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MSids

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Rockstar Games DDoSed Heavily By Players Protesting New AntiCheat Code (cyberinsider.com)

Rockstar Games’ servers have been under heavy fire from massive DDoS attacks in recent days, causing widespread login and connectivity issues for players of GTA Online. These attacks come in the wake of Rockstar’s recent implementation of BattlEye, a new anti-cheat system designed to crack down on in-game cheating, sparking...

MSids ,

At one point I had been playing GTA V online pretty consistently when I had a cheater start targeting me. It was pretty frustrating and after 30 minutes of that I gave up and closed down for the day. I shifted my attention to other games after that. I definitely get that they want to stop cheaters - cheaters ruin the fun for others. It’s a shame that the new anti cheat has made it so that Steam Deck players are stuck unable to play online.

MSids ,

For some I’m sure it might have value but I can’t imagine subscribing to a service to play retro games. Dozens of excellent retro handhelds exist with no monthly fee to fiddle with.

MSids ,

Yeah I suppose if the convenience is worth it. To me it’s odd to rent anything - especially retro games.

MSids ,

Links awakening is great. Past that some other GB titles:

Super Mario 2: 6 Golden Coins is incredible.

Tetris is great but I prefer the Rosy Retrospection hack. Maybe wait and see if Modretro releases the officially licensed Chromatic Tetris down the road. Chromatic Tetris is already being used in competitions and it looks incredible.

Dr. Mario

MSids ,

I work just outside of the Pease air force base and drank the coffee and water for ages. They were on the base well system which was heavily contaminated. Thanks a bunch.

MSids ,

“We are returning fire with guns that shoot pills, but the doc says it could take 2-3 weeks for it to build up in his system”

Microsoft bans China-based employees from using Android devices for work, mandates switch to iPhones (www.techspot.com)

Microsoft has told all its employees in China that they will soon only be allowed to use iPhones for work purposes. The ban on Android devices is part of a security-related Microsoft initiative for providing a unified way of managing and verifying employee identities....

MSids ,

Play services actually works very well for containerizing work apps. Better actually than on iOS. My work can offer a set of apps that are available in this isolated container and apply policy to them that doesn’t impact other areas of the phone. I can also shut off all of them with a single button when I am on PTO. Microsoft’s apps require these services to build the container, and I believe Android phones in China do not have play services. It’s not perfect, but I personally think it works very well.

MSids ,

Plex should not be accessed externally using a port forward. Always use app.plex.tv as it prevents unauthenticated users from seeing the instance.

MSids ,

You do not need to port forward to share a Plex instance over the Internet. App.plex.tv manages the inbound connections automatically. All you need to do is manage invites to your friends. They log in with their email/password or with Google SSO to app.plex.tv and your content will be available over a secure connection with no port forwarding.

MSids ,

The cloud today significantly different than the 2003 cpanel LAMP server. It’s a whole new landscape. Complex, highly-available architectures that cannot be replicated in an on-prem environment are easily built from code in minutes on AWS.

Those capabilities come with a steep learning curve on how to operate them in a secure and effective manor, but that’s always going to be the case in this industry. The people that can grow and learn will.

MSids , (edited )

The costs are definitely a huge consideration and need to be optimized. A few years back we ran a POC of Open Shift in AWS that seemed to idle at like $3k/mo with barely anything running at all. That was a bad experiment. I could compare that to our new VMWare bill, which more than doubled this year following the Broadcom acquisition.

The products in AWS simplify costs into an opex model unlike anything that exists on prem and eliminate costly and time consuming hardware replacements. We just put in new load balancers recently because our previous ones were going EoL. They were a special model that ran us a about a half-mil for a few HA pairs including the pro services for installation assistance. How long will it take us to hit that amount using ALBs in AWS? What is the cost of the months that it took us to select the hardware, order, wait 90 days for delivery, rack-power-connect, configure with pro services, load hundreds of certs, gather testers, and run cutover meetings? What about the time spent patching for vulnerabilities? In 5-7 years it’ll be the same thing all over again.

Now think about having to do all of the above for routers, switches, firewalls, VM infra, storage, HVAC, carrier circuits, power, fire suppression.

MSids ,

Eh, it’s not quite the same as other professions. If a sysadmin gets an after hours call, they must work it. If a ride share person is offered a fare, they can accept it or turn it down.

MSids ,

Possibly, but it doesn’t have anything to do with being on-call.

MSids ,

Eyyy yes! I just picked up an MZ-N505 a few months ago! It’s been great at work to quickly start music without staring at my phone for 5 minutes first.

MSids ,

Your link is to example.com

MSids , (edited )

I always wonder why some people are so dedicated to Jellyfin. Even if JF had full feature and experience parity, it would still not have secure remote access the way Plex does. There is no need to port forward or NAT Plex for external access if you use app.plex.tv to access. With the threat landscape the way it is today, that is worth a lot.

MSids ,

I have not looked into it for a while but I believe their servers broker a direct connection between the client and server.

MSids ,

Plex, as a company, definitely is aware of what items are in your library but streams don’t go through the Plex servers unless you use the Plex proxy service which is enabled by default but only used when the client connection speed is too slow to use the desired streaming setting.

Everyone who accesses their Plex externally should use app.plex.tv rather than NAT/port forwarding unless you’re also doing IP whitelisting on the NAT (not feasible for most remote access scenarios, as IPs are dynamic in most cases). Jellyfin should never be exposed externally.

I work in a highly regulated sector of IT and have learned that even the most robust software will have serious exploits at some point.

MSids ,

I was interested in Apple’s approach where they would look at checksums of the images to see if they matched checksums of known CSAM. Its trivial to defeat by changing even a single pixel, but it’s the only acceptable way to implement this scanning. Any other method is an overreach and a huge invasion of privacy.

MSids ,

Checksums wouldnt work well for their purposes if they could easily be made to match any desired checksum. It’s one way math.

Can I refuse MS Authenticator?

So my company decided to migrate office suite and email etc to Microsoft365. Whatever. But for 2FA login they decided to disable the option to choose “any authenticator” and force Microsoft Authenticator on the (private) phones of both employees and volunteers. Is there any valid reason why they would do this, like it’s...

MSids ,

It’s done by IP address not phone or laptop GPS.

Linus Tech Tips (LTT) release investigation results on former accusations (x.com)

There were a series of accusations about our company last August from a former employee. Immediately following these accusations, LMG hired Roper Greyell - a large Vancouver-based law firm specializing in labor and employment law, to conduct a third-party investigation. Their website describes them as “one of the largest...

MSids ,

At my work we pay auditors to assess our security controls and I would chose a different company if I thought they were being anything less than honest with us on their findings. The agreements and SOW are set up at the beginning of the engagement, so the investigators get paid regardless of their findings. It’s not like the bond rating agencies on Wall Street.

MSids ,

You don’t think it’s possible that the accusations were mostly unfounded and the LTT crew are just decent people? They did bring up some issues with onboarding which are completely expected on smaller companies.

MSids ,

This should be a standard option at annual physicals. Skip the BP check I just want out.

MSids ,

People can’t let go of tipping. A few restaurants near me tried it and ended up closing.

Tipping isn’t just a part of culture but it also breaks up the spend for the consumer. You commit to a $15 burger now, then the $3 of tip later. Integrating the tips with the cost makes it seem like everything is more expensive and also makes it not optional for how much you give.

MSids ,

The subscription model is, in my opinion, dumb. If they need it to work, maybe they should buy games instead of studios. I can’t work out exactly how long term patching would work though, unless they kicked back a maintenance fee from sales and gamepass usage to the studio.

MSids ,

It must work like the music streaming model where Apple kicks back a fee to the devs based on monthly installs or usage to the dev. It probably works better than Microsoft’s model of buying a developer, not committing resources to run them, then closing the studio.

All the ways streaming services are aggravating their subscribers this week (arstechnica.com)

Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced....

MSids , (edited )

When I worked at an internet provider, Netflix sent us a cache (I’m sure they have several at that ISP now). I can’t imagine it cost them more than a few thousand dollars, as it was just a bare bones box full of hard drives. We gave them free power, internet, and rack space in our data center. Every night during the slow period it would fill up with whatever they thought would stream the next day.

There was nothing to do with neighborhoods, the cache served customers all over Maine and they didn’t pay us anything. Netflix’s costs are more likely content and licensing.

AM radio law opposed by tech and auto industries is close to passing | Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)

A controversial bill that would require all new cars to be fitted with AM radios looks set to become a law in the near future. Yesterday, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) revealed that the “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act” now has the support of 60 US Senators, as well as 246 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, making...

MSids ,

I felt bad doing it but had to do the same for the AMBER alerts. Maine got me a few times with child abductions at 3am. Spoiler it was a domestic issue and the abductor was a family member every time. Kids were fine.

Wikipedia is gauging interest for an extension that uses AI to see if any claim is cited on Wikipedia (meta.wikimedia.org)

A prototype is available, though it's Chrome-only and English-only at the moment. How this'll work is you select some text and then click on the extension, which will try to "return the relevant quote and inference for the user, along with links to article and quality signals"....

MSids ,

Available to all Wikipedia+ subscribers

MSids ,

I bought an Ayn Odin 2 recently and noticed how hard it was to find Russ/Retro Game Corp’s site and videos even when searching directly for retro game corps. It was like the results some days were buried and other times I could find them in the top few.

MSids ,

App-based TOTP are not phishing resistant and do not require any level of proximity to the login session. The future is more likely passkeys that use device TPMs.

MSids ,

Those are better, but are also not phishing resistant.

MSids ,

I wish the password autofill feature was more robust for Firefox on Android. Using it as my default password provider but it regularly does not pick up on password fields.

MSids ,

Chaotic me wishes they would kill Gmail. The next handful of cool things would surface from the ashes and I could finally cut ties with big G.

MSids ,

Just curious, why is that a deal breaker? It seems like a mild form of anti spam protection, potential 2fa backup, and a way to uniquely identify users.

MSids ,

Hopefully they won’t have to provide a phone number to the restaurant

MSids ,

They are high thinking people will pay $5/mo for search AND being limited to 300 searches/mo. I avoid subscriptions at all cost, so if I were ever to consider paying for search it would need to be a completely forgettable number like .99/mo.

MSids ,

It’s not lost on me, I get it, don’t pretend like you’re the only one who understands how advertising works on the Internet. That’s the agreement with anything you don’t directly pay for. The fee that Kago is asking for is unreasonable in my opinion.

MSids ,

In what non-US country is this the case?

MSids ,

Every game on Steam that uses the publisher’s launcher.

MSids ,

I am on board with cancelling some student debt for those who are struggling, but I wonder if this is a good long term solution. How do we stop getting overburdened graduates into the debt machine at 22? Do we lower tuition costs, make college free, talk kids out of going, giving more government grants to low income students?

If the taxpayers are going to socialize anything I’d prefer to start with healthcare. That impacts everyone.

MSids , (edited )

A few counters to this:

Given that public opinion weighs so heavily on the ability to get anything done, healthcare, to me, seems like an easier win. Focus on one thing, get it done right, make people happy, get elected to a second term.

Student loans do not affect everyone. College attendance is declining and nobody ever dies from not having a bachelor’s.

Home prices and interest rates are out of control, but neither has anything to do with student loans. Home prices have risen at way beyond inflationary rates to beyond what is affordable even for those without debt. Other factors are at play here.

MSids ,

Interesting to think about. I wonder how much schools would need to scale back to make a noticable difference in tuition and what jobs would be cut in the process. At a time when private colleges are already struggling, it might be difficult to find the fat to trim.

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