Hosting costs money. Theoretically (some) cryptocurrency can obfuscate that but… there is a reason graph problems got really popular again for a little bit.

But domain names also cost money. They also need to be registered to a person/company.

That is why a lot of torrent sites end up getting their domain stolen.

Also, all of this ignores the actual developers. But that is par for the course when it comes to discussing liability with open source projects.

Yeah. It is why I really like that Proton basically say "We will turn on you in an instant if we get a legal order. But here is what we’ll actually turn over and here is how you can minimize your vulnerability to that.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

Plenty of hosts and providers over the years have claimed to be super privacy oriented and blah blah blah. Once they get a legal request, they roll over. Because they aren’t going to prison for the customer anymore than they are going to prison for you.

Nope.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

What is the alternative?

Closed source “I swear this executable that will let you play all the games you want is legit” hosted on sourceforge or random websites that get hugged to death every day that ends in a y?

Also: it isn’t like that would stop this kind of legal action. MS/Github are barely a factor. It is the devs themselves getting the “hey, stop it or we’ll turn you into indentured servants” letters.

Jokes aside:

Nobody should ever play the first Lords of the Fallen. Probably one of the worst non-indie Souls games (and I played Code Vein…) with mediocre world building and even worse boss fights. Iron Pineapple has a great video where he basically tears into it and points out why it is bad.

Part of it is the same “human speech” aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because… that should be obvious.

This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to “This youtuber sounds smug” or “They are presenting their opinion as fact” then you see why people prefer “natural human speech” over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.

And… while not all pay to publish journals are trash, I feel confident saying that most are. And filtering those can be shockingly hard by design.

But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.

I mean… everyone contributing all those super useful posts that everyone thinks are the only authoritative sources of information on the internet are doing exactly that.

Every time you provide some tech support or a bit of advice? You are providing reddit shareholders’ money.

People tried that.

reddit corporate will remove those mods and ask which other mods want to be super duper awesome and be able to say they moderate another N thousand users per day for zero pay. And people leap at that.

Until the users leave, nothing will happen. In a fucked way, reddit corporate are doing everyone a favor by removing the spineless “We are going to go silent for 24 hours with no real demands or bargaining power” idiocy.

My understanding is a lot of those were just wrappers for mobi files to add even more drm, but I haven’t looked super closely.

I dunno. I used to be super hardcore about ripping every book and putting it in my calibre library. Then I eventually realized that… mostly I don’t care. There are very few books I am going to re-read and the majority of those were so good that I either want the hardcover to put on a shelf or don’t mind buying again from a vendor that gives the author a better percentage.

The supply chain problems of covid REALLY broke everyone.

Consoles selling out is actually “bad”. Why? Because they are closed gardens. If people can go down to best buy or browse amazon and pick up a console they are more likely to buy a few games to go with it. Rather than needing to frantically monitor five different discord servers to get into a queue as fast as possible to MAYBE get one. The former encourages browsing and impulse buys. The latter is basically only for people with very targeted shopping lists.

Also… it is not even October. MAYBE come early November you can start to make these assessments for that most holy of holidays, Black Friday. But hell day and xmas are still months out and the holiday rush of shopping hasn’t begun yet.

I personally see nothing compelling about the ps5 pro. But this is the equivalent of buying an xbox and saying microsoft are going to win because they have a stronger supply chain.

Doesn’t even really let you do that.

A “DRM Free” kindle ebook still basically requires a physical kindle (or shenanigans with apps) to even access the raw file of. If you just go to your content library to try and download it to transfer via USB you get told to pound sand and buy a kindle. That might change if you have a physical kindle registered to your account (I currently read exclusively via my phone and my onyx boox) but… yeah.

And yeah, as long as it is in The Cloud, amazon can do whatever they want. I am not aware of having any books removed from my account but I do recall having the option to “upgrade” an ebook to a newer version in the case of publisher screw ups.

Of course you don’t. Did anyone think otherwise?

Kindles have always slotted in as somewhere between the mass market paperbacks and trade paperbacks. Cheap books you read once or twice and then likely never again. If you do get in the mood to read it again? mobi files hold up a lot better than pulp designed to decay in order months but MMPBs always had a tendency to be lost forever just like amazon has a tendency to fuck with your library.

We live in a world where everything you do or say on the internet is potentially part of someone else’s training data. Lemmy is already a shitshow for that but you can bet that “ooh, piracy board” is fair game for everyone because nobody would be dumb enough to sue about that.

If someone wants to delete a comment for ANY reason, they are more than welcome to.

If y9ou are close enough to a system of importance that you can spray it, you are close enough to compromise it in countless other ways.

This is just one of many physical access attacks. Just like “you could take a hammer to it”

Like, I know people want to think this is some Ocean’s Eleven heist waiting to happen. It isn’t. This is only viable if you can drench an area with helium (which means you can already gas everyone you care about) or you have such close physical access that there are so many other things you could do. At best it is an episode of Burn Notice where Michael has to rapidly improvise an escape where his CIA handler of the week already refused to give him something much more useful.

If you are close enough to spray a device you are close enough to just steal it. Or spray the owner.

If you are in a position where you can dump random gases into the air supply to the degree it impacts these devices then they are likely compromised in other ways as well.

I would actually very much argue that the N64 is when they “stopped trying” as it were.

Sony (which is a can of worms on its own), Sega, and even frigging Atari realized that CD-ROM was “the future”. Nintendo… let’s skip the Sony aspect and just say they chose not to.

The end result is that everyone else had 700 MB-ish to use for resources and were working on finding ways to hide the load times (RIP Shang Tsung). Nintendo continued to use a cartridge that could hold 4-12 and later 32 and 64 MB. This meant dialogue and cutscenes remained almost non-existent and texture work was similarly VERY limited in favor of solid colors.

Its Nintendo and most of The Internet are still the kids on the playground looking to beat up the Sega kids so we mostly talk about the good parts of those consoles going forward. But it is always fun to watch one of the Influencers have that “So… outside of like four games the N64 REALLY sucked, huh? BUT THOSE FOUR GAMES ARE THE GREATEST GAMES TO EVER EXIST AND I STILL LOVE YOU MIYAMOTO SAN!!!”. Whereas we all almost universally agree “The Playstation had an amazing library… and most of them look like someone sharted on the screen” because… 700 MB is still not a lot for texture and audio work. And “Oh yeah. The Sega Saturn existed… That was the tower of power, right?”

And from then on? It was gimmick city. The Gamecube was “portable” because of the handle. Wii is obvious. Wii U was marketed atrociously but actually was way ahead of its time in terms of second screen (… I actually loved my Wii U) but was marketed like another condom for a wii mote. And the Switch is obviously the gameboy/console hybrid.

Different people like different games.

But SoD is very much built around that sandbox style gameplay. Your guide is how you connect the evidence of whatever crime you are investigating.

That said: I think the tutorial is “a lot” but it is well worth doing at least a good chunk of it. They do a great job of teaching you the basic steps for how to investigate a murder and what to do next.

… mostly the other way around?

Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any “personal” device and any “private” device.

There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not to an hour away from wherever they are staying that night.