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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I had to spend an annoying amount of time finding all of the settings to make it so that my windows machine would never wake up on its own, spread out over an even longer period of time because some of them aren’t easy to trigger on my own so it was a matter of trying something and then trying more things if I find it awake on its own again.

    Even disabling the wake on mouse movement was a pain because it doesn’t properly label mice and keyboards and doesn’t have a global setting. I wanted to keep wake on keyboard but not have it wake if my mouse moved a nm because a butterfly flapped its wings too vigorously as it flew by the closed window.

    After I installed Linux, I went to do the same thing there only to find it already had sensible defaults set.


  • I remember the very first time I saw that was a thing and wondering why the fuck would anyone ever want that? Can’t remember if that was before or after I started the habit of disabling autorun on any inserted media, too, though I do know that that was my reaction to learning about Sony’s rootkit.

    Though I might be one of the few that didn’t like UAC because it wasn’t strict enough instead of because it was annoying. I wish it had a setting where every action required permission and the dialog included the specific thing it was currently tying to do instead of the vague “it wants to change things on your computer”.

    An installer is likely going to trigger that prompt whether it’s legit or not, I’d like to know if it’s triggered because it’s trying to associate its filetype with its application or trying to overwrite a dll in an unrelated program’s files.


  • I just did the switch myself on a new PC and getting gaming working wasn’t even that hard. I picked fedora cinnamon.

    Difficulties I had:

    1. When trying the initial live boot, it failed checksum… Because windows fucked with the drive after it saw the utility that wrote the image to it left it “unmounted” (and autoplay would had also fucked with it if I hadn’t turned that off ages ago).
    2. Wired ethernet wasn’t working. Wifi does work, currently using that until I get around to working on that again, though it might just work now that it’s updated.
    3. After installing steam, many games said they were windows games only. Had to enable a setting inside steam to get it to just run them all via proton. Only tried two games so far, but haven’t seen any issues yet. My saves are usable on the one game I was already playing on windows.
    4. Optical audio wasn’t working. Worked around that by plugging in my soundbar to usb, though I’ve also confirmed that the analog port does work. This one might also have been resolved by updating.
    5. Had to set up permissions for steam to use my games partition instead of my home dir for installing games, though I think this was because I missed a step during the install.

    It took more effort getting YouTube (well porn but apparently the same issue affects YouTube) working (netflix just worked, quality seems to even be better, like it doesn’t seem to default to a low quality stream before moving up as the video plays like it would in windows). And even that was only because the desktop I picked didn’t use the same software as instructions for enabling 3rd party repositories and I for some reason decided to search for a GUI option instead of just running the command I could have run from the start.

    The only difficult part is that with all of the available desktops out there that do things a bit differently, it can be hard to find solutions specific to the one you’re using. Like I might have caused some future issues by installing gnome-software since cinnamon uses a different tool for that. But at this point, I feel like making the jump to a different desktop (or even distro) will be much easier, so don’t feel like I’m committed to the one I did pick.

    Which is so much better than windows because on that platform I had to struggle to not be committed to things I didn’t and wouldn’t pick. And it made me avoid updating often because I didn’t want to commit to whatever nagware ms added this time to try to get me to use some software I wasn’t interested in using.




  • Lol back when games were simpler, they were harder because one of the few ways they could make a game harder was to reduce the amount of leeway you had from needing to do pixel perfect moves.

    Plus a lot of older games didn’t even have save points, so you either beat it in one sitting, left it on and hoped the power didn’t go out or no one else wanted to use the system.

    Oh and arcade games were often tuned to let you have fun for a bit then suddenly get way harder so you’d lose and need to put quarters in if you didn’t want to start over from the beginning and ports to consoles often kept these mechanics. I remember noticing the pattern in mortal Kombat, where I wasn’t very good at the game (in hindsight) but could consistently win one match only to lose the next one, continue and repeat until I ran out of continues.


  • It’s frustrating but it does give information to attackers. If an attacker just sees the login attempt was rejected, then they have no idea if it was because the password changed, the user entered it wrong in the phishing form, the user realized it was a phishing attempt and gave garbage to fuck with them, the password expired, or if the service provider is on to them.

    If an attacker sees “your password has been reset and you must set a new one” then they have some information that could be used to social engineer their way into the account. Especially if it’s a work account where the email is behind the same password.


  • Step 1: find phishing site
    Step 2: find/write brute force script that doesn’t stop on successful login but has longer random delay between attempts (so it isn’t obvious it’s a form of a DOS attack)
    Step 3: poison phishing site data

    Use proxies from areas that would normally use the service the phishing site is mimicking.

    Bonus step: in case the phishers use the same proxies source, make enough invalid login attempts to the actual service to get the proxies IP blocked so they can’t use them to test the large number of invalid logins to find if any are valid.



  • My guess is that the brand names got stuck from their own popularity. People knew what they tasted like and might have reacted badly if they tried to tweak the recipe, whereas the budget brands were easier to either change or even discontinue and replace with slightly different branding. People were buying them for the price, not the recipe.

    And then, after enough experimentation, they were able to figure out something that matched or surpassed the brand names.

    In Canada, there’s the PC brand that I always considered a budget brand. Until I worked at an ice cream factory that had their own premium brand but also made some PC flavours. The PC ones looked better than the factory brand ones. The factory did things the old way (where ice cream flavours were still more about the ice cream than extras added) while PC focused more on the extras like cookie dough or chocolate caramel cups. I can only speak for myself, but I’m more into the extras than the ice cream itself, so it felt like PC was more in tune with what I wanted than the premium brand.

    Additionally, the premium brand sticking with the less preferred recipe kinda feels pretentious at this point, like they are being ice cream purists or think they know better about what people want, given the higher price.

    PC also had their versions of various pop flavours that have colouring on the boxes to make it clear what they were cloning and their Pepsi cola clone was just as good as the real thing but way cheaper.



  • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldPick 3
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    2 months ago

    Yeah, the power gamer one is siphon abilities plus whatever two give the best advantage with that. Though psychic might be enough to negate any other, plus would help figure out where to get the others.

    Though it’s hard to meta game with just ability names. Like it could be god tier where teleportation works like you said and can be used on its own to find things or people, or it could be the kind where using it at all is risky because you might end up inside a wall.

    Psychic could mean you can freely look into the future, past, and present (like knowing your opponent’s poker hand). It could mean you get a warning if you need to deal with danger. Either of those could make invulnerability unnecessary (along with very rich, intellect, physical fighting, and others). Or it could just be con artistry like psychics that sell their “abilities” in the world we live in.

    Siphon abilities might be permanent, temporary, or might require contact with the ability owner to use the ability. Maybe you get a copy of the ability or the original owner loses their ability. Maybe it applies only to powers on the list or maybe to any skill/ability.

    Magic and divine power are especially vague, could be anything from the most powerful on the list (maybe even including everything else on the list already) to what real life magicians and priests can do.




  • One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user’s input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there’s some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).

    Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn’t be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can’t see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?

    Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it’s a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won’t catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton’s f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it’s even more sensitive to sample rate.

    Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.

    That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.

    I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).


  • You can install it onto a USB key. A search for it gives a lot of results. That’s, ah, about as far as I’ve gotten into the process (oh and I’ve bought a couple of usb flash drives), but it’s looking promising. I might even make some progress and click one of those links tonight, though not sure if I’m feeling that ambitious today.