Dark Arc

FYI as someone that’s colorblind these captcha’s don’t seem to have anything specially relevant to being colorblind in them.

Now if they start showing me a dozen traffic cones and asking me to pick the green one, we might have a problem.

Indeed

For me it’s a mix of what you said and how they treat their employees/where they’re making the product.

I spend extra time trying to find higher priced, higher quality, more fairly manufactured products.

ClamAV is mostly for filtering things on mail servers or uploads to a shared resource like a wiki.

You can also use it as a system virus scanner, but most viruses it detects are Windows viruses.

What companies use Kaspersky?

Isn’t this mostly a consumer level issue?

I’d settle for first party repair and a repair window of up to 20 years.

Modification is great and should always be legal… But I’d take the win to get away from so much throwaway technology.

Not as complicated, but the parts are bigger. Few would want an even bigger smart watch just to get repairability.

The bigger issue is monetization. YouTube is popular in no small part because creators are trying to make money.

Calling RCS an industry standard is a bit… Questionable. Still, I’m happy to see Apple finally implementing it so there’s a good cross vendor texting implementation.

I wonder how this scales to large voice rooms.

I was going to defend “well ray tracing is definitely a time saver for game developers because they don’t have to manually fake lighting anymore.” Then I remembered ray tracing really isn’t AI at all… So yeah, maybe for artists that don’t need to use as detailed of textures because the AI models can “figure out” what it presumably should look like with more detail.

I’ve been using FSR as a user on Hunt Showdown and I’ve been very impressed with that as a 2k -> 4k upscale… It really helps me get the most out of my monitors and it’s approximately as convincing as the native 4k render (lower resolutions it’s not nearly as convincing for … but that’s kind of how these things go). I see the AI upscalers as a good way to fill in “fine detail” in a convincing enough way and do a bit better than traditional anti aliasing.

I really don’t see this as being a developer time saver though, unless you just permit yourself to write less performant code … and then you’re just going to get complaints in the gaming space. Writing the “electron” of gaming just doesn’t fly like it does with desktop apps.

Plex is moving in the app direction… So Plex is probably moving away from what you want despite being one of the easiest options.

It would probably be helpful to know what you’re trying to accomplish beyond “what”. Like, why do you want to host your music and play it via a web browser.

IIRC telegram does as well

So, the web uses a system called chain of trust. There are public keys stored in your system or browser that are used to validate the public keys given to you by various web sites.

Both letsencrypt and traditional SSL providers work because they have keys on your system in the appropriate place so as to deem them trustworthy.

All that to say, you’re always trusting a certificate authority on some level unless you’re doing self signed certificates… And then nobody trusts you.

The main advantage to a paid cert authority is a bit more flexibility and a fancier certificate for your website that also perhaps includes the business name.

Realistically… There’s not much of a benefit for the average website or even small business.

So the local machine doesn’t really need the firewall; it definitely doesn’t hurt, but your router should be covering this via port forwarding (ipv4) or just straight up firewall rules (ipv6).

You can basically go two routes to reasonable harden the system IMO. You can either just set up a user without administrative privileges and use something like a systemd system level service to start the server as that user and provide control over it from other users … OR … if you’re really paranoid, use a virtual machine and forward the port from the host machine into the VM.

A lot of what you’re doing is … fine stuff to do, but it’s not really going to help much (e.g. building system packages with hardening flags is good, but it only helps if those packages are actually part of the attack surface or rather what’s exposed to the remote users in someway).

Your biggest risk is going to be plugins that aren’t vetted doing bad things (and really only the VM or using the dedicated user account provides an insulation layer there – the VM really only adds protection against privilege escalation which is pretty hard to pull off on a patched system).

My advice for most people:

• Make a new user on the system to run each game you want to run
• Run the game using systemd and that user
• Use something like kopia + the root user’s crontab (easier than systemd timers, but systemd timers also work) to backup the files on disk

For Minecraft in particular, to properly back things up on a busy server you need to disable auto save, manually force save, do the backup and then enable auto save again after your backup. Kopia can issue commands to talk to the server to do that, but you need a plugin that can react to those commands running on the server (or possibly to use the server console via stdin). Realistically though, that’s overkill and you’ll be just fine backing up the files exactly as they are periodically.

Kopia in particular will do well here because of its deduplication of baked up data + chunking algorithm that breaks up files. That has saved me a crazy amount of storage vs other solutions I’ve tried. Kopia level compression isn’t needed because the Minecraft region files themselves are already highly compressed.

So most dorms don’t want you using your own routers because a bunch of student routers causes A LOT of inference.

You should probably reach out not to the dorm folks but the university networking folks as they’re the ones that will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to turn things off/disconnect you.

A cheap networking switch would probably be okay by them to get some more wired connections in your dorm room (routers aren’t really a great way to do that).

https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Business-LGS105-Unmanaged-Enclosure/dp/B00FV12VSW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_sspa?crid=3PUXDK6TFLZIT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zm2b2eGNCSReGFJuUskv6-s3cUVDK12lfqOmf729Jjx1nw8mI07xRjx4RZCcnWDhplIUW-7IOfSn6R7TMu0yVy_k9hGXtOs0SNS7RO8sN4RI5aa_8-iwSOXz6biaUH5pE27eM8eYyBzJl9tkYxX4erfrbMwkWwhSrqIKQGOSqx1DQ1z5ZiDGCyQ_u0k8IhaN1Ra-Zpsr07cg-ZjJnDz6lA.iHHYMOhPc6OW0LmOOPkf8taxFxWnD5Sbwy_NxZwTQbU&dib_tag=se&keywords=network+switch&qid=1725717407&sprefix=network+%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1

As a secondary concern, using a router will cause a double NAT for all your connected devices (universities don’t operate in the way ISPs do). That could cause some weird networking shenanigans, particularly for anything peer-to-peer like online games.

A fact I struggle with on an almost daily basis…

A co-op infamous game for PC I would drop full price on, no questions.

Full disclosure: I never played the sequels (I play co-op almost exclusively now), but I absolutely loved the original game. It would be great to be able to go back to that dystopian world and rediscover my powers (or maybe other variants of them that appeared from disasters) in say … London, DC, or LA (instead of NYC) with a friend.

True, though presumably users in those places would be stuck with the “less trustworthy” instances (and ideally, would be able to get their local laws changed to make themselves more trust worthy).

It’s definitely not perfectly moral… but little in the world is and maybe it’s sufficient pragmatic.

Yeah, BlueSky has this concept of user moderation lists. It’s effectively like subscribing to a adblock filter. There might be some things blocked by patterns (e.g., you could have one that blocks anything that involves spiders) and there might be others that block specific accounts (e.g., you could have one that blocks users that are known to cause problems, are prone to vulgar language, etc).

I think the problem with credibility scores in general though, is it’s sort of like a “social score” from black mirror. Real people can get caught in the net of “you look like a bot” and similarly different algorithms could be designed to game the system by gaming the metrics to look like they’re not a bot (possibly even more so than some of the real people).

This is kind of what lead me down the route of bringing things back into the physical world. Like, once you have things going back through the normal systems … you arguably do lose some level of anonymity but you also gain back some guarantees of humanity.

It doesn’t need to be the level of “you’ve got a government ID and you’re verified to be exactly you with no other accounts” … just “hey, some number of people in the real world, that are subject to the respective nation’s laws, had to have come into contact with a real piece of mail.”

Maybe that just turns into the world’s slowest UDP network in existence. However, I think it has a real chance of making it easier to detect real people (i.e., folks that have a small number of overlapping addresses). The virtual mailbox the other person gave has 3,000 addresses… if you assume 5 people per mailing address is normal that’s 15,000 bots total before things start getting fishy if you’ve evenly distributed all of those addresses. If you’ve got 3,000 accounts at the same address, that’s very fishy. Addresses also change a lot less frequently than IP addresses, so a physical address ban is a much more strict deterrent.