i_am_not_a_robot
@i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on The oldest Minecraft server, MinecraftOnline, is being shut down by Microsoft 1 week ago:
What Microsoft is doing with Minecraft should be illegal. After they purchased Minecraft from Mojang, they started changing the rules so instead of being a game you have purchased and you play with your friends how you want to play it, it’s a game that you have a temporary license to use in a way that Microsoft thinks is appropriate for small children, even if you are hosting your own private server like these people are doing. Microsoft doesn’t like the way that these people are playing the game and talking outside the game, so they are taking the game away. You may not like these people because they sound like the kind of people that use “free speech” as an excuse for hate speech, but would it be the same if Microsoft were taking away the game from servers that allowed people to specify their pronouns or use different color combinations associated with LGBTQ representation, which they may soon be pressured to do by the government of the country they are headquartered in?
- Comment on Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck? 1 week ago:
It is impossible. CPV is only going to allow the attacker to know that the device is probably not located next to the VPN server. It can only prove a positive, not a negative.
The second method you’re describing is only possible for people who control internet infrastructure and are able to infer correlations data going into your VPN server with data going out of your VPN server, which is both easier and more difficult than you’re suggesting. The attacker does not need to most of the internet routers because they only care about the data going into and out of the VPN server (it’s onion routing where the attacker needs to control many routers), but the attacker does need to have a powerful enough device to be inferring (hopefully) encrypted network flows on the public network to the packet sizes of encrypted VPN traffic for all of the traffic that is passing through that VPN server at the same time.
- Comment on Youtube can detect VPNs now... the fuck? 1 week ago:
The latency to your VPN server is a constant added to the latency between your VPN server and whatever servers you are connected to. As long as the user’s VPN service doesn’t use different VPN servers for different destinations, it is impossible to determine the location of the user behind the VPN based on latency, and in general it is impossible to determine how far a user is from their VPN server because of varying latency introduced by the user’s own network or by bad infrastructure at the local ISP level. You can only know how far they aren’t based on the speed of light across the surface of the earth.
But, without a VPN, this is a real attack that was proven by a high school student using some quirks of Discord CDNs. Even without using Discord’s CDNs, if somebody wanted to locate web visitors using this technique, they could just rent CDN resources like nearly every big company is doing. Of course, if you have the opportunity to pull this off, you normally have the user’s IP address and don’t care about inferring the location by latency. The reason why it was notable with Discord was because the attacker was not able to obtain the victim’s IP address.
- Comment on Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin 3 weeks ago:
It’s the natural progression of subreddit simulator. Somebody heard about dead internet theory and had to make it a reality.
- Comment on As Microsoft bids farewell to Windows 10, millions of users won’t 3 weeks ago:
Unfortunately, if you use either of these methods to install Windows 11, you will wind up with Windows 11. You will eventually regret it.
- Comment on itsfoss promotes hyprland on instagram!? 3 weeks ago:
It’s so user friendly. It tells you exactly what to do to solve the problem. Switch to a tty (if that even works on your system) and log in, type this long command from memory, making sure not to mistake those 0s for Os or the Unicode left single quote for back tick, restart your lockscreen, which of course you know how to do, and then come back. If that doesn’t work, start terminating some processes and praying.
It says you can return using “ctrl+alt+F[N] where N is the tty number in the top left corner.” I can’t find my F0 key.
- Comment on Framework under fire for Omarchy/DHH/Hyprland support? 3 weeks ago:
It’s not even good. It’s just scripts for some starter Arch rice, not a serious distro.
- Comment on Can anyone ELI5 the severity of this? Emerging Unity game vulnerability 5 weeks ago:
Some Unity games may be launched with a parameter that causes them to execute arbitrary code. It seems like it only makes sense on Android. Windows and Linux games can normally only be launched by a process with the same or greater privileges than the process being created, but on Android you can elevate privileges by invoking another app. In practical terms, another app can access the save data of your mobile games.
There was also something about games that register to be launchable directly from a webpage, which would allow web sites to escape the browser sandbox, but it didn’t sound likely.
- Comment on They thought they were making technological breakthroughs. It was an AI-sparked delusion. 1 month ago:
Nearly $1,000? ChatGPT can’t even give correct instructions for building a computer capable of hosting itself.
- Comment on Nissan announces 2026 Leaf pricing, starting at $29,990 2 months ago:
If you can keep it disconnected from the internet you can keep the company from pushing out a downgrade to introduce new subscriptions. I’m already doing it with my TV. If it doesn’t have subscriptions and it can be disconnected from the internet so it can’t sell my data or introduce new subscriptions, I might buy one.
- Comment on Nissan announces 2026 Leaf pricing, starting at $29,990 2 months ago:
Is it really 29,990 or is it 29,990 and monthly subscriptions and your data?
- Comment on From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control the Whole State’s Access to The Internet 2 months ago:
I think it would be harmful to my children to know that people like this exist and are hurting everyone, including children, supposedly on the behalf of those children. I would like to require age verification to interact with these politicians. They can only use services that support age verification and cannot interact with anyone who hasn’t verified.
- Comment on From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control the Whole State’s Access to The Internet 2 months ago:
What if I want myself or my children to have access to this content? Where is my control?
- Comment on Apple’s lock on iPhone browser engines gets a December deadline 2 months ago:
Will they? It’s possible to do on Android but I’ve never heard of anyone doing it. Cordova on Android uses the Android web view component rather than ship its own copy of Chromium. Of course Android web view is now Chrome so it’s less likely that you would have difficult compatibility problems that would make you want to ship your own browser engine.
- Comment on Apple’s lock on iPhone browser engines gets a December deadline 2 months ago:
React Native and React are different. React Native does not use a web browser.
- Comment on Microsoft extends updates for old Exchange and Skype servers 3 months ago:
Not Skype: Skype for Business, which is a different product from Skype.
Microsoft would go on to make this mistake again, naming both Teams and Teams the same thing before ultimately combining them into Teams last year.
- Comment on YouTube Forces Dubs Now 3 months ago:
It also returns these auto dubbed videos in search results, making it increasingly difficult to find intelligible videos about foreign topics. You’ll get a native describing the problem to other natives with a common understanding, auto transcribed, auto translated, and auto dubbed.
Here’s a hilariously bad example. This video has an AI English dub. youtu.be/DNceEVQulwY?t=908 (warning: up close whispering) Have you ever noticed YouTube’s automatic translation system sometimes buffers up a lot of text and dumps a whole paragraph on screen at once?
- Comment on Apple hits back against 'unprecedented' €500m EU fine 3 months ago:
Commit an unprecedented crime, pay an unprecedented fine.
- Comment on Google's Hotseat Hypocrisy - Open Web Advocacy 4 months ago:
Isn’t this a complicated problem? Android has no “hotseat.” Each launcher has it’s own layout and each phone manufacturer has it’s own default launcher. The complaint makes it sound like Google just chooses not to do it.
- Comment on Only 1 in 3 Euro consumers are trading in their old phones 4 months ago:
Until a few years ago, it was common for Android devices to stop receiving features after about 1 year and then stop receiving security updates after 2 years. Unless you’re getting security updates another way, which may not work correctly and may even require you to build Android yourself, you should not use the device for anything important after that point. The batteries would be next to useless by that time. Now it seems more common to get three years, which isn’t great either. iPhones last longer, but they come with all the iPhone problems.
- Comment on Google hits back after Apple exec says AI is hurting search 5 months ago:
That’s part of it. The other part is that Google, and other search engines, assume you’re clueless and try to “fix” your query for you, and you can’t stop it because they’ve been removing support for searching exact words or using boolean expressions or excluding words.
- Comment on The Trouble With TikTok Is Getting Old 7 months ago:
This article is very confused. America definitely isn’t banning TikTok because it’s unpopular or unimportant. American billionaires are stealing TikTok because it is more profitable than their apps.
- Comment on Social Security Website Crashes as DOGE-Linked Disruption at the Agency Continues 7 months ago:
Just like last time?
But he’s too stupid for that. He wants so badly to be king when the problems catch up that he would destroy the country to do it. He had a years long tantrum after he lost the election.
- Comment on Porn on Spotify Is Infiltrating the Platform’s Top Podcast Charts 7 months ago:
Back when I still used Spotify it would regularly recommend to me podcasts more offensive than porn.
- Comment on Mom horrified by Character.AI chatbots posing as son who died by suicide - Ars Technica 7 months ago:
This will become more common. I’ve seen dead people involved in scams on the internet.
- Comment on Wait, why is the White House using Starlink to ‘improve Wi-Fi’? 7 months ago:
Or so it can be turned off in later to sabatoge a more competent government.
- Comment on 'The point is to be generous': This $20 FPS releasing next month is trying something new—giving away a full version of the game 8 months ago:
This isn’t new, but maybe it’s been forgotten since online matchmaking. The original Starcraft could be installed as the full version which required a CD and a CD key to run, or as a version that didn’t require a CD or a key and could only by used to join multiplayer games.
- Comment on On May 5, Microsoft’s Skype will shut down for good 8 months ago:
It’s the other way around. Lync, formerly Office Communicator, became Skype for Business which became Teams, not to be confused with Teams, a distinct, non-interoperable product made by the same company. Skype for Business probably took some code from Skype but I’d bet it was mostly about branding and it never had that much in common with the real Skype.
Microsoft killed Skype in 2017 and replaced it with a different thing also called Skype.
- Comment on Meta approves bonuses of up to 200% of company executives' salaries as it trims stock awards for employees 8 months ago:
It’ll be their children’s children’s problem.
- Comment on Demo: 3D Footage Elite Dangerous 3840×1080 Pixel, 60p, SBS (sbsr) version 9 months ago:
The SBS video requires VR/XR glasses and either a mode that forces SBS or a special player because you didn’t upload it to YouTube with the metadata for YouTube to recognize it as 3D: support.google.com/youtube/answer/7278886