Maybe this is a hot take, but… I kinda understand not selling a product in a country where nobody in your org knows the laws or speaks the language.
3-person indie teams self-publishing can skate past, cuz they’ve got nothing to lose and can’t spend time triaging crashes due to unicode chars and weird keyboard layouts even if they wanted to. Big companies have to decide what’s worth the risk and the potential demands on their time.
I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.
One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”
They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.
I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?
I realize the personal experience I shared was a mismatch between the physical and digital depts, but that was just to explain that these mistakes can go on for a long time before they get fixed.
The mismatch I could see happening at Sony would be that their PC dept was listing titles in regions that their Playstation digital dept doesn’t.
You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.
Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.
There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.
That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!
But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.
Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.
I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.
I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.
FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.
Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.
Instantly makes ransomware [edit 2: my brain was being dumb, I didn’t mean literally ransomware, I meant hackers blackmailing companies with the threat of releasing/selling stolen data] far more profitable.
Edit: And heavily discourages self-reporting. There’s a Schneier quote I like: “You can’t defend. You can’t prevent. The only thing you can do is detect and respond.”
So imagine you go to tiktok.com and you click on a link to bestbuy.com/cool-product-i-want-to-buy. But instead of taking you directly to bestbuy.com/cool-product-i-want-to-buy, it keeps you on tiktok.com and just opens an iframe with a keylogger injected into it.
So then when you enter credit card info into the bestbuy.com UI, the tiktok.com JS can see what you typed.
(This scenario is largely impossible these days, due to modern browser security.)
The difference is that if you witnessed this kind of XFS in your desktop browser, you might notice it because the location bar still says tiktok.com, because you never actually left the site. But in a mobile in-app browser, you don’t need an iframe. You can inject JS directly into the browser itself, making it invisible to the user. As far as you can tell, you’re on regular ol’ bestbuy.com, not a modified version of it.
Absolutely. But the penalty does modify the cost-benefit analysis. If a hacker demands $5m or else they will release stolen data, you might be more inclined to YOLO the 5 mil on the 1% chance they’re an honest hacker if the penalty for the breach is $50bn.
I’m not a security expert, but my tech career has involved a lot of automated testing in weird scenarios, including iframe-based Facebook games and browser-based mobile apps. Automated tests face a lot of the same challenges that a malicious third-party would, so I know a little bit about how to get past them – or rather, how to deliberately create vulnerabilities (in the dev build of your system) so that your tests can get past them.
Edit: I am curious why someone downvoted me on that one though. I can understand how my comment about the ban being dumb but TikTok also shipping a keylogger could anger people on one side or the other. But just explaining how in-app browsers revive a security problem that’s been long-solved in standalone browsers?
Bit of a misdirect in the headline. This was not primarily a scientific projection. This was a political reckoning by scientists who had recently suffered the bureaucratic pain of serving on the IPCC, and voluntarily responded to a survey.
As one climate scientist put it:
“As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make,” Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media. “We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades.”
Change never comes from politicians first, but these are people who are zoomed in on whether politicians are changing their minds.
They’re not going to change their minds slowly over time. It’s gonna be nothing at all until the electorate is too loud to ignore, and then suddenly 100% of officials will claim they’ve “always condemned fossil fuels”, “from day one”, and “in the strongest terms possible”.
We’ve seen time and again that policy changes tend to bubble just below the surface for long time and then suddenly emerge with multiple changes happening in quick succession.
I was of voting age when just saying the word “civil union” in the context of gay rights was political suicide, and I’m not that old. Things can change quickly. Keep your hope alive and keep agitating. We can do this.
Idk, I think publicly exposing a wealthy sexual predator is a good thing, and I wish people did it more often. Especially considering that his gig affords him plenty of opportunities to invite girls backstage.
First, they sent the missionaries. They built communities, facilities for the common good, and spoke of collaboration and mutual prosperity. They got so many of us to buy into their belief system as a result.
Then, they sent the conquistadors. They took what we had built under their guidance, and claimed we “weren’t using it” and it was rightfully theirs to begin with.
If they manage to strip any concept of authenticity, ownership or obligation from the entirety of human output and stick it behind a paywall, that’s pretty much the whole ball game.
If we decide later that this is actually a really bullshit deal – that they get everything for free and then sell it back to us – then they’ll surely get some sort of grandfather clause because “Whoops, we already did it!”
My mobile client doesn’t show downvotes, so I was surprised when I saw exactly how bad the stats on this post are. Like, I saw all the comments declaring it a wasteland, but… Holy shit.
I hope we develop a new form of media literacy to deal with this kind of stuff.
Disturbing
rule (lemmy.cafe)
Steam is now refunding Ghost of Tsushima for people in affected countries. (lemmy.ca)
Dell warns of data breach, 49 million customers allegedly affected (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
Birds of a feather (lemmy.world)
77% of Top Climate Scientists Think 2.5°C of Warming Is Coming—And They're Horrified (www.commondreams.org)
“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the Global South,” one expert said.
Washington State Ban on the Unhoused (lemmy.world)
Original Article
Beef is dumb (lemmy.world)
Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT (www.tomshardware.com)
Arrest of journalist Olga Fedorova (Alex Kent, New York, May 8 2024) (kbin.earth)
2x2 lumber at Home Depot is now 1.28x1.28. Actual size is supposed to be 1.5 (kbin.run)
I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you'd think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.
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