rightos

Any Android One device is probably worth a look. Maybe used iPhones too - though given Apple's slowdown with old batteries and attitude towards right to repair I'd be quite hesitant to seriously suggest that these days.

Think I found the full text of the original article hosted on another site too. Archived mirror here:

https://archive.is/QxQtZ

Nothing about that sounds substantially addiction producing. Just flashy and designed, like anything else in a video game. Is there a proper study on that being a substantial addiction causing effect compared to card games and such? I've seen people lose ridiculous amounts on completely boring gambling games like SatoshiDice where all they do is push send. The fact that you get the random outcome seems much more likely to be the primary culprit than any flash effects around it.

I get the impression people saying that are just making excuses because they don't like loot boxes as a business model for games. Would you be accepting of it if they replaced it in the game with a simple click and get the result system?

> addiction triggering

Sorry, but virtual flames shooting out of a box and a "here, you lost" screen doesn't exactly stimulate a dopamine response.

What the hell is going on here? Doesn't Microsoft offer similar for free download from their own website? I seem to remember their media creation tool not prompting for a key until install time. Why on earth would they fight this?

Restrictions on the export of cryptographic technology is definitely something that can be argued makes us less free. Fortunately many die hards have put massive effort into exporting cryptography and have effectively won at this point.

Little Snitch is all you need.

I generally agree with you here actually, I wouldn't want any of this to be used to completely suppress speech, but I don't think it's unreasonable to hide by default communities which are higher friction to some degree.

I can definitely see a completely open alternative viewpoint, but reddit has already gone in a very different direction.

Yes, I'll admit to that to some extent, but it's a toxic environment when a subreddit like that regularly appears on the front page yet disallows any sort of significant discussion. For similar toxicity reasons they hid The_Donald from the front page, which I'd say is about equally as toxic. So why's the treatment different here?

They literally delete anything that questions straight up communist views.

Read their sidebar. I don't think that's exactly "in the eye of the beholder".

I agree wholeheartedly, but I also think it should be called into question if something like that belongs on the front page. Admins have added specific rules banning right leaning subreddits from appearing, but not even the most extreme left leaning subreddits get that treatment. And if nothing else it makes for a toxic default view.

You're right, censored discussion is probably a better way to put it.

They delete anything questioning their viewpoint, not just spam, hate speech, harassment etc.

Admins do nothing to prevent extreme moderation as occurs on there from deleting any comment with an alternative viewpoint. Yet it appears quite consistently on the front page with only agreement in its comments section.

Yeah, I do the same - I plugged in Postfix, Dovecot and SpamAssassin and haven't had to touch it other than occasionally confirming backup scripts and automatic security updates are working.

> act like "dude just get more servers" is the answer.

The biggest problem here is that it largely used to be a distributed system. You used to just be able run your own dedicated server on whatever provider you liked. The dev would just run a single server list. Now many game developers have decided they're the only ones who get to run servers - primarily because they can charge more for micro transactions and private servers this way as far as I can tell.

It really hurts games - PUBG is the best example I've seen - constant lag issues, complete lack of server side checks for things like shooting through the ground (because hey, that costs CPU and every additional cloud server they need means less profit), etc. It's basically made the game unplayable.

Game developers are unfortunately stuck between immersion in their games and the rage that leaves players with when technical issues occur. The more immersed your players are, the more rage they'll experience when your game crashes or lags at the wrong time.

If you need this on a regular basis, check out Emby or Plex. They do transcoding on the fly for your entire media collection and fetch metadata online automatically for a really nice browsing experience. I certainly wouldn't describe either as crapware.

VLC does seem great for a one-off use case though.

> is cryptographically inferior to WireGuard

Would you say this is true even if you configured openssh to only use the more modern options?

In recent years they've added a chacha20+poly1305 option as well as Curve25519 for key exchange and ed25519 for host and user authentication.

This would seem to bring it up to about an equivalent level cryptogtaphically speaking, in terms of application security, it's definitely more complicated, but it's also one of the most proven pieces of software around and much of that complexity is post-auth. The wireguard site itself pretty clearly states that it hasn't seen much in the way of field testing, though it does look extremely promising. I'll definitely be keeping on eye on it once it's available on more platforms.

You still need to worry about it being found in the pure software case - there's far higher odds of me seeing some suspicious traffic than a small custom bit of RF gear inside. If someone's taking the thing apart and sees your physical extra bits, odds are they're doing so to dump the firmware, just like this guy... if they're not doing that, they're not necessarily skilled enough to spot whatever modifications you may have planted either. It really depends on the target though I suppose. Of course, at the point you have physical access, all bets are off, they could swap chips on the board with identically labeled ones which serve different functions - replace the firmware and signing with their own, etc. An essentially undetectable hardware modification.

But it'd be trivial for them to slip an extra bit of hardware, wire it to the existing mic and use that to do all the actions they wish. At the point where someone has physical access to the device the game is over.

This is not an attack - its an immutable law, if someone else has unrestricted physical access to your device, it's not your device anymore.

Yes, not just experience is important, but experimental experience. I learn so much less at work than I do on personal projects simply because I don't experiment as much. Unfortunately the realities of time and effort have caught up with me and I don't get to put nearly as much time into personal projects.

Yeah, I pretty much just recently learned enough electronics to feel comfortable doing something like that and I still haven't done it on my hardware for fear of bricking it.

I'm just hoping for a 100% software exploit that will do this.

The reason you need to buy some Siacoin in order to become a host is simple - you need collateral in case you fail to fulfill your hosting contracts - collateral of more than the value of those hosting contacts themselves. Turn off or not, that seems to be the only reasonable way to achieve private hosting contracts to me

Maybe at startups, but most enterprises self-host things - including Skype for Business (formerly Lync).

Yes, the #1 rule of IoT - if it doesn't have a solid LAN-only protocol, don't buy it. Anything relying on a single cloud service isn't worth your time or money. If you have LAN-only access it means not only that you'll have the ability to use it after the manufacturer goes away but also that you can always secure it by simply dropping it behind the appropriate NAT or firewall.

It's interesting to see many of Filecoins promises realized already in alternatives like Sia or Storj, but Filecoin still takes the hype, despite not having anything released, let alone anything superior... I guess because it's by the IPFS developers and had a big flashy ICO?

I do hope they'll keep maintaining it - I've been working with an ESP32 lately and the stuff Espressif has been able to build using FreeRTOS as a base is nothing short of incredible. $7 for wifi and bluetooth on a development board.

Worse still - on iOS there's no way to block this kind of stuff. On Android there's both VPN and hosts file based blockers as well as extremely capable tools like XPrivacy for those who really want to get down and dirty.

Try launching one of the top games with XPrivacy installed. You get to click allow for the dev's server and block to 5+ 3rd party analytics, crash reporting and ad services. I'm sure many of these provide developer value, but there's definitely a harm to user privacy.

You can get a lot of uMatrix's functionality just by enabling the "I am an advanced user" checkbox in uBlock Origin. I actually find it a better interface, but that's a personal preference.

> (you need to log in to try it out)

I was expecting you meant login to eBay... nope, you need a facebook account to muck with that.

I've never seen one of these (well, minus the really stupid AIM and Skype spam bots), where do you find them? Are they on the sites that constantly nag you to click through to live support on every page? The few of those that I have used all seemed to be real humans.