I remember working in environments where management had decreed that we would not install updates ever. . .That’s…definitely a decision that puts a lot of trust in Microsoft’s security. Lol
It was a very different time. Security was still something that happened mostly at the network perimeter, and even then not much. Routers without firewalls were very common and things like SQLSlammer were much more possible.
Ya, I’m sure the AI code isn’t helping, but is it materially any different? I spent way too many long nights trying to unfuck Windows servers after updates failed to install correctly. And that was well before the AI Slop Boom. Even more fun is when the update reported installing correctly but the Nessus scans came back showing the old version of DLLs still in the System32 folder. There is a reason no one installs Windows patches on day 1. At minimum, you give them a week to let the foolhardy and fanboys get their disks slapped by Microsoft, again.
Going back to my days supporting Window 2000/2003, I remember working in environments where management had decreed that we would not install updates ever, because of too much downtime due to bad updates. Even today, updating in OT environments can be very difficult due to shitty software running on really old versions of Windows. At least that stuff can usually be kicked off the network and left to rot in isolation.
It seems like any effort to protect children is hated.
They say this won’t protect children, but they offer no alternative solutions that would.
The second statement is why the first one exists. None of this is about protecting children, it’s all about data gathering and monitoring people. They don’t give a fuck about children. But the idea that they can have a government enforced reason to collect personal data, be able to reliably tie that to accounts and then use that data to sell targeted marketing, that’s something they will bend over backwards for.
Team speak? What year is it?
I remember hosting a teamspeak server for folks I played Wolfenstein: ET with. In the early 2000’s.
While I don’t know the specific post you are referring to, Malware exists for Linux. Here’s a great overview from last year. If someone wants to argue, “oh it’s from a security company trying to sell a product” then let me point you at the Malware Bazaar and specifically the malware tagged elf. Those are real samples of real malware in the Linux specific ELF executable binary format (warning: yes it’s real malware, don’t run anything from this site). On the upshot, most seem to be Linux variants of the Mirai botnet. Not something you want running, but not quite as bad as ransomware. But, dig a bit and there are other threats. Linux malware exists, it has for a long time and it’s getting more prevalent as more stuff (especially servers) run on Linux.
While Linux is far more secure than Windows by design, it’s not malware proof. It is harder for malware to move from user space into root (usually), but that’s often not needed for the activities malware gets up to today. Ransomware, crypto miners and info stealers will all happily execute in user-land. And for most people, this is where their important stuff lives. Linux’s days of living in “security through obscurity” are over. Attackers are looking at Linux now and starting to go after it.
All that said, is it worth having a bloated A/V engine doing full on-access scanning? That depends on how you view the risk. Many of the drive-by type attacks (e.g. ClickFix, fake tech-support scams) all heavily target Windows and would fail on a Linux system. The malware and backdoors that come bundled with pirated software are likely to fail on a Linux system, though I’ll admit to not having tested that sort of thing with Wine/Proton installed. For those use cases, I’d suggest not downloading pirated software. Or, if you absolutely are going to, run those file through ClamAV at minimum.
Personally, I don’t feel the need to run anything as heavy as on-access file scanning or anything to keep trawling memory for signatures on my home systems. Keeping software up to date and limiting what I download, install and run is enough to manage my risk. I do have ClamAV installed to let me do a quick, manual scan of anything I do download. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to buy A/V product. Most of the engines out there for Linux are crap anyway.
Professionally, I am one of the voices who pushed for A/V (really EDR) on the Linux systems in my work environment. My organization has a notable Linux footprint and we’ve seen attackers move to Linux based systems specifically because they are less likely to be well monitored. In a work environment, we have less control over how the systems get (ab)used and have a higher need for telemetry and investigation.
That of ServiceNow, whose tools help businesses automate various tasks, dropped by 13%
If AI can kill ServiceNow, I’ll happily praise our new AI Overlords. I’m sure ServiceNow can be really good. I’ve just never seen it in practice. Perhaps we just never paid for the “interface which doesn’t suck” module.
Principal photography on Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew
Color me truly surprised. From the headline, I expected yet another The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe remake. I always assumed that The Magician’s Nephew would never be turned into a film. It’s just such a big break from the previous books.
I ditched cable TV over a decade ago for a simple antenna (and wrote a notable Reddit post on the antenna while I was at it). That was done because I was tired of my wallet being raped each month, because I had to buy a higher bundle to get the channels I wanted. I was stuck with cable internet for a number of years afterwards, as it was the only option in my area. Then T-Mobile offered up 5G based internet in my area at a low price. That was around 6 years ago and I haven’t looked back.
The cable companies sat on their laurels while the world moved on. They are now shocked that their terrible offerings for terrible prices are falling to real competition. Sure, I fully expect the new carriers to do everything in their power to enshitify their service offerings. That’s the nature of business/ But, with the market open to competition, there is now a real opportunity for us customers to shop around and get a less shitty experience. Broadband internet is a commodity and is completely fungible. Prices should be falling and it was only rent seeking rules keeping the prices up.
While it’s not a service I would use, if it helps move the needle away from Windows’ dominance of the gaming market, that’s a good thing. The more people who can ditch Windows, the better. It probably means an Eternal September for Linux. But that is ultimately a good thing. If Linux becomes the default choice for gaming PCs for the mass market, more games will be released with Linux Native versions, driving further Linux adoption. It’s the type of virtuous cycle which is needed to kill the giant that is Windows.
I’d just be happy to see “evil” choices which weren’t cartoonishly silly. So many of these game end up offering you choices like:
There’s never anything like:
Really well done “evil” should be loved by the people, seem outwardly good while using that as cover to do selfish things. But that is much harder than “Press X to murder an innocent for no reason”.
Rather than interact with a machine, you’ll just be walking around, sipping coffee, having thoughtful conversations with a bot laughing along with your jokes as it writes your letter and does your taxes.
So, basically the computers from Star Trek: TNG. I’d go for that, but unfortunately, what we’ll get instead is enshitified AI slop which exists to suck a subscription fee out of you every month while pushing ads.
They are chopping the development teams and titles up into convenient bite-sized chunks. Ubisoft will hang onto the large titles in the Vantage Studios vertical, and the rest will be spun off or sold off. Any spun off studios will be saddled with crippling debt.
So, the layoffs didn’t cause the change to smaller expansions. The change to smaller expansions made the layoffs easier.
This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.
I mean, no shit? Part of the Snowden leaks was information that the NSA had intercepted Cisco routers and backdoored them before they were shipped on to international customers. So, even without willing actions by US vendors, there is that to worry about. And the idea that a private company would install a backdoor for US Spy agencies in their infrastructure isn’t new. The fact that any Chinese company is using US hardware/software just seems incredibly stupid. And no one should be using CheckPoint.
It’s the same reason Huiwei was thrown out of US infrastructure. You cannot build trusted architecture with hardware/software from a nation which you know wants to hack you. I work for a US based company in cybersecurity, we treat WeChat as Chinese State spyware, because it is. We wouldn’t consider a router or firewall from a Chinese based company and we treat any software from China with outright suspicion. Sure that all sucks and we may be missing out on some great stuff which isn’t malicious. But, the risks far outweigh the costs. I’d expect my Chinese counterparts to be making the exact same risk calculation for US based tech.
Steam is certainly in a dominant market position. They had a large first mover advantage and have also done a lot of work to make and keep gamers happy with the platform. That said, I can understand companies being upset at the 30% Steam tax on sales. It’s a pretty large cut and other stores (e.g. Epic) have tried to compete based on that cost. The problem being that many games have massive Steam libraries and want to keep everything on one place and they aren’t really affected by the cost to the devs; so, without a significant reason to change, they won’t. It also doesn’t help that some competitors (e.g Epic) have been user hostile in the past and so don’t have a high level of trust. Steam has also built a lot of goodwill with power users for their work on Proton.
While I do think there needs to be healthy competition for storefronts, as long as Steam resists the temptation to enshitify their dominant market position, I don’t see them losing market share in any meaningful way. Perhaps it would be better if Steam were spun off from Valve, putting them Valve on equal footing with other devs. But, video games aren’t really fungible. It’s not like I’m going to say, “oh darn, Kingdom Come is too expensive, I guess I’ll buy Half Life instead”. They are just fundamentally different games and if I want to play the first one, I’m not able to get that by buying the second. So, the price of one of them isn’t really a factor in pushing me towards the other. Though, Valve might use Steam to push one game over the other, and that could be something that is a problem.
Gotta have that progress bar, otherwise you might be tempted to <Ctrl>-C and you will be left with some of your software problems.
Yes, and you can probably get better performance with different block sizes. This is just what I used to fix drives as it was fast enough and I couldn’t be arsed to do any real testing to find the right speed. Also, my stash of drives was no where near homogeneous, so the right size for one type of drive may not have worked for a different type of drive. I also used the 4MB block size when imaging drives to have an ok-ish speed while not losing too much data if there were read errors.
For a physical machine:
for f in $(lsblk | grep disk | cut -d ' ' -f 1); do sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/$f bs=4MB status=progress; done
That will remove all your current software problems. You’ll have new ones, but the old ones will be gone.
Unless the romance is central to the game, that sort of focus and depth just isn’t going to be put into it. There is also the issue that the writers in video games have far less control over the main character than they do in other mediums. In a book, you don’t have to worry about your main character deciding to to fuck off for a week collecting all the boxes in a village and stacking them on the town well, just because it’s funny. That main character stays on task and on plot for the writer. There are games where that high level of control is possible, visual novels exist, but that starts to push into the question, “why not just make a book/movie instead?”
Similarly, I think it’s going to be hard for any video game romance not to come off as transactional, due to the nature of a game being a computer program. Imagine trying to tell Romeo and Juliet as a video game. At some point, Romeo and Juliet will need to interact. Romeo arrives at Juliet’s window and professes his love. How does the player interact with the game for that scene? Is it just a cutscene? Or a cutscene with quick time events (press X to woo). Trying to replicate a Jane Austin style story would be even worse. As books about people sitting about in drawing rooms drinking tea and being catty to one another, replicating that in a video game is all going to boil down to dialog trees. Perhaps the first time through it could feel fresh and interesting, but on a second playthrough it’s going to quickly be obvious that the whole thing is really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”. Maybe we could get a Jane Austin Rouge-like, in that each time you load it up the characters’ personalities change and you really do have to pay attention to verbal and social queues to get anywhere. But even that is still really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”.
Ultimately, I think video games are always going to be fairly transactional in nature. They are computer programs and are ultimately deterministic. All the interactions you have in a video game need to be planned out, scripted and maybe even voice acted. It’s what makes all the interactions in Baldur’s Gate 3 so amazing. Everything those characters do was planned for, written and recorded. Every comment, every facial expression was planned, written and coded. There is no spontaneity, because there can’t be (maybe with AI, but that’s a different can of worms). That so many little things actually did get covered is amazing. But, the trigger conditions for playing that bit of animation and voice acting will be hard coded. Whether or not a character likes the main character must be a set of numbers stored in memory, because that’s how computers work. Yes, it could be far more complex than just an easily identifiable number. And perhaps hiding those numbers from the player would make it feel less obvious, but they aren’t going to go away.
And all the work which goes into planning, writing and coding those interactions is time spent during development. Going back to Baldur’s Gate 3, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of the NPCs started pairing off with each other? If the main characters isn’t getting busy with Shadowheart, maybe she discoverers an interest in big men who can turn into bears so you come back to camp sometime to find her and Halsin sitting very close together talking softly. This could even have the whole random element where different characters have different crushes/interests each time you play through. That would be neat to see, but it’s going to require a lot of extra development. Unless that’s a feature which starts selling video games, it’s not going to happen. Perhaps this sort of thing will show up in indie games, I wouldn’t expect it in major titles anytime soon.