t3rmit3
@t3rmit3@beehaw.org
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 2 hours ago:
How so?
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 11 hours ago:
I mean gambling in general, not just loot boxes or TCGs.
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 12 hours ago:
Frankly, I don’t mind. I don’t love being accused of posting in bad faith and berated just because you forgot what you originally posted. Cheers.
- Comment on Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense 13 hours ago:
Yep. There are too many people who don’t understand addiction, and think that gambling is the root cause problem, rather than one of many systems that preys on addiction disorders.
The reality of addiction is that it will always find something to fulfill it without treatment, and banning or regulating every trend of collectibles that pops up is not an actual solution. Banning or regulating specific structures that intentionally prey on addiction is important.
Too many people mistake their objection to gambling that was inherited from the protestant moral objections, with actually being about solving predation on addiction.
- Comment on Android: sideloading blocked and open source updates withheld to twice a year 15 hours ago:
MVV app is super convenient, but I could still use the kiosks without too much added delay. MVVswipe is like 30 seconds to “check out” a ticket, MVV kiosk machine is like 90 seconds. The biggest inconvenience is having to find a kiosk outside of a train station.
- Comment on Android: sideloading blocked and open source updates withheld to twice a year 15 hours ago:
Holy hell it’s been a while since I heard that name… I remember putting Cyanogen on my PSP back in the day.
- Comment on ‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push 15 hours ago:
*laughing as Atlassian dies*
“I guess I was the…”
*puts on sunglasses*
“jeer-a all along.”
- Comment on ‘Devastating blow’: Atlassian lays off 1,600 workers ahead of AI push 15 hours ago:
Somehow a multibillion dollar company can’t compete with an ancient quad core server shoved in a coat closet when it comes to page load times.
To be fair, it’s nearly impossible for remote sites to beat on-prem page load times, given the added per-component transit times over the internet.
- Comment on 14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns 15 hours ago:
That’s not what this commenter was doing, though.
So what do you think there were doing, exactly?
Let’s break their comment down, and then you can point out the part that is “extremist”.
14,000 sounds like a big number, until you realise that there’s many millions of routers.
This is 100% accurate, especially in the age of Mirai-like IoT botnets. 14k is pretty small nowadays. Variants of Mirai (e.g. Midori and Aisuru) had 300,000+ devices.
Asus is not known for backbone routing
Correct, this is a pretty low-danger botnet due to being low-power consumer devices, even if it’s difficult to clean.
so while this might be happening, you have to ask yourself, is this the biggest threat across the internet,
Less fair, because it is still news, and Ars is a tech news site.
or is this article intended to serve another interest?
The part I assume you take issue with, but it’s also a completely fair question (and is in fact precisely “telling people to question the purpose and bias of news”). The article made the deliberate choice to name-drop BitTorrent and IPFS, despite them not being related other than them also using DHTs. I understand the writer may not have been intending to draw a “malware <-> bittorrent” association in the readers’ minds… or they may have. It’s sort of like saying, “the killer drove an Audi, much like Nico Hulkenberg”. That’s why you have to critically question news.
what’s the point of this? To me it seems like an argument over the semantics of a word which I honestly couldn’t care less about
The point is that you immediately jumped to calling them an “extremist” for what seems a pretty innocuous (if not particularly useful) comment. We generally assume good-faith around here, and calling people “extremist” for questioning an Ars article doesn’t seem like that to me.
- Comment on 14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns 16 hours ago:
But in the society we live in, that position is pretty extreme.
By what metric? And “Extreme” and “Extremist” are two different words, with different meanings and connotations.
Extreme simply means the far end of a spectrum. Extremist means
having or involving beliefs that most people think are unreasonable and unacceptable
At no point did I ever say that it’s a bad thing to hold that position
Without offering any metric by which to assert that, you most certainly did convey the commonly understood negative connotation by calling it extremist.
- Comment on 14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns 16 hours ago:
So to be clear, asking whether an article has ulterior motives qualifies as an “extremist” question, in your eyes?
Because that seems a pretty extreme limitation on acceptable critical and contextual interrogation of news, to me.
- Comment on 14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns 16 hours ago:
That’s a misreading of what it means. The botnet averages 14,000 routers + IoT devices a day, not new devices per day. Every day, devices cycle in and out of these botnets, so their count is always in flux.
- Comment on 14,000 routers are infected by malware that's highly resistant to takedowns 1 day ago:
I don’t think anything Onno said is “extremist”, I just think it’s so vague that what they think might be happening is indecipherable. Makes it more likely to be rage/engagement bait, imo.
But it’s not extreme to think that perhaps, given the current anti-anonymity push among governments worldwide, and the fact this uses DHTs and P2P routing, governments might love to tarnish those things in peoples’ minds in order to more readily accept banning of bittorrent, onion routing, TOR, etc, which can help bypass a lot of the dangerous government net restrictions and surveillance being put in place.
Do you think that government intrusion into media, or the existence of online influence campaigns, are “extremist” conspiracies rather than proven realities?
- Comment on Exclusive: AI Error Likely Led to Iran Girl's School Bombing 2 days ago:
That would be a crazy turnabout given their public banning by Trump from being used by the USFG (mil included).
- Comment on What is a game that hits a similar itch for you as Divine Divinity? 6 days ago:
- Comment on VPNs Can’t Make You Anonymous Online. Don’t Be Fooled by Anyone Who Says They Can 1 week ago:
You can’t be sure, but you can use providers and exit nodes that are based in places hostile to whoever you are trying to protect against.
Also, functional anonymity can exist by different entities having different pieces of data that together would de-anonymize you, but who are unlikely to ever intersect. A good example of this is DMCA requests: if a copyright holder sees a US IP address on a residential Comcast IP, they’re going to file a court case and get a subpoena for the subscriber info. If they see a Hong Kong IP from a co-lo datacenter who would need to cooperate to tell them who owned that IP at that time, they’re not going to even bother because they don’t know how to even start filing a court case in China, and if your VPN has too much data it won’t even matter because no one will even have contacted them.
It all depends on your threat model.
- Comment on VPNs Can’t Make You Anonymous Online. Don’t Be Fooled by Anyone Who Says They Can 1 week ago:
There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on you when configured correctly, and just hear “no one can see what I do”, because that’s what snooping is, right?
When I worked at a university IT dept, we’d often get content block hits for adult websites from inside the internal protected network, via the university VPN, because a professor or staff member thought a VPN would route their traffic ‘past’ us.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
This absolutely did not kill them. I’ve been dealing with federal procurement, including ATOs for DoD, for years, and 99% of companies never even remotely interact with it. Yes, there’s a large number that do, especially among Fortune 500s and up, but the actual percentage of companies who have military contracts is tiny. This was meant to intimidate them into compliance, but this doesn’t make them any less viable than AIaaS already is or isn’t.
no company wants to become a supply chain risk to potential customers who might have a DoD supplier somewhere down the supply chain
The order is actually much narrow than that; it only applies to companies who directly have contracts with the military.
- Comment on AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations | OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases 2 weeks ago:
Would not be surprised if it’s trained on the thousands of policy debate “nuclear war terminal impact” arguments on openev.
- Comment on Automated catalyst testing uses two coordinated robots, cutting 32 days of work to 17 hours 2 weeks ago:
I’m not arguing against the automation used in this particular case; that sounds perfectly reasonable.
I’m arguing that the only reason it’s newsworthy is because companies want to put a positive spin on automation right now, right as the majority of companies expanding automation aren’t doing it to benefit workers.
- Comment on Automated catalyst testing uses two coordinated robots, cutting 32 days of work to 17 hours 2 weeks ago:
But what’s newsworthy about this in 2026?
It’s about framing the debate of “robots doing work” in terms of being a positive thing (“see? they’re helping us do important SCIENCE!”) so that people will be just a little less combative when they get a BigMac handed to them by a robot arm.
- Comment on California Just Killed Open Source - YouTube 2 weeks ago:
They’ll likely only target fully assembled 3d printers, which is why just like their firearms laws it will only stop people who aren’t actively attempting to circumvent the law.
- Comment on California Just Killed Open Source - YouTube 2 weeks ago:
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but given that this is an anti-firearms bill, they will probably do the same thing they do when you purchase a firearm magazine cross-state; they’ll open the box and check that it is ‘compliant’ with the 10-round limit. If it is, they’ll ship it on to you. If it’s not, they’ll ship you the empty box with a notice of seizure. You may also be contacted by CADOJ later, depending how much free time they have.
- Comment on CIOs told: Prove your AI pays off – or pay the price 3 weeks ago:
I’m sure they’re quaking at the thought of floating out on their golden parachutes…
- Comment on Discord roll out global age verification system, including an "age inference" model that runs in the background 4 weeks ago:
just say ‘doggo’ and ‘w00t’ and ‘roflmao’ a couple times and the AI will peg you as an elder millennial and leave you alone
- Comment on Smart Homes Are Terrible 4 weeks ago:
I’d settle for any home, smart or dumb.
- Comment on Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance 4 weeks ago:
I’m so mad they’ve switched from their “protect the children” for Boomers, to “protect the pets” for us Millennials.
- Comment on Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70,000 IDs 4 weeks ago:
IRC is still alive and well, team speak for voice chats. Hell, Nextcloud even has these, as well as video calls.
- Comment on Counting the waves of tech industry BS from blockchain to AI 4 weeks ago:
Everyone forgets that “Information Technology” was just a rebrand from the more accurate “Information Systems”, which was itself the less accurate rebranding of “Data Processing”, which is what computers actually do. There was also the failed push by IBM for Information Communication Technology (ICT).
It’s been hype cycles since the beginning.
- Comment on What games similar to hardspace shipbreaker can you recommend? 4 weeks ago:
Every derelict I take salvage has so much crap I have to compulsively clean up, including my starter ship…