Ah, gotcha. Yeah, it’s always hard to know what really happened when dealing with this kinda stuff in the media. In this English version they say,

a Russian government official said…The official, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity due to concerns for personal safety.

Here’s the Russian version of the article (which uses штурмовики) where they instead say,

a Russian government official explained to The Moscow Times.

So it sounds like they’re not quoting a public statement from the Kremlin, but someone on the inside feeding information to this outlet. Allegedly. Could be that person’s wording, or could be the outlet’s “interpretation”.

Thanks, good to know!

The term predates star wars, if that’s what you’re thinking. Star wars got the term from actual fascist regimes. According to Google translate, they probably used the term штурмовой отдел.

I think their question is, what do you mean by “secure”? Because as the saying goes for internet services: usually, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

The existence of this article is confusing to me. FB doesn’t need to “scrape” their own site, and they don’t care about whether you set your photos to public or private.

The way I see it, if it’s a rule of film to “show, don’t tell”, then it should be a rule of games to “engage, don’t show and tell”.

People don’t argue as hard if you convince them not to take you seriously.

As someone still playing through vanilla Elden Ring, none of that means anything to me. And if my first 80h are any indication, I’ll finish the game and still have no idea.

You’re thinking of “redundant”.

“Essential lore” is an oxymoron in these games

Yeah that’s true. Not always ideal, though. I’d prefer the option to spoof a location to the app, just to avoid dealing with apps that unnecessarily block features when you deny them location permissions.

I assume it’s part of the security for the app to not even know whether the GPS data was ever there.

Agreed. As I understand it, $50k-$100k is on the high end for a TV show to use a clip from a very well known song in an episode. Some band I’ve never heard of being paid $22k for their song to be played in the background of a game might be a little on the low end, so it’s totally reasonable for the band to counter, but it’s also totally reasonable for Rockstar to turn down a 10x counter. Publicly crying about it seems childish. The game is gonna happen with or without your song.

Agreed. Anyone who thinks it’s ok to just expose ssh on 22 to the internet has never looked at their logs. The port will be found in minutes, and be hammered by thousands of login attempts by multiple bots 24/7. Sure you can block repeat failed logins, but that list will just always be growing.

Normal for who? I wouldn’t expose SSH on 22 to the internet unless you have someone whose full time job is monitoring it for security and keeping it up to date. There are a whole lotta downsides and virtually no upsides given that more secure alternatives have almost zero overhead.

I find it to be a bit sketchy in general, because it means the OS is actually parsing and editing the actual bytes of the file contextually when an app tries to access it. Probably making a shadow copy somewhere without the GPS exif data.

But yeah, I agree, at a minimum the OS should pop up a notification that “By default, GPS data will be stripped from the file due to inadequate location permissions” until the user either changes their preference or says “that’s fine, don’t remind me for this app”. Having it happen silently just isn’t good.

the incentives are community thriving, trust, pleasure, and all the other aspects that make life worth worth living outside of capitalism

I think technically Frostpunk is this, but it’s probably not what you mean.

You’re not entering a contract with those people, let alone being paid. If you believe you’re getting paid in an untracable way, your govt would like a word with you.

I don’t know why you think the company got played, did you read the article? Dude is busted. Best case, they’re going to garnish his income for the rest of his life.

ToS was the wrong term. Artists agree to a contract when they monetize their content on Spotify. The contract specifies exactly what the artist will be paid for. If the artist was misrepresenting facts in order to be paid more than the contract would otherwise stipulate, it’s called fraud, and that is a crime.

Artificial streams are not new. Spotify has many articles dedicated to describing the problem of artificial streams, and the penalties for artists engaging in it. Here are One, Two, Three of them just from a single search.

This is a loophole in the same way that taking stuff when the owner isn’t looking is a loophole. In other words, it’s just called a crime.

It’s not a loophole, though. Their ToS specifically prohibits creating artificial streams. The guy isn’t going to get away with it. The AI generated music isn’t a problem, but spinning up bots to give it streams is the same as using click bots to farm ad revenue. If the man catches you, the man’s gonna win.

Vulfpeck made a silent album and asked fans to stream it nonstop. THAT was a loophole, because there wasn’t anything spotify could do, there wasn’t anything in their agreement that said they couldn’t do that, and that’s awesome. Spotify (and the others I assume) has since plugged that hole, but I applaud them for taking advantage while they could.

Yeah, I have to think there are others out there doing this same thing at a smaller scale, being more subtle about it, and not getting caught. This guy just got a bit too greedy.