Just a regular Joe.
It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.
They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.
Do you get billed every 4 months, or why frame it that way? Or is this a weird danish thing, like your numbers? :-)
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hacker
“The media’s definition of the real term malicious cracker. A hacker used to be a well respected individual who loved to tinker with gadgets.”, plus a few other definitions.
It’s time for Steam to launch their own payment processing company, and apply pressure directly on the card networks and the future competition.
It won’t be nearly as profitable as their current business model, but sometimes industries need a shakeup.
Judges usually don’t know this stuff, but they primarily work with systems and software supplied by the state…whose experts should know what they are doing.
My bet is that this guy decided to work on personal equipment, probably in violation of the rules. Being a judge, he’s unlikely to be sanctioned for it, and will certainly learn from the experience. If anything, there may be some internal discussions which we’ll never hear about.
Law is an area where AI can add value, though… searching through past rulings and legal opinions is tedious, and anything that can assist to find needles in haystacks would be welcome. It shouldn’t be used to write legal judgements or arguments though…
They have a fetishist concept that anyone with a business empire is someone to be admired. They probably think they have a chance, the fools.
DMOZ forever!
Is this the right room for an argument?
It sounds like one should be building deliberate AI workflows with extra checks (automated or human in the loop) that make careful and cost efficient incremental progress toward a measurable goal.
Sounds like hard work… when we could just build 1,000,000 MCP servers instead. (raises pinkie to corner of mouth)
There are so many time-saving things that can be done with a little bit of scripting. It’s one reason why excel is so abused. Now that the bar to real scripting is dropping significantly, and we’ll see more and more people solving their own small problems rather than relying on others or suffering through repetitive work. Good stuff.
It doesn’t mean that they are ready to design, build and maintain reliable software or services…
We’ll see more APIs and libraries being used directly by end users, though.
AI agents are a counter-force to this, letting LLMs interact directly with APIs, meaning users don’t have to even touch code.
It sounds like a wilful lack of investigation & enforcement, in that case. The US gets what it votes for, I guess.
Some countries do it simply: You can hire from abroad if (a) you can demonstrate problems hiring in the local market for that position, and (b) the position is at/above market rates.
There’s still room to game the system, but it’s no longer a ridiculously low bar. And there is scope for investigations and legal action, which most companies try to avoid.
(Don’t get me started on social insurances… the US super majority seems irrecoverably brainwashed, and would probably cheer on non-contributions by gainfully employed foreigners)
Just wait until they release the list … it’ll have a few holes.
Unfortunately, it’s very hard to trust any such list. If he had any sense, he would have also added a few extra names over the years of people who he just didn’t like, or those he wanted to manipulate. Scumbags be scumbaggy, whether rich or poor.
That said, all implications and accusations should be thoroughly investigated, and if corroborated by victims and/or witnesses, and then be brought to public trial or just made public if the reasonably accused is dead.
I don’t think you need separate laptops, but a separate router may be useful.
If you use Linux, you can have apps isolated to their own lightweight network namespaces (like containers), using different VPNs. Otherwise VMs can serve a similar purpose on Windows and Macs.
Iptables can also be used to block traffic, and force it through proxies (which can be whitelisted by uid/gid) or VPNs.
If you want a more secure VPN setup, I’d even recommend having the VPN(s) running on the router (eg. portable OpenWRT setup) so your laptop never gets offered a public IP / connects directly to network. Put a proxy on it for special (eg. DNS based) routing exceptions, like banking from real IP, reddit via the US, etc.
Disable IPv6 on your router or primary interface, and enable it on your VPN. If anything can discover an Internet IP on your PC, the link can be formed. Worst case, you are not using the VPN for IPv6 at all.
Hmm. You are right, but they might not need it for every region. Steam is probably big enough that existing regional companies would come to it and be eager to form partnerships. They could become more of a payment processor aggregator, focused on a low risk market segment. And of course they can do CCs directly too - that’s the easy part.
The challenge will be to get consumers on board. I know that I groan every time I need to enter my CC details online these days.
They would face anti-competitive behaviour from Peepal though. So it’s a risk.
Internally, they are probably already working on ways to appropriately segment their catalog based on payment provider. “Sorry User, you cannot purchase title X using Paypal. We recommend $Competitor instead.”