Privacy Pass would also be a good option. You can use it with Kagi, where you’ll have cryptographic tokens that you can use for searches without them being linked to your account. Even if you use a non-anonymous payment method, you could still use the service without leaving a trace.
> After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.
That's not true about Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2 was the first Call of Duty game where you could no longer host your own servers. In its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, however, that was still possible. For MW2, unofficial servers created by players only became available later on. However, Activision has taken legal action against many of these projects.
> Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned?
In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it. However, games that use such standardized services are actually less problematic in practice. For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator, which emulates Steam’s online features. Games that do not have additional DRM or any extra features but simply use the standard Steamworks SDK for multiplayer can be played entirely without the Steam client or server using this emulator.
Even for services that had already been shut down, like Gamespy back then, Openspy quickly emerged as an alternative. Not all games worked right away, but the community fixed most of the issues very quickly. So, in the end, the games that use some kind of custom solution built by the developer themselves are much more important.
> In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it
So AWS are now contractually required to offer all of their managed services to be self hostable or they can’t be used in games?
> For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator
So open source reverse engineered solutions are ok? Why aren’t they acceptable for games instead of the underlying platform? Why is it ok for a game that uses steam for online services but not epic (as there’s presumably no equivalent emulator), or an in house tech?
> Games that do not have additional DRM or any extra features but simply use the standard Steamworks SDK for multiplayer can be played entirely without the Steam client or server using this emulator
And those games are unaffected by anything that will come from this law.
The law isn't requiring that all online features of the game be available. Just a minimal viable product to play the base game online. No storefronts, no news prompts, no matchmaking servers, just server lists. You don't need AWS for that.
> There's also the likelihood of the server architecture requiring many moving pieces. Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.
There are already several Fortnite servers available for self-hosting. Fans have created these on their own without access to the official code, and they run on a standard PC or a custom-built server using off-the-shelf hardware. One example of this is Project Reboot, which is publicly available on GitHub. People use it to play older Fortnite seasons or to play the game with friends on unsupported platforms like Linux.
Even though I wouldn't really use something like that myself, I actually think it's a good thing when people share their dotfiles with others. Whether you call it a “distribution” or not is basically irrelevant, and I don't understand all the fuss about it.
However I would still generally advise against using Omarchy because the maintainer does not seem to place any importance on security. For example the default firewall configuration leaves the SSH port open and the number of failed login and sudo attempts before a timeout has been unnecessarily increased. Furthermore Omarchy installs some of the offered programs via a .sh script that is downloaded via curl rather than using a package manager like the one Arch already has. In addition Hannsen still refuses to sign his commits, which means it's only a matter of time before a supply chain attack occurs.
> For example the default firewall configuration leaves the SSH port open and the number of failed login and sudo attempts before a timeout has been unnecessarily increased.
Leaving SSH exposed is bad if password auth is enabled. Otherwise, under what threat model is either of these a problem?
No, thanks. Vivaldi is proprietary software and therefore not trustworthy. Since the source code isn't fully available, there's no way to verify whether an update might secretly add a feature that collects data. Since the source code isn't fully available and you can't compile it yourself, there's no way to prevent a feature that collects data from being secretly added during an update.
The reasoning behind why it isn't open source is also complete nonsense. Just because it's easy to create a fork doesn't change the fact that most users will stick with the original as long as the fork doesn't offer significant improvements. With Firefox, people aren't flocking to the existing forks either.
> I, for one, like streaming apps enough that I don't want to go back to locked-down, expensive DVD players. The alternative to DRM isn't "no DRM", it's "no content".
That statement is simply not true. The demand for streaming services would still be there. There would simply be even more illegal alternatives than there already are, so companies would still be forced to offer movies and TV shows via streaming. They only have the choice between offering DRM-free content and making money, or making no money while people watch it anyway.
But that would only be possible for large companies. If I'm just tinkering with my own Linux distribution for fun, Google won't even bother responding to my request.
The intention behind it doesn't matter at all. In the end, it just means that only a few major operating systems are allowed, and the market is divided up among the established manufacturers. Anyone new to the market faces a major problem right off the bat, and trying to build something yourself doesn't work either.
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