Big Tech is about to repeat a big mistake.
Microsoft has actively sought to increase its control of privately owned Minecraft servers since it acquired the game in 2014.
Last month, the tech giant began cryptographically tying messages to accounts, setting the stage for universal moderation. In the upcoming 1.19.1 update, any account which violates the Community Guidelines may be banned from ALL online servers — Public or private.
The long and short of it is that a megacorp is asserting the power to ban you for life from a game you bought for how you conduct yourself in your own home.
It’s been almost a decade since the first #GamerGate. The vidya oligarchs are overdue for a sharp lesson in what happens when they piss off extremely online, tech savvy autists.
And let this be another lesson to counterculture artists. Do not sign your rights away to the enemy. Unless you want to see your life’s work bastardized and weaponized against your audience.
And let it serve as a reminder to consumers not to pay people who hate you.
In the meantime, there’s a petition against Microsoft’s Minecraft censorship. Make sure you uncheck the “Show my name” box, and sign it here.
“The vidya oligarchs are overdue for a sharp lesson in what happens when they piss off extremely online, tech savvy autists.”
What happens? Mundane Matt cries about getting swatted? Teddy Spaghetti nominates cringy media for the Hugo Awards?
It really puts it into perspective when swattings have become a common occurrence since then and the Hugo Awards are so useless that China bought them.
As for vidya, it’s mostly owned by the middlemarket and indies again, with a dollop of Nintendo. It’s probably just going to hasten the flood and the crash that AAA has been trying to ignore since HD came on the scene.
Eventually gaming is going to be left with their own Worldcon crowd, which they have. Their Cliffy Bs, their David Jaffes, their Neil Druckmanns, their AAA studios, to their own playpen producing failing cult trash that the mainstream entirely ignores.
There isn’t much for anons to do but to continue not buying their garbage.
Brian’s advice on DGMtPWHY is Platinum Level.
JD,
Once again this usurpation by the neurodiverse underscores how much we regular people have to put them in their place. Those nerds and geeks who are simply overwhelmed by the give and take of social interaction have the gall to censor my OFFLINE behaviour.
No. I refuse to let Sheldons police my behaviour when theirs is shallow and defective.
We’ll need to locker stuff them repeatedly until they know their place.
xavier
GamerGate’s essential fruit was red pilling a small army of Gen Ys and Millennials to the media’s lying nature. That led to the Trump phenomenon, which blew the lid off those lies for millions.
What the Gen Z version could look like is anyone’s guess.
I’ve seen a lot of people who generally don’t care about DRM or corporate shenanigans say that Windows 11 requiring an account is too much for them to accept. (The result being mainly switching to a flavor or Linux or rolling back to Windows 7.)
I predict that unless there is a collapse, within the decade we will see a fully fractured internet. In one part you will have sites that require a “verified” Microsoft or Apple account, tied to your very operating system. Conversely, the operating systems will not let you access “insecure” pages. The other part will basically be a mix of modern and Web 1.0 design, but with no attempt to placate normies since they will not even be able to get there in the first place. It will probably be referred to as “the dark web” even though it won’t require anything like a Tor browser.
I honestly do not think the internet as we know it will still be around by the middle of the 2030s. By that point, it will probably be as empty as an OldPub chain bookstore.
Web 1.0 was as far as the Internet should have gone.
“Web 1.0 was as far as the Internet should have gone.”
That’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed in a lot of industries, some of which I have direct experience with. HDTV tech reached maturity ca. 2010. Since then there have been no substantive advances, just TV manufacturers cramming in superfluous extras to justify keeping their margins ahead of depreciation.
Then we have phones, which are *losing* features with each new generation.
The online installer for Windows 10 now requires a Microsoft account, and I also need a Googlag account to take full advantage of my Android phone. I already have the fluoride stare when it comes to big tech shenanigans, unfortunately.
It is ironic that I am tech savvy enough to spare myself from the mandatory Windows 11 update—only to desire to switch to Windows 11 anyway. I want to prove to myself that I can make it usable.
Sargon of Akkad, wearer of suits, keeps cashing in those W’s. We have him and GamerGate to thank for Trump and the repeal of Roe v Wade, after all.
“Not a reliable source of news.”
Can you go and evangelize the spergs somewhere else?
Roe v Wade? Some guy on YouTube?
You’re overlooking 50 years of Catholic social witness to the sanctity of life, a rising tide of prolife ministries, and more prayer and fasting, including countless rosaries, than anyone but God can tally. We Evangelicals helped, a bit, but I have to say our Roman brethren carried this fight. I think those factors laid the groundwork for this victory far more than anything that happened on Capitol Hill.
This.
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam
The time warp back to 2016 is up the stairs and to your left.
Frankly, any tech savvy person who cared for Minecraft needed to have spent the time since it was bought by Microsoft forking/hacking/customizing it to the best of their abilities, so that they no longer received updates. This was always how it was going to end up.
Finally had enough freedom (financial and required software-wise) to pitch Windows last year. So happy. Probably wouldn’t get the same flavor of Linux I got this go-around again, but in spite of the insanely entry-user-unfriendly nature of the decentralized beast, Linux makes me tear hair out at least 4/5 less.
I might rather go back to learning Mandarin (a very hard language that is fun, but the least fun of the ones I have studied) than try to understand most Linux users’ best attempts at “help” articles, but there is almost always a way to fix it, and some of the problems I had with Windows were simply enigmas that professional IT guys couldn’t solve.
Microsoft is like the IRS, and has been for quite a long time–they WANT the process of using their products/services to be painful. YET another humiliation ritual, and one you feel helpless to avoid because of the ubiquity of their presence. Kind of like the first sign/symptom of potential convergence–when the product becomes the punishment.
Matthew,
I’ve around the computer revolution for many years and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s been stymied by Bill Gate’s envy.
He was envious of Steve Job, Wordperfect, etc. And has the world really benefitted with his version DOS? Windows and Word?
Finally, I’m suspecting glowies also helped along the way. How else do you explain the OS/2 debacle and how MS took out so many competitors caught flatfooted with the appearence of Windows? And subsequently those same competitors disappeared or regulated to the wilderness?
xavier
“Finally, I’m suspecting glowies also helped along the way”
There’s an indication that this is what’s going on with Tor. I don’t know a lot about it, but this article (https://restoreprivacy.com/tor/) makes a convincing case that its not what some think it is.
NLR,
What bothered me at that time was the tone and attitude by the tech press.Everyone but MS and Bill Gates; and grudgingly Jobs, were all inept spazzes whose companies were always 18 months from bankruptcy. Also the reviews of Word and Wordperfect in some of computer magazines. The dishonesty as well as denigrating the other DOSes, etc. Then the 90s stagnation and the same press complaint about how boring it was
xavier
Xavier,
I don’t have a sauce on hand, but I am under the impression that the Gate’s family was hooked up inside the MIC, with positions in DARPA and on the board of IBM.
There’s a lot of features with Windows 10 that have went this way:
-On release there was an option that you could select to easily toggle whether you wanted it or not.
-At some point the toggle stops working. Either it says that you need to have admin level access (even if you are an admin) or it just lets you swap the option without doing anything. But you can still fix the problem through the group policy editor with a clearly marked option.
-At some point THAT stops working. You can change the option, but nothing will happen. However there is usually some registry hack that will work.
-Even the registry hacks become more obscure over time. Usually earlier there will be a key that has an obvious meaning (once you find it.) But later on they will delete that key and you can only get the feature you want by re-adding it. At this point there’s no way you are possibly getting it done without a guide.
Some things (such as disabling the preview window when hovering over taskbar item) might be impossible to do now, despite menus and group policies claiming that you can do it.
You can kind of document the history by looking at help articles and seeing the comments go from “thanks, this helped a lot!” to “tried this, nothing happened” over time. Often these will be official Microsoft support articles with a representative swearing up and down that this the official fix, since not even Microsoft is really aware of how things work anymore.
2023 Vision
Linux box: Internet and comms (until Linux is completely converged)
Windows: Version 7 on old iron or in a VM under Linux — both on a box off the ‘Net.
Might be handy for the future: https://alternativeto.net/
And, no, Linux doesn’t make the comms safe. But it pulls you just a little farther away from the Incompetent Walled Garden of MS.
The preview windows for the taskbar are just that: live preview windows. The help articles that explain how to disable them refer to them as “thumbnails” and tell you to disable the thumbnail settings in the Windows performance settings to make them go away. An Indian programmer probably changed them to stop behaving like thumbnails, however, and his changes were either illegible or devoid of context. He was also probably unaware that his changes invalidated the group policy menu descriptions.
This is why corporations should hate spaghetti code. If you’re a cog that the corporate machine can easily fire and replace, your work is supposed to be cleanly formatted and helpfully commented to help your replacements update your code without any hickups.
I chose that feature because a couple of years ago I spent a day trying to disable it (it was interfering with videos I was making on a company issued laptop with a small screen.) I tried everything: disabling the options that you mention, messing with the group policies, adding registry keys to extend the delay time for them to pop up (effectively making them never come up), using third party programs that claimed to give the same results, etc. Nothing worked. Even the stuff that was supposed to delay when it came up didn’t delay things by even a second, let alone the minutes I was going for.
The problem is probably as you state; something changed by someone who didn’t know what effect it would have, and it broke everything.
Another thing this showed me is how much garbage data there is out there. No real official tech support, and the sites you find on a search all just copy each others data to draw users for ad revenue or to get people to download their malware “virus remover” programs. Even today you will see dozens of sites with creation dates from this year, offering the same solutions that didn’t work for me two years ago, and when there are comments they almost always have people saying it doesn’t work. But what makes things more frustrating is that occasionally the repeated solutions DO work and you would never be able to duplicate them without being told. This was the situation I ran into when I wanted to disable windows search from bringing up websites; it still is possible but requires a very specific registry key addition, all other methods fail.
I’m curious how they intend to enforce such a thing when there are so many private servers out there running heavily modded versions of Minecraft that are based on much older versions of the core game. If this feature relies on the latest version of the game to function, then all one needs to do in order to dodge enforcement is to never play any versions of the game from 1.19 forward.
Heck, for that matter, keep all communication outside the game itself. Do they really think that people won’t start using Discord even more than they already do just to get around this nonsense?
I’d say the original GamerGate never ended as game journos and studios still invoke it every chance they get like it’s a macro. Anyway, my summary of GamerGate:
1. Pre-GG: No doubt there was collusion between studios and journalists, but the games were so freaking good and the journalists clearly loved games, so no one cared.
2. Mass Effect 3. Instead of a promised finale that would be based on the choices made in the first two games, gamers got the red, blue, or green ending and rightfully complained. Game journalists told them to shut up and consoom product. Not GamerGate yet, but a clear manifestation of the divide between gamers and journalists.
3. Since games were getting worse and worse, gamers had to supplement their want of entertainment by pointing and laughing at the studio/journo collusion; specifically in the coverage of the non-game *Depression Quest*. Journos lost their minds and published dozens of “gamers are dead” articles within 24 of each other, thus proving the collusion.
4. Studios and journos have been on a quest for revenge ever since. They’re never going to get it because it’s the internet so, barring an intervening grace, they are eternally bound to their wrath. Today, game journalists blame everything from Trump, to Covid, to climate change on GamerGate, and studios desecrate their franchises out of spite.
5. As always, thank God for our enemies. Before GG, I was a hopeless pop-cult junkie. Witnessing their oozy contempt and malice has inspired me to be much more discerning with my entertainment dollar which led me to discover guys like John C. Wright, Brian Niemeier, et al. So thanks, morons!