Google email reads all your mail and sells what it finds to advertisers.

The encrypted zip could work as long as the filenames don’t reveal anything. Google looks in encrypted zips and reads the filenames (which aren’t encrypted).

Steam was by no means the first form of DRM

While there was a game that had online authentication before Steam, Steam popularized it to make it industry standard.

Copy protection is very different than online authentication that restricts your ownership rights.

. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell

Absolutely untrue! You were denied the right to copy the software. If you bought a CD, you absolutely had the right to resell it.

Purposely making code and behind the door deals to exclude any browser development or success for years does, yes.

There was no code to exclude other browsers. Netscape at the time was the monopoly web browser. Netscape failed because Netscape 4 was a disaster. JWZ wrote about it extensively. I personally experienced Netscape’s failure. Netscape 4 had a bug in their dialer that couldn’t handle area codes. When I called to tell them, despite having already paid tens of thousands to Netscape in licensing fees, they wanted $80k to look at the problem. I called my friends who ran other ISP’s to ask them what they were doing because Netscape 4 was broken. They said they weren’t even trying- they were shipping only IE 4 on their CD’s. I wanted my customers to have the choice so I spent the development time to work around Netscape’s bugs and had my tech support field the calls.

Netscape ran themselves off a cliff. The Netscape coders themselves said so. It is utterly ridiculous to claim that MS sabotaged them somehow with “code and deals”.

So is Netflix a monopoly then because it wiped out video rental stores?

As I already said, monopoly is a label given to businesses that have dominant marketshare. It doesn’t matter how it is obtained. Once you own the market, you have restrictions placed on you that smaller companies don’t have to keep the free market working.

Monopoly is again, the manipulation of market forces and regulatory control.

That’s not the definition used by the government. You are declared a monopoly and after that restrictions are placed on your actions.

Steam is not the main force behind that.

Steam started it! You must be too young to remember the uproar in the gaming community about HL2 being the first Steam game and requiring Internet authentication to play with the ridiculous restriction of not being allowed to resell the game you bought at the store. It was years later before they eased selling restrictions but still never to the amount that consumers enjoyed before Steam existed. Gabe was the original techbro: “Hey I know it’s illegal but what if we do it anyway. Then we use the profits to pay the lawyers to make it legal.” It’s why France sued Valve to require them to follow the laws that exist for everything else. https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/video-games-europe-welcomes-french-supreme-court-decision-on-the-resale-of-digital-video-games/

Steam was like Walmart moving into a new territory- with the added consumer hostility of adding restrictions to purchases that consumers used to enjoy. It was because of Steam’s success that other businesses realized that consumers would take abuse if it meant they could get their entertainment conveniently.

Trump purging his best staff like Stalin in 1938.

Stop connecting to My connection. Connect to your own.

Why does the browser need to open?

Serious answer:

I believe many office environments have customer service reps using only web apps. They don’t run an .exe, they go to a webpage that has the corporate web apps.

Personally I had to spend a lot time getting my raspberry PI to autoload Firefox at boot because I have a custom html home automation panel. A distro that had the option of “boot to web page” at start up would have saved me an hour of googling.

but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.

That is absolutely not true. I was President of a mid sized ISP at the time. We shipped both IE and Netscape on CD for consumers to pick which they wanted to install.

The bundling was a problem because of their already pre existing dominant market position.

Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome

Microsoft did not own and control Netscape’s rendering engine which was the really dominant market player. Apple uses their market position to make Safari the majority web browser in the US. (phones outnumber home pc’s and Apple has over 50% marketshare.)

go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.

I don’t give a fuck about Epic. Steam is Walmart and Epic is Kmart.

It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys

If it was only about developers then consumers could have the right to resell their game at whatever price they wanted.

EU countries wouldn’t have to sue Steam for consumer rights:

https://blog.igv.com/steam-freedom-equality-and-game-resale-steam-vs-france/

It was restricting the web browser market.

If bundling a web browser is an uncompetitive act that requires government intervention then Apple, Google (Android), and commercial Linux distros would also be sued by the government. Microsoft was sued, not for the action in isolation but because of their monopoly position. They didn’t get their monopoly from bunding a web browser. They already had a monopoly. People overwhelmingly chose Windows because it was the best. At the time Linux didn’t have consumer friendly distros and MacOS was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from 1982.

Steam’s monopoly destroyed ownership of games. You used to buy a game at Egghead, and when you were done playing, you could sell it for whatever the free market said it was worth.

Steam’s monopoly also means you can’t open a small game store- they wiped out those businesses just like Walmart. Vendors deal with Walmart because a tiny profit of being in every Walmart is better than a large profit from a few stores exactly like vendors sell on Steam.

Artemis is an ai fake. You can tell by the pixels that Maisy Williams wasn’t watching the launch like that.

The 1969 moon landing was real because we didn’t have the technology to fake it.

Remote control for the US Robotic Soccer Sports Team.

(I used to have shelves of those wired into Portmasters when starting my ISP. After replacing the analog modems with pri digital modems we took the shelving outside and gave it the Office Space treatment.)

My home came with one of those. I ripped it out and replaced it with a touchscreen powered by a pi running custom html for a lcars interface for home security and music. I never got around to re wiring the intercom part. It’s on my list.

Probably insider corruption. Like the corporate sales agent or podcast employee is somehow related through friendship or blood to someone at openai.

Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software,

Nope. MS was declared a monopoly because of marketshare and therefore had to add support for competing software.

Offering a better service that attracted customers.

Monopoly is from marketshare. How it is obtained doesn’t matter. Once you are the biggest company you need to have restrictions placed on you so that smaller companies have a chance to compete.

It only applies to steam keys.

A steam key is the receipt that you paid for the game. It is ridiculous that companies get to skirt laws by saying, “It’s on a computer.”

Imagine you buy a car. Years later you go to resell it for less and the manufacture claims you can’t because the sales receipt that proves you are the legitimate owner is a “Steam Cars Inc key” and therefore all existing laws do not apply.

monopoly laws they violate

A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.

In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.

Now I really want to know what it said without digging through the html.

Both sides bad. Amirite?

I noped out of arch during setup. It expected me to partition the drive for swap/os/usr. It’s not 1996, I’m not doing that today.