So, MS is exiting the console market to sell HTPCs with an XBox logo?

Kerchoff’s Principle has long been a keystone of cryptographic security. That a crypto system should be secure, even if everything about the system is known, except for the key. This has resulted in robust cryptographic protocols, specifically because the protocols could be open and well researched. This same principle shows up in other areas of security under the axiom, “security through obscurity is not security”. If the security of a system fundamentally relies on the details of the system remaining a secret, then that system is inherently not secure. Having security systems based on open source protocols and software is this working in practice. By having everything open and available for a wide range of researches to test and validate, we can be more assured of the security of a system. Closed, proprietary protocols and software are a risk to organizations. They have no way of knowing if those closed systems are really well designed or a house of cards hiding behind a curtain.

Given the roughly similarly sized drop in Win11 users. I chose to believe that the Win10 jump is from people nopeing out of the Win11 slop.

AI Slop code base. Did Microsoft go open source?

It’s voice phishing. It’s basically a scammer cold-calling a victim and talking them into giving up useful information or doing things the user really shouldn’t do, like entering credentials into a scammer owned web page or adding a new multi-factor authenticator.

This one is a mixed bag. KYC regulations are very useful in detecting and prosecuting money laundering and crimes like human trafficking. But ya, if this data needs to be kept, the regulations around secure storage need to be just as tight. This sort of thing should be required to be kept to cybersecurity standards like CMMC Level 3, audited by outside auditors and violations treated as company and executive disqualifying events (you ran a company so poorly you failed to secure data, you’re not allowed to run such a company for the next 10 years). The sort of negligence of leaving a database exposed to the web should already result in business crippling fines (think GDPR style fines listed in percentages of global annual revenue). A database which is exposed to the web and has default credentials or no access control at all should result in c-level exec seeing the inside of a jail cell. There is zero excuse for that happening in a company tasked with protecting data. And I refuse to believe it’s the result of whatever scape-goat techs they try to pin this on. This sort of failure always comes from the top. It’s caused by executives who want everything done fast and cheap and don’t care about it being done right.

I have two:

1. Waves glowing with bioluminescence during a red tide. We didn’t know it would be going on and were just camping by the beach. Walking on it at night, we all saw the waves glowing and weren’t sure it was real. As we got closer, our footsteps in the area where the waves were rolling in and out were glowing as well. Just surreal.
2. A house blowing up. Guy opened a natural gas valve in the house and touched it off. Insulation shot way up in the air and the house itself bowed outwards in basically every direction, stayed standing though. At least until it burned down.

Oh ya, I remember her greatest hit

Unless the romance is central to the game, that sort of focus and depth just isn’t going to be put into it. There is also the issue that the writers in video games have far less control over the main character than they do in other mediums. In a book, you don’t have to worry about your main character deciding to to fuck off for a week collecting all the boxes in a village and stacking them on the town well, just because it’s funny. That main character stays on task and on plot for the writer. There are games where that high level of control is possible, visual novels exist, but that starts to push into the question, “why not just make a book/movie instead?”

Similarly, I think it’s going to be hard for any video game romance not to come off as transactional, due to the nature of a game being a computer program. Imagine trying to tell Romeo and Juliet as a video game. At some point, Romeo and Juliet will need to interact. Romeo arrives at Juliet’s window and professes his love. How does the player interact with the game for that scene? Is it just a cutscene? Or a cutscene with quick time events (press X to woo). Trying to replicate a Jane Austin style story would be even worse. As books about people sitting about in drawing rooms drinking tea and being catty to one another, replicating that in a video game is all going to boil down to dialog trees. Perhaps the first time through it could feel fresh and interesting, but on a second playthrough it’s going to quickly be obvious that the whole thing is really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”. Maybe we could get a Jane Austin Rouge-like, in that each time you load it up the characters’ personalities change and you really do have to pay attention to verbal and social queues to get anywhere. But even that is still really just “pick the right options for a chance at sexy-time”.

Ultimately, I think video games are always going to be fairly transactional in nature. They are computer programs and are ultimately deterministic. All the interactions you have in a video game need to be planned out, scripted and maybe even voice acted. It’s what makes all the interactions in Baldur’s Gate 3 so amazing. Everything those characters do was planned for, written and recorded. Every comment, every facial expression was planned, written and coded. There is no spontaneity, because there can’t be (maybe with AI, but that’s a different can of worms). That so many little things actually did get covered is amazing. But, the trigger conditions for playing that bit of animation and voice acting will be hard coded. Whether or not a character likes the main character must be a set of numbers stored in memory, because that’s how computers work. Yes, it could be far more complex than just an easily identifiable number. And perhaps hiding those numbers from the player would make it feel less obvious, but they aren’t going to go away.

And all the work which goes into planning, writing and coding those interactions is time spent during development. Going back to Baldur’s Gate 3, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of the NPCs started pairing off with each other? If the main characters isn’t getting busy with Shadowheart, maybe she discoverers an interest in big men who can turn into bears so you come back to camp sometime to find her and Halsin sitting very close together talking softly. This could even have the whole random element where different characters have different crushes/interests each time you play through. That would be neat to see, but it’s going to require a lot of extra development. Unless that’s a feature which starts selling video games, it’s not going to happen. Perhaps this sort of thing will show up in indie games, I wouldn’t expect it in major titles anytime soon.

Pepperidge Farm remembers:

Is there anything we could try to get alternatives to YouTube?

Yes, you can pay for it.

If you want “free” then you’re going to be stuck with the same ads, tracking and enshitification. If you don’t want any of that, you are going to have to crack open your wallet and pay for the privilege. As an example (not an EU one), there’s Nebula which is ad free, owned and operated by creators, free of AI slop and mostly free of the usual dross the youtube algorithm pushes. At the same time, it’s scope is pretty limited (predominantly science and edu-tainment type content). And there is little guarantee that they will survive and/or grow. I personally have a subscription and keep hoping they succeed, but I also don’t expect them to reach anything like the scope of YouTube.

And that sort of thing brings with it another problem: a lack of democratization. One of the things YouTube does is allow nearly anyone to put something up. While the algorithm is hardly kind to new or niche creators, it’s still entirely possible for some random person to start posting cat videos as dramas in three acts, and maybe that takes off. With the siloed services, that’s never going to happen. Maybe they won’t insist on some sort of editorial input, but they are also going to be far more selective in what they platform. So, there is a trade-off to be had.

There is also the BBC model, with a publicly funded service. You’re still paying for it, but it’s not directly controlled by a corporation with it’s shareholders to serve. Though, there might still be the question of opening up the platform for more “niche” creators.

one day when we will hopefully be living in more peaceful times without imperialists

You don’t read much history? Humans have never lived in widespread peace for any length of time. We have evidence of violence between groups of humans well back into the Stone Age. We are not a species prone to peace.

President John F. Kennedy had the highest average approval rating among the presidents tracked by Gallup at roughly 70%.

So the secret to a President having a high approval rating is to get shot in the face. Guess Trump should have shifted the other way.

Team speak? What year is it?
I remember hosting a teamspeak server for folks I played Wolfenstein: ET with. In the early 2000’s.

While I don’t know the specific post you are referring to, Malware exists for Linux. Here’s a great overview from last year. If someone wants to argue, “oh it’s from a security company trying to sell a product” then let me point you at the Malware Bazaar and specifically the malware tagged elf. Those are real samples of real malware in the Linux specific ELF executable binary format (warning: yes it’s real malware, don’t run anything from this site). On the upshot, most seem to be Linux variants of the Mirai botnet. Not something you want running, but not quite as bad as ransomware. But, dig a bit and there are other threats. Linux malware exists, it has for a long time and it’s getting more prevalent as more stuff (especially servers) run on Linux.

While Linux is far more secure than Windows by design, it’s not malware proof. It is harder for malware to move from user space into root (usually), but that’s often not needed for the activities malware gets up to today. Ransomware, crypto miners and info stealers will all happily execute in user-land. And for most people, this is where their important stuff lives. Linux’s days of living in “security through obscurity” are over. Attackers are looking at Linux now and starting to go after it.

All that said, is it worth having a bloated A/V engine doing full on-access scanning? That depends on how you view the risk. Many of the drive-by type attacks (e.g. ClickFix, fake tech-support scams) all heavily target Windows and would fail on a Linux system. The malware and backdoors that come bundled with pirated software are likely to fail on a Linux system, though I’ll admit to not having tested that sort of thing with Wine/Proton installed. For those use cases, I’d suggest not downloading pirated software. Or, if you absolutely are going to, run those file through ClamAV at minimum.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to run anything as heavy as on-access file scanning or anything to keep trawling memory for signatures on my home systems. Keeping software up to date and limiting what I download, install and run is enough to manage my risk. I do have ClamAV installed to let me do a quick, manual scan of anything I do download. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to buy A/V product. Most of the engines out there for Linux are crap anyway.

Professionally, I am one of the voices who pushed for A/V (really EDR) on the Linux systems in my work environment. My organization has a notable Linux footprint and we’ve seen attackers move to Linux based systems specifically because they are less likely to be well monitored. In a work environment, we have less control over how the systems get (ab)used and have a higher need for telemetry and investigation.

One of the things to look at is the interest rate you would be paying for either loan and how that would effect the total cost of the loan. Also, there is the question of the utility of any money spent up front. For example, if using a loan on the existing house would result in no up front costs and a 5% interest rate over 30 years, and the standard mortgage would cost $20,000 and have an interest rate of 8%, you’re almost certainly better to use the existing house as backing and throw that same $20K in a long term interest bearing investment (e.g. government bonds). All this assuming you plan to hold onto the second property long term.

Compounding interest is a fantastic tool and a fearful master. If you can make it work for you, then do it. If you are facing the possibility of paying it, you almost always want to lower it as much as possible.

While it’s not a service I would use, if it helps move the needle away from Windows’ dominance of the gaming market, that’s a good thing. The more people who can ditch Windows, the better. It probably means an Eternal September for Linux. But that is ultimately a good thing. If Linux becomes the default choice for gaming PCs for the mass market, more games will be released with Linux Native versions, driving further Linux adoption. It’s the type of virtuous cycle which is needed to kill the giant that is Windows.

I’d just be happy to see “evil” choices which weren’t cartoonishly silly. So many of these game end up offering you choices like:

• Kiss the baby, donate all your money to an orphanage.
• Kill the baby, cook and eat it. in front of the mother.

There’s never anything like:

• Kiss the baby, take over the orphanage, run an outward front which looks like a fantastic charitable organization while training the orphans to commit crimes for you.

Really well done “evil” should be loved by the people, seem outwardly good while using that as cover to do selfish things. But that is much harder than “Press X to murder an innocent for no reason”.

Rather than interact with a machine, you’ll just be walking around, sipping coffee, having thoughtful conversations with a bot laughing along with your jokes as it writes your letter and does your taxes.

So, basically the computers from Star Trek: TNG. I’d go for that, but unfortunately, what we’ll get instead is enshitified AI slop which exists to suck a subscription fee out of you every month while pushing ads.