Nope, that’s a misconception/misinformation. That’s just for Steam Keys (i.e. you can’t sell Steam Keys cheaper than on Steam). Everything else is fair game.

Yeah, it’s also ignoring that the issue with Apple’s “30% cut” isn’t that they take 30% of game sales. It’s that they’re forcing you to use their payment processing service to put an app on the store, and then they take a 30% cut out of that, even though third-party payment processing providers take much smaller cuts than that.

Physical stores also took a 30% sales cut, because there’s value in getting people to see your product. It’s literally been the standard storefront cut for decades. Microsoft and Sony take the same cuts for their console sales/transactions.

Valve does a lot more for companies than just put eyes on their games, too. They’re pushing for Linux-compatibility with Proton, they provide you with networking libraries and infrastructure for multiplayer servers if you use SteamWorks, Steam will optionally update your game’s SDL libraries so you have up-to-date controller bindings, etc. It’s not like they’re sitting there twiddling their thumbs and taking 30% of your money for nothing.

I’d argue Microsoft and Sony do comparable work for devs on their platforms too.

The whole argument against the 30% cut is so fucking dumb.

People who genuinely believe game prices will get lowered if stores take a smaller cut are delusional. You can literally look at the Epic Game Store and see that it isn’t even remotely true. The only games on there that are cheaper than on Steam are the ones Epic invested in specifically to entice developers/gamers to use their services. The ones that don’t have exclusivity deals are the same as on Steam.

Edit: changed “take a cut” to “take a smaller cut”.

Every time I see non-tech people talk about Bluesky vs Mastodon, they talk about how awful the user experience is on Mastodon, and how it’s been an issue for years and they keep ignoring it, so people just go to Bluesky instead.

It definitely feels like a “Us tech folk who care about the tech love it, we don’t mind the user experience as long as the tech is here” vs the “I just want the same thing I have over here, the tech aspect could not be any less relevant to my choice of platform” kind of issue.

Only if you have the appropriate level of privacy settings enabled (and extensions installed) in your browser. Your IP address actually has very little to do with ID-ing you, since most trackers will use hundreds of different fingerprinting methods to create “shadow accounts” of you using things like your system information, screen resolution, installed locales, etc.

This doesn’t mean a VPN doesn’t help, though. Just pointing-out that you probably won’t be asked if you’re a bot if you go on Google while logged-in to a Google account, regardless of whether your VPN is on or not.

Disclaimer: This is speculation, because I haven’t read the actual law (and I’m not Italian, so it’s not like I really have a reason to).

I would assume that they will handle it like this:

To be able to sell your VPN service in Italy, you’ll have to get accredited. Since you’re now taking Italian customers’ money, your company’s dealings in Italy fall under Italian law. They might be able to extradite you, depending on what country you operate from, but realistically most businesses don’t want to get involved in that kind of stuff, because even if you don’t get extradited, no one wants to be put in a situation where they need to actively avoid a country.

This leaves free VPN services, right? Well, since ISP and “legal” VPNs need to conform to the new law, the Italian government could blacklist those VPNs’ websites (which all ISPs and legal VPNs are required by law to block within 30 minutes of them being added to the block list). So now, you’re in an awkward position as an Italian if you want to get a VPN that doesn’t follow those laws.

I’m not sure at what extent this law goes, or how they handle people who are paying to circumvent it (because you might have bought a VPN before this), but they might simply require that banks refuse to process payments from VPN providers that refuse to get accredited.

Obviously, they can’t really block this thing without going the Great Firewall route (and even that has ways of being bypassed), but that’s not really their goal here. Their goal is to establish a stranglehold on what the everyday citizen does. It’s to put a framework in place that allows them to quickly and efficiently block content they deem you shouldn’t be able to see. It’s a disgusting display of a government overreaching and censoring what their citizens’ have access to on the web.

I’ve had an RPI3 running for 7+ years (currently running Home Assistant on it). Still uses the original SD card that shipped with it, too. These things are durable and reliable as hell, as far as I’m concerned.

A document detailing technical requirements of Italy’s Piracy Shield anti-piracy system confirms that ISPs are not alone in being required to block pirate IPTV services. All VPN and open DNS services must also comply with blocking orders, including through accreditation to the Piracy Shield platform.

According to the article, it requires them to get accreditation to operate in in Italy, unless I’m reading that wrong.

Most corporate VPN companies I’ve dealt with would love to slip in additional cost to counteract this cost on their end.

Reading the article: A ruling body filled with randos puts a site on a block list and every VPN operating in Italy must block the site within 30 minutes. There is no review or judicial oversight to sites added to the block list. This seems to include all forms of VPNs, including corporate ones. They could start charging a premium to Italian users which would start affecting businesses, I guess.

Yeah, in general, you’ll be fine with Firefox and any of the default filters uBlock provides (even the ones that are disabled by default). The issue usually comes from outdated third-party filter lists that try to block youTube’s tracking. Since the changes, you should pretty much only rely on the official lists for anything YouTube-related.

Or maybe OP’s got another extension that tries to block ads. I know I’ve had to disable Enhancer for YouTube’s ad blocking (because YouTube detects it immediately).

I find it makes my life easier, personally, because I can set up and tear down environments I’m playing with easily.

Same here. I self-host a bunch of dev tools for my personal toy projects, and I decided to migrate from Drone CI to Woodpecker CI this week. Didn’t have to worry about uninstalling anything, learning what commands I need to start/stop/restart Woodpecker properly, etc. I just commented-out my Drone CI/Runner services from my docker-compose file, added the Woodpecker stuff, pointed it to my Gitea variables and ran docker compose up -d.

If my server ever crashes, I can just copy it over and start from scratch.

I am very disappointed that markdown is not perfect.

Triple backticks are meant for code blocks, not to make the text look fancy. Not wrapping lines is a feature and working as intended.

YOU DO NOT NEED A VPN.

Ugh, self-righteous pirates are the fucking worst. My brother in Christ, you’re pirating Assassins’ Creed 14. Just fucking say you’re stealing it. You don’t need to sugar-coat it.

Currently? Zero reason.

Lummy, the creator of Gitea, wrote a post about why he moved Gitea over a company.

The TL;DR; is that it allowed Gitea to better work with companies that wanted to fund them but couldn’t fund individuals directly, moved the Gitea trademark to an entity that could outlive the creator, etc.

There hasn’t been any significant changes to how Gitea operates or can be used from a user point-of-view since the change happened.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea that will pull changes made from Gitea, without being a company. In the events that Gitea goes to shit, it’ll be there as a replacement.