To make sure they get blocked by the most amount of people.

It applies to most business.

1. You give a positive face to the market you’re in (Game Pass, Phil Spencer, pro-dev vibe, etc).
2. You buy chunks of the market (Activ-Bliz-King is a massive chunk), while saying it’s good for the industry.
3. You squeeze the company of its IP, while bleeding the market dry of money. All of which kills, or at least hurts that market.

Right now, Micro$oft is in the Extend phase.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

What she didn’t see is me whispering in her mothers ear “I run Arch, by the way”. Then giving her a quick wink.

There’s a couple of ways to block it.

1. Via an application Firewall, which will run on your PC. Safing’s Portmaster works on both Linux and Windows. Objective-See’s LuLu is a good Mac option. Both of these tools are free and open source.

2. If you know Unity’s IPs, you could block it in your firewall. I’m guessing you do not. Though, with a little work, it can be done.

3. If you can’t do either, you could at the very least block it at the DNS level. This will stop the software getting those IPs. It doesn’t really work if the IPs are already baked into the software, but that is incredibly unlikely in games. A great configurable DNS provider is NextDNS. If you have the know how to self-host a Pi-Hole or Adguard Home are great options.

There’s also ways to analyse that traffic, which I won’t go into here.

Lying about collecting that data, because they do (and I block it). Not lying, but backtracking on everything else.

Just gota get it up. Might be harder than it looks, though.

A TV will do, for a child. He doesn’t NEED anything fancy. Will it be a great experience? Absolutely not. Others here have already gone over the issues. That being said, if cash flow is an issue (relatable), it’ll be fine. Console gamers have been doing it for literal decades. I also used to do it, back when I was a kid, when we had an old 480i TV. Your kid should be grateful that he can play his games. People can spend too much time worrying about not getting the best experience (especially when giving advice to others), when it’s often not needed.

OpenSnitch is a solid option, but I don’t find it that reliable to install on Arch. Instead I’d suggest looking at Safing’s Portmaster.

RIP Volition. From Decent, Red Faction, Summoner, and Saints Row, they made some really good stuff. Even if the modern Volition is nowhere near the team it might have been, it’s sad to see a studio being closed.

Check out Heroic Game Launcher. It works with GoG, handles GoG Galaxy Cloud Save support, and works with Proton (similar to Steam). A very good client.

It’s a great option, but it’s debatable whether or not it’s privacy improving. On one hand it’s your domain. You don’t need to worry about moving email services, and as you control it, you can have as many addresses as you want. One for each service, catch all, and so on. On the other hand it’s YOUR domain. Only you have access to it. It’s quite easy to filter out the first part, before the @ sign, and identify exactly who you are. It’s a unique data point, tied to you. It’s arguably as bad as handing out a phone number.

Depending on your threat model, consider printing them out. You’ll have a physical copy of your keys, not tied to any electrical good. Even if they get stolen, they’re not usable, due to them not knowing your password.

Alternatively keep a digital pdf, or txt document with them inisdie. Save that document on a a USB drive or SD card. You could save it on your phone, but it’s best to keep your backup codes away from your normal 2FA codes.