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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.

    It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.



  • That’s what I’m saying. It’s like everyone knows some college kids smoke pot from the smell in the dorms, but Police can’t legally search room by room to find out who it is, they need a search warrant which they need more than a general suspicion that someone in the dorms smoke to get.

    Same with I2P, it’s done in a public setting so from traffic patterns we can be pretty sure someone is downloading a shit ton, and that it’s likely illegal content. Residential IPs have little reason to consistently download several GB files on a daily/weekly basis, streaming and download also look vastly different profile wise and at least no one I know of go to those lengths to try and mask their traffic patterns by trying to make streaming look like download or vice versa.

    But as I said and you reiterated, you still need to crack the encryption to actually prove it in court. But given a specific target there are many ways to do that. A generic approach is likely not going to happen. Which means that I2P is secure much like having a secret chat in a crowded place like Grand Central Station in NY. You know that people are meeting there to chat about illegal stuff but you don’t know who. It becomes much easier if you know who to follow and eavesdrop on, but of course still not easy.

    It is however nowhere near as safe as communication over channels that aren’t public to begin with. But such of course do not exist outside military and other special contexts.



  • +1 for Genshin. While I think your gacha warning is excellent I do want to point out that the amount of resources you get for getting characters is more than enough to clear all story content. Hell if you’re a good player you could probably clear the whole game without using a single primogem, not even the countless thousands you get along the way.

    And massive is also the understatement of the year. There is voiced content here that dwarfs even whole trilogies. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more recorded lines than all of Dragon Age and Mass Effect put together. And the story is likely not even at the halfway point yet, there’s still years to go. Closest analogy would probably be SWTOR, the MMO, but with much better combat.



  • I don’t know why the article doesn’t bring up Valve being the company to bring loot boxes and that business model to gaming as the prime example. Valve earns extreme money from the skins market and gambling in CSGO / CS2 since they sell the keys and take a cut of trades as well. They’re far more concerned with money than actually caring for the people involved. Gambling ruins lives and Valve is the gambling company that faces by far the least vitriol in that horrendous crowd.


  • I disagree because the biggest they did and continue to do is loot boxes. I argue that it was Valve that popularized that business model with CSGO and it is the most predatory shit that has ever entered the gaming sphere. It’s a complete cancer and Valves implementation is amongst the worst there is because of their market giving the items easily accessible real money value. This makes it not just like gambling in my extremely firm opinion, it makes it actual gambling. They’re also double dipping with the community market since it also takes a cut from aforementioned gambling. How Valve has escaped the vast majority of loot box hate is completely beyond me. And how they’ve managed to so far avoid a world wide crackdown on the unregulated gambling is also to me mind boggling. I despise Valve for this to the very core of my being because I know first hand how easily that shit can ruin lives and I know people that have got hooked and fucked up their life big time from CS skins. Left at the altar fucked up levels.


  • Yes, which is exactly what I’m stating. Showing a forcibly non-upscaled video (or one where you’ve manually tweaked the upscaling for that matter) is likely not what you want because there are no circumstances where that is what you’d watch on that particular screen. It could perhaps work as an example of how that video would look if you had a 1080p monitor of the same size instead of the 4k one you have, since it scales in a linear fashion, a pixel of 1080p is 4 pixels in a square on a 4k screen. But that’s likely not what you want to test. Instead the thing you do want to test is “does it matter if I download X content in 1080p or 4k? How big is the difference really?” And if that is the question you need to let it upscale.




  • I think this follows in most nations that the less you have the more likely you are to lean towards the left side of you nations political spectrum. And the more you have the more likely you lean towards the right side. Home ownership is one part of that, a fairly big part given the state of home pricing these days.

    Really it’s always been about the class struggle, of the have nots vs the haves, rich vs poor, bourgeois vs proletariat, whatever you want to call it. The US has just done a “better” job of muddying the waters and suffocating organized class warfare.

    Mainly by instilling that you’re not really poor because you’re within reach of being a millionaire. The American dream. (Which you need to be asleep to believe in as Carlin put it.).

    Though I’m not really holding my breath on people actually waking up to this reality and actually doing something about it. The Circus seems to suffice in the US, and any struggle and violence is directed between marginalized groups. People in declining rural areas “fighting” people from the worst parts of the cities. Middle class suburbians opposing the choices of other middle class suburbians that just want freedom of expression but that somehow limits the first group in ways they can’t even articulate when asked. It’s madness.



  • Tell them to move to yubikey or similar hardware key which is far more secure than any password policy will ever be and vastly more user friendly. Only downside is the intense shame if you manage to lose it.

    The key should stick with the user thus not be stored with the computer when not in use. The key isn’t harmless of course but it takes a very deliberate targeting and advance knowledge about what it goes to and how it can be used. It’s also easy to remote revoke. If you’re extra special paranoid you could of course store the key locked at a separate site if you want nuclear codes levels of security.