3 is relevant here?

Because they literally tout security as one of the primary reasons for forcing it onto people.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/intro/

The first line is “A step in the direction of security, privacy, and performance.”

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/mv2-transition/

“Manifest V3 is more secure, performant, and privacy-preserving than its predecessor.”

It’s the first thing they say.

If it doesn’t prevent a malicious extension from lifting your password in perhaps the most dumb and naive way I can think of, then it seems fairly disingenuous to describe it as “secure”.

They use data, just not the data from the customers paying them for enterprise licenses.

Honestly fear of leaking customer data is the only thing that’s kept my work from spunking every single byte of data we have at some LLM service a lazy attempt to come up with a product they can sell with minimal effort. They’re gonna love this shit.

Holy shit that’s too real. I come here to get away from work!

Ok so it’s my fault that now someone at Intel knows how much porn I look at because I clicked “next” on a beta driver?

They collect:

The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself

The information collected includes categorized web browsing history that shows how long and how often you visited specific categories of sites (i.e. social media, personal finance, or news). All site visits are classified into one of 30 categories. We do not collect URLs, web pages titles, or user-specific content without explicit permission from you.

Software usage: for example, frequency and duration of application usage such as Intel® Driver & Support Assistant, but not the application content itself such as specific actions or keyboard input.

Feature usage: for example, how much RAM you usually use or your laptop’s average battery life.

Other devices in your computing environment

Includes universal plug and play devices and devices that broadcast information to your computer on a local area network: for example, smart TV model and vendor information, and video streaming devices.

(the emphasis is mine, as is the minor reordering to not hide the browsing behaviour stuff at the bottom)

Yeah that’ll be a no from me there, bud.

100% on Safari with just Wipr.

I know. I don’t disagree. I’m just tired of everything being desperate to collect invasive amounts of information about me.

Because they invariably record way more data than they need to.

How bout just don’t install privacy-invading data collection services alongside a fucking device driver at all.

Shit no! You know what you can’t change if/when they inevitably leak your data? Your fucking hand.

                                 has entered the chat.

The only problem with using paths is the service might not support it (ie it might generate absolute URLs without the path in, rather than using relative URLs).

Subdomains is probably the cleanest way to go.