Sony, Sony, Sony... *facepalm*

Over eight and a half years since Sony decided to play a nice game of "we have altered the deal, pray we don't alter it further" with me, I finally get to put my grudge to rest... kind of.  My settlement check came in today's mail.  They did stick with their plan of offering "up to $65" per claim, depending on the number of claims, but my prior unease about how they came up with that number looks to have been spot on, since the check I got was a whopping $10.07.

So, yeah, I've gotten some compensation, years after the fact, for the feature Sony removed, so I don't have any direct reason to keep them on my "no buy" list any longer.  That said, implying a $65 payout and delivering a $10 payout doesn't make me eager to give them my trust any time soon.

What's this, just desserts?

I put Vizio on my no-buy list back in 2015, when they were caught spying on their customers and colluding with advertisers to even more intrusively track them on other devices they owned (link).  I pretty much just forget them after that... I mean, consumers rarely see anything resembling justice these days, so why cause myself heartburn, right?

Well, I just happened to stumble across a new article today... looks like a judge is going to make Vizio post a pop-up notification on all the affected Vizio TVs, informing their owners about the spying and instructing them on how to get on board with a class-action lawsuit.  Mind you, it's not perfect, class-action lawsuits tending to be both slow and mainly a means of enriching the lawyers, from what I've seen... but it tickles me to see a misbehaving company forced to let their customers know, in a hard-to-ignore way, that they've been had.  Should be fun to see what happens with Vizio hereafter.

Today's mini-rant: web advertising

Let's make one thing clear from the start:  I absolutely despise most advertisements.  That's because they tend to be nothing more than cheap manipulation of our more primitive urges to try and get you to buy something you neither want nor need.  That said, I can understand ads having a place in supporting "free" content that would otherwise be unavailable, whether that's broadcast TV and radio, or the various websites that support themselves with ads.  However, advertisers have taken liberties with their web ads, to the point where the unscrupulous can damage the computers of the people being advertised to.  Not surprisingly, tech-savvy end users have worked out ways to interfere with ads, and in some cases have made "ad-blockers" available for the public to download and install without needing that much tech-savvy.  Advertisers have taken issue with that (with some validity, since it's their ad dollars that are paying for the content that's being delivered), and have been working with their website developers to find ways to counter those ad-blockers.  All very cat-and-mouse, much the same story that plays out in, for example, computer security.  However, I've recently run into one tactic that I disagree strongly with.

Some websites have taken it upon themselves to try and detect whether your computer is running an ad-blocker... and if it is, they'll call you out on it, and demand that you turn it off for their website before they will let you see what you've come to see.  In theory, that's entirely reasonable, and a suitable answer to the advertiser's concerns... but that's only if they're remarkably good about detecting the presence of ad-blockers.

Me, I don't use an ad-blocker... but I do use a little tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation called Privacy Badger, whose sole purpose in life is blocking misbehaving advertisers (and their tracking cookies).  They're more than welcome to shoot any ads my way, they just don't get to do so with embedded payloads of tracking nastiness to follow me from one website to the next.  Mind you, because nobody seems to want to use a "default" ad these days, I rarely see much in the way of ads at all, but, frankly, that's their problem, not mine.  At any rate, now I've got some websites (including at least one that I rather enjoyed) demanding that I turn off Privacy Badger for their site... and frankly, if you're a web developer, and you think that's a reasonable request to make, I want nothing to do with your website.  So, here's hoping this particular ad fad doesn't gain any more steam... and I hope those websites that maybe lose traffic from this change their minds, and somehow let us know.  Maybe with a nice static ad banner somewhere?

Risk Legacy - fun, but I can't recommend it

So, you know Risk, right?  World conquest, 3-on-2 combat dice action, these days it's practically Baby's First Wargame.  So, take that, spin a tale of an alternate Earth being invaded by a bunch of human factions that can't share, each with special powers to give them distinct flavors, add victory point rules to make the game end in a reasonable time frame, and you're basically there.  It's fun, it's not super deep, and, as any legacy game should, it has various piles of stuff to unlock, to add more flavor/depth to the game... but that's where it falls apart.

You see, I picked up the game well after it released (say a year or more), and in our copy... two of the unlocks were mixed up, so we got an unwanted preview of things to come.  That's not something you can fix with errata.  So, yeah, we'll keep playing for a while at least, but if the manufacturer can't get their ducks in a row a year on, I can't justify telling you to spend your money on them.

So, it's been a few months...

...and honestly, not a whole heck of a lot to report at this point.  Our injured player is still rehabbing, so we can't really gather in our usual gaming spot with the huge table... our game sessions are pretty well limited to things that will fit on a folding card table for the time being.  Between that and various scheduling conflicts that have arisen, I don't see us getting back to playing Seafall any time soon.

Turns out, however, that a folding card table is just big enough to play Risk Legacy on, so a few of us started giving that a go this past week.  It's a bit different from your regular game of Risk, even at the get-go, what with different factions with different abilities available... but it'll probably take a few games before we decide whether it's really a better game.

Seafall Hiatus

So, we finally got the still-healthy members of our group together to play last night... and decided that we just weren't feeling it.  As such, we're putting Seafall away for a while, hopefully to come back to it later this year.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but anybody looking to find out what happens when that last box is unlocked might want to look elsewhere, since who knows when we'll get back to this.

Seafall Interruptus

For anybody waiting with bated breath for the report on the next round of Seafall... well, keep on waiting, I'm afraid.  The player hosting our get-togethers had a bit of an accident shortly after our last game, putting it on hold for a few weeks, and no sooner did we try to get together again, he had another, putting him out of commission for the foreseeable future.  We were going to get started again last night with the remaining four players, but one of us was a no-show... and another player is going to be gone for our next session.  So... we'll get back to playing as soon as we can, but, well, life and all that.