Hail Satan.

Kbin
Sharkey

Using Mbin as a backup to my main Kbin account due to tech issues on Kbin.social. May either switch to this one permanently or abandon it, depending on how Kbin’s development goes. All my active fedi accounts are linked.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 4th, 2024

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  • From what I’ve seen, the SH2 remake looks really good. Honestly, it’s a fine starting point if you want to get into the series as SH1 is pretty inconsequential to the rest of the games, so you can definitely just skip it and not really miss out on much.

    I really hope that Bloober gets the greenlight to continue remaking the rest of the series. I’d love to see a modernized SH3.





  • Lol it’s like Nintendo just wants to back itself into a corner and waste away with its IP.

    This is a Switch emulator, meaning these are games that are still available for sale. It’s not like taking down a SNES emulator or something Nintendo hasn’t made available for 30+ years, it’s involving games they’re selling today. Taking down an emulator is literally Nintendo protecting its IP.

    I honestly have no desire to purchase anything from them anymore.

    If you were using this emulator, you weren’t likely purchasing anything from them in the first place. And I’m no doctor, but… I’d have to imagine that’s likely the reason Nintendo took this down to begin with.


  • Nah, not really. Technically, this is better. But only marginally so, and unless Valve does something catastrophically, egregiously abusive with the Steam platform, then the people who will actually benefit from this are few and far between. Valve wouldn’t just say “come sue us” if they weren’t wholly confident that they weren’t about to be losing any cases any time soon.

    This isn’t some huge “win” for the people; gamers aren’t gonna rise up over this. For 99.999% of Steam’s userbase, this is an entirely lateral move. Valve are the only ones who will see any tangible benefit from this.


  • Because it’s not quite the good-faith gesture people are making it out to be; it’s a cost-saving measure for Valve. From the consumer standpoint, very little actually changes, as the average user isn’t taking Valve to court in the first place. It’s not as if Valve is suddenly lowering their legal funding in conjunction with this move; they’ll still defend themselves harder than most consumers would be able to, and will win their cases in court instead of in arbitration, which is even more costly for the consumer when they lose.

    While arbitration favors companies, so do the courts. If anything, this just makes it more cost-prohibitive on the consumer side to make Valve face the law.



  • You do realize that if the bank authorizes a transfer, that you did not… it’s wire fraud and they’re obligated to refund that cash, regardless if they recoup the cash or not.

    You do realize that not every transaction happens in countries where these protections exist, right? Not everybody can rely on something like the FDIC to protect their funds.

    On the other hand, if you give your credentials to a 3rd party, that’s against the ToS none of us actually read, and if something happens to your account; they’re going to deem it as your fuck up.

    You’re not providing your bank credentials directly to the third-party, either. They use OAuth-like systems to log you in, typically. I’m not familiar with Ozow, specifically, but from what I can tell about their company, they appear to be doing mostly the same things as Plaid.


  • It’s also risky to give. Banks will generally approve all transactions between two accounts if one of them is a business account, because the assumption is that those are business transactions and are legitimate 99.99% of the time, so there’s very little scrutiny involved for those transfers. Giving the merchant your routing/account number gives them access to make withdraws from your account at will and at any time and can’t be revoked, and giving that access to somebody you may not fully trust the reputation of is a dangerous move.

    A trusted financial institution as a middleman can be useful for those situations, because they’ll tokenize your details to expose as little as possible to the merchant, directly. These services are typically insured, so even if something did happen to your account, you’re more likely to get your money back than if you gave a merchant direct ACH access to your bank account. It’s basically a modernized version of Western Union.


  • That’s unusual, but not unheard of. Some online merchants will allow you to make payments via ACH transfers. Can be useful for things like international purchases or if you don’t have a normal credit/debit card to use. Sometimes smaller merchants will prefer this, if they don’t have an existing business partnership with a payment processor already.

    Usually these will go through a third-party system that tokenizes your login with your bank. This way the merchant can only access your routing/account numbers to do the transfer. As for why you’d need to provide your bank login instead of the routing/account numbers directly, it’s usually just a form of fraud prevention, as the login verifies that you’re actually the account owner and not trying to pay with a checkbook you found on the street.

    It’s similar to Plaid, which is a near-identical service that some merchants in the US use. From what I can tell, Ozow appears to be legitimate, so realistically it’s probably safe to enter your login details as long as you’re not getting any certificate errors on the page.

    E: Not sure why this is downvoted. I’m not saying it’s a good system, just saying that it’s not inherently a scam.