I really can't agree, there are so many great VNs out there and DDLC only really stands out in that it plays heavily to the English-speaking world's preconceived notions of VNs as "nothing more than simple dating simulators"
Agreed, I've been through something like this before and it was not legit. They'd compromised a Bangladeshi police email account and used it to try to get data out of us.
That's right, there's no guarantee the data hasn't been tampered with after encryption. The mechanics of the tampering you could do depend on the cipher mode you use.
To give a simplified example (which doesn't match what this program does but is useful to demonstrate), ECB is the simplest mode (which really shouldn't be used for anything). Your input is split into fixed-length blocks (16 bytes for AES) and each block is encrypted separately, producing a deterministic ciphertext for each block. (e.g. a block of all "A" will always encrypt to the same thing).
So if an attacker is able to figure out what plaintext a block of encrypted data corresponds to, they could use that knowledge to build a "fake" encrypted message. They could also remove blocks from a message, or shuffle them around.
If you're interested in playing around more practically with this kind of thing, I highly recommend the https://cryptopals.com/ challenge sets.
Steam on Linux already uses LD_PRELOAD under-the-hood to load the overlay. Valve signs the overlay SO files, so they could be making an exception for Valve-signed-preloads in VAC, but it's also possible that VAC does something else to check for suspicious libraries loaded in.
This could work for domestic requests, but the one example of this I've seen in the wild (and this was mentioned in the original post) involved a request (supposedly) coming from police internationally. Though, requests from foreign police are more likely to be handled with scrutiny, so maybe forcing more manual verification (and identification of the proper process in the first place) aren't bad things.
That's a matter of repository policy, but yes, Flathub (by far the largest and most popular repository) allows for this. I believe that they generally put a disclaimer that it's not an official package in the description, and allow the upstream developer to claim the application ID for themselves if they wish to maintain it.
I've heard that it works fairly well on Proton already. In fact, perhaps even better than it does on Windows in some regards as a result of Valve having implemented some mitigations for things the engine does incorrectly in Proton. (Thanks to a desire to have the game work properly on the Steam Deck)
I haven't tried yet, though, as I'm playing my way through the Dark Souls series proper before giving Elden Ring a try.
It's _very_ good at "learn by example" with some twists. It _does_ make mistakes, and I do double check it, but it still definitely saves time. I used it to write the bulk of a new implementation of a new audio backend for a game engine yesterday - it filled out a lot of the "boilerplate" integration work (e.g. generating all the functions like "set volume/pan/3D audio position" that map over 1:1 to functions in the other library).
I will say, though, that it's also good at making up code that looks very believably real but doesn't actually work.
The ethics involved in Copilot are a bit strange, and I'm not sure I'll keep using it for those reasons, but it does a good job.
I've been using Wasabi for a project where cost is more important than anything (i.e. a side project with reasonable scale that can't accept income) and on that front it is great. (S3 costs have been atrociously high to us sometimes.) For CDN-type resources we do a Wasabi bucket with Cloudflare with caching set very high. Reliability has been the only problem; it's not awful by any means, but there are a lot more "hiccups" using it. You get what you pay for, I guess.
That said I'm looking to see if just using R2 is a big improvement. It'll cost more but the reliability and performance might be worth it for us.
You're joking, but I've read that Valve Software does/did something similar, every desk in their office is on wheels so you can move your desk to join up with whatever project you want.
Maybe unsurprisingly, I've also read stories of "clique"-ish behavior there over the years (though I can't confirm how true they are.)
I don't think it's currently possible for any cloud service to make this obsolete, at least in the ways that I'd want to use a portable gaming device. Which is to say, mostly in transit, which tends to have spotty (at best) internet accessibility. (In the air on an airplane, between stops on the subway, ...)