There were some telephone engineers I used to know who worked in telephone exchanges in the electromechanical era, and they could tell when they walked in if things were not working correctly by the sound...
More like a replacement for something like CyberArk than for Citrix.
It's not so much about the remote access as it is about control and auditing.
i.e. ability to permit/deny certain commands/behaviours, and a complete audit log of the session, sometimes extending to a screen recording of an rdp session.
The lack of security is one thing, but why have they retained the information at all!
iirc, one of the elements of GDPR is "storage limitation", i.e. you must not keep personal data for longer than you need it - and in this case, the data is only needed to verify the age of the user, and shouldn't ever be required again (unless people can now get younger).
Once a document has been used to verify a person's identity and that the person is of legal age, there is no reason to retain a copy of the document any more.
It would be reasonable and fair to retain a photo of the user to verify that the person matches the account, but that's it.
With "AWP" (Amusement with Prize, as opposed to SWP: Skill with Prize, i.e. quiz machines), they're often set to payout 80-85% of money taken in. (SWP's are usually around 30%).
And at that level they're still pocketing hundreds of pounds per week per machine.
The most lucrative ones I've seen (admittedly ~20 years ago now) were being emptied by the operator twice a week and taking out £600-800 every time, per machine, with 3-4 machines per location.
An eye opening industry - I'm sure there are businesses out there that pretend to be one thing (pub, club, etc), but their primary profit source is gambling.
The blurb in game suggests the multiplayer side of things will be open, the 'premium' thing on steam gives the one closed bit, which is the single player campaign.
I once asked them if we could enable IPv6 on a 1Gb DIA circuit, and the response I got back was that "we can convert the circuit to IPv6, but you'll need to give up your IPv4."
I can't really see this ending well for the end user, however well it does/doesn't end for the stakeholders.
I thought Roku took off due to their focus on the streaming platform itself, and being agnostic to the streaming services that could be accessed via that platform. Having one specific content producer buy that platform feels like it destroys or devalues the USP of the platform, at least from the point of view of the consumer/end-user.
Or is this just another step in the relentless enshittification of all services?
I'd not seen that one, and it does look like it has some nice points - although needing its own special app is rather frustrating (vs leveraging apps that people are already using).
Seems not too disimilar from the echo show's video calling capabilities in that respect (i.e. only calls within the Amazon ecosystem).
We bought two portals for elderly relatives, predominantly for video calling, and I don't think there has been another product, then or since, that fitted that use case as well, especially with people who maybe aren't as familiar with smartphones.
So somewhat frustrating when it all started to wind down various bits of functionality disappeared a bit at a time, until finally you had something that would receive calls, but not be able to make them - and perhaps not even that any more.
(About the only downside I saw on it was the messenger vs whatsapp tussle caused a bit too much confusion).
But it was a solid bit of household tech for several years, so +1 for that!
> the time to fun is/was too high and was for a long time.
Yup - I got one for the other half as a present... like an hour and a half / two hours into setup/onboarding, they lost interest, it went back in the box and never came out again. :(
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind — from quick facts to the deep, complex or hyper-specific questions that can be hard to articulate."
Really? My aim has always been to find a place off google that has the information that I'm looking for.
If the purpose of google search is no longer aligned with what I want from the product... then maybe that tells me all I need to know.
If you want a search engine... it sounds like that's not what Google is any more.