People love the concept of pokemon and monster collection, and it hasn't really evolved beyond the same RPG formula in 20 years.
Nintendo has utterly failed to deliver different experiences in the franchise. There's clearly an appetite for it.
I don't think different genres mean a completely different target audience. Most gamers play multiple genres, and there's a massive overlap of fans of Pokemon and fans of Palworld in particular.
Nintendo is the publisher and co-owner of the franchise. They have outsourced development (e.g. Bandai Namco) or licensed to other developers (e.g. Niantic) in the past, and seemingly could have done so more often.
Perhaps they were so successful at getting their clients minimal punishments that they didn't see a need to meaningfully invest in proper IT security compared to the inevitable slap on the wrist.
I just tried the experiment myself and I get very similar results to what the article describes.
It's mostly sponsored (4 of the top 10 are sponsored). There is only 1 on the entire first page where I recognize the brand. It's the 2nd last on the page (Cuisinart). I see no KitchenAid or OXO.
My experience is more similar to the parent. Granted, the first row seems to be a sponsored spot with 3 listings of spatulas for a brand called "MOACC", but the KitchenAid spatula is the first in second row, which is also prominently labeled "results". A good portion of the search results are also for brands that I don't recognize, but it's not impossible to find name brands. The third row is labeled "AMAZON’S CHOICE", which contains products from KitchenAid, OXO, and Rubbermaid. The fourth row (ie. second row of results), also contains KitchenAid and OXO products.
This is done on amazon.com, from a US VPN ip, using chrome browser on desktop.
That link shows Gabe Newell's estimated net worth, but does he have have 100% ownership of Valve? The Valve Wikipedia page shows his ownership as ">50%" [0], but isn't more specific.
> Valve was valued at $7.7 billion in May 2022 based on Bloomberg calculations and discussions with Michael Pachter, a Los Angeles-based analyst at Wedbush Securities. This value has been adjusted for the performance of the Russell 1000 Electronic Entertainment Index since then.
If anything the mobile browser situation is much worse.
On one major platform, there is Chrome by default (so even bigger market share issues). People can install other browsers, but far fewer do than even on desktop. For those that do, most use the Play Store which has some conflict of interest concerns.
On the other platform it's even worse. The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest is fully realized because other browsers aren't even allowed on the App Store
Check the sales figures. The Pixel line is a very minor player, especially worldwide. The biggest vendors are Samsung, Xiami, Oppo, Vivo and Huawei. All have their own browsers. The Pixel line has 2% market share in NA and less worldwide.
Chrome dominates because it's better. People install it.
> The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest is fully realized because other browsers aren't even allowed on the App Store.
This is such a persistent myth on HN - I think I read it at least once a week - usually on one of the many alternative browsers, plenty of which are available on the AppStore.
WebKit is the building block of browsers on iOS, but there are an extremely varied selection of browsers using it.
I agree, this doesn't feel like much of an apology.
In addition to the reasons you mentioned, it also only acknowledges a single event, when the original post describes multiple incidents spanning multiple years.
Furthermore, there's no statement that suggests he intends to change his behavior in the future.
Have you considered using something other than ETag for your use case? It seems like ETag been compromised by trackers, and unfortunately this is why we can't have nice things.
We use the ETag header to make use of browser caching - not just for performance, but as a component of offline support. Yes, we could add an additional header with the same information to work around this specific extension for application-specific functionality using it, but that would leave the browser-based features broken.
While the ETag header may have been usable for cross site tracking at some point in the past [1], browser caches are isolated per-origin in Firefox, so there's no longer a cross-site tracking concern. That leaves it usable to identify you across sessions only in a first-party context, just like cookies, IP addresses (to a lesser extent), the Last-Modified header, and any number of other identification techniques ClearURLs doesn't block.
[1] I'd be interested to see any credible evidence of ETag headers being used for tracking in the wild - I've only seen theorizing that it _could_ be used as such, prior to cache isolation being implemented in Firefox and Chrome.
> ETags can be used to track unique users, as HTTP cookies are increasingly being deleted by privacy-aware users. In July 2011, Ashkan Soltani and a team of researchers at UC Berkeley reported that a number of websites, including Hulu, were using ETags for tracking purposes. Hulu and KISSmetrics have both ceased "respawning" as of 29 July 2011, as KISSmetrics and over 20 of its clients are facing a class-action lawsuit over the use of "undeletable" tracking cookies partially involving the use of ETags.
It appears that there have been at least a few cases of this in the wild.
The main distinction (at least to me) between ETag and the other tracking methods you mention is that ETag doesn't appear to be easily clearable by a user (although that sounds like something browsers should fix if they haven't already).
It's unfortunate that features like this end up getting co-opted by trackers, which leads to breaking legitimate use cases like your app in the process.
That's certainly credible evidence for past use I overlooked, though it remains unlikely to be useful with the advent of per-origin cache isolation.
The Last-Modified header can be used in exactly the same way, and isn't blocked by this extension, which harkens back to my original point: this is an extension that appears to see significant use by non-technical users, yet it breaks a browser feature by default. There are plenty of other methods of identifying a unique user that it doesn't prevent, so this seems like a pretty unexpected feature users should take note of.
It looks like the add-on has an option to "Allow referral marketing" which is off by default. If you install this add-on and feel like enabling this, it looks like you can.
That said, it still results in some level of tracking and given the add-on's purpose, having to opt in to affiliate links seems like the right choice.
People love the concept of pokemon and monster collection, and it hasn't really evolved beyond the same RPG formula in 20 years.
Nintendo has utterly failed to deliver different experiences in the franchise. There's clearly an appetite for it.
I don't think different genres mean a completely different target audience. Most gamers play multiple genres, and there's a massive overlap of fans of Pokemon and fans of Palworld in particular.