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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • I actually haven’t seen that particular argument. It’s not that Linux itself is unreliable. It’s that there’s a harder learning curve for trouble shooting issues when you do have them. Linux has less guides for things because it doesn’t have the market share.

    I use Linux (fedora), and it’s mostly just fine. I like it. But if I tried to use it on my work machine running the apps I need in a VM or wine or similar and something went wrong, I wouldn’t have anything to fall back on to help me figure it out.

    I will say that a lot of people who use windows could probably just use Linux and everything would be fine. But unreliability isn’t what I’ve been hearing about when people explain why they don’t switch.



  • Some extension cords absolutely do have circuit breakers, I know this because we use them at work for some of our heavy duty equipment. I also know for a fact that fused link extension cords were their predecessor and you can buy both on Amazon still so I know they exist.

    Further I was not saying don’t use an extension cord with a welder. I was saying the correct gauged wire for that extension cord may be necessary to carry the load.

    The point of bringing up 110 vs 120 volts was to point out that more voltage = more push. More push through a smaller circuit than is recommended means more heat.

    Amperage is the draw, and it’s important because most devices are rated by draw rather than voltage, so what I said does make sense in that context. I wasn’t trying to say they were the same thing. The reason they’re rated in amperage is because the amperage is what kills you, and because thats what the safety devices are rated in. That’s how much of a draw they can withdtande before they break the circuit.

    I was also pretty exhausted when I responded so my explanation barely makes sense even to me, but I do see where I was going with that. Have you ever seen one of those old brown extension cords with three outlets? They’re usually 2 prong (don’t have a third prong for ground). They also don’t have any of the fail-safes that new extension cords do have.

    While I was not specifically talking about daisy-chaining power strips, I wanted to make it clear that even using multiple extension cords in a daisy-chain manner adds significant resistance to the circuit and with enough push and a big enough amperage appliance it absolutely is a fire hazard.

    I’m not sure where you got that I said you shouldn’t use an extension cord with a welder. I was saying you don’t need an extension cord worthy of powering a welder safely in order to power a lamp. But a smaller lower rated extension cord that works for a small indoor appliance is not up to the task and would be dangerous to use with a welder without the proper protections.

    https://a.co/d/j4LCF4t

    https://a.co/d/aZ3Nc8I



  • The short answer is rating changed. We got more and more devices that required higher amperage ratings. So we went from 110 (which was what most homes were rated for in the 50’s) to 120. But if you happened to have an old extension cord lying around in your basement from before the change etc you absolutely could overload it.

    The real problem though is that some devices you might use an extension cord for (lets say a welder because I know from experience those require more power than a standard 20’ extension cord puts out), require a certain gauge of wire to carry that power. If that wire is too small or the power source is insufficient, it’s likely no electricity will flow (without flaws in the circuit).

    There are various kinds of extension cords made for various uses. Longer = more money, fused = more money, larger wire = more money. More insulation/weather proof plugs = more money.

    You probably don’t need a big beefy extension cord for the lamp in the hallway. But you might need it for your weedwacker.

    But if, say you hooked up an outlet dedicated for something like a washer/dryer. And you used the correct extension cord to connect to that outlet. Now let’s say you attach an older extension cord or power strip to that extension cord. One that doesn’t have an internal breaker to trip (there’s definitely a fair number that didn’t, back in the day). It would be an astronomically bad idea to attach your welder (or any high draw device) to that circuit. You absolutely can and will let the smoke out of your wires and where there is smoke there is fire.


  • Yeah. I’m not sure it matters much that their content is similar. Using the DMCA system for something it clearly wasn’t intended for and then furthering that with what is ultimately a frivolous lawsuit (when you’re both copying a rich and famous influencer yourselves) is ridiculous especially with the Amazon algorithm giving them similar or the same items to schill to the public. This lawsuit is dumb (regardless of the minutiae). But it highlights how much of the algorithm builds these people’s “brands”.




  • Anti-viruses flag a lot of things. It is called a False Positive (or sometimes a “Someone didn’t pay us for an exception” Positive but…). It has nothing to do with something hooking into a kernel or just being a program you run in userspace.<<

    A layman who doesn’t know why the program was flagged and doesnt necessarily know the name of the Anti-cheat program or just hits delete all (which is probably thousands and thousands of people), you’re telling me you wouldn’t be extremely upset if a game you spent $60+ on suddenly wouldn’t start or your account go auto banned because the anti-cheat software has been deleted by an antivirus program by mistake?

    Genshin Impact’s anti-cheat was literally used to stop anti-virus programs running on people’s computers and mass deploy ransomware,<<

    I assume you are referring to https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/research/22/h/ransomware-actor-abuses-genshin-impact-anti-cheat-driver-to-kill-antivirus.html<<

    You don’t have to assume. I linked the article.

    Which… I’ll just raise you https://www.polygon.com/22898895/dark-souls-pvp-exploit-multiplayer-servers-remote-code-execution which allows for ridiculously dangerous RCEs without needing any kernel level hooks at all. So…<<

    You have failed once again to establish what this has to do with the original complaint, which is that kernel level anti-cheat allowed this security breach vector. And it has everything to do with the quoted text just below this from one of my previous comments:

    and the gaming industry as a whole is extremely lax about the security of their users.<<

    I choose not to spend my money at companies that enable this kind of crap in their games.<<

    I mean this in the most inflammatory and blunt way imaginable:

    Nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody gives a shit about me either.<<

    We are two people. We don’t fucking matter. What matters is the people who play every single Riot game ever made for thousands of hours each. THEY spend money.<<

    This doesn’t explain regulating industries. It doesn’t explain why so many companies (including game development companies) spend so much money lobbying for the right to be free of regulations that should be covered by privacy law but aren’t because these companies don’t want that. And if you can’t see the correlation here then you’re a bit far gone because if they can lobby so can we. It has to start somewhere.

    Like I said before: it is about accepting risk. Knowingly or unknowingly, it doesn’t matter any more than telling your parents that you must have gotten a virus from that pokemon cheat code rather than the hardcore pornography that came in exe form for some reason.<<

    You don’t want to compromise your security more than you already do. Cool. Most people playing these games are fine with that if it reduces the odds that they have their free time ruined for them by aimbots and wallhacks. And… clearly there is merit to this approach if studios are willing to pay for it.<<

    I would argue that the vast majority don’t know. People like to act like gamers are in some way really tech savvy and they just know all the ins and outs of all that goes into the game and what is installed on their system. But the opposite is true for most people. They buy a game or program from a source they don’t have a reason to distrust and they install it and give it whatever permissions it asks for. This is the main reason I’m arguing that people absolutely should be educated and they won’t get that education from game developers because for the most part those devs prefer it this way.

    Because, at the end of the day? We’ve been through this. Back then it was DRM. DRM was bad and DRM was horrible and EVERYONE had a super obscure russian (?) cd rom drive that Starforce would brick. And the same arguments of “ideologically this is bad and it could ruin things for a very small percentage of people” came up. And the answer was always “I refuse to buy anything”<<

    And… everyone else DID buy things. The genuinely bad shit like starforce went away in favor of activation model DRMs (which continues to this day) but also… alternatives were actually presented. Steam is basically a variation of GOO (which is also basically what GoG does) but Steam has the added benefit of people being scared shitless of getting caught by Uncle Gabe and having their account taken away.<<

    People bought things with DRM because they didn’t know, or there was not another option. And DRM was a significant thing even before the internet was a widespread thing which is why once it got it’s foothold it kept it. The average consumer didn’t know and wasn’t intending to pirate anything so they didn’t care.

    And that is what we need here. Not asinine requests for politicians who understand nothing to solve this for us. We need actual alternatives that work better AND are less invasive.<<

    Why is it asinine to tell the government I want a public industry regulated to protect my right to privacy? Because that’s what it comes down to. It’s my right to not just privacy but security of information. This would never be a question if a company were requesting it but when people do it it’s somehow problematic?

    As an aside: I increasingly notice that you say very inflammatory things based on a misunderstanding or misconception of the thing you are criticizing. That is a bad habit in general but it is a REALLY bad thing when it comes to cybersecurity (which this basically is). Because it gives you a false sense of security when you think you are following best practices but are actually spewing nonsense and ignoring all your other risk vectors.<<

    Education wasn’t your goal as far as I can tell because you’re extremely combative. You make a lot of statements that you don’t back up with anything. You assume a level of knowledge that you probably shouldn’t. And you get upset when the other person doesn’t understand, completely ignore their questions and points in favor of whatever crusade you happen to be on, and then double-down while ignoring the clarifying questions they ask.

    There’s not going to be a discussion between devs and consumers if we don’t educate people on what’s going on. That’s literally what we’re talking about. And you seem to assume that I’m just adverse to that without taking into account that I think we should have both things. We as consumers should have open dialog with the industries that rely on us to buy products. But we should also very much expect that our government that we pay taxes to regulates industries accordingly.

    Because we’ve had so many data breaches in every industry but the ones in gaming have been pretty abundant and that’s not okay. You seem to want to act like nothing is connected to anything else and that’s a good way to go through life without getting anything done and with a giant target painted on your back.

    I can’t assume that every consumer is like me. You shouldn’t either. And just because they got rid of other DRM that you view as worse doesn’t mean that we’re in the clear.


  • The thing is though, if a drone is spying on you the police have to do something about it. And if they can’t or won’t then you document everything and when they show up saying you did something, you tell them “so you found the guy who’s been stalking me via drone?” /S for obvious reasons, but these laws are going to have to change sooner rather than later because there’s a lot going on that technically isn’t legal with drones but can’t be prosecuted by the legal system because of this law.

    Add that to the military airspace drones keep violating (not under FAA jurisdiction) and eventually this is going to be a problem that the government can’t ignore.


  • What is your argument here? Is it that Anti-cheat is good? Is it that Anti-cheat is necessary? Is it that it’s bad but you feel my information is incorrect? Because you’re all over the place. “I’ll raise you” is you literally saying, malware can be spread without anti-cheat at kernel level so anti-cheat at kernel level is okay? And it’s not relevant to the conversation because it’s not about whether or not some threat actor can use other means to compromise a system or several thousand of them.

    Like. Even if you feel you needed to add context you actually seem to be intentionally using inflammatory language in order to in some way try to discredit not my reasoning but my stance that Anti-cheat is invasive and should in fact see opposition.

    My argument is that refusing to buy isn’t going to fix the problem and I thought that was obvious from what I said, but apparently not. So, the question originally was "is it time to take a stand (not as individuals, but as a group) against kernel level anti-cheat. And my answer is that it’s been time and bad things keep happening and have the potential to keep happening because of it, and no it doesn’t matter if it’s only a handful of users, especially if those users are rocking $3K worth of parts in a gaming rig.

    You’re suggesting that a security issue that is wholly ignored by both the public and the government as well as the industry that should be regulated is going to be fixed not by regulating it with laws and that’s extremely confusing give. The fact that we know it’s not how this works and “Uncle Gabe” has already implemented a solution and that solution is to make it apparent that games have kernel level anti-cheat so some of us are more informed. Because some random corp is going to do a better job than the government at regulating the industry.

    I’m not sure why you think that’s what’s going to happen or even how you might believe it’s any less of a pipe dream than these companies (Microsoft included) doing the right thing and safeguarding the data they are allowing access to. Anti-cheat at kernel level is running all the time regardless of whether you’re playing the game that has it or not. It’s not just one singular program. It’s all different ones because there’s not any regulation in this space to speak of. And companies don’t want there to be. Valve is not strong enough in this space to make this go away by themselves.

    People say crazy things about how powerful Valve has become in the PC gaming space. But while they have consumers generally on their side, Microsoft is older and has been in the space longer, and is definitely more powerful (money, connections, longevity of the business etc), and they have no real intentions of doing away with kernel level access for anti-cheat despite what few articles there were suggesting otherwise just after the crowdstrike fiasco.

    You’re right that corps don’t care about individuals. But they care about the masses because we’re the ones they exploit for money. That’s literally why any type of organized opposition from millions of people is successful at making any changes at all. So again, what point are you making here?

    Is your intent to educate? Is it to say that I’m wrong for saying we should organize against Anti-cheat at kernel level? Is it that you think you have a better idea of how this works, and what changes should be implemented? Are you for keeping Anti-cheat because you feel it serves a purpose?




  • We literally have a cloudstrike report giving direct examples of how bad it is potentially as a vector for malware. Additionally it doesn’t solve the problem it aims to solve, as reported by several outlets because it doesn’t stop hardware level cheating, just potentially stops scripts. So you could absolutely enable cheats through a device like a keyboard and mouse or controller and the Anti-cheat does nothing.

    Additionally though, I am not buying products with kernel level Anti-cheat and that is intentional, so I am not agreeing to the TOS or EULA of those games. If you add to this the fact that some games retroactively added kernel level anti-cheat, it’s bogus to assume that people are in the know or that they agreed to such things in the original TOS or EULA. Steam only recently made developers list kernel level anti-cheat on store pages for their game.

    Also, kernel level anti-cheat in single player games is just ridiculous and invasive.


  • You did not read what I wrote in my response and it shows. I have taken responsibility for my machine. I don’t buy games with kernal level anti-cheat. I specifically view them as an attack vector for malware. They started the cake vs fork argument and my response was directly related to them using such a poor expression for the context of the conversation we were having and therefore it took that to its logical conclusion based on the argument they made.

    Since you didn’t read and decided to downvote I am choosing to not discuss this with you further, having vetted the ingredients of your cake. Have a good day.