t3rmit3
@t3rmit3@beehaw.org
- Comment on Death Of A Forum: How The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Killing Communities 2 days ago:
The British turned London into an absolute surveillance nightmare, and sadly most British people seem to be fine with it. I’m not surprised that OSA passed, nor that it’s doing exactly the kind of chilling of speech that it is.
- Comment on Take It Down Act Has Best Of Intentions, Worst Of Mechanisms 3 days ago:
I’m extremely wary of any law that can be used to censor or otherwise remove material online, but one gripe i have with the Techdirt article is their assertion that hash matching is expensive or difficult.
Generating a SHA hash of an image when uploaded is very inexpensive in terms of processing, and there’s already going to be a db somewhere that stores the image metadata, so it’s not like putting the hash there is hard. Similarly, a simple No/SQL lookup for a known hash is incredibly simple and non-intensive.
The real issue is the lack of an appeal mechanism, the lack of penalty for our legal mechanism to ignore false reports (which should probably about spam/ volume rather than single requests), and the lack of definition around what exactly a site must do to show good-faith, reasonable compliance.
- Comment on Far cry 5, where are the mods? 3 days ago:
Ubisoft has never been a mod-friendly publisher, and none of their titles support modding to any extent that I’m aware of. The mods that exist for it are pretty limited in nature (i.e. they modify existing values and textures, and don’t really expand the game afaik). I like FarCry 2, 3, 5, New Dawn, and 6, but the series has definitely written itself into a corner. Removing the guns makes it not work (e.g. Primal), but they’ve literally ended their timeline with 5 and New Dawn, and 6 just makes it feel like they don’t know where to go and are doing offshoots. 6 felt more like Just Cause than Far Cry, to me.
- Comment on Are We Ready For Driverless Buses? 3 days ago:
My conclusion is not that we need to replace all the buses with trains, it’s that I’m not okay with replacing manned buses with unmanned ones. Unmanned trains, I’d be fine with.
- Comment on Are We Ready For Driverless Buses? 5 days ago:
Are We Ready For Driverless Buses?
If they’re on a set of parallel metal beams on the ground, absolutely!
- Comment on Is this the first casualty of the Online Safety Act? An online cycling community web forum with over 60K users shutting down 6 days ago:
This is OSA in the UK, not KOSA in the US.
- Comment on Coming soon – offline speech recognition on your phone 1 week ago:
Coming soon
Not to my phone it’s not!
- Comment on TikTok’s annual carbon footprint is likely bigger than Greece’s, study finds 1 week ago:
Or their hills that spew smoke 24/7 (because they’re on fire).
- Comment on Luigi Mangione, CEO shooting suspect, is a tech worker 1 week ago:
One thing to note is that the campaign to make him into a ‘broken’, ‘damaged’ individual is well underway in the media. There’s nothing positive about being well-adjusted to a harmful system, and being broken by a harmful system is not a personal failing.
Is he going to be a perfectly polite, mild-mannered person in court? Maybe not. But don’t let yourself be tricked into the narrative that this discredits his reasoning, or into thinking his actions are the result of some personal failing rather than a reasonable reaction to a harmful system.
- Comment on What do we think will be GoTY and which game do we think should be? 1 week ago:
Balatro will win.
Vampire Survivors should win.
- Comment on anyone know any good android games? 1 week ago:
Imperium Galactica 2: Alliances Knights of the Old Republic
- Comment on Luigi Mangione, CEO shooting suspect, is a tech worker 1 week ago:
He’s really out here raising the bar each day…
- Comment on What happened to gaming? 2 weeks ago:
I definitely think you’re in a bubble of AAA games. This is literally the middle of an indie game renaissance.
- Comment on No NAT November: My Month Without IPv4 2 weeks ago:
Thank you, this is super informative!
- Comment on No NAT November: My Month Without IPv4 2 weeks ago:
So first off, I think it’s safe to assume that the article is not about going and removing IPv4 on your company’s corporate networks for a month, so I’ve been speaking in regards to home internet service.
NAT is not a firewall, but in normal use by the average home internet user it is a means to prevent computers outside of their network from reaching computers inside the network without ports being forwarded on the router, or the internal machine initiating the connection. If you do not have a firewall on the devices, and they are not behind a NAT gateway/router, then they are by default exposing ports. There’s no inherent guarantee that a router has a firewall, or has it enabled.
I’ve never seen NAT in combination with IPv6 and I’ve seen plenty of deployments at our customers.
I’m interested in how this works. In a normal IPv4 scenario for home internet users, you are assigned a single IP for your router by your ISP, and internal addressing is usually handled by router-resident DHCP automatically. In the deployments you’re seeing, are ISPs handing out /120 blocks to each router? Does that require the ISP to have access to alter your home router, or do customers configure the DHCP themselves (which seems unlikely to scale)?
- Comment on No NAT November: My Month Without IPv4 2 weeks ago:
I admittedly did not read the original Mastodon post from nixCraft about the purpose of No NAT November, but surely it’s not just about moving to IPv6? You can (and usually would) still do NATing with IPv6. You don’t want every device to be internet-exposed, but still want them to be able to access the internet (and who wants to configure internet-defensive firewall rules on all their internal home hosts)?
- She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She’s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook.theintercept.com ↗Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 3 comments
- Comment on No NAT November: My Month Without IPv4 2 weeks ago:
You can essentially achieve this with some routers with a “DMZ” network segment/ device, so all incoming requests to your external IP get forwarded to it automatically if not part of an outbound NAT’ed session. You don’t even need to disable NAT.
- Comment on Tech companies put on notice as Australia passes world-first social media ban for under-16s | CNN 3 weeks ago:
Something the article doesn’t clarify is whether this is meant to only to apply to kids in Australia. Normally that would be obvious, except that Australia already has tried to demand social media companies remove content even for non-Australian users on the basis that Australians could bypass geo blocking with VPNs. If age checks are location/ IP based, they could make the same (bad) argument.
- Comment on What's your favourite it's all in the gameplay game? 3 weeks ago:
This (sandbox games that are all about “pure” gameplay, where the narrative is made by the pseudo-random events) is my bag!
In no particular order except for #1, these are my top-10:
- Kenshi Post-apocalyptic alien planet sandbox that can be a colony simulator, a faction-combat game, an exploration and boss-fighting game, and so much more. This is by far and away my TOP recommendation.
- Rimworld Dwarf Fortress-like colony simulator set on proc-gen alien planets. Supremely mod-able.
- Starsector Sandbox space game with a bit of everything. You can play it in so many ways, and there are so many encounters and missions and things to do. Tons of mods.
- Mount and Blade: Warband A medieval-combat “simulator” where you lead a… Warband of soldiers around a faux medieval world. First-person combat with a lot of great complexity. Supports mods.
- Derail Valley A train-driving simulator, where you just take contracts to haul stuff between towns/stations/etc. Multiple engines to drive, and a lot of cool physics to contend with.
- Project Zomboid Zombie apocalypse survival simulator, with multiplayer. Lots of mods.
- Spore A sandbox classic, where you usher a species as it evolves from protozoa to being an interstellar species.
- The Sims 3 Playing house for adults (and kids). Build a house, decorate it, get a good job, have kids and pets. The unattainable Millennial fantasy.
- Starbound Universe exploration sandbox, with a bunch of humanoid aliens you have to ally with to defeat a big monster thing. Moddable.
- X4: Foundations Economic simulation sandbox set in space. Build stations, ships, influence wars between empires using economic sway… Very very slow, but fulfilling.
- Comment on The Right Has a Bluesky Problem 3 weeks ago:
Had us in the first half, not gonna lie…
- Comment on Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive 4 weeks ago:
I actually love my foldable Razr. I never could afford one as a kid, and the smaller form-factor is actually really nice.
- Comment on Whomp-whomp: AI PCs make users less productive 4 weeks ago:
Basically yes, a chatbot and the ability to do simple actions (agents). So in their fantasy universe, instead of clicking on Firefox and typing a query in the search bar, you’d ask the desktop to search for something, and it would do those steps.
That’s all just an excuse though, to explain why they need to collect all your local data. :P
- Comment on Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe 4 weeks ago:
Probably none. Now I’ll name one that is large and influential, and isn’t trying to combat the problem: X
- Comment on Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe 4 weeks ago:
No, bots are not real people, so them masquerading as real people holding an opinion is, by definition, misinformation.
- Comment on Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe 4 weeks ago:
This isn’t misinformation.
Right, the other example was. The whole point is the difference between propaganda (the bots) and legitimate political sentiment.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
When these crappy "AI"s finally do displace my job, I will become a fireman, but in the Fahrenheit 451 sense, and it’ll be servers instead of books.
- Comment on I need to talk about Mouthwashing 4 weeks ago:
There not just reading into it, if that’s what you mean; the SA, and the rest of the crew’s behavior towards Anya is all very much what they described. Jimmy seeing Anya as a disfigured womb with a foal (as in, a horse) is literally what happens, not a figure of speech.
- Comment on I need to talk about Mouthwashing 4 weeks ago:
My partner loves this game, and also endorses anyone here who hasn’t played it to do so. :)
- Comment on Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe 4 weeks ago:
I think it’s important for groups of people to be able to choose to ban propaganda and misinformation, because propaganda is not simply information being imparted, it’s an entire ecosystem of deceptive methods to disseminate information and to alter your perception without you realizing.
If it were calling for the EU banning X solely because they don’t like Musk’s shitty personal opinions, I’d agree with you, but they cite the disinformation, misinformation, and outright propaganda that the platform is being used to spread, and I think that’s perfectly valid.
Take 2 scenarios:
5 million actual people telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
500 thousand actual people, plus 4.5 million bot accounts telling you that ‘x’ political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
In reality, you don’t even need the bot accounts to outnumber the real users if you control the algorithms that determine what people see, which is exactly the situation that X is in right now.
tl;dr This isn’t about banning the viewpoints themselves, it’s about banning a platform that deceptively alters visibility of viewpoints to manipulate people.
Banning things you don’t like is not a solution
Tell that to Musk; X bans TONS of people over their viewpoints.