Wow thanks! Didn’t know that. I remember reading about it when it first came out and gamers didn’t have much compatibility and could only get standard vibration with Steam input, probably around when the console first came out. I now see there’s full support, and while most devs can use Steam input, there’s a new DSX version for PS5 that claims to support adaptive trigger haptics on Windows. I game on my PC with KBM and an Xbox Series controller though. I don’t know how well PS5 haptics will work on my Linux PC though.

Astro Bot. I’d argue it is a system seller. It’s as wonderful as Mario Odyssey was for the Switch 1, one of the greatest platforming adventure games I’ve ever played, has a breathtaking soundtrack, gorgeous visuals and art style, incredible dynamic controls especially with the PS5 haptics, and a top 10 game for me. I had so much fun playing both Astro Bot (paid) and Astro Bot’s Play Room (free game). This absolutely deserved game of the year, and I’m happy it won. Asobo (developer) showed their full passion and love for gaming in this gem, and to play it is well worth the price of a PS5 in my opinion. It’s that good. And I’ve been a PC and Nintendo gamer for a long time.

I hope it’ll come to PC one day so that others can experience it. PC won’t have the tantalising PS5 haptics that immerse you into the game (the incredible adaptive triggers as you’re climbing, as an example, or walking through grass in that game and feeling the gentle scintillating haptics in the controller), but regardless, it’s a magnificent game that I want everyone to experience. I can’t praise Astro Bot enough, it’s such a gem.

“According to the posting, an unidentified bad actor on July 24 targeted a Cisco representative in a voice phishing (vishing) attack that enabled the attacker ‘to access and export a subset of basic profile information from one instance of a third-party, cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that Cisco uses.’”

Reported for spam

100% this. My favorite retro games to revisit.

Meanwhile, Nintendo in their rebellious youth:

Note: mario didn’t exist at the time, but i got this image from a news site that added it to censor the woman’s breasts.

Never heard of this ad since i was a kid at the time and not Dutch. Here it is.

Wow.

https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/5/15190396/sony-psp-ad-white-is-coming-pepsi-kendall-jenner

Still sounds gross. While the developer might have opted in to selling your processing power to scrape websites, I doubt the users of each extension opted in.

Response from the developer:

" Users who want to support a free software product or creator can decide to opt-in to share their bandwidth. … Developers can decide to offer them additional features and content or simply use the money to keep the products free and available."

On User Consent:

“Our approach is always opt-out by default. I’ll write more below on how we are going about enforcing it now as part of a stricter approach to maintaining a transparent ecosystem. We provide default opt-in/out hosted pages to simplify asking consent and have left this page where users can see all the plugins to which they have opted-in and manage their settings with no developer as an intermediary: mellow.tel/user-control.”

In other words, users are opted-out by default. They can also go to that web site, and when they click the link, the page checks which extensions are installed in the browser and whether or not you opted in.

On Opt-In Enforcement:

Ars Technica article states there are “no checks to determine if a real user knows what they are approving or to determine if the developer just opts all users in on their behalf”.

“We do have a page where users can go and see if they are opted-in or have been opted in without their knowledge from the developer: mellow.tel/user-control. But you are right and we should do more. We have started enforcing the opt-in policy from today (by simply checking each integration and not sending requests to those that don’t show an opt-in) and will be doubling down on that in the coming days. Each new websocket request from an unknown integration will be quarantined and we won’t allow requests to go through until we have controlled the integration is compliant and is asking users to opt-in + is leaving an opt-out option clearly visible. We will also start enforcing routine checks on our Mellowtel integrations to create a transparent environment.”

In other words, the Mellow.tel developer has it set to always opt-out by default. However, developers of extensions may just opt-in the users without consent - which, I agree with you is gross. It’s possible those developers don’t explain the full implications. Now, the Mellow.tel developer is putting in remediations to ensure that the opt-in policy is enforced, and users will have more exposure to knowing whether or not this is happening. Meaning, they’re going to try to enforce default opt-out (as they stated this was always their policy), and make it easier for users to know they get opted in.

On Personally Identifiable Information and Monetisation:

The developers basically claims everything is anonymized. And the way they make money is, if you opt-in, you share “a fraction of your bandwidth” when browsing the web, fetching from a server, etc. They don’t collect or sell your user data because they aren’t advertising, and their business model is not advertising.

“all [Response data] is completely anonymous, it doesn’t point back to any user, and isn’t stored except the minimum time to at on it… Location - The only information used is country level (e.g., US, ES, DE), [and] it isn’t associated with any Personally-Identifiable-Information (PII) at all.”

So my conclusion - I care about my privacy. I don’t like being opted into things without my consent. According to this developer’s response, they never did. They’re trying to come up with a model to help the web stay free. Who knows if this will be viable or not. Developers of extensions can leverage this stuff, and in the past, some of those developers may have opted users in without their consent (or without full transparency or understanding of how this was happening). Even if a user was “opted in”, it doesn’t appear to be a significant impact to privacy as they have their source code published, processing happens locally on the user’s device, and the data that gets process is not transmitted, sold, or even have any identifiers. In fact, the data they claim is quite sparse to the extent that it’s limited to bandwidth allotment, country, and simple “keep alive” checks (heartbeat). Now I don’t have any association with this company, know this developer, nor do I have any stakes at all in this. This just caught my attention and I Had to read and learn more about it, and assess whether or not it affects my privacy threat model (it doesn’t for me, simply because none of the extensions I use have this thing).

For my background - I’m a software engineer for a SaaS provider. My company processes observability telemetry, and we assist customers to instrument agents in their environments (server, machines, clusters, DB, and end-user devices like browsers and mobile devices) to collect metrics to enable observability of their platform, and generate automatic application topology. Also a suite of tools to examine metrics and dynamic baselines, health rules for baseline deviations or other anomalies, analytics, user queries, complete business transaction view, incident remediation, etc. However, I have no background whatsoever in security. So I can’t comment on the security point because I don’t have a cyber security background. I’m only going off what the developer said, and it made sense to me. But I’d defer to a person with cyber security expertise to comment here.

Edit: Added some additional context, fixed some spelling.

Nice, thanks for discovering that. I wasn’t aware there was a rip off version of it.

These extensions use MellowTel-js. After this article from ArsTechnica went live, the developer responded in full detail and transparency.

If you’re a Dark Reader user (as that’s one of the most widely used extensions), definitely read MellowTel’s response on how their technology works. It made me realize the Ars article was not fully vetted.

https://www.mellowtel.com/blog/responding-to-ars-technica-and-mellow-drama-article

Currently playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Game seems okay overall. I’m still in the early parts of the game and I’m waiting for it to hook me.

Love this game. Have fun!

Split Fiction is worth the MSRP. Ideally it’s great if you can get it on a discount, but this is one of the few games I’d pay full price for. My spouse and I loved it.

Sure thing. I also read more comments and saw you have a laptop and stream games to a tablet.

For my use case, I have a desktop PC for when I want to play at high fidelity and have serious time to sit down and game. The Steam Deck I have is for the free moments of gaming time I can get. I can be on the couch and game. Sit on my porch during a break and game for a bit. I can click the button to sleep the console and pick up in two days from right where I left off - either Steam games or ROMs.

A Steam Deck isn’t cheap so definitely weigh your options and find out what works best for you. If you feel you want the performance uplift and can just wait, then put your laptop in another room so you won’t hear it and steam it to a tablet with a controller in your hands or something. That’ll give you a great experience, too. Then you can get Deck 2 and feel happier with your decision.

If money isn’t as much of a concern, freaking get it now lol.

Even if a new AAA comes out that you’re eagerly wanting to play and the performance may not be great on Steam Deck, don’t forget about all the hundreds of games you also love that can be played on Steam Deck. Or the ROMs from nostalgic consoles that you love.

If you have a gaming solution now and you’re not ready to commit, just wait for the inevitable next gen Deck as you’ll be happier that way. Of course we’ll never know when it is coming.

Get a device now and play the games you want? Or wait ~2 years and get the next gen so you can play some games better?

Only you can make that informed decision that works best for you. Best of luck!

I think I know what fight you’re talking about, and I understand why some persons would back out of the game at that point.

In general, if one finishes the first playthrough, they’ll get the first ending. This left me with questions so I played it again, and this time you get the game from Android 9S’ perspective. Each playthrough is shorter, and the goal is to get endings A, B, and C. Which makes for a remarkable, unforgettable game. Definitely have to get through the cliches and some of the common JRPG tropes, but the whole experience greatly outweighed those problems such that I could look past them.

Nier Automata

How dare you feel this way, you scruffy-looking Nerf-herder!

I am unhappy with your comment! But I respect it, so I hope you have a great day ahead.

I didn’t see these listed so I’m dropping some objective masterpieces here:

• Persona 5 Royal
• Golden Sun
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age
• Horizon Zero Dawn

Edit: Added HZD as I didn’t see it while scrolling through this post.

+1 for Beyond Good & Evil.

For those unfamiliar with this game, this was early 2000s Ubisoft when they used to be creative, celebrated, and original.

HTTPS with no VPN:

You trust the web site to encrypt your data if and only if the web site has properly implemented encryption along with encrypted DNS traffic. Sometimes you make a connection to HTTP before you’re redirected to HTTPS. Your ISP can see what web sites you visit, but the ISP can’t see what you’re doing because the traffic is encrypted so long as encryption is implemented correctly. ISP knows you went to https://www.website.com/.

Conclusion: Your ISP knows exactly what web sites you visit, but can’t see what you’re doing on the web site (if encryption is properly configured by the web site provider).

HTTP or HTTPS with trusted VPN (e.g., Mullvad):

You trust the VPN provider. Your connections are encrypted entirely. Your ISP can’t see what web sites you’re visiting nor can they interpret your traffic.

Conclusion: Your ISP is completely blind to what you’re doing and where you’re going.

ExpressVPN:

"HTTPS is essential for security, but it can only do so much. Don’t fall into a false sense of security—there are limitations to HTTPS protection:

• HTTPS doesn’t hide what websites you visit. Your ISP or network provider can still see which sites you access, even if they can’t view what you do on them.
• HTTPS won’t protect data stored on a website. If a site suffers a data breach, HTTPS won’t prevent hackers from accessing your saved information.
• HTTPS cannot encrypt all your internet traffic. It only secures connections between your browser and a site—not your entire internet activity.
• You have no control over HTTPS. The protocol is set by website owners, so if you visit a website without HTTPS protection, there is no way for you to enable it." Source: https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/https-vs-vpn/

PureVPN:

"HTTPS:

• Encrypts data between your browser and websites.
• Protects against eavesdropping on web transactions.
• Activated automatically with ‘https://’ VPN:
• Encrypts and routes all internet traffic, including from apps.
• Protects the entire internet connection. A VPN is used to establish an encrypted connection - also referred to as tunnel - between your device and unsecure network like the Internet. Since all your traffic goes through the VPN’s server rather than that of your ISP, nobody can find out what you’re up to online. What HTTPS Cannot Do?
• Hide Your IP Address: HTTPS doesn’t mask your IP address. Websites and your ISP can still see your IP and location, whereas a VPN hides your IP, making your online presence more anonymous.
• Encrypt All Internet Traffic: HTTPS only secures data between your browser and websites. A VPN encrypts all your internet traffic, including apps and services outside your browser.
• Prevent ISP Tracking: Your ISP can still see which sites you visit with HTTPS, they just can’t see the exact content. A VPN encrypts all your traffic, preventing ISPs from tracking your web activities. https://www.purevpn.com/blog/https-vs-vpn/

Here are more sources I won’t quote, but you can read:

• https://www.zdnet.com/article/reader-question-answered-if-i-have-https-do-i-need-a-vpn/
• https://nordvpn.com/blog/https-vs-vpn/
• Mullvad. This is more advanced as the article is targeted to technical users. However, it explains how they handle encrypted DNS in their services: https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls