Mainstream: Canada's Cyber Siege & GTA 6's Accessibility Quest

Coming up... AI causes havoc for Canadian cybersecurity. And will Grand Theft Auto be accessible? The bigger picture.

This is Double Tap Mainstream. Hey everybody, welcome to another Double Tap Mainstream. I'm Stephen Scott, and who are you? Oh, thank you for asking.

I'm Stephen Scott. Oh, no, I'm not. I'm Sean Preece. How are you, sir?

Has my identity been stolen? I shouldn't have given access to Claude. You've given access to everything. Everything away at this point, Stephen Scott.

Yeah, coming up, a special report from Mark Aflalalo. A very important topic, by the way. Oh, sorry. Did you know that Canada faced 17 billion cyber attacks last year alone,

making it the second most targeted country on earth for ransomware attacks. Canada. Lovely, lovely Canada. Yep.

Who's picking on Canada? They want to know where that maple syrup is. They want to know where that maple syrup lives and they are going to seek it out the best they can.

Oh, wow. That is actually, being serious, that's quite surprising. What's Canada hiding? Well, we'll find out.

Okay. We're going to get all the news from Derek Mankey from Fortinet talking to Mark Aflalo a bit later in our special conversation today.

So you can look forward to that. But I want to kick off with the news about Grand Theft Auto because we don't often talk here about Grand Theft Auto on the show because it was a game that for a long time

for many people who are blind, it was just not accessible. It was not a game that would be ever accessible to us. The question is, with Grand Theft Auto 6 around the corner,

and I say around the corner because I don't actually know the official date. It keeps changing about. This month, next month, or Christmas.

Who knows? We'll get it when we get it. Well, it's software. You'd think it would be, you know, it could at least put a date on it.

It's not like you had to buy a transit auto computer. Seriously, let me stop you right here, here, here. That's GTA 6. This is the biggest thing.

This is biggest than the latest Hollywood movie. This is going to sell billions and billions and billions. This is massive. And we're going to be left out of it, maybe.

Well, that's the question. Will we? I mean, look, we know because we've had the conversation so many times on the show about the increase in use of AI and how it's being used to make things more accessible. But I want to take you back to 2024 when we had Steve Saylor, the blind gamer, on the show.

And he told us his thoughts then about whether or not Grand Theft Auto 6 would actually be accessible or not. The game started development before accessibility kind of became a big topic of conversation within the industry. And so my prediction for Grand Theft Auto would be that they might have some accessibility in there, but probably may not be as fully accessible as a lot of disabled players may want it to. And yes, it is disappointing, of course, especially with knowing that, OK, yeah, now we're at a point in the industry where accessibility is kind of almost considered standard at this point.

not fully yet, but, you know, getting to that, getting to that point, there will be some disabled players that are, they're going to be rightfully so upset that they were hoping that this would be accessible for them.

But I think that a lot of folks would definitely would do better to be able to understand the context that this like development takes, as you said, development takes years to be able to build. I mean, the last of us is sort of like the biggest example that took several years to

be able to kind of get to that point where it is accessible. Sure. definitely made a big splash and uh but we can't expect every every game to kind of uh to come out and basically to like within even that year to be the same accessibility as the last of us because yeah it takes several years i mean even uh cyberpunk uh took like over 10 years to be able

to try to be able to get that right um and even then they're just they only just added an accessibility menu uh and that's like three years after launch and i could definitely see that in the future like basically okay they if grand theft auto launches and it doesn't have the uh the accessibility as much as we as disabled players would want because of how much rockstar invested

into grand theft auto online and that it's basically been an ongoing game for gta 5 for 10 years my guess is that they will probably have a lot more updates and keep constantly updating that so that their more accessibility can be added so yeah it may be disappointing to not be able to play it at launch for some disabled players but uh i think that if rockstar has definitely the right team

and the right sort of champions within the the this those studios to be able to make it to uh to champion accessibility i think we'll definitely see a lot more uh updates post-launch um to be able to add more accessibility into the game steve sailor talking to us back in 2024 you know we don't have the time to dig into this today but i think it's an interesting conversation and i wonder what

our audience think about this are you excited about this game coming do you think the ai might play a part in making this game more accessible as steve says i mean even back in 2024 he's thinking about the mods and those kind of things i think that's where it's going to be uh yeah it's just disappointing that accessibility in such a massive game as this is still we're still worrying about it

shouldn't be the case but obviously it is we will find out but yeah very interesting to hear what our listeners think about this. Yeah, absolutely. You know, this game is coming out. It's going to be a big deal. Everyone's talking about it. Everyone's excited about it. Will it be accessible? And if not, is that good enough? Well, we'll get into it. And of course, we welcome your feedback.

Imagine your front door getting knocked on 17 billion times in a single year. That's essentially what happened to Canadians online in 2025. And the people doing the knocking are getting smarter,