Fun fact! Sony wanted to screw over Nintendo not because they were screwed over by Nintendo, but because they were humiliated by Nintendo.

Sony was trying to screw Nintendo over in the first place, Nintendo realized it, pulled out, and Sony threw a hissy fit.

The tl;dr: is that Sony basically wanted distribution rights for IPs that were published on CDs. Nintendo initially thought Sony meant as in ‘we want to be able to distribute stuff published on CDs’ which makes sense… but Nintendo’s lawyers realized at the last second that Sony meant ‘Anything that is published on CD, we now own that IP’s distribution rights entirely’

As in, if a Zelda game was ever published on CD, Nintendo literally could not ever publish a Zelda game without Sony’s approval. Defacto ownership of the Zelda IP, though not actual ownership.

Considering Nintendo was literally currently dealing with Sony extorting them over the dev kits for the Sony sound chip in the SNES, Nintendo very wisely walked away from that, and pivoted to Philips. (Sony and Philips jointly created the CD standard.)

While the CD-I was obviously a failure, this whole thing was a MASSIVE embarrassment to Sony, because they had already been doing the industry equivalent of bragging about the deal (which they shouldn’t have been, because it wasn’t finalized yet). Them yapping about it is also how Nintendo’s lawyers realized that Sony was basically trying to do a hostile takeover of all of Nintendo’s IPs. Needless to say, Nintendo was (rightly, imo) pissed.

And then Sony had the gall to complain about Nintendo like THEY were the bad guys, setting a narrative for years.

I’m going to be honest, this sounds like an astroturf campaign trying to reduce SKG into absurdity to harm it’s credibility.

Well, there’s his literal original post on X, praising republicans as the party of privacy against big tech: https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660 When people lost their shit, he went on reddit and posted an ‘official proton response’, doubling down: https://archive.ph/quYyb (archive link because proton PR eventually came in start deleting things and creating a new narrative)

When that was deleted, proton claimed it ‘wasn’t actually an official response’ despite being on the official proton account and literally saying ‘proton’s official response is’, and a shitload of now-deleted doubling down in the thread that I don’t currently have time to find, but you can probably see them in the thread by looking for the outraged responses to deleted posts (or finding whatever the current deleted-reddit-mirror is, I don’t know the most up-to-date one atm). They then claimed they were ‘politically neutral’ despite that literally being impossible by dint of being pro-privacy, which isn’t politically neutral at all. https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i29k9t/proton_shouldnt_use_their_official_socials_to/m7csaky/

I don’t have time to really dig in and find all the deleted reddit/mastodon posts for you, but they’re still around because the internet is eternal, and deleting something only hides it from shmuchks who don’t know better, so I’m sure you can find em.

You’re probably downvoted and insulted because you made up a narrative. He straight up said Republicans were the party of privacy, and were shilling them. The backtracking ‘Oh I was just supporting the pick’ was Proton’s PR company coming later, after nuking a significant number of reddit posts from andy yen doubling down, as well as iirc the entire mastodon thread where he was doing the same. It was wild as fuck to watch in real time, we were literally joking in discord that some poor intern was probably trying to physically wrestle the keyboard away from Yen while screaming for someone to call their PR company.

That whole fiasco is literally why Proton no longer uses mastodon, because no one there let them forget the whole thing despite attempts at nuking the posts from existence.

This isn’t the first time proton, and andy yen specifically, has shown a troubling tendency towards supporting fascism. Vibe coding their apps is also a big warning flag just from a security point of view as well.

I’ve still been hesitantly recommending proton VPN to my friends, because a questionable VPN is better than no VPN, and most people aren’t willing to shill out money for… well, mullvad used to be what I recommended if they were willing to pay for it, but I guess I’ll have to rethink that now. But yeah, it was, to my knowledge, the best free VPN, though that’s a low bar.

In many states it’s illegal to not connect your solar panels to the grid, because fuck you, they own the politicians and will ensure they take your money one way or another.

electricity companies will just start raising prices for connecting to the grid just to make sure they aren’t losing any money from you.

What are you, a fed? Fuck off.

It absolutely did not, by such wide margin you’re just straight up trying to start shit. If we count all the votes trump got as legit (which is increasingly looking like complete bullshit), even then he barely got 33% of the eligible vote.

He lost the popular vote, even with absolutely COLOSSAL amounts of voter disenfranchisement preventing Democratic voters from even voting in the first place, and a shitload of their votes being invalidated or even just outright thrown away, and we still don’t know how much damage Musk did with his control over the polling machines.

There’s shitloads of protests going on over the matter, actually, but much like the protests against all the rest of Trump’s bullshit and especially ICE, you wouldn’t catch the media covering any of them, despite them being nigh-constant.

Fuck off with that. Yes we are.

Oh no, everyone else in the republican party got off scott-free, including the current sitting governor, and the laws and funding that were bribed into existence are still around as a result, and the taxpayer money (over 1 billion of it) won’t be repaid.

I think the only exceptions to them getting off scott-free is Larry Householder, who I mentioned is in jail, and Sam Randazzo, the former PUCO chair who committed suicide. And I supposed technically the ex GOP chair Matt Borges, who was convicted, but released almost immediately.

FirstEnergy themselves are being investigated, the sitting US Senator just testified iirc last week on the matter, but the politicians that facilitated everything have otherwise not been charged with anything and there’s no intent to, and the judge seems fairly intent on ensuring no one at FirstEnergy goes to jail as well. She’s been overreaching by trying to squash any journalistic coverage of the court case, to the point of where multiple newspapers/news companies are suing her. She also just straight up dismissed money laundering charges, claiming that the prosecution hadn’t proven that the defendants knew that they payments they made were illegal… despite the prosecution providing the defendants’ own text messages celebrating it, and documents and fucking testimony from FirstEnergy’s own attorney advising them against the payment. On top of that, she dismissed the charges despite the fact that the case is still ongoing and evidence is still being entered into the record!

So yeah, it’s fucked, and it’s likely to resolve with them getting away with it. $60 million in various bribes for over $1 billion in Ohio taxpayer money, propping up power plants that don’t even serve Ohio.

Considering how horribly corrupt PUCO is- part of quite literally the largest modern bribery scandal (possibly the largest in the history) of the US, lets maybe not use Ohio as an example here.

For context for everyone else, this was so bad republicans literally threw a senior republican politician (sitting state representative, former speaker of the house) in jail for a 20 year sentence.

Have you thought about not trying to drag meshtastic down to try and prop ham up?

I get it, you spent a bunch of time studying for your ham and you don’t want it to feel like a waste, but lets be perfectly frank here- most people aren’t going to get a HAM license. It IS, however, VERY accessible for someone to buy a cheap gadget on sale to try out.

I never understand why ham radio people always try to sabotage every other communication method, but you guys do it every time.

Let other people communicate how they want.

Unfortunately I haven’t seen one yet- I would like to, so I could provide it to people in situations like this, but none of them have e.g. the now-deleted doubling-down Yen did on the official account, or noting the ‘88’ in his usernames, or even most of the mastodon clusterfuck beyond ‘they left mastodon after backlash.’

I was there reading most of it, but unfortunately I didn’t think to save screenshots of any of it, which is why I know it all happened, but this was also several months ago and I couldn’t recite the exact timeline anymore.

The long and short of it that when Andy Yen posted that, it immediately blew up on mastodon and reddit- along with presumably twitter, but I have that DNS blocked, so I have no further insights to that one, and frankly there’s enough weirdos on there that I don’t even want to know how that went down.

Mastodon, to my knowledge, was fairly bog-standard and I think most of it is still there, because proton’s PR team couldn’t lean on anyone to get it all purged. I suspect that’s the real reason why they left mastodon. Most of their posts involved were edited to be a lot less concerning sounding, however.

Reddit, on the other hand, had (presumably) Yen posting on the Proton official account (example that WAS archived by a very smart person who clearly saw proton for who they were: https://archive.ph/quYyb - that post no longer exists) doubling down for a while before someone else clearly took the reigns and started trying to play damage control, at which point andy yen got on his own reddit account and kept doubling down on it, using a ton of really concerning buzzwords. I remember reading him complaining about ‘the woke’ being ‘triggered’ at one point and just being like ‘What the fuck am I even reading right now.’ All of that was also edited away or deleted, but you can still find user replies to him boggling at him using GOP language that are unedited in the reddit threads that weren’t nuked.

Also revealed during all this is that Andy Yen’s personal reddit account is ‘andy1011000’. For those of you that don’t know, 1011000 is binary for ‘88.’ As in, the very famous nazi dogwhistle. While you can argue it may have another meaning- and I’m sure people will- the simple fact of the matter is that announcing your support for an authoritarian fascist with an encoded nazi dogwhistle in your username is a bad look, especially if you categorically refuse to acknowledge or change it when it’s pointed out to you. I know several people born in 1988 who used to have 88 in their usernames who instantly and comprehensively ditched those usernames the very second they found out what it meant, but Yen still uses it to this day.

I’m so, so tired of seeing that fucking article by ‘ovenplayer’ over and over again. It’s not your fault, mind you, but damn do I wish that abomination would get erased from the internet.

It’s incredibly biased, missing a ton of information, and just frankly outright lies to frame the whole thing as positively towards Proton as possible, and completely skips mentioning Proton’s attempted cleanup job. Even worse, it pretends to sound neutral while doing all that to try and gaslight people into thinking it’s actually a full journalistic dive into the issue.

I’m like 90% sure it’s just Proton’s PR team creating an easy astroturf- an account that was made JUST to post that article, nothing else, created right at the same time as the Proton PR team started working on the whole issue?

The only reason it’s only 90% instead of 100% is because there’s a lot of proton apologists who think Proton supporting this shit is ‘blown out of proportion’ because they have no idea what they’re talking about, but feel personally attacked because someone isn’t supporting ‘their team.’

I mean, their security IS directly impacted by their support of a fascist government. They’ve already happily gave over personal information of an account owner to authorities when asked- the security posture doesn’t matter when they choose to circumvent it.

More to the point- they have a history of deleting proof of misdeeds and pretending they never happened. That is not what you want to see from a company touting its security!

https://lemmy.org/post/1309818

People found AI config files in their public repos. When they were found, Proton deleted all discussion of it and then altered the repository history to pretend the config files were never there.

Shady, scummy behavior. They’ve tried to do the same ‘delete everything and ignore it’ when their CEO publicly praised Trump and the Republican party, and then kept doubling down in reddit and mastodon comments until someone on the PR team wrested the account away from him and started mass-deleting all of it.

Unfortunately news reports- and even people- discussing his praise of Trump and the republican party often do not know that there was more than just the 1 or 2 statements he made, so it seems like it was at least slightly successful in that case.

GOG has no DRM, but they also don’t offer the same kind of services, like workshop, updates, cloud sync, etc.

Not trying to say they’re worse or anything, I love GOG, but it’s really kind of comparing apples to oranges here.

I’m going to be honest, I have no idea how I forgot google. They also definitely take 30%.

I should note that 30% is incredibly standard in the industry, and Valve offers a LOT more for that 30% than literally any other digital publisher. Physical publishers take substantially more, and the only digital store that offers less is EGS, which is simultaneously absolute dogshite and also has been trying very, very hard to astroturd the ‘30%’ thing for ages.

Nintendo, Sony, and Apple all take 30%. I think MS does as well, but don’t quote me on that one.