I reckon a nice cold beer would’ve been a better charitable donation.

Also if launching from Lutris you can setup something like Firejail as command prefix (per-game or as default for all wine games) so that Wine (and everything run via it) runs sandboxed.

If running it via Lutris or from the command line you can use as command prefix a proper sandboxing application like Firejail so that wine itself is launched inside a sandbox.

For example I have it set up in Lutris so that by default all my games run with networking disabled.

As per your point, Wine is just an adaptor layer not an emulator or sandbox, so a Windows binary running in Wine can try and load Linux libraries and start doing Linux stuff rather than Windows stuff if it succeeds (in other words, it’s perfectly possible to make Windows malware that acts as Linux malware when it detects its running with Wine)

I’m more worried about other “enemies” of the American Regime, such as journalists, syndicalists, foreign politicians (including in “allied” nations) and even just people who have access to things as simple as internal strategical information in companies that compete with American companies.

I mean, once you have access to it thanks to things like the Cloud Act and the Patriot Act, it’s not exactly hard to use internal access to Microsoft and LinkedIn systems to automate mass industrial espionage by linking people to certain positions in companies competing with American companies and specific computers to those people and then push a special Windows Update to track what they’re doing and documents that pass through them (though with Windows 11 I bet the eavesdropping part is already done by default on all computers with the data sent to MS).

It makes it easier for Microsoft to know where to push that very special Windows Update that installs whatever the NSA wants installed in the computer of some journalist, foreign politician, syndicalist, high level manager on a foreign company that competes with an American company and other such “extremists”.

Look, with things like the Goldberg Emulator almost all games that use the Steam API can work without Steam as it provides you with a drop-in replacement to the steam api dll.

The main practical differences between Steam and GOG is are:

• You need to have certain technical skills to work around Steam’s (often very weak) locking. Not crazy high (basically how to navigate a filesystem), but some.
• In Steam you do NOT know at the time of the purchase if that will actually work or not (games heavily integrated with the Steam API still won’t work with the Emulator) or if the game has or not further DRM, so you CANNOT make an informed purchasing decision in terms of “will I still have access to these games in the future no matter what”.
• You know for certain that games in GOG have no DRM, theirs or from the publisher’s, because CONTRACTUALLY GOG forces the publishers to not have DRM in their games to sell via GOG.

Personally I buy tons of games from GOG and only a handful from Steam because I do value the certainty that if I have the hardware and OS for it (or an emulator), I can still have fun with those games 10 or 20 years in the future. Then again I’ve been gaming for almost 4 decades hence have enough experience with getting to a point were I miss a game that was fun but can’t run it anymore.

PS: Funny enough, my latest return to sailing the seven seas was because of an oldish game I have in Steam that wouldn’t run in Linux with Proton, probably because of the original DRM from the game itself. The pirated version runs just fine. I strongly suspect that if that game ever got sold in GOG it would also run just fine in Linux.

And you can get a crack for most DRM out there (nowadays, even Denuvo).

Being weak and possible to work around for those with sufficient technical skill doesn’t make it any less a DRM.

Steam’s DRM is clearly only trying to stop the people with average and below technical skills from installing and running the games outside steam, not trying to stop the people with higher technical expertise from going around it (and in fact if you use something like the Goldberg Emulator there are even more games which can be made to run outside Steam than just the “many” you talk about).

By comparison the no-DRM posture you see in with GOG is not only “here are the offline installers to download” directly from the page for the game in your library but even “CONTRACTUALLY game publishers cannot sell games here with ANY DRM”.

“The rules are there but we don’t enforce them” is a very different posture from “we make sure there are no such rules”.

You can do this right now with the Goldberg Emulator, but it doesn’t work well for games which are deeply integrated with Steam’s API (for example, to do things like Cloud Saves).

And Gabe can have a accident or a heart attack tomorrow and die and then it’s not a benevolent autocrat that controls your game collection anymore …

I do know how the SMTP protocol works.

Just because the envelope is not sealed doesn’t mean that the state should be allowed to get a photocopy of what’s inside to be perused by some apparatchik if they feel like it WITH NOT EVEN A SUSPICION OF A CRIME MUCH LESS JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT

Is this shit Democracy or is Autocracy with a bit of Theater of Democracy on top?

They still get to eavesdrop on your e-mails.

You know, the digital version of mail.

Guess who used to open and read people’s mail … oh, yeah, the political police of every fucking dictatorship in Europe (both Fascist and Communist) during the XX century.

This is the shit these people in supposedly Democratic nations have enacted.

If you’re a citizen in an EU member state, I suggest you have a look at who are the MEPs in you country who voted for this shit. In mine - Portugal - which had a Fascist dictatorship complete with mail opening secret police, this was passed entirely with the votes of the mainstream parties and even the far-right voted against it.

It dissipates righteous indignation by making sure that people feel the satisfaction and the release of “doing something” (and thus not act any more forcefully) whilst said “something” is the least impactful thing imaginable.

It ultimately makes those who would do more do less instead.

Not only would that solve this little problem, it would reduce Google’s power and remove one’s data from the claws of US authorities (were the Patriot and Cloud acts let them mass track everybody using a Google product).

Just make sure you chose a non-US Linux phone.

Most online petitions are nothing more than a way to safely (for those targeted and for those amongst the authorities who support them even against the public interest) dissipate the common people’s righteous indignation, by making them feel like they “did something” whilst said something is just about the least impactful thing imaginable.

(Some official ones, for example those mandating parliamentary sessions on the subject if they reach a certain threshold, might not be so, though its unclear as it really depends on the legislation around it allowing politicians to just ignore it at will)

This bullshit will require a lot more than adding your name into a list on some corner of the web in some legal jurisdiction where they’re free to sell your private information.

And if you think the nation where Tinder the company is based - the United States - isn’t using all the information from it, I have a piece of watercrossing property to sell you.

They’ve longed lobbied for anti-circumvention legislation and the corrupt politicians in the US and the rest of the World (with the EU Comission as a notable mention) have made sure it was implemented everywhere, exactly to avoid such a future.

The entire rotten edifice of Intellectual Property in the present day is literally the product of decades of corrupt politicians stealing more and more from the Public Domain to extend and protect this entirelly artificial kind of “property” for the benefit of the ultra-rich - as Digital became more and more important, laws were made or changed to take more and more rights away from common people in order to make the wealthy wealthier, which is why the richest people in the world right now are mainly in Tech.

I was there in the 90s when this corrupt destruction of the “commons” started limiting what could be done in the Digital domain and saw how we Techies lost that war, which is how we ended up with two decades of every more and ever more enshittified “closed garden” setups for all kinds of digital things.

Without shit like anti-circumvention legislation run of the mill people would have easy access in their friendly corner store to China-made devices doing things like what you describe or, for example, break your iPhone out of Apple’s closed garden.

The shit low-innovation (certainly when compared to the 90s) World we live in right now is the product of decades of this purposeful transforming of the digital and intellectual commons into a Feudal system.

Clearly she asked Copilot to get these numbers.

Shameless bullshitting got her where she is now, so obviously she’ll keep on doing it.

And nepotism.

And cronyism.

Coming from the upper-middle and upper class and having attended the right schools and become mates with the right people is very highly correlated with becoming a top level executive.

The salvageable employee will actually learn.

The AI doesn’t learn.

They’re only equivalent for the kind of manager who thinks investing in people is a waste of money.