steadyready

Not sure if the only one, but not getting ploughed by a Tesla with a guy shooting YouTube videos from the backseat certainly takes first place.

funny yet sadly true

The only time I’m actually glad I don’t live in the U.S. and that we (Europe) get access much later (or never) to the cool new tech

> "How do you go from ‘Apple is offering a new payment method’ to a rant about how you don’t care about privacy?"

Because some other people started ranting about cashless payments, payment processors and their privacy.

> "Why would people have to choose between using only cash and sharing their data with everyone?"

Because that's how other people put it. I was just raising the point that we shouldn't have to give up QoL improvements, instead push for more privacy-focused laws, like limiting PII-data being sold along with transaction histories.

Not 100%, but we can outlaw PII selling, and therefor everybody wins. I get “peace of mind” knowing IKEA doesn’t get targeted information, and IKEA still gets some level of anonymous demographic data from advertisers.

I never said “remove cash”. It should continue to exist nevertheless, because it’s a level of system redundancy and backup. I just said that I shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality of life improvements and STILL have my PII data sold from other channels.

Man, I swear sometimes I feel like I’m on a forum full of wanted criminals, state actors, and/or felons.

I’m not saying I’m against privacy. I am all for not being tracked, but we are approaching absurdity.

I really want to see all of you who praise “privacy” go fully offline and use only cash. No cards. No bank account. Nothing. Salary? Cash, because earnings could also be sold and used for advertising. Groceries? Cash. Gas? Cash. No checks also, as they can be tracked /s Also, while we are at it, no Android, no iOS, no Windows or Macs. Only Linux, because we can’t trust UE vendors.

Really, maybe we should start spending our energy in convincing legislators that PII should not be sold along with transaction data/histories. Matter a fact, let’s rally for universal privacy laws. How about that?

Let’s not go 50 back in evolution just because “visa bad”. I’m happy not to lose cash or reach for my wallet anymore.

I did a lot of cheat development and always read the related forums. Let me tell you that kernel anti-cheats are the funniest and ugliest pieces of software out there.

Almost ALL exhibit rootkit behaviour. Capture all OS events, dig through system and user directories, list all processes, fetch DNS and browser histories, block certain system calls, and more just to name a few. But hey! Their software (including drivers) are signed by Microsoft, so that’s alright :))

Funny part is that all those drivers are created by no other than ex-community members, under no advisory from system specialists or security experts. So guess what? Security vulnerabilities all around. Pretty much all their drivers are wide open and unsecure.

Nice fun having persistent, kernel-level, system-trusted exploits auto-installed on your system!

Oh, almost forgot, BattlEye has the ability to download custom bytecode from their servers and execute it. RCE baked right in. Good stuff.

So your frustration is more than reasonable..

EDIT: I will try to find the posts pointing to all vulns that I mentioned, and cite them.

They did make one. It was called FairFight[1] and was mainly used by EA in the Battlefield franchise. It also was a dumpster fire: bans were applied to legit players all the time, moderators were overwhelmed and manual review took too long and many times resulted in nothing.

Behavioural anti-cheats are not the answer. Implementations are crap and under-developed, and I don’t blame them: you would need tremendous (server-sided) power to correctly process the models considering how complex multiplayer games are, and it just isn’t worth the investment and complexity to them.

It’s just cheaper to pay rootkit developers (like EAC or BattlEye) and knowingly infect client devices. Hell, their drivers are even WHQL signed by Microsoft. And when false positives hit? Just blame the anti-cheat vendor. Potential HR problem dodged.

[1] https://www.i3d.net/products/hosting/anti-cheat-software/

Yes, I know! I don’t remember what video I saw but the wings were bent beyond imagination. Made me realise that what I saw while flying wasn’t even 30% of what they can withstand. Incredible engineering.

Fuel pumps have backup pumps. Matter a fact, the whole fuel system is a lot more complex than this.

And as for “the wings fall off” part, makes me remember a quote of an engineer I once read that goes something like this: “The wings are the strongest part of the airplane. If you worry about them ripping apart or falling off, you have way bigger problems than that, like the rest of the plane missing”.