Was the communication encrypted?

Less than a year ago. I've been using it a little here and there for almost two decades - DirectX is accessed and operated through COM API - but I never bothered to actually learn it in depth, until I had to jump straight into debugging obscure errors in an application that used a DCOM-based service.

> Because back in the day I didn't know even one developer who wouldn't curse when working with DCOM/Corba implementations because of convoluted complexity, bugs, and problems with debugging.

Yeah, I got that impression about COM through osmosis over the years. But come to think of it, isn't the exact same thing happening with the current trend of microservices, and super-convoluted stacks of Docker containers and Kubernetes? So perhaps the problem ultimately wasn't with COM per se :).