Technology

The SimCity series has achieved the universal success few games do, with a veneer of realism that draws gaming and non-gaming fans alike. But just what is SimCity's model based on? And what politics are hidden inside the black box driving the simulation?

“The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and adjunct professor at Stanford University.

But even among corporations that were sure in their preparations, there was sufficient doubt to hold off on declaring victory prematurely. The former IT director of a grocery chain recalls executives’ reticence to publicize their efforts for fear of embarrassing headlines about nationwide cash register outages. As Saffo notes, “better to be an anonymous success than a public failure.”

After the collective sigh of relief in the first few days of January 2000, however, Y2K morphed into a punch line, as relief gave way to derision — as is so often the case when warnings appear unnecessary after they are heeded. It was called a big hoax; the effort to fix it a waste of time.

Just don't buy these cursed machines. Get a nice, big, dumb, computer monitor.

If you bought a new smart TV during any of the holiday sales, there’s likely to be an uninvited guest watching along with you. The most popular smart TVs sold today use automatic content recognition (ACR), a kind of ad surveillance technology that collects data on everything you view and sends it to a proprietary database to identify what you’re watching and serve you highly targeted ads. The software is largely hidden from view, and it’s complicated to opt out. Many consumers aren’t aware of ACR, let alone that it’s active on their shiny new TVs. If that’s you, and you’d like to turn it off, we’re going to show you how.

The one-sentence description of effective altruism sounds like a universal goal rather than an obscure pseudo-philosophy. After all, most people are altruistic to some extent, and no one wants to be ineffective in their altruism. From the group’s website: “Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” Pretty benign stuff, right?

Dig a little deeper, and the rationalism and utilitarianism emerges.  […]

The problem with removing the messy, squishy, human part of decisionmaking is you can end up with an ideology like effective altruism: one that allows a person to justify almost any course of action in the supposed pursuit of maximizing their effectiveness.

Think of every enshittification as being preceded by an argument. Some people say, “We should extract this surplus: it will make our bosses happy, make our shareholders richer, and increase our bonuses.”

When the people on the other side of that argument said, “If we do what you suggest, it will be make our product worse and it will cost us more money than it will make us,” they tend to win the argument.

When all they can say is, “Yes, this will make us more money, but it will make the product worse,” they forever lose the argument.

The elimination of competition – and the ensu­ing capture of regulation – removed the discipline imposed by the fear of customers defecting as the product degraded. The harder it is for users to leave a service, the easier it is for the factions within a company to best their rivals in the debate over whether they should be allowed to make the service worse.

That’s what changed. That’s what’s different. Tech didn’t get worse because techies got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the ex­ternal world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments.

Now, if you read your contract and EULA closely, you might have noticed, as Office Watch did, that Microsoft promised Office 2019 and Office 2016 would have support for another two years. Now, they find "that they have no guarantee that they can connect to Microsoft’s own services for two years less than what they paid for."

Oh, and by the way, there will be no Extended Security Update (ESU) program. Your Office 2016 and 2019's lifespan is now up in the air.

Instead, Microsoft recommends…, well, go ahead and guess what it recommends.

Yes, that's right, Microsoft suggests you "upgrade" to Microsoft 365 E3. For a mere $36 a month, you can still have a Microsoft 365 app for your desktop. If you can live with a pure web-play take on Office, you can subscribe to Office 365 E3 for $23 a month. 

Certainly, if you’re a smaller publisher, the likelihood of receiving a demand letter is lower, but if codec licensing goes through Patel’s “inflection point,” it’s going to affect a broad swath. After Apple lost and paid Nokia $2 billion, how many companies of any size would opt to challenge Nokia in court?

What to do? Clearly, you can’t assume that what’s happened in the past will keep happening in the future. In this regard, my initial article provided bad advice.

You should keep your ear to the ground and pay attention to any patent-related lawsuits or agreements. Now might be a good time to consult with a patent attorney to identify your risk and formulate mitigation strategies.

As stated in Patel’s article:

"Whether you’re a patent owner, a product/service provider or an IP services company, the acceleration of video licensing will affect your business. The companies that best prepare for this transition are most likely to avoid significant liabilities and capture a significant share of the value that will flow into the video IP marketplace. The video epoch is entering a new phase. Are you prepared?"