It also strongly encourages people to return their ballots in person likely because the GOP is already set to challenge mail-in ballots as “rigged”.

Buying a social media network: $40 billion

Buying a US election: $0.13 billion

Democracy is fucked.

If anyone is looking for an alternative firmware, check out Fresh Tomato: https://freshtomato.org/

Telegram requires a phone number too? I mean yeah there’s the option to use that blockchain phone number service, but you can do the same for Signal. 🤷

I barely watch YouTube as it is. Sometimes I have to watch a tutorial or review that I can’t find information on elsewhere, but literally every time I wish it was a blog post instead.

Then why can I buy a prepaid SIM with cash and no ID? I do this when travelling to the US because it’s cheaper than international roaming.

I’ve started using Obsidian with a kanban plugin, though any sufficient kanban style solution would work. I have a to-do column (aka backlog), an in-progress column, and a finished column. I add notes to the cards about what I did and I never delete stuff from the finished column so I can review if I need to re-open or re-do a task in the future.

Yes, I said in my original comment that it can’t universally parse and validate every HTML document. If they’re older pages that don’t do lots of crazy formatting then it’s not too hard to use regex as a first pass then take a second pass through the results to weed out the odd stuff.

I guess it depends on your definition of “parse”, but let me tell you it’s still very painful to deal with things like attributes appearing in any order inside of a tag so I definitely am not advocating to use regex to “read” (or whatever you want to call it) HTML.

I use regex in SQL to parse HTML stored in a database. It can’t universally parse and validate every HTML document, but it can still be used to find specific data like pulling out every link.

So if Spiderman got his powers from being bit by a radioactive spider… 🤔

They spelled “violate” wrong.

Well if Meta is the “industry leader” of tools designed to prevent this yet it’s still happening at a large scale, then he’s basically admitting that there is no way the industry can solve this. I hope they get legislated into the ground.

Yup, very true. There’s even the possibility of hardware level cheats, just like that new MSI monitor that analyzes the screen with AI. Imagine that but instead it’s a KVM switch like device that can “see” everything happening on the screen as well as the keyboard and mouse inputs. You could train it to recognize and track enemies in an FPS then add in some extra inputs to correct the aim every time you fire, or activate abilities in a MOBA automatically in response to enemy actions. I think this is what Gameshark might be trying to do. Short of requiring cryptographically secure input devices, the only way to detect this type of cheating would be behavioural.

I mean I’m not going to jump to the conclusion that they are definitely actively doing this, but more that if they openly admitted that their anti-cheat software has the ability to invisibly monitor everything on your computer from your browser to your password manager, then people would be way less accepting of it just because of the potential risk.

I find it contradictory how Riot’s own explanation contains the following two statements:

This isn’t giving us any surveillance capability we didn’t already have.

The problem here arises from the fact that code executing in kernel-mode can hook the very system calls we would rely on to retrieve our data, modifying the results to appear legitimate in a way we might have difficulty detecting.

If the first statement was true (which it’s not), then they shouldn’t need any additional capabilities offered by running at the kernel level to surveil the system to detect cheats. As they admit in the second statement though, it is exactly because cheats abuse the OS security model to gain capabilities to both monitor and interfere with the game in an invisible manner that they need to get those additional capabilities to invisibly monitor and interfere with other programs too. The best they can do is a pinky promise that they won’t abuse this power, but they don’t even give us that promise and instead insist they don’t actually have that power. That’s super suspect to me.

I hope people using cheating software understand the dire security consequences of installing and running that type of software too, especially in that it comes from very shady sources.

Yeah that’s true, I was thinking more of consoles but I suppose Steam doesn’t really have any bearing on that market. I guess the better equivalent for PC would be DRM free games where it’s downloadable, and could be backed up to physical media (not provided). 😅

I think the direct parallel was Netflix. It used to be the only platform of it’s kind with an extensive catalog, so it was a far easier sell for people to sign up and stay subscribed. Even at it’s peak though, Netflix never managed to kill off physical media because there are still fans who want to own that disc of their favorite TV show or movie that they could watch anywhere, anytime. Then when other media companies wanted to grab their share of streaming revenue by clawing back their stuff from Netflix and setting up their own smaller catalogs, thinking they would get the same retention that Netflix achieved, instead people started to play the subscription hopping game. In the wake of this, sales of physical media are even seeing an increase too.

I feel like Steam comes close to being the “Netflix” of games because even though it’s not literally streaming games and doesn’t use a subscription model, it still has an extensive catalog and acts as an alternative to owning physical copies of games which comes with both benefits and drawbacks. I’m pretty sure that if publishers keep trying to claw their stuff away from Steam though, that we’ll see a similar uptick in people returning to buying physical copies as a result.

What’s funny to me is the streaming model for media already has shown this won’t work out well for gaming companies. When a new game drops people will sign up for a month, binge it, then cancel their subscription. They could try and trickle out DLC to get people to stay subscribed, but unless the DLC is significant people will probably just wait a while until a bunch of DLC is available then binge it again.

Personally I can only focus on one or maybe two major games at a time so I’d be happy to only pay a small monthly fee to one major game company at a time over paying for several $80 AAA titles a month.

I’ve become a fan of KDE Neon. It’s based on Ubuntu LTS but with the the most up-to-date KDE release.