They’d replace affiliate link cookies with their own

Practically every coupon site does this too though, as do other coupon extensions.

The fact that BugMeNot and RetailMeNot grew so huge is interesting. They were created by two Australians, and for a while were only popular in Australia.

Good points. I was using KDE with both and didn’t have any issues (even though Debian’s version of KDE was older) but that might not work in all scenarios.

I don’t have compiled things in the home folder - they go in either /usr/local/bin or /opt.

Install a few and see which one you like the most. You can install several distros at the same time and they’ll all appear in the boot menu. When I was deciding which distro to use on my laptop, I was dual booting Debian and Fedora, with one /home partition shared between both of them.

Mint and Fedora are good choices for a beginner.

Fedora tends to “just work” too. Some manufacturers that support Ubuntu also support Fedora for customers that need a “RedHat-ish” distro instead of a “Debian-ish” one.

Shout out to DeArrow, from the same developer as SponsorBlock. It replaces video titles and thumbnails with community-provided non-clickbait versions. Available as a browser extension, and is also built-in to several third-party YouTube apps, such as SmartTube.

That’s correct.

and California (where this lawsuit is coming from)

Based on what I’m reading in the post (since I don’t use Discord), it’s still obstructing the cancelation flow and making the user go through more steps, which is illegal in California.

I have this bookmarked from a few years ago, back when PayPal only supported Symantec VIP: https://gist.github.com/jarbro/ca7c9d3eebba1396d53b4a7228575948. I haven’t tried it for a while, but it should still work.

If you want to self-host chat, Conduit (implementation of a Matrix server) is really nice. Much better than the official Matrix implementation (Synapse).

I had a negative experience when initially setting up my account, because of TikTok. This group of kids who called themselves “Fidelity Boyz” discovered that you could deposit a fake check and immediately withdraw the money.

So many people did this that they had to severely lock things down. For most customers, money transferred in either via check or via ACH pull (telling Fidelity to take the money from an account at another bank), was subject to a 16 business day (three weeks and one day) hold. Direct deposits (e.g. paychecks) were not affected, and ACH pushes (when you tell another bank to send the money to Fidelity) were eventually fine too.

It was a big pain. The money I transferred was in limbo for a long time, after I had already switched all my auto-pays over to Fidelity, so I had to switch them all back until the money cleared.

Now that that’s over, it’s great. I love that they reimburse ATM fees worldwide, and I’m a big fan of their basket portfolios product since it makes it so easy to rebalance a portfolio. Saves me from having to manually do a bunch of calculations, and I love that it has a fixed monthly price instead of being percentage based like roboadvisors.

I’ve got one. It’s nice. The cash is automatically invested in a money market account, which is a bit like a high yield savings account.

In case you weren’t aware, Symantec VIP is just TOTP-OATH in a fancy coat. You can extract the secret and use it with any TOTP app. I use Authenticator Pro (now called Stratum) because it’s open-source and has a watch app.

it’s hard to infiltrate telecom systems like S7

Telecom systems can be (and are) infiltrated though, which is what the FBI is warning about.

SS7 is very insecure. See this video, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y

is already using TOTP.

A lot of things are moving to phishing-resistant technologies like FIDO2/WebAuthn or passkeys. All my important accounts, like my password manager, are secured using Yubikeys (one that I keep with me and one as a backup in a secure place).

This is extremely common with free VPNs. The way they make money is by selling your internet connection to anyone that has money and wants to use it. Having a large pool of residential IPs to use as proxies/VPNs is very valuable to criminals because traffic is less likely to be flagged as malicious compared to traffic coming from networks and data centers that are commonly used for malicious activity (like M247).

I also only play games offline, and these days it’s usually on my Xbox rather than on PC, but I’ve been following this since I’m a software engineer and it’s interesting from a development perspective. Kernel-mode anti-cheat has a lot of similarities with malware/rootkits.

Anti-cheat systems already have to make changes, since Microsoft have plans to significantly restrict kernel mode access after the major Crowdstrike issues earlier in the year. Kernel mode code is very invasive, difficult to get correct, and can result in major security holes or stability issues if not written correctly.

A bug in userland code may crash that one app. A bug in kernel mode code can (and often does) cause bluescreens, that people blame Microsoft for. I’m sure they’re tired of being blamed for buggy code written by other companies.

Running the anti cheat code in userland will (in theory) make it easier to run on other OSes too.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-paves-the-way-for-Linux-gaming-success-with-plan-that-would-kill-kernel-level-anti-cheat.888345.0.html

The fundraiser looks super sketchy and we don’t even know who is running it, so a lot of people probably don’t trust it.