• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • If y9ou are close enough to a system of importance that you can spray it, you are close enough to compromise it in countless other ways.

    This is just one of many physical access attacks. Just like “you could take a hammer to it”

    Like, I know people want to think this is some Ocean’s Eleven heist waiting to happen. It isn’t. This is only viable if you can drench an area with helium (which means you can already gas everyone you care about) or you have such close physical access that there are so many other things you could do. At best it is an episode of Burn Notice where Michael has to rapidly improvise an escape where his CIA handler of the week already refused to give him something much more useful.




  • I would actually very much argue that the N64 is when they “stopped trying” as it were.

    Sony (which is a can of worms on its own), Sega, and even frigging Atari realized that CD-ROM was “the future”. Nintendo… let’s skip the Sony aspect and just say they chose not to.

    The end result is that everyone else had 700 MB-ish to use for resources and were working on finding ways to hide the load times (RIP Shang Tsung). Nintendo continued to use a cartridge that could hold 4-12 and later 32 and 64 MB. This meant dialogue and cutscenes remained almost non-existent and texture work was similarly VERY limited in favor of solid colors.

    Its Nintendo and most of The Internet are still the kids on the playground looking to beat up the Sega kids so we mostly talk about the good parts of those consoles going forward. But it is always fun to watch one of the Influencers have that “So… outside of like four games the N64 REALLY sucked, huh? BUT THOSE FOUR GAMES ARE THE GREATEST GAMES TO EVER EXIST AND I STILL LOVE YOU MIYAMOTO SAN!!!”. Whereas we all almost universally agree “The Playstation had an amazing library… and most of them look like someone sharted on the screen” because… 700 MB is still not a lot for texture and audio work. And “Oh yeah. The Sega Saturn existed… That was the tower of power, right?”

    And from then on? It was gimmick city. The Gamecube was “portable” because of the handle. Wii is obvious. Wii U was marketed atrociously but actually was way ahead of its time in terms of second screen (… I actually loved my Wii U) but was marketed like another condom for a wii mote. And the Switch is obviously the gameboy/console hybrid.


  • Different people like different games.

    But SoD is very much built around that sandbox style gameplay. Your guide is how you connect the evidence of whatever crime you are investigating.

    That said: I think the tutorial is “a lot” but it is well worth doing at least a good chunk of it. They do a great job of teaching you the basic steps for how to investigate a murder and what to do next.


  • … mostly the other way around?

    Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

    Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any “personal” device and any “private” device.

    There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not to an hour away from wherever they are staying that night.



  • I think any “privacy oriented OS” is inherently a questionable (kneejerk: Stupid and reeks of stale honey) strategy in the first place.

    A very good friend of mine is a journalist. The kind of journalist where… she actually deals with the shit the average person online larps and then some. And what I and her colleagues have suggested is the following:

    Two flash drives

    • One that is a livecd for basically any linux distro. If you are able to reboot the machine you are using and boot to this, do it. That helps with software keyloggers but obviously not hardware
    • One that is just a folder full of portable installs of the common “privacy oriented” software (like the tor browser) supporting a few different OS types.

    Given the option? Boot the public computer to the live image. Regardless, use the latter to access whatever chat or email accounts (that NEVER are logged into on any machine you “own” or near your home) you need.






  • I’ve been rewatching Veep in honor of Kamala and only having moderate anxiety going into November and… this is the kind of shit even Selina wouldn’t have screwed up on. Part of that is very much that Selina might be a horrible person but she is a fundamentally good leader who cares about The American People.

    But it is also just that this level of unforced error from candidates with entire political parties behind them should be unfathomable. Even Veep usually had to make convoluted situations for why Selina would always be blindsided by something The Main Party did or what horrible tragedy she was accidentally mocking that week.

    And yet… that is the GOP.


  • Ignoring the baseless speculation on whether these are legal guns or illegal guns, since there is a pretty good spread on that spectrum:

    The importance is having fewer guns overall. If the availability of legal guns is drastically reduced then it will be a lot harder for an ar-15 to fall off the back of a truck or go missing in someone’s home. It won’t happen overnight but it will happen pretty quickly. We have seen this happen in other “Western” nations.

    Personally? I don’t want to infringe on the rights of responsible gun owners. If anything, I want to make them even more responsible. What that means is that I want:

    1. Much stricter background checks on buying firearms. By all means, factor therapy and rehabilitation into that (just because someone had a nervous breakdown in high school shouldn’t impact their ability to own a people killer so long as an accredited mental health professional signed off on it. But no “gun show loopholes” and more “cooling off periods” to ensure that NOBODY can buy a gun same day.
    2. Ammunition is a controlled substance. You want to buy a box of 9mm rounds? Cool, you are going to fill out a form to make sure that is tracked and you are going to be limited to a certain number of rounds per year unless you fill out the proper forms to get more (comparable to how suppressors and SBRs are handled). And, again, cooling off period. You fill out the form and a week later you can buy your bullets.
    3. Liability on firearms. If your gun is used in a crime then you are charged for it, regardless of whether you pulled the trigger or not. You can bet that people will be disposing of their twenty kitchen cabinet guns almost immediately once they realize they are liable for Little Timmy shooting up his school. And if a gun goes missing? You can bet they will report that within minutes of finding out (and will be checking those gun safes semi-regularly as a result).
    4. Liability on sellers. If a gun is used in a crime then ALL the above paperwork will be triple checked and any improper procedures will result in the seller losing their license or even being charged with negligence.

    All these giant piles of “illegal guns” will dry up pretty quick (comparable to a civilized nation where they are fairly rare for criminals to use) and all the guns that kids take to school will similarly actually be locked up in a way that Little Timmy doesn’t have unsupervised access to.

    But all those Responsible Gun Owners™? They won’t be affected because clearly they are already securing their firearms when not actively in use and always know where their collection is and are making sure that only people who are also Responsible Gun Owners™ have access to it.


    Hell, as a treat, let’s let people who own public shooting ranges jump through some more hoops to relax some of that. You need 500 rounds of .223 a day to practice shooting? Buy it by the mag at Herman’s Military Antiques and use it at his range. You can’t take it home with you but you never needed to take it home to practice shooting, right?

    But also? Public shooting ranges. no private ranges or members only rangers that let rich youtubers build up an armory. If you want the exception then you have to admit anyone who can pass a safety check (with strict penalties for those who inevitably lie to keep The Pink Haired People out) and have documentation that they are using a legally owned firearm.


  • It isn’t about being reasonable.

    If you are expected to track your time to this degree (and, to make it clear, the majority of employers actively don’t want you to), there is a reason. That reason usually being different funding sources. Generally a mix of grants and clients.

    And if a client or grant source finds out you are lying about those? Maybe you only had enough work to do 34 hours instead of 40 hours in one week. Would you be cool paying extra because the guy repairing your muffler had a slow week?

    And if people think being proud of a tool that openly talks about what everyone else silently does isn’t a red flag for employers? Hey, its a great job market so I am sure none of that will matter.