EnglishMobster
@EnglishMobster@kbin.social
- Comment on Google ditched Omnibox features to meet quarterly numbers 1 year ago:
Maybe switch to Firefox then?
- Comment on Twitter (X) loses over 30% of users in two months! 1 year ago:
My guess is TikTok.
- Comment on Starfield - Review Thread (87/100 OpenCritic) 1 year ago:
This is the core issue with all procgen games, IMO.
You are promised "infinite exploration", but in truth there are countable variants of the procgen algorithm. Once you see all those variants, you've effectively seen everything. Sure, you'll see small variations, or new ways to combine the existing variants... but when you see all the "tricks" the veil falls.
- Comment on Anyone remember Xfire? 1 year ago:
It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn't have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.
I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day...
- Comment on LK-99 isn’t a superconductor — how science sleuths solved the mystery 1 year ago:
To be fair, you don't get to be an expert at something by just reading about it. You become an expert by immersing yourself in it and knowing all the nuanced details of what you specialize in.
For example, I'm a AAA gamedev programmer. My specialty is the Unreal Engine. I know tons of little quirks about the engine that many of my coworkers don't - but that's because I've been using the engine for over a decade at this point.
I don't devote every waking moment to learning about Unreal - I used to spend a lot of free time researching it before I got hired, but now I leave gaming stuff at work to avoid burnout.
You don't need to like hyperfixate on something to become good at it. You just need to work on it for long enough - and if it's literally your job, you'll spend 40+ hours/week engrossed in it, for years.
- Comment on Your Computer Should Say What You Tell It To Say - Google is adding code to Chrome that will send tamper-proof information about your operating system and other software, and share it with websites 1 year ago:
The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that's where Google got the idea from.
Basically, this is the way it works:
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You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS). This is the "attester". Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can't patch the binary).
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A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a "good" attestation and reuse it elsewhere.
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The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - "this browser, this OS, is not running this program, subject to these rate limits," etc.
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If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can't patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.)
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The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key.
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The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data.
They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many ("low entropy"). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that "Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.")
That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn't want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they're pushing "low-entropy" under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.
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- Comment on Brands that don't buy enough Twitter ads will lose verification 1 year ago:
Notably, Vine was created by Twitter.
And then Vine was axed by Twitter. (One of the dumbest mistakes Twitter ever made.)
So really, Vine was just video Twitter, instead of Twitter being text Vine.
- Comment on Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down 1 year ago:
You are technically correct, but surely you must know at this point that's not at all how domains are used on the internet. Bit.ly isn't hosted or affiliated with Libya.
And if you ever doubted that the maintainers of Lemmy are tankies, well have I got a post from you, from the horse's mouth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.
Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.
So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.
Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.
Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.
I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.
The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. They chose ".ml" because they are Marxist-Leninists. They first advertised on /r/communism and that post outright states they're Marxist-Leninists.
Thinking they chose .ml because they really like Mali is absolutely ridiculous.