This is what I do. I don’t like DRM in games that I own, and even just today I was helping a user that got blocked from playing a game that they own because the EA DRM breaks itself often on Linux. I wrote a Linux-specific guide for it but the procedures should also work on Windows with some imagination. The exact methods may vary per game but for the vast majority of Steam games you’ll only need to crack Steamworks API protection off of it.
(warning: guide is long. Sections 5 and 6 are the most directly related to actually cracking popular DRMs off a game)
Hell yeah, that’s awesome. I hope the guide can be of use - I often reference it myself when I forget how to do something, so hopefully I can keep it up to date with whatever my current knowledge level is.
There weren’t many school shootings, and suddenly Columbine happened.
The thing is - Columbine wasn’t really a school shooting.
It was a failed bombing. The shooting was to get everyone into the cafeteria where they’d set up barrel bombs which luckily didn’t go off. In fact, the largest casualty attack in a US school remains a bombing from 1927.
As a school shooting, Columbine was also quite atypical, with two perpetrators.
But as soon as you now had what was really a failed bombing being covered by the news as a school shooting, suddenly thereafter were a ton of school shootings (that fit the normal archetype of a mass shooting with a lone perpetrator).
And each of those got a ton of coverage and the numbers of mass shootings went up yet again.
If you suddenly prohibited covering mass shootings in media (impossible because of the 1st amendment, but hypothetically), I am certain you’d see mass shootings drop by double digit numbers.
The fact that Columbine was so atypical of what events followed in its planning but was so close to what followed in how it was covered in the news tells a pretty damning story of the role of mass media in this phenomenon.
Also see:
Towers, S., Gomez-Lievano, A. Khan, M., et al. (2015). Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings. PLOS One. 10(7): e0117259. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117259
Lankford, A and Tomek, S. (2017). Mass Killings in the United States from 2006 to 2013: Social Contagion or Random Clusters. The American Association of Suicidology. doi: 10.1111/sltb.12366
As massive consumers of American news media that includes the extensive covering of mass shootings, I wonder what is keeping Canadians from a rise in shootings that is equally meteoric.
Coverage - since so much media comes from America - would seem to be the same, but the results are different.
Far from gun-avoidant, Canada boasts the longest rifle hit on a target, both for moving and stationary.
Canada has fewer guns per person than the US, but still many more than most countries. I think there are a couple of other differences though. The types of guns are very different. Handguns are extremely restricted, and ownership is rare. Many (most?) semi auto rifles are either prohibited or restricted, and there are mag limits (5 rounds) for all centrefire rifles. This doesn’t exactly prevent people from committing shootings, but a lot fewer people have those types of guns because they’re kind of a pain in the ass get, store, and use. Safe storage is legally required, and much more encouraged by the gun-owning community.
The other factor might be what guns are used for in Canada. Concealed carry is practically non-existent, open carry is severely restricted, and while self-defence with a firearm is technically legal, ownership for that purpose pretty much isn’t.
Not really, IMO. As a user of Android since v1.5 Cupcake, it’s disappointing to see how locked down Android has become over the years. I still recall how I took a leap of faith when I ditched the then highly customisable and feature-full Windows Mobile, to the barebones Android - I believed in the opensource nature of Android, thinking how exciting it was to be on what could be a developer’s and power user’s dream mobile platform. Although the Android dev scene at the time was nascent, I could forsee an explosion of root utilities, mods and custom ROMs. And I was right - the early Android dev scene was so exciting. From cool and useful utility such as DriveDroid or Chainfire’s CF.Lumen, to innovative custom ROMs such as Paranoid Android with their per-app DPI, Halo, Pie controls etc, the early Android scene was full of activity and really exciting as a power user.
But even as Android got more and more locked down and killed my favorite apps, mods and ROMs, I still enjoyed following many of it’s developments such as the projects Butter, Svelte, Volta, Treble and Mainline. However, I can’t recall anything major or exciting in recent years.
As someone else here mentioned, nowadays all the good stuff seems to be Pixel exclusives (like motion deblur, 7 years or software updates etc). Plus, Google keep pushing more and more stuff towards their proprietary Play Services stack, encouraging developers dependency on them - including anti-freedom features such as Play Integrity (SafetyNet). All of this makes it increasingly harder to break free from Google’s grasps, and as former fanboy of a company which once claimed to “not be evil”, it makes me sad that the ecosystem I once looked fondly towards, is now something that I’m looking to move away from.
I do agree with some points. However, most of these changes are somehow related to security. As someone working in FinTech, play integrity and the likes are something you cant escape, as rooted devices,ROMs, emulators and such are 90% are ‘hackers’. Shame google didn’t think of a way to bake it into Andorid itself… Having it in their services is locking Android so much.To add, lately all the “new” features are something that Samsung already had for years. Like Knox work profile container added to Android. Samsung seems to be evolving Android more than Google which is just sad.
Would you sacrifice NFC/Wallet features to have that freedom back? I personally would not.
I do see a genuine market for a phone you can root and apply custom ROMs etc on, but not do banking or public transport tickets or anything else that needs a layer of trust between the merchant and the phone user.
Oh wow you made my revive those days when I was changing the ROM of my One Plus 3 every week because there was so many on development and adding new features. So many great memories having control of my device.
Pawn shops margin comes from buying products cheaply from desperate folks and reselling them at a premium where possible. If you are only buying than you can treat a pawn shop like a thrift store with the major difference being there possibility of price flexibility. If you limit your purchases to items whose value you are knowledgeable about you can secure decent bargains especially if you have any charisma and can negotiate.
If you go in for instance with no knowledge of jewelry and just pay their asking price for a random ring you stand a high chance of not being a great value.
If you limit your purchases to items whose value you are knowledgeable about you can secure decent bargains especially if you have any charisma and can negotiate.
To add to this go online and look up what items are going for used online. Don’t care what people are asking for them, that’s not indicative of the true value. If possible you want to know what the final bids in several auctions were.
Also when negotiating price remember they paid for it and need to make a profit on it. Any offer that doesn’t allow them to make money on a sale can be an insult.
Any offense from the clerk is certainly either frustration or a negotiating tactic. Negotiating is their business, if they’re getting offended by low-ball offers they need to find a new line of work
Realistically, i’d go to city hall and hand in my death certificate. They’ll take it in because they’re not being paid enough to care. Then i’d be legally dead. Afterwards i’d go into the mountains and probably die because i don’t know how to live in the mountains, but it sounded nice in my mind.
The notion that free* healthcare, free* education, subsidised transport, government provided unemployment supports etc is even labelled “socialist” strikes me as particularly American.
Having lived for quite a long time in canada, I think most Americans would love the it.
Semi related - The USA is already socialist if you consider they have more spent per capita on healthcare, and pay for things like roads, police, fire departments, schools and the like. On the last point, they pay all the way through High School and then significantly subsidize universities as well. It’s all a matter of degree. In the usa, we socialize on many fronts, and then pay companies more than we would pay to socialize the same service and consider that better. Imo, it’s very much not.
I’m not sure if spending more per capita means “socialize” healthcare. Isn’t the problem with US healthcare is that “accessing healthcare at any time without the worry of financial burden” is not currently true for everyone?
I think your definition is a fine one. I think the Nuance I was trying to make and perhaps did poorly was that the US already pays a huge amount for healthcare but we pay it to companies to do research that they then use to make profit worldwide. Not to provide services for everyone. It’s a matter of priority
But if you’re getting healthcare and unemployment that would be two supports that most Americans don’t get. The plural for support is supports isn’t it?
That meaning of support is a non-countable noun, like water or happiness (or Lego, but lots of people get that one wrong). There is no plural of non-countable nouns.
You might use (for example) “bodies of water”, “levels of happiness”, “pieces of Lego”, or “sources of support” etc.
The amount of people in here claiming there were no takedown requests is a bit frustrating. As if we were blocking those communities for shits and giggles. Sure there was that Bungie troll but around the same time we DID get a takedown request for threads in the piracy community. Threads that didn’t even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.
We were also considering different hosting options to counter those DDOS attacks back than and that would mean moving the server to another country and thus exposing members of our team to legal issues should shit hit the fan. One of our team members back then was in the legal team for the hosting company we were considering moving to. So he wasn’t just making this up, he literally wrote the rules.
In the end we decided not to move to that hosting company. And we took some other measures by creating some tooling to deal with this stuff better. And that takes time.
Undoing the block means more work for us too. Work we do for free on our own time, next to having jobs and a families. And we’re definitely not a corporate entity with fancy lawyers.
Hmm, so you say there was a DMCA takedown notice but that the thread contained no material or links to material. You also say you can’t provide evidence of it even happening. Yeah, I’m going with you didn’t actually receive one and are just trying to retroactively come up with a good reason.
I don’t care dude lol. Why should I post this, we have always tried to be as transparent as possible over at Lemmy World. But we’re not going to release documents that would allow doxxing.
You would redact IP addresses and other sensitive information. That’s a pretty basic given. Regardless, you made a claim and can’t back it up therefore it didn’t happen. It’s really not a matter of you caring or not, it’s a matter of you just making stuff up.
I’m not even on LW but I think they have already gone out of their way to explain everything. But it’s never enough for some people. “I don’t believe you” ok sir have a nice day 👋
I mean, let alone that it’s probably not a good idea to poke the bear with an expensive legal team. It doesn’t always matter that you’re not doing anything wrong, if they can bleed you dry with legal fees instead.
Hi Antik, as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I was very happy to hear that you decided ‘unremove’ our little community. I appreciate you going to the effort of revisiting the earlier decision and being transparent about the process, and I’m sure that goes for the vast majority of the people here (though obviously not all 🤨).
While individual users were probably more impacted by that decision than we were as a instance (because they couldn’t access this community from lemmy.world), I can tell you that our admin team fully understood the situation you were in and there are no hard feelings from our side.
I don’t know whether there is a wider appreciation of the fact that managing a lemmy instance is quite labor intensive and technically challenging for the system admins, who are all volunteering their time and expertise. And there’s still lots of bugs and problems to identify and deal with.
Hey Unruffled. I know you had your opinion back when we made that unpopular move too ;) But whatever the users here might think, the contact between most instance admins over on the matrix channels is pretty good and helpful. We might not all allign all the time but there is always respect and understanding. And I think you can confirm that everyone just tries to help each other there no matter what the differences.
I contacted db0 soon after we blocked those communities and have always been in good contact with him since. He understood our situation very well. And as you know yourself Lemmy World has been very active and very publicly pushing the fediseer project. Again, we have our differences but we all want Lemmy to succeed.
You’re saying you can tell us that your team understood the situation fully? I know db0 was understanding. I also know yourself was trashing us for completely uninformed reasons and riding the hate wave when it happened. Time to leave that in the past, I guess. I appreciate choosing the peaceful way.
I’m assuming that the takedowns were send by automated systems scanning the net, but please correct me if this is wrong. Could hiding content from piracy related instances for visitors that aren’t logged in work to prevent automated falsely flagged content?
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Comes from the copy pasta of “I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux” and. And a bit more memeing with the fact that Linux itself is not as “free/libre” as GNU AFAIK (or the famous quote of Linux is cancer from Ballmer)
On the one hand... Dude, even as someone who loves dark humour, I couldn't bring myself to make a cancer joke upon news of a diagnosis unless the person was a true shitstain on the earth, like Trump.
On the other hand...that was fucking brilliant and works on so many levels.
I had pretty much the same thought process.
It’s dark, but brilliant.
Yet I can’t imagine RMS being offended by this, so I shouldn’t either.
That’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear from the guy himself.
The world is a better place because of him and I wish him well.
pictured: a comment, a reply ‘retard’, and then you replying to that. im on jerboa+sh.itjust.works, it may be showing the wrong comment on my end, idk.
Dunno why you of all people are insulting their intelligence.
While they made a clever double reference to the GNU/Linux meme and tying it in with the Ballmer 'Linux is cancer' rant, you not only come out with a one word response, but that one word makes you look infinitely worse than the person who literally made a cancer joke upon news of a diagnosis.
While they made a clever double reference to the GNU/Linux meme and tying it in with the Ballmer ‘Linux is cancer’ rant
No. It’s an unfunny and retarded “meme” that is overused by redditors. And this obviously isn’t related to the steve ballmer rant. They just use the same template with any subject.
Just because you ain't got the braincells to make the connection doesn't mean others can't.
Speaking of overuse, you sure are using the r-word liberally for someone who couldn't get the joke. Or is it one of those "I'm black therefore I can use the N-word" kind of things?
Why yes, that slur does apply to me! You see, I have autism and don't take particularly kindly to that slur.
Unlike you though, I actually have to tell people before they know there's something wrong with me. Because, again unlike you, I can act like a normal human being. As opposed to acting like a 5 year old that just learned the r-word. Sorry, I can tell you need an explanation for these things!
What do you have to gain from being this rude to strangers and using slurs against them? This behavior is legitimately antisocial, and unless you’re literally 13 years old it’s inexcusable.
You know, serious question from someone relatively new to the fediverse: how do you make sure that people won’t just create many accounts across instances if they want to evade bans or create one-time throwaways for posting abusive comments? One instance has no idea about users on other instances after all.
You can't, not effectively. This ain't necessarily a federation problem though, centralised social media has the same problem. You can do the same on Reddit.
That's not to say there aren't things that can be done. Instances can agree to implement shared banlists that include known-abusive IPs or, if an abusive user has a habit of using a pattern in their evasion usernames, you can use a Regex to hunt them out.
On reddit the entire user database is in the hands of one company, so they might be able to tell whether two people are (likely) the same person. So I think that might actually be a problem made worse by federation.
You'd be surprised how hard the task is. Any given identifier can be trivially changed. IP addresses aren't permanent and change frequently for home users. Multiple people genuinely use the same IP. People are likely to have very similar writing styles to someone else by complete coincidence. Browser fingerprinting can be thrown off by simply using another browser or fucking with the User Agent.
That about puts paid to any identifiers either Reddit or an instance owner may have.
Well it’s dark humor and I can see how some are deeply offended. The post even says it’s a slow growing treatable form, so personally I’ll laugh at the joke. It’s not like he’s end stage untreatable form of cancer. Like you know arch linux running on WSL level cancer.
Alternately, perhaps the algorithm knows me better than I know myself. Perhaps the humidifier I just bought is about to kick off a new hobby of collecting humidifiers. /s
It’s getting weird. I’m suddenly seeing a lot of things pretending to not be ads but specifically referencing my age or things generally blanketed to my age group. But weird things like life insurance and dick pills. Stuff I’ve never searched before because I already have employer provided insurance and my shmegan works as intended.
Yeah I’ve got ads for very weird, retiree, conservative dad shirts a lot a while back, with text like “dad: I fix things and like cars” or something dumb like that.
I’m in my thirties, European, super left, don’t like/never wil have kids. Wtf?
(By the way algorithms those facts are just a present, see what you wanna do with it)
I’m still waiting for the spooky stuff I’ve been hearing about for years.
I’m being tracked. My information sold and exchanged. Big, evil corporations trading my data with other companies like it was baseball cards. All my inner-most desires leaked!
All to get an ad for a “litter box robot” or whatever when I’m browsing memes.
I did notice that one we talked about vacuum cleaners or something, we got some ads about that. Weird i guess. But 90% of the time with household stuff like that its: research something (and start getting ads), buy something and keep getting ads for another month. And companies are posting top dollar for those ad- companies and their algorithms???
Continuing education mostly. Retreats, online courses, stuff like that.
I’ve had a few major surgeries that are often used to treat cancer, and I to understand what I was getting myself into I basically had to put myself through an abbreviated online med school. Got actual med school syllabi, went through the relevant classes, read the textbooks, asked my doctors anything I didn’t understand and a few verification questions to make sure I was understanding the content properly. I basically know enough to be dangerous. Right around then I started getting a lot of ads for jobs in the medical field and I guess I tricked the algorithm into thinking I got a good one.
I have no advice for you, as I live in a very humid place without very much risk of static shocks. I just want to say this question and post are hilarious.
This is the way. My last place was so dry, I would get zapped touching the metal frame in my desk and reboot my PC. I installed a humidifier into the central heat, no more zaps!
kbin.life
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