• 12 Posts
  • 190 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • This, and lay out the details like ELI5 and as an unemotional objective thing with detail.

    I have received many flags to sort out that take more than a few minutes to figure out the tone and meaning. I strongly believe people have a right to be stupid, wrong, a bit rude, or to have a bad day. I need to know exactly why the comment is more than this in a well laid out fashion. If you think it is a pattern with the individual, prove it. If some subtle phrase carries more meaning than I may realize, say so. I want to make people feel welcome on all fronts with a Hippocratic framework of “first, do no harm.” At the same time, a visible mod is a bad mod. I will read every detail. I will give the benefit of the doubt in every possible case. I won’t be passive to bigotry, but I will allow an asshole that does no harm. I’m but one insignificant mod. I care a whole lot more as a person, but I act conservatively as a mod. When flagging something imagine the person on the other end is working on some big project, stopping their day, and taking a half hour to sort out the details, thinking them through, and taking action. It usually takes me longer to shift gears and do this in practice. I’ll usually send a message explaining why I did or did not do anything as well.


  • (47m/8b) × 100 = 0.5875% of the world. Those numbers are likely total accounts as well and nowhere near the real active users. I bet many of these are also systems with multiple users or users with multiple accounts. Reported numbers are usually unverified and inflating them as much as possible is in the best interest of Sony on may fronts.

    It is neither here nor there. I used to love the first few generations of PS stuff, but I really see no reason for consoles like these any more. I owned everything I played back then. I find it rather pathetic that my right to own has been stolen.

    I’m presently taking a snack break from Cataclysm DDA after tracking down foods with better iron content in the game. Under that I have a bash script and Emacs running with my mods to the game. I’ve been playing all afternoon and making little odds and ends for the game. Sorry if my perspective from a non dystopian space rubs the wrong way. What I’m doing isn’t for everyone, but if everyone had some better self control and the character to stand up for themselves, you will find that you get your rights back from these asshats, or you will get them from the next generation of platforms that rise from the ashes. The only terms that actually matter are the ones you’re willing to put money into. I back up that statement. I’m on a 12th gen Intel with 16 GB GPU. I would be playing AAA titles but there are no game manufacturers. I don’t care if I’m the only person unwilling to adopt feudalism and serve some tyrant overlord on their yacht. So be it.




  • If you run a whitelist firewall, you never see CAPTCHA’s. The vast majority on the internet have nothing to do with the website you’re visiting. When the website cannot redirect you to the CAPTCHA host site, it just continues on to the intended destination. The only way I ever see a CAPTCHA is if it is hosted on the same server as the site I am trying to visit, and that is very nearly never. I bet the vast majority of them are actually some advertiser collecting more data to mine in addition to whatever fingerprinting they can collect. Ads only work by opening a hidden frame that is basically another browser tab where you then visit the ad server’s website. This is no different than visiting them in a browser tab. They can access everything available to fingerprint. If you’re using anything Google controls that means they know everything about you down to how dirty your underwear is right now. /s÷2










  • I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.


  • While it is outside of the scope of most people’s abilities, the bios is on a flash chip that can be removed, read, and disassembled. I’m no expert here by any stretch. That said, my usual check with software is to simply check for http in strings. Even with a binary like a bios ROM, I can pass it through the $ strings command to look for any addresses. No matter what kind of malicious nonsense the software is doing, it has very low value unless it can dial out.

    My lack of a complete understanding in this area is why I use a whitelist firewall for most of my devices. It is also the ultimate ad and tracker blocker as I only visit the places I chose to access. I don’t conform to the lowest developer’s ethics and will simply stop using any site or service that fails to be direct and transparent.

    The thing is, even most whitelist firewalls are inadequate. They only filter incoming packets. That is really an inadequate model in most cases now, especially with local large language models where it is impossible to verify their capabilities. My reason for all thus bla bla bla is to say, a whitelist on a trusted 3rd party device is a PITA but an effective low barrier way to prevent any bad actor from communicating with the questionable device. It still leaves you open to a potential situation where the device could be sending a packet stream to the outside world over something like UDP.

    Otherwise, the main thing I would be concerned with, if it is a UEFI device, are the UEFI secure boot keys. Whomever holds these keys has a lower ring access than the operating system kernel. Anything happening in kernel or user space is effectively under their control.

    Anyways, the main way to monitor and check the device is a trusted 3rd party router that blocks any unauthorized connections. This can be challenging to setup with something like OpenWRT. There is a forked OpenWRT device running a version that makes a lot of this easier called PC WRT. That can make a whitelist fw a little easier than sorting out NF Tables and scripting a whitelist firewall.



  • Most cases have ridiculous nonsense for cooling though. Laptops usually have considerable thermal engineering, but kinda set the threshold of real hardware requirements.

    I was just given an old “gaming rig” someone didn’t want that had water cooling, 9 fans, a cobweb of LED wiring, and the most obese ABS panels attached to the sheet metal case… The thing works fine even when overclocked with no fans except the one built into the power supply and GPU. Only the one in the GPU cycles on enough to be audible… This guy had a freaking harrier jet taking off in the room beside him for a decade.