Historically, Valve has hired lawyers to weasle out of legal responsibilities around the world, to limited success. They repeatedly tried to get out of legally mandated refunds for digital goods in several western nations, and now people think that Valve is the good guys for eventually capitulating like it was their idea in the first place.

I cannot imagine a scenario where Gabe Newell would hire a lawyer just to have him say “comply with the new laws instead of fighting back”.

EDIT: Just cause I felt like it made for more present context, Valves legal team clearly isn’t going to take the “maybe we should ban loot boxes as a form of online gambling targeted towards children” debate lying down. You mess with Valve’s sources of revenue, they will pull out every possible slime ball argument to say they are legally allowed to piss over any and all consumer rights. Gabe’s not about to allow porn to be banned on his store of “digital game license’s where you don’t own anything actually”. Not until the legal situation gets so dire that porn isn’t worth attempting to profit off anymore. He has fought far more tasteless battles in his career.

I thought this was going to be about the blatant Nazi posting, both in the community forums and and in asset flip/game spam in the store. Apparently the lawyer in question was bringing up accepting more censorship in the lead up to more pornographic content becoming available on Steam.

I don’t typically care for Gabe, but yeah, I would have said the same thing. Probably not for the same reason tbf. But even if you don’t have any political concerns outside of making money for your yacht collection… Hate speech isn’t currently costing Valve money. Porn bans are directly effecting a market they have invested into. Why would you pay a legal expert to be so spineless?

Pretty sure they can’t close the forums, actually. I’ve never seen a Steam forum be outright disabled, despite seeing many devs/publishers who would absolutely close that down as a place of critique. I haven’t even seen delisted but viewable games close down their forums from new posts. Are you sure Valve doesn’t have an agreement with publishers that they are required to keep the forum open for their games?

The discussion I have seen from publishers is that the automated moderation on Steam is literally nonexistent from their end, and the global automation is far too lax. So they push their player base to platforms that are actually capable of dealing with problematic behavior.

Have you noticed any change in battery performance on BasicSync? I’ve been thinking about switching over; aside from the poor dev transition/communication, the new version by ResearchXXL started chewing through my battery life. Used an older version of the app and confirmed that it used less energy, but was too concerned about possible security exploits in what is a very popular p2p application with extensive file permissions…

Why do you think a client should have to download a dark mode CSS separately? Have you put any thought into why that is treated as a separate request, rather than a function of an existing page that could be switched between offline without any acknowledgement sent from the client?

Web standards have been butchered to force these constant validation measures for the sole purpose of telemetry/spyware. A client should be able to render a web page however the fuck it wants and the server that sent the page should be none the wiser.

And what of things like battery status? That has no legitimate purpose at all. No web site is going to change its behavior in response to your battery status, but current charge % and battery wear stats alone are enough to perfectly distinguish your mobile device from anyone else that you would be sharing a IP address with.

I can hate them both. 90% of this info has no legitimate reason to leave the clients machine. In a world where open source development is still legal and available, I don’t see why its so hard to have a web browser that doesn’t broadcast every single hardware detail about your machine.

I hate how this situation is spoken about as a lost cause. People in the comments section here are acting like this information is required for the web to work at all. Probably weren’t alive at a time where websites could be stored offline because they didn’t expect constant client validation. Multiple comments acting like light/dark mode requires a server request, and couldn’t just be handled offline by the clients browser choosing how to render stuff after its been downloaded. Bet they think the web server needs to know the time zone too.

So that you can run interactive 3D applications like games in your browser.

Hardware info does not need to be sent server side to accomplish this. OpenGL and Vulkan APIs can both say what the current hardware supports without hardware identifiers. A malicious website could probably still fingerprint based off those listed features, but that’s just a justification for “don’t accept requests for GPU hardware acceleration without user permission”. Currently modern web browsers broadcast it no matter what the page is requesting.

To adjust the performance of a web application to save more power.

Name me one web “page” that does this. A web “application” doesn’t count. My native browser should should never broadcast this, ever.

To give you matching website.

Can/should be ran client side.

Again to adjust performance or to pause an application.

Can/should be ran client side. Its none of the websites/applications business whether I have frozen its process or not.

Is often used to give you a download link that matches your OS.

A small quality of life, isn’t worth it. Thankfully its the easiest thing to fake/lie about on this list. Most of these “features” on this list are not user facing and cannot be turned off with basic configurations.

A lot of this accounts older posts are on Lemmy.world, is your instance defederated from there?

Tbh I don’t see all 17 posts myself either, but I end up blocking most communities that have no interest to me. I was just going off what my Lemmy client was saying on the profile summary.

??? They have 17 posts listed when I check their profile. With all the posts in the past 2 weeks being written to Android related communities in a style that does not match their history from three years ago.

Their comments are written like madlib paragraph blocks.