TGIF? Hello again from freezing Düsseldorf! Your workweek is probably about to end, which I kind of envy you for. It looks like I’ll be working through the weekend once more. But hey, I made that choice for myself, so I should stop whinging about it. Let’s instead look at what news stories are interesting to me right now.
They All Came Crawling Back
Tyler Wilde has written an interesting opinion piece in PC Gamer on PC video game stores. He observes correctly how the trend of every big publisher creating their own store to cut out the middleman has failed and how a lot of these games are coming back to the original PC game store: Valve’s Steam.
Eight years later, in 2020, EA finally released Mass Effect 3 on Steam. Perhaps overcompensating, it then released Mass Effect 3 on Steam again in 2021 as part of the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. If any doubt remained that the publisher's Steam vacation was over, it killed Origin this year. Granted, Origin was immediately replaced by the EA app, which is the same thing, but the point stands. EA came crawlin' back to Steam, and it wasn't the only big publisher to do it
Steam has recently welcomed notable newcomers, too. For a while, we wondered if Epic's relationship with Sony would mean that former PlayStation exclusives would favor the Epic Games Store as they trickled onto PC. Epic apparently made an offer, but Sony didn't pick a side: God of War and other PlayStation-published games are on both Steam and EGS.
Perhaps things would actually have turned out worse had EA, Microsoft, and others not annoyed us by pushing their own stores and launchers for as long as they did. A decade and change ago, it seemed like Steam was on its way to becoming synonymous with PC gaming, with only a few companies, like Blizzard, able to succeed outside of Valve's ecosystem. As influential as Valve is today, it did not ultimately become PC gaming's "Xerox," which I think most will agree is for the best. The reaction to Microsoft's hoovering up of important studios suggests that PC gamers don't like seeing too much power consolidated within the Seattle Metropolitan Area.
It feels premature to say that the era of the Steam rival is over, but I do think PC gaming has quietly (and sometimes loudly) endorsed a Steam monopoly. For all of the virtue that PC gamers and this publication proclaim about the platform's openness and freedom of choice, I think it's also understandable that so many of us value the predictability, convenience, and centralization that comes with Steam's dominance.
Why Crypto Currencies Are Largely Useless
Speaking of cutting out the middleman: That is one of the biggest promises of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. On his Substack Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias has recently posted a well-written analysis of why this isn’t actually as useful as many people seem to think.
We see very clear movement over time away from stuff like bearer bonds and paper stock certificates in favor of “Ameritrade says I own such-and-such.” This is because making it harder for your stuff to be lost or stolen is very valuable. Alex Tabarrok, a very smart economist who I often agree with, was explaining recently that crypto is useful because it lets him make very rapid financial transactions at weird hours of the night. Adam Ozimek replied that with normal banks, you get the much more valuable commodity of peace of mind.
Crypto’s basic model starts from the idea that electronic transactions are convenient relative to paying for everything with little pieces of precious metals, that the current reliance on trusted intermediaries is a necessary evil, and that developing a means to conduct electronic transactions without a trusted intermediary is a big win. But this just isn’t true. For the bulk of the world’s economic activity, the trusted intermediary system is a much better way to do things. Not just for technical reasons related to blockchain energy consumption, but because alternative approaches leave you dangerously vulnerable to criminals. This means in turn that the primary bona fide use of an alternate system is for committing crimes.
Crypto can be used to work around laws or bank system failures, but only if the tokens maintain some value. But what use case props that value up? Just working around laws and bank system failures? That’s not nothing. But it’s also not a lot, since almost by definition, all the demand for this is going to be in relatively poor and dysfunctional countries. Venezuelans are using crypto as a safe harbor because their economy is collapsing. People in Vietnam use a lot of crypto and Vietnam is getting richer, but I don’t think Vietnam is going to get rich with a crypto-powered financial system. Either they’re going to get their banking act together and prosper, or they’re going to hit limits to the economic potential of a country that lacks proper banking.
There’s also the “digital gold” scenario where some people think that stockpiling some crypto assets is a good way to hedge against tyranny or future state collapse. I don’t think this really makes very much sense, but holding physical gold as a hedge against state collapse doesn’t make much sense either, and some people have been doing it for generations. Crypto is much more up-to-date and easier to store than gold, so I’m actually pretty bullish on Bitcoin partially displacing gold as a paranoiac’s hedge over time. This makes it a potentially lucrative long-term investment (the “market cap” of gold is high), but still nothing like a transformative technology.
I’m not very good with financial matters and I’m probably the last person you should listen to when it comes to an analysis of the economy or parts thereof. But I do think this analysis makes a lot of sense.
Ukraine War, Huge Fish Tank Explosion in Berlin
Journalists seem to be waking up to the fact that Putin is in the war in Ukraine for the long haul. D’oh! Or as the ISW puts it, stating the obvious:
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objectives in Ukraine have not changed according to Ukrainian officials’ and ISW’s assessments based on Kremlin statements and actions. Putin continues to pursue maximalist goals in Ukraine using multiple mechanisms intended to compel Ukrainians to negotiate on Russia’s terms and likely make preemptive concessions highly favorable to Russia. This fundamental objective has underpinned the Kremlin’s various military, political, economic, and diplomatic efforts over the past 10 months in Ukraine.
German public broadcasting, referencing some propaganda from the MOD in the UK, called this an “outdated mode of static warfare”. Apparently, the Russians are building “traditional trenches, unchanged from World War II” and this is “weak to modern ways of attacking with precise, indirect strikes”. Well, we will see, won’t we? I seem to remember both sides employing trenches pretty effectively in the Donbass from 2014 onwards. And since the Ukrainian military doesn’t boast massive tank armies, trenches do seem like a good idea on the face of it. In any case, it looks like we are in for big winter offensives from both sides, according to the ISW:
The winter 2023 timeframe suggested by Ukrainian officials for such a potential offensive is consistent with ISW’s long-standing assessment that the winter will facilitate Ukrainian and Russian offensive operations and is consistent with the current projected timeline for the completion of Russian force generation efforts.
And while we are talking about bad things… Something bad has happened in Berlin. Not on the scale of all-out war, granted, but there has been a surprising level of devastation. A huge fish tank, located in the middle of a hotel courtyard downtown, has exploded and nobody knows why.
The fish tank was being maintained by the Sea Life company. When it exploded at around 6 am this morning, it flooded parts of the surrounding streets and blew pieces off the hotel’s façade. 1,500 fish are dead. There were 400 people in the courtyard when the thing went to pieces, luckily only two people were injured.
Behind the Scenes of The Twitter Files
Bari Weiss, one of the journalists involved in the disclosure of the Twitter Files, has posted an interesting behind-the-scenes look at her reporting:
The most interesting part of it is some insight into Musk’s motivation:
As far as Musk sees things, “birth rates are plummeting, the thought police are gaining power, and even having an opinion is enough to be shunned. We are trending in a bad direction.”
He says he wants to transform Twitter from a social media platform distrusted and despised by at least half the country into one widely trusted by most Americans. To have it fulfill its highest mission: that of a digital town square where all ideas can be heard, and the best will win out.
“If there is one information source that breaks ranks, then I think it ultimately forces others not to have the same narrative,” he said. “If even one organization competes hard for the truth, others will have to follow.”
He says Twitter wasn’t so much a company as it was an activism non-profit. Which is why he fired so many of the staff.
When Musk took over, he said, he found Twitter in disarray. Employees had unlimited vacation time and permanent work from home. The company had stopped doing performance reviews altogether, according to a long-time Twitter employee. “As long as Twitter could just keep its head above water and be roughly cash-flow break-even, then that’s all that they cared about,” Musk said.
Musk calls the Twitter he purchased a “non-profit.” Twitter, as it existed, wasn’t pursuing net earnings but “social influence,” he said. “This was fundamentally an activist organization.”
It’s fascinating stuff. And I think Weiss has an excellent take on it.
If I took anything away from my week at Twitter, it’s about power. It’s about how a handful of unelected people at a handful of private companies can influence public discourse profoundly. They can do it because of how good the tools they made are—and how little the public understands them. They can influence the outcome of elections. And they do.
Because all of those people tend to move and think as one, there is something refreshing about Musk barging into the Twitter Tower on Market Street and turning over the tables. But I’m not sure anyone should have that kind of power.
One additional note: For the past few days, conservative media—and social media—has thought this was the biggest story in the world. The legacy press—and those Americans who rely on it—barely seems to know it exists.
We are living in a culture that’s been suffering from a lack of open, transparent, informed, public debate. For people to have the courage to speak their minds, they have to know, at least, what’s happening.
Twitter’s former leadership curtailed public debate; drew arbitrary lines about what’s fake and what’s real; and gaslit ordinary Americans. Musk says he won’t do that. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for the inevitable third owner to open up another set of archives.
Malicious Windows Drivers, Rebelle 6 Released
Once again we’ve had valid Windows drivers, signed by Microsoft, that were used to execute malware on people’s computers.
Microsoft says it has suspended several third-party developer accounts that submitted malicious Windows drivers for the IT giant to digitally sign so that the code could be used in cyberattacks.
In tandem with its Patch Tuesday rollout this week, the tech goliath also revoked certificates used to sign the bad drivers, and promised to put in place measures to prevent organizations from loading the malicious code.
These moves come after eggheads at Google-owned Mandiant, SentinelOne, and Sophos told Microsoft in October that multiple cybercrime gangs were using malicious third-party-developed Microsoft-signed kernel-mode hardware drivers to help spread ransomware.
Essentially, these crews created developer accounts with Microsoft to submit malicious drivers to the software goliath's Windows Hardware Developer Program. Once Microsoft was hoodwinked into digitally signing the drivers, signalling the code was legit, the software would be trusted by the operating system.
At that point, once the miscreants had compromised a victim's Windows PC and gained admin access, they could load the drivers and use them to do privileged things, such as disable antivirus and security tools, and fully compromise the device and possibly the whole network.
This is nothing new, of course. But it’s always scary when it happens, because this particular way of attacking people’s Windows systems is pretty powerful.
In much better news, Escape Motions has released Rebelle 6. Rebelle is my digital painting program of choice, I’ve been using it since Rebelle 4. This software is pretty unique as it physically models the interaction of watercolour, oil and acrylic paints on a canvas. The results are pretty amazing.
I’ve just recently bought Rebelle 5 and the new features in version 6 aren’t essential to me, so I currently have no plans to upgrade. But if you like to draw and own a drawing tablet for your computer, you should at least try out Rebelle once. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with this software.
On My Desk Today
I’m mostly preparing things for future projects today. But I’m also hoping to get the time to write a blog post on Valheim later, which I’ve been enjoying again recently. Speaking of the blog, this isn’t news but I found out about it recently and I thought it was very fascinating: Did you know that there’s a cursed colour in the Kodak ProPhoto RGB colour space? If you hadn’t heard of that, check this out.
Alright. I hope you’ll have a good weekend! As Christmas and the New Year approaches, this newsletter will probably slow down significantly, but I’m sure I’ll find the time for some issues next week. Thanks for reading and see you soon!