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merc

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merc ,

Mmmmmmm baking engineer…

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...

merc ,

It’s amazing to me that Blizzard spent 15 years with the PvP realms in such a broken state. It was only when they introduced “war mode” and the option to turn it off that people finally had some relief.

What finally made them address the problem was that many PvP realms had become 95% one faction and 5% the other faction. That meant that any PvP encounters were very one-sided, and they were also very rare, because the outnumbered faction just avoided any areas where they might be attacked.

Even if you lived for griefing, being on the dominant side in a 95% your-side realm sucked because there weren’t enough victims to pick on.

I guess they wanted to make griefers happy because making the game fair for people who enjoyed PvP but didn’t want to grief others would have been relatively easy.

merc ,

You would also think that Rockstar would want to stop those kinds of cheats just for greedy reasons. If there is some kind of ultra-powerful flying saucer item available, it’s probably something that they sell to players for money. At the very least, when someone spawns something like that, check to see if their account purchased it.

So much of the rest of the stuff could be handled using heuristics. The average player gets X headshots an hour, this player is in the 99.9th percentile. Maybe they’re just very good, but let’s flag that account and see if there’s anything else suspicious about their playing. That’s the thing about an MMO, you have vast amounts of data about players so there’s a lot of stuff you can use to see if something is normal.

I guess if they’re not doing it they’ve done some business calculations and decided that investing $X in techniques to ban cheaters won’t result in at least $X more in revenue from happy players who want to play more now that the cheating has been reduced. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re counting on making money off the cheaters somehow – maybe they periodically do get detected and banned and have to buy a new copy of the game. So, the math now says you don’t want to be too aggressive about the cheaters because they’re a good, reliable source of revenue.

merc ,

Many pagers, each with a small explosive inside? What’s hard to get?

merc ,

Lithium batteries burn, they don’t suddenly explode.

merc ,

Also, how many pagers are still out there with explosives in them?

Option 1: Israel blew up all the pagers containing explosives, regardless of whether they’d been sold / passed on to family members, friends, or other people who had no connection with Hezbollah, so many of the thousands of injured were innocent bystanders.

Option 2: Israel got the pagers into the hands of tens of thousands of people, then only blew up the ones that were actually in Hezbollah possession, leaving thousands of pagers out there containing explosives.

Knowing Israel, it’s almost certainly option 1.

merc ,

The scary thing about a supply chain attack is that Hezbollah aren’t idiots. This is basically like buying a “burner phone” (that name will now have different connotations now).

In the movies, people buying burner phones go to a random corner store and buy a random phone off the shelf. That way, even if they’re under surveillance, the cops / CIA / FBI can’t pre-bug the phone because they don’t know which corner store the person’s going to go to, let alone which phone they’ll pick off the shelf.

If you’re an armed group in Israel’s crosshairs, you’re going to take similar precautions when buying thousands of pagers. The safe way to do it would be to slowly and unpredictably get a small sample of ones that are being sold to the general public. If this is true, it could mean that there are tens of thousands of pagers out there that contain explosives that were merely sold as “decoys” in order to try to make Hezbollah feel safe in buying them. In other words, there may be tens of thousands of explosives in pagers that weren’t activated because they weren’t in the hands of Hezbollah when Israel decided to hit the button.

merc ,

If the device in my pocket started smoking like that, I’d throw it away pretty quickly. I suspect these were actual explosives, and there are almost certainly more of them out there.

merc ,

because you can’t call from this thing or communicate with it any other way because it’s receive only

Yes, it’s a pager. Pagers are still useful, that’s why they’re still being manufactured and sold. Someone in IT who’s on call can have a pager set up so that an automated process sends them a notification if a system breaks. They don’t need two-way communication for that. A doctor can use one to be notified if they’re needed at the hospital. It’s more reliable than a cell phone and in many cases the battery lasts a lot longer. They could even be useful for a parent to give to a kid, so that the parent can get in contact with the kid and have the kid call home if something happens. In rich countries that could happen because the parent doesn’t want the kid using the device all the time to scroll TikTok. In poorer countries it could happen because a pager is much, much cheaper than a phone.

The fact that thousands of these devices were exploded suggests that it was a pretty wide group of people who were using them, so the odds are pretty good that at least some of them were given away / sold.

merc ,

It’s got to be driving him absolutely nuts that the second shooter is also a presumably christian, straight, white, man. Anything else and he could work with it. White woman? Women are too emotional and shouldn’t be trusted to make important decisions. Black man? Go-go all out on the racism. Brown skinned? Anti immigration fear mongering. Trans or gay? Groomer nonsense. Anything other than Christian and he could fearmonger about their foreign religions.

Literally the only identity he can’t exploit is christian, straight, white men and they’re the ones who keep trying to kill him.

merc ,

I don’t understand the point they’re trying to make. “The United States is the only modern civilization in the world left alone”? What does that even mean? Does he/she think that in the past all these countries were powerful civilizations all at the same time? When Rome (Italy) was powerful, Greece was already past its prime (a.k.a. it was a “shithole”). Rome was so much better than Greece that some prominent Greek people arranged to have themselves sold into temporary bondage / slavery to Romans because once they became freed from that bondage they gained Roman citizenship.

The New Kingdom of Egypt existed between the 16th century BC and the 11th century BC. It overlapped a little bit with the Greek empire, which started around 1200 BC. That powerful Egyptian empire was long gone by the time of the Romans, which is how we ended up with Mark Antony, a Roman, in charge of the “shithole” eastern provinces, which included Egypt under its queen Cleopatra, a Macedonian / Greek descended from a companion of Alexander the Great. Egypt gave way to Greece which gave way to Rome.

In more recent times, Before WWI Great Britain was the world’s largest empire, and by the end of WWII the reins had been handed by the new upstart, the USA. When the US empire crumbles, someone else will be the next major world power. That’s just how things go. Of course the past empires look like “shitholes” whereas the current empire looks powerful. Once the US is replaced as a world power, it will look like a shithole too.

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (arstechnica.com)

My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk...

merc ,

Yeah, I was going to say that we know that Ea-nasir’s copper was shitty.

Obviously not everything from 1750 BC survived, but we do know that certain mediums are more likely to stand the test of time than others. Something physical with the writing carved in? That will probably last. Something with pigment on vellum, that won’t be quite as good, but you can store a lot more information per kg. Something involving bits? That won’t last even a quarter century. Something involving bits stored using magnetism and retrieved using mechanical motion? Good luck keeping that for even a decade.

But, the thing we’ve shown will 100% stand the test of time is keeping the information flowing, though at the cost of some degradation. In the past, this was one generation telling stories to the next. When that happens, not only does the information get passed on, the language used is subtly updated in time with the evolution of the language. You don’t need to learn Akkadian cuneiform to read it, it’s available in whatever the modern language is. Similarly, if digital files keep getting passed around, it doesn’t matter if the original came on a floppy disk, and floppy disk readers are now gone. The file exists, stored in whatever medium is current. But, you get degradation with this process too. Music might be turned into mp3s with some data getting lost. Photos might be resized, cropped, recompressed, etc.

If I wanted something to be preserved exactly as-is for centuries, I’d carve it into a non-precious metal (so nobody melted it down). If I wanted something to be easily accessible for centuries, I’d try to share it as widely as possible to keep it “in motion” and in a format that was constantly up to date.

merc ,

To me, this is just another story of the music industry’s technical incompetence.

Even in the 1990s, everyone would have known that hard drives were not a long-term archival storage solution. This is like crumpling up a piece of paper, tossing it in the corner, then being upset decades later when your “archival solution” had issues.

merc ,

A bunch of paper tossed into a corner could get wet, mouldy, get munched on by rats, etc. But, I know what you mean. Spinning plates full of magnetized bits with a connector technology that only lasts a decade at most is hardly going to be reliable, even if stored under ideal conditions.

Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?

Kamala Harris running a damn near flawless campaign, with just a month 1/2 of campaigning. She’s been holding rallies nonstop with Tim Walz & not making her talking points about her race or gender like Hillary. She’s offering expanded healthcare, reinvestments back into public housing, wants to take on corporate greed,...

merc ,

gave the odds 65-35 or so, in Clinton’s favor

I don’t think people realize how close that means the race was. 50/50 is like a coin flip. 35% is like rolling a six-sided die and getting either a 1 or a 2. It’s not the most likely outcome, but it’s not a surprising result either.

merc ,

It’s propaganda. But, it’s not just propaganda, it’s effective propaganda.

The fact that it’s so effective is somewhat new and very concerning. We have to understand why it’s effective if there’s any hope of eventually stopping it. And, it’s effective not just because the propaganda is well crafted, it’s effective because there’s a whole system that immerses the audience in it and never lets them see an alternative point of view.

In North Korea the only information you get is information specifically selected by the state. The US free market and first amendment was supposed to be a shield against that sort of propaganda. Unfortunately, while people have the right to find other forms of media, a lot of people want the comfort of living inside their own media bubble. Then the propaganda channel tells them that every other source of media is full of lies, and controlled by the jews, and who knows what else, and those people get even more locked in to their propaganda source. Then they’re told that scientists are getting rich (ha!) by selling out, so you can’t trust scientific papers. So, you can’t trust the government, the media, scientists, doctors, schools… you can only trust them.

Then they’re told that if they ever do try to do their own research, they’re not going to get results because of censorship. Some censorship exists. Sometimes it’s formal, sometimes it’s informal, like YouTube taking down videos that hurt their bottom line, or cause them headaches. But, the convenient thing about claiming that information is being censored is that it’s unprovable or “unfalsifiable”. You can’t prove that something that doesn’t exist was censored because you can’t prove it ever existed in the first place. And, of course, when an idiot is told that information on “turbo cancer” is being censored, they search for it and get no results, that just reinforces their belief that the news is being censored.

Add to that that the same group that wants to lock people into a pipeline of disinformation also wants to defund schools and universities. You can’t hope that someone can learn the truth from a teacher or a professor if the school no longer exists. You can’t hope that the next generation learns critical thinking in high school if the high school is defunded and shut down.

Big tech companies making their platforms extremely engaging is yet another element in this shitty soup. Most of these companies actually employ mostly liberal people, and the culture is at least somewhat left of center. But, they get their money by keeping people engaged, which means feeding them things that are shocking, angering, etc. That keeps people in their bubbles, and keeps them from engaging their critical thinking abilities.

The end result is you get people living in bubbles, listening to, watching and reading news that makes them feel good because it reinforces their existing biases. They cut off people in their lives who have dissenting views because either they’re angry about that person’s views, or it’s just too much of a headache to constantly fight with them. Social media keeps them in a bubble that keeps them engaged, and keeps them seeing the same point of view over and over. And so-on.

Because the whole situation is so complicated, it’s not going to be easy to reverse. It’s not just a matter of shutting down Fox News, or Newsmax or MSNBC or any other propaganda fountain. It’s also going to have to involve breaking up tech monopolies, or at least removing their Section 230 protection for their editorial decisions. It’s also going to require major educational system reforms, ensuring that all kids go to schools that teach critical thinking skills, and because this is the US that will involve major fights over property taxes and religious freedom. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be possible.

merc ,

Thank you for proving that the left lives in a bubble just like the right.

merc ,

I just love that in a world with Power Delivery (PD) they decided that the best way to indicate Display Port (DP) was to have an ambiguous symbol involving a P and a D.

merc ,

Yeah, Display Port is old, but I’ve never seen that P and D symbol before, or at least never noticed it. And, even if it existed before Display Port over USB, you’d think that that potential confusion was a good opportunity to come up with a new logo for something that would be put next to a USB port.

It’s almost as if having all these different features would be easier to differentiate if they had different physical shapes.

I think the goal was always that you’d only ever need one type of port and one type of cable and that that port and cable could do anything. Unfortunately, because there are so many revisions and so many features are optional, you’ve now got a situation where the port is the right shape, the cable fits into the port, but you can’t get the thing to work without reading the fine print, or without decoding obscure logos.

merc ,

If you’re going to forbid any 2-letter initialism because it might have naughty connotations, you’re not going to be left with many options.

merc ,

COBOL

merc ,

Noone should of aloud this code to go out the door. Atleast alot of other people people probably complained aswell, so your apart of a bigger group, incase you were worried.

spoilerAnd yes, this was painful to type.

merc ,

I miss Allie’s blog alot.

merc ,

Your well come.

merc ,

Also, “piracy” or “copyright infringement” isn’t theft in any sense.

A key element of theft is that you deprive the rightful owner of something. You now have it and they no longer do. What makes it wrong is that the person who should have it no longer does. It’s not that you have it. That’s why the punishment for “mischief” where someone completely destroys something belonging to someone else is similar to the punishment for the theft of that same object.

Copyright infringement is breaking the rule that the state imposed giving someone the exclusive right to control the copying of something. You’re not depriving anyone of anything tangible when you infringe a copyright. They still have the original, they still have any copies they made, any copies they gave out or sold are still where they were. The only thing you’re doing is violating the rule that gave them exclusive control. If you’re depriving someone of anything, it’s depriving them of the opportunity they might have had to make money from selling a copy.

If anything, copyright infringement is more similar to trespassing than to theft. Just like copyright infringement, trespassing involves not allowing someone to control who accesses their property. If you sneak onto someone’s campground property and have a bonfire party, the person loses the opportunity to rent out the campground for the bonfire, and any money they might have received for doing that. But, if you sneak in and sneak out and leave no trace, you could argue that nobody is harmed.

merc ,

Ah, I would say that is worse than piracy, since you deprive them of the ground for a time.

Maybe, in my mind I was picturing a situation where someone had lots of property and didn’t realize that anything had happened. I see your point though, that in theory you’re depriving them of the use of it whereas with copyright infringement there isn’t even a second where they can’t enjoy their own property. They only potentially lose out on a sale.

Sneaking into a concert that isn’t full is probably a better analogy. You get the experience of the concert without paying for it, and the venue owner maybe loses out on a sale without knowing it.

merc ,

its

merc ,

I don’t think Linux Bros will ever find a way to appeal to women newcomers. I think it will take a company that can afford to hire UI/UX designers, marketing people, etc.

But, that’s hard because there’s a chicken / egg situation. Selling a Linux-based computer to the general public is going to be very difficult because of the network effects around Mac and Windows machines. Everyone else uses them and so there are people you can ask for help, there are software vendors who make stuff for the platform (also with nice UIs meant for normal people). I can only see someone spending money to make a mass-market friendly Linux in some limited circumstances.

One situation where a company might make a truly user-friendly Linux distribution is if a company like Valve decided to make a game console. They already have the Steam Deck which is doing really well, but nobody’s going to be doing their taxes on a Steam Deck (although they could). But, if they made a desktop-replacement game console that could both play games and also act as a normal home PC, they could afford to spend the money needed to sand the rough edges off the experience.

Another situation might be if a big country mandated Linux for something, either for government computers or for kids in schools. They’d probably have to have a support contract for that, and whoever was supporting those systems would want them to be as user-friendly as possible so they didn’t have to deal with as many support issues. So, if say Brazil mandated that all government employees switch to Linux, that could result in some company making a Linux desktop experience that was comparable to Windows.

merc ,

Most of the time the fact there’s a beginner-friendly option doesn’t mean that there aren’t also options for more advanced users. This is especially true with Linux.

On phones both Apple and Google lock things down so much that your options are limited. That’s mostly an issue with monopolies not with phones. Macs have a bit more freedom than phones by default, Windows has a bit more than that, then you can go back to Mac if you’re willing to hack around and run QT apps and so on. But, I can’t imagine a Linux distro that didn’t let you ditch a beginner-friendly UI for something more powerful.

I’m still hoping that the success of the Steam Deck will get the ball rolling. Steam Deck success might lead to more games that work really well under Linux. That means less of a reason to keep using Windows. More people using Linux might lead to more software being fully available for Linux, which might get more people to use it. I still think eventually you’re going to need non-hobbyists to come in and smooth a lot of the rough edges. But, stage 1 in that whole process is getting more people using Linux, and maybe that’s actually happening now.

(It also doesn’t hurt that Microsoft keeps shooting themselves in the foot with things like the Cloudstrike bug, and the Windows Recall snoopware failure. Long may that continue.)

merc ,

Greater Catalonia.

merc ,

So, pre WWII that was more-or-less East Prussia. Does anybody know how Russian it is these days, in terms of language and culture? Is there any remaining hint of Prussianness vs Russianness? I would think that having no land route connecting it to the rest of Moscow might result in it having its own identity. But, I don’t know enough about its history to know if any of the people there feel a connection to the pre-WWII identity.

OTOH, sometimes you get the opposite effect, like people in the Falkland Islands feeling even stronger connections to Britain than a lot of the people actually living in the British Isles.

Also, since it’s the home of the Black Sea fleet, I imagine that means a lot of Russians in the navy moving there, which would tend to exert a strong Russian cultural influence on the area.

merc ,

That looks more like feudalism.

For Capitalism there should be multiple different money scoops, some better designed than others. There should also be a greased-up rope that leads from the unicycle-bar to the top, showing that it’s theoretically possible to rise to a different class, it’s just practically impossible.

merc ,

There was a quote from one of them the other day talking about being unable to sleep well because he’s constantly afraid of people coming after him for what he’s got. If only there were a way to remove that target from your back…

merc ,

It’s so lazy to describe capitalism backsliding towards feudalism as “late stage capitalism”. If capitalism actually had “stages”, you’d have to progress forward to reach later stages. Backsliding towards the feudalism that birthed capitalism isn’t some kind of “late stage”, it’s capitalism failing and feudalism reasserting itself.

merc ,

Sure, sure.

merc ,

Imagine thinking political theory involves selection pressures.

merc ,

Does GPS really require an internet connection? I know it uses the radio, which kills the battery, but AFAIK you can get GPS without Internet access. For example, I’ve downloaded offline areas for Google Maps and have tracked my location that way, while traveling in countries where I didn’t have a SIM allowing me to access the Internet.

merc ,

I haven’t gotten into the Beta, so I haven’t played it, but I’m curious, is the game designed so you can’t do anything without walking, or is it so that you can creep along at a snail’s pace without walking but to actually make real progress you have to walk?

It seems to me like you could use the psychology of a Pay To Win / Microtransactions game to motivate people but by using walking instead of money.

merc ,

That’s not really a common situation though. Sure, people might use the BSD license on something they did as a hobby, or just to learn things. But, the scenario described here is more like:

A group of people all have the same little problem, and they work together to come up with a solution for it. They solve the main problem, but their solution has a few rough edges and there are similar problems they didn’t solve, but they’re not motivated to keep working on it because what they have is good enough for their current needs. So, they put out some flyers describing how to do what they did, and inviting anybody who’s interested to keep working on improving their fix.

A company comes along, sees the info, and builds a tool that solves the problem but not quite as well, and for a small fee. They spend tons of money promoting their solution, drowning out the little pamphlet that the original guys did. They use as much IP protection as possible, patenting their designs, trademarking the look and feel, copyrighting the instructions, etc. Often they accidentally(?) issue legal threats or takedown notices to people who are merely hosting the original design or original pamphlets.

Maybe the original inventor didn’t get screwed in this scenario, but you could say that the public did.

merc ,

Yep. You wouldn’t have adventurous magicians going out and casting spells against dragons. The variety of spells known by D&D type wizards wouldn’t even be a thing. You’d have a guy who was a specialist in ritual-casting flame spells whose job consisted of continuously heating up cauldrons of metal ore so it could be smelted. If he was jumped on his commute home, he couldn’t fight the attackers off with “fireball” or something. Maybe that was covered in school decades ago, but he’s spent his entire career doing nothing but that one smelting spell Or, you’d have the “Gate” wizard whose entire job was to keep up a portal for their entire 8 hour shift, so that tourists could pass back and forth.

merc ,

I think the real issue with driver development is that almost nobody ever has a reason to do it. It’s a much more constrained way of programming compared to normal programs, and isn’t necessary unless you need to talk to hardware or something. So, nobody has an excuse to learn it.

merc ,

Yes… as I said. But, most people use hardware provided by other people, which means other people write the drivers.

merc ,

No, it abolished slavery with an exception carved out for punishment for crime.

The difference is important. Saying it was “made a punishment” suggests that before the amendment that option didn’t exist. It did. The 13th amendment just clarified that that use was allowed to continue.

But, it’s also worth noting that in the late 1700s and early 1800s imprisonment was uncommon, and a lot of crimes just carried the death penalty. In England, pickpocketing more than the modern equivalent of about $40 could result in a death penalty. Same with cutting down trees, or stealing from a rabbit warren. For less serious crimes there were the stocks, whipping, and fines. England had an option that wasn’t available to the US: transportation. Australia was originally a penal colony, and the people sent there were forced to labour until their sentences were up.

Prisons (along with their work programs) were seen as a new, progressive idea that could potentially reform a prisoner, rather than just killing / punishing them.

merc ,

However, it’s our late stage capitalism

It’s not capitalism. It’s rent-seeking, which is what came before capitalism. The “Free Market” that Adam Smith talked about wasn’t a market free from regulations, it was a market free from economic rents, free from monopolies, etc. The big problems we’re seeing now aren’t because we have too much capitalism, it’s because the capitalism we have is shifting more towards rent-seeking, monopolies, artificial scarcity, etc. It’s basically feudalism. In a proper capitalist system you have competition. That’s the “free market”. If someone doesn’t like the decisions a business is making, they’ll switch to another one.

Companies can only get away with the kinds of things Disney tries when they don’t have to worry about competition. In other words, it’s no longer a capitalist system, it’s a rent-seeking business. Disney is built around its intellectual property, and IP is nothing but rent-seeking. Nobody can compete with Disney and make a better Star Wars movie because Disney owns the rights to anything Star Wars related.

merc ,

If you don’t step foot on Disneyland or Disneyworld it’s pretty easy to avoid. Just find alternative sources for all their media instead of paying them.

merc ,

Weird. Where do you live?

merc ,

If it is under the Disney umbrella, I’d bet that Disney World, Disney Springs, the Raglan Road Irish Pub, and Disney+ are all legally separate companies.

Probably, but is a customer expected to know that? What if you’re inside Disney World itself and you’re injured on the It’s a Small World ride, and then Disney says “oh, that’s not us, that’s owned and operated by ‘It’s A Small World LLC’”.

Part of the attraction of the whole Disney Springs area is that it’s under the Disney umbrella. As a visitor, you know that the company is going to keep everything clean, make sure that everything is up to high standards, etc. You’re probably going to pay a bit more to go to a store / restaurant there than a typical strip mall, but in exchange you get part of the Disney experience. It’s pretty reasonable to assume that that will also include restaurants that produce high quality food and that ensure that someone’s allergy needs are met.

Video of Eric Schmidt blaming remote work for Google’s woes mysteriously vanishes (techcrunch.com)

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption,...

merc ,

Almost everyone who starts a new tech company has worked in a different one.

Yes, most people have previously held jobs.

And sometimes Google sues former employees.

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