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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Tesla is far from alone in flashing the “death cross.” The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 both showed it as well on Monday, as the indexes continue to fluctuate in wild and somewhat unpredictable ways thanks to the endless uncertainty that the Trump administration has introduced to the market through its blanket tariffs and “will they, won’t they” exceptions that keep getting tacked on and taken off.

    An individual stock hitting this point doesn’t really seem like that big a deal when indexes are getting there.



  • The article is out of date. According to this one, the game has been removed from sale on Steam in the UK, Canada and Australia, and the dev is going to withdraw it from Steam entirely.

    Zerat Games has announced it will withdraw its sexually explicit visual novel from Steam after it was removed from sale in the UK, Canada, and Australia.

    Posted to the game’s Steam page, which is no longer accessible to those who have not previously purchased the game, the developer defended its title but confirmed it would be removed from the platform.

    “We don’t intend to fight the whole world, and specifically, we don’t want to cause any problems for Steam and Valve,” the developer said.





  • CBC has English coverage, and the law is only described as a “trade irritant”, not anything illegal, which is surprising given the insane claims the Trump admin likes to make:

    The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its annual list of global trade barriers Tuesday, and it includes Quebec’s controversial language law Bill 96 as a trade irritant between the two countries.

    The law isn’t new but it has provisions that kick in in June that seem to be the main issue:

    The changes impact the use of French in the judicial system, health care, schools, workplaces and businesses across the provincial economy, but the issue singled out as a trade barrier by the U.S. is how it impacts trademarks and labelling.

    “U.S. businesses have expressed concerns about the impact that Bill 96 will have on their federally registered trademarks for products manufactured after June 1, 2025, which is when the relevant provisions of Bill 96 enter into force,” the National Trade Estimate Report said.

    When the new provisions kick in this summer, trademarks displayed on a product can only appear in English if there’s no French version of the trademark registered. If the trademark or label contains generic terms or descriptions that are not in French, the trademark must be changed to include a French version of those terms and descriptions.

    Companies found to have violated these changes to the law can face fines of up to $90,000 per day for their third offence, while individuals can be fined up to $42,000 a day for their third offence.





  • Apple is apparently working on getting encryption added to the standard

    In a background briefing with reporters, Apple spokespeople touted the company’s recent announcement that it will support the RCS messaging standard for iMessage sometime during 2024. In order to attend Apple’s briefing and view a background document, we had to agree to paraphrase the company’s remarks instead of quoting them directly.

    Apple clarified that it is not implementing RCS as it exists today because it doesn’t believe the standard offers enough privacy and security. Apple said it is working with a standards body—this is likely a reference to the GSMA—to ensure that the version of RCS it eventually implements will support encryption and strong privacy and security.

    Apple said that once it adopts RCS, iPhone and non-iPhone users will be able to exchange messages with higher-resolution photos and videos, and will experience improved group texting. Apple said it hasn’t brought its own message app to non-Apple devices because the user experience wouldn’t meet the company’s standards and that it cannot ensure that a third-party device’s encryption and authentication are secure enough.



  • Careful. There are quite a few terms of service that you’ve agreed to over the years that if certain aspects of them were enforced, you wouldn’t think they were very reasonable.

    Epic has an entire legal department to read over agreements like that, and yet they deliberately breached the terms. That’s hugely different from someone unknowingly breaching a TOS that they didn’t read.



  • This isn’t some random developer, it’s a developer that has already breached a contract with Apple. It’s reasonable for Apple to be wary of entering into another contract with them when the CEO is publicly complaining about the terms.

    There’s definitely a case to be made that Epic shouldn’t need an Apple developer account to make their own app store, but Apple is well within its rights to deny them an account based on their history.


  • Apple said one of the reasons they terminated our developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because we publicly criticized their proposed DMA compliance plan. Apple cited this X post from this thread written by Tim Sweeney. Apple is retaliating against Epic for speaking out against Apple’s unfair and illegal practices, just as they’ve done to other developers time and time again.

    Epic breached the terms of its agreements with Apple and Google to kick off its lawsuits against them in 2020, and now that Sweeney is openly complaining about Apple’s terms for third-party app stores Apple doesn’t trust Epic not to breach those too. Seems reasonable.