Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with...
You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…
Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.
I understand that no Operating System is 100% safe. Although this backdoor is likely only affects certain Linux desktop users, particularly those running unstable Debian or testing builds of Fedora (like versions 40 or 41), **Could this be a sign that antivirus software should be more widely used on Linux desktops? ** ( I know...
So, I got malware that seemed to create an hidden proxy or VPN or something when I was online, without me having to install anything. I was on Fedora using Firefox in private mode with Ublock Origin and some script blocker. Ghostery, or Privacy Badger, or something. Fedora has it’s firewall enabled and blocking inbound connections, and SELinux was running. It would occasionally report small things like VLC or Clam AV wanting access to something.
It took me a little bit to realize something was wrong.
I realized it after Google started demanding repeated captcha attempts for everything, I started seeing unsuccessful attempts to sign into my Microsoft account from around the world, and some websites started blocking my IP for abuse. A few times, the blocking page (usually Cloudflare) showed that my public IP was over 240.0.0.0, in the unassigned block. My modem logs showed my machine making outbound connections to these random or impossible IPs at times that roughly lined up with my connection issues.
But if I simply hit refresh on those pages when they blocked me, the websites suddenly returned my correct residential IP address and started working again. I was slow to catch on. Hell, I hadn’t even used my Microsoft account for years, and I assumed Fedora with SELinux would alert me if anything strange was going on. It didn’t. My machine started acting weird, but I couldn’t place my finger on exactly how. I tried tools like Clam AV, or any number of intrusion detection solutions to assuage my growing paranoia. Problem is that they require some knowledge and you have to set them up before things go wrong.
Besides a terminal tool to unhide running processes, which inconsistently returned zero to dozens of unknown short-lived programs with increasingly high PIDs, nothing was detected. I later ran that unhide tool on a live USB of Fedora, and it did the same thing, so I assumed it was a false positive.
Ultimately, it was my fault, I know. I just went on a shady website to watch a TV show. Stupid, but not uncommon. My android phone also started acting strangely around the same time. I assume because I visited the same site to finish some season in bed using Firefox mobile. It’s been replaced entirely now.
But the point is that SELinux didn’t stop anything, I didn’t have to explicitly download or install anything to my machine, and it was some kind of drive-by infection that somehow added my machine to a kind of botnet, I think. Hard to tell just from the various logs I gathered from my machine and modem.
I don’t know what it was doing, but when I finally put all the pieces together, I completely wiped the drive in that machine, including a long dd operation on the drives with /dev/random. Still not sure what I’m going to do with it.
I’m also not sure if the infection was limited to Firefox itself, or if my entire machine was compromised. I may never know for sure.
While I was being stupid, I wasn’t being completely reckless and just running untrusted code from strange places. I watched TV in Firefox’s embedded video player. All it took was going to a website that I found by other people recommending it on social media. I should have known better, but I’m human.
If I can’t even visit a webpage without getting invisible botnet malware that escapes professionally configured tools like SELinux on Fedora, then how are complete newbies, or kids, or grandparents, or “know just enough to be dangerous nerds” (like me) supposed to be safe?
I agree that the user is the single biggest point of failure in security, and should be mindful. But when you’re not installing random Github packages, or turning off your firewall, or enabling SSH, and your machine can still get so easily pwned, what then?
That’s the value of anti-virus software. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but neither is your list of rules to follow. There is no single perfect approach, and people are lazy, impulsive, and sometimes drunkenly want to watch Breaking Bad. I don’t know what the solution is, but outright denying everyday antivirus seems… unwise, I guess?
Even if if takes a month for the vendor to be able to detect it, that’s still protection for anyone who comes after. It doesn’t have to be perfect to make a positive difference.
And, no: For anyone curious, I’m not going into more detail about the website.
Let’s keep in mind that if this is a state actor or some sort of global organized crime, then they don’t put all their eggs into one basket. If that’s the case, they’re going to have a bunch of other plans and backdoor attempts ongoing. This isn’t the end and we can assume there’s something else somewhere that went unnoticed.
Security is a constantly changing war of attrition, not a goal/product/configuration.
I know this is an issue fraught with potential legal and political BS, and it’s impossible to check everything without automation these days, but is there an organization that trains and pays people to work as security researchers or QA for open source projects?
Basically, a watchdog group that finds exploitable security vulnerabilities, and works with individuals or vendors to patch them? Maybe make it a publicly owned and operated group with mandatory reporting of some kind. An international project funded by multiple governments, where it’s harder for a single point of influence to hide exploits, abuse secrets, or interfere with the researchers? They don’t own or control any code, just find security issues and advise.
I don’t know.
Just thinking that modern security is getting pretty complicated, with so many moving parts and all.
This isn’t the same thing, but I’m reminded of Minecraft.
Minecraft is a massively popular game. Notch once said he planned to make it open source when its popularity died down. But now Microsoft owns it.
Not only that, but Mojang accounts don’t work anymore. You have to have a Microsoft account to play it now. Even trying to download and play an older version of the game offline requires Microsoft to approve it. Microsoft is actively tightening the leash on the game because it makes them money. Open sourcing the game will likely never happen now. The best we can hope for it for versions to fall into public domain after 70-ish years.
That’s how I see Microsoft. They only care about what its beneficial for them to drive profits. Working on open source projects, and open sourcing a few of their tools to get the benefits of community adoption and code review is great, sure. But they’d sooner try to incorporate Linux into Windows to keep people in their surveillance ecosystem, than to open source Windows.
Remember when Windows 10 was the last version, until they changed their minds? Remember when they floated the idea of charging a recurring subscription to use Windows, before they silently dropped the idea? Remember when there was credible talk about the next version of Windows being cloud-based where they controlled all your data and you had no privacy? Hell, you have basically no privacy on Windows 10. Trying to reclaim some involves registry edits, special third party tools, and a constant battle with automatic updates reverting your changes.
I’ll say it again. Microsoft doesn’t care about OSS. It’s just currently beneficial for them to pretend they do.
Goggle seemed to care a lot about OSS, then started making everything in Android depend on their proprietary ecosystem to function. Now Google is using the dominant position they got by taking advantage of OSS adoption, and have been pushing privacy-invading standards and trying to get rid of ad blockers online, among many other things.
For these huge companies, OSS is just a tool to get more control and power. The moment it’s no longer useful, they’ll find ways to work around the license and enshitify everything again.
It keeps happening. I refuse to keep trusting bad actors every time they dangle a shiny trinket over our heads.
I do appreciate the work this person did in finding the bug. It’s not all doom and gloom.
What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes....
VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
I installed NetGuard about a month ago and blocked all internet to apps, unless they’re on a whitelist. No notifications from this particular system app (that can’t be disabled) until recently when it started making internet connection requests to google servers. Does anyone know when this became a thing?...
When I saw this on a custom ROM, it was basically the same thing, but said that my financial institution or whoever had admin access to my phone, including seeing texts and everything else, until my phone was paid off. Still not sure why that was there in a custom ROM, but I ended up not using it.
I lived across the street from a department store, a grocery, some pizza places, a “smoke” shop, video game stores, and everything else I could want on a normal day. It was amazing. I walked everywhere except to work. I miss living there. The main downside was that it was in Florida.
Nah, it was Orlando, but not the city proper, more like one of the smaller areas around the actual city. Trying not to give too much away, but it was near Altamonte Springs.
Not disagreeing, but I think the point is that no single person or company should be in a position of that much power. All it takes is for one thing to go wrong, one law to change, or one financial scare to happen, and BOOM. Suddenly this great monopoly is doing things people hate and there’s no alternative.
It will be possible to configure COSMIC to look like Unity out of the box. There’s only a few panel applets that need to be implemented to make the experience 1:1.
I’m sorry to hear you’re frustrated. As an AI, my job is to assist and provide you with the information or help you need. Please feel free to let me know how I can better assist you, and I’ll do my best to address your concerns.
One of my favorite moments like this was a Reddit thread where some account was pretending to be human and arguing with people in favor of the CEO’s actions during The Purge. Then one person asked it a question about making some dangerous thing or other, and it starting replying with things like “As an AI model, I cannot explain how to do that.” and stuff. It was great.
That’s true. The reason why I suggested it is because the other person said they know nothing about Linux, have barely used a terminal before, and just wanted to try a certain distro. I thought this website would be a quick and easy way for them to play around a little bit to scratch that itch and see if they wanted to dive deeper into things.
They all work well enough on my weak machine with an RX580.
Buuuuuuuuuut, RWKY had some kind of optimization thing going that makes it two or three times faster to generate output. The problem is that you have to be more aware of the order of your input. It has a hard time going backwards to a previous sentence, for example.
So you’d want to say things like “In the next sentence, identify the subject.” and not “Identify the subject in the previous text.”
Linux already won years ago. Linux won so thoroughly that Windows 10 includes a Linux subsystem, almost every supercomputer runs Linux or BSD, and the majority of all mobile devices use the Linux kernel.
Hi Beehaw! I’ve finally made the switch to Linux, I’m using Nobara OS based on Fedora. It’s been very nice so far (I had tried to go with Arch but Nvidia drivers ehhh). I’m running into issues remapping controls to my Xbox Adaptive Controller. Was hoping someone here might have some input....
Sad to see this fork of SC Controller is now archived. It provides an Appimage version, and also worked with my PS4 controller. Credit to Kozec, the original creator.
There was also Qjoypad, but I haven’t used it in a while.
Basically, the game is reading the raw controller input as well as the translated virtual controller input. I’ve run into that a lot before on other games. The fix I found is usually to try another mapper, or to disable the controller in the game and map the controller to keyboard and mouse. It’s annoying.
With luck, you -might- have luck with closing the game and setting up the controller mapper, then start the game. If the mapping program provides an Xinput option, try toggling that and see if it helps.
Good luck.
EDIT: Did Kozec stop developing the app? I used to support them on Patreon before I lost my job. There haven’t been any official updates in a while. Sad day. :(
Nintendo: “Let’s force retro gamers to buy the Switch if they want to play our titles, by pressuring Steam to remove all Nintendo emulators, and by suing Switch emulators into oblivion.”
Also Nintendo: “Why don’t retro gamers want to buy our products anymore?”
God, I only use Ublock Origin on Firefox. No TOR, VPNs, or anything like that.
Despite that, there are a handful of Google-related websites like Virustotal that now permanently trap me in repeating captchas. Youtube will occasionally decide to block my IP entirely for a week.
Let me tell you, this shit doesn’t make me more inclined to disable ad blocking. Instead, I’ve starting finding alternatives and using a sandboxed vanilla Chromium for problem pages.
Don’t know. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t sit around mulling over how much I like or dislike different religions. I do think about when the people in those religions do stupid and evil shit, but otherwise I don’t care that much.
Not sure, but I’ll say that if you use ChromeOS, you’re much more likely to buy special hardware (Chromebooks) to run it on. Not many people download ChromeOS to run on their pre-existing computers. But you can just slap Linux on a toaster if you really want to. Even more, Valve’s Steam Deck comes with Linux by default, and that’s basically a desktop with touch and gamepad controls in mind.
I just wish the culture around open source gave more back to the people working on the software, even if it was just businesses. I think we’d see even more delevopment and support if the one guy making a critical driver for some obscure device that only power plants use, could take a vacation or quit his day job.
People around the world depend on open source being freely available and shareable. But if you’re making millions of dollars a year, I think it’s only fair to give some money to the people making your profit possible.
Oh no, I got you. I was kind of looking at if from another angle.
You normally can’t buy a machine with desktop Linux pre-installed, but you can with ChromeOS. Despite that, Linux has a bigger market share. I think part of the reason why is specifically because ChromeOS is so limited and intrinsically tied to Google, that people who do things like install new OSes avoid it like the plague. Google’s push to satisfiy shareholders and build walled gardens is the reason their desktop OS isn’t being used.
I’ve installed Android in virtual machines and played with x86 builds on bare metal. I’ve installed Linux on Macbooks, desktops, servers, and handhelds. I’ve tried out BSD on network shares and other little devices. I’ve never done anything like that with ChromeOS. It holds zero appeal to me, despite being easily purchasable at a retail store.
I use Gnome 3 because of Comic-like tiling extensions, lack of random bugs and crashes (looking at you my beloved KDE), and because so many apps require GTK that it almost always gets installed by something I want to use.
I dislike using it because SO MANY features and quality of life things were removed and never reintroduced. Like, I have to make a custom bookmark for root or my Desktop folder in Nautilus, and can’t remove the default ones that I never use. Creating symlinks is disabled by default. I have to go to “other locations” and manually type in a network address because you can’t even type in the ADDRESS BAR. If too many windows are open on a tiled workspace, the lack of any reserved clickable space on the titlebar means Nautilus gets squished and I can’t drag and move a window without either moving something else first, opening the overview, or using the keyboard. Not entirely the Gnome team’s fault, but it’s little oversights like that which make the desktop a pain to use. The awful “classic mode” application menu with no ability to search or right click on entries for more options is a good example too. I have to open the mobile-like workspaces view or whatever its call to do that stuff now. I’m not on mobile, this is a desktop.
It’s like they’re trying to force me to use their cursor/touch based UX in some ways, but in others I have to use a keyboard or dig in the settings to do anything. Or maybe they’re just of the opinion that if people want features, someone will volunteer to make and maintain an extension to enable them.
Don’t get me wrong, Gnome 3 is impressive, looks good, and is generally simple to use, but I end up trying to spend so much time working around its intentional limitations, that I start to hate it a little more every day. I use it begrudgingly, waiting for something better to come along. If I was a smarter person with more time, I’d try to help the project with these papercuts, but my coding skills are crap.
But, just so I’m not beating up on them for no good reason, I’ll add that there are a ton of very nice things they created or implemented that I enjoy. The quick settings menu comes to mind; and the settings app in general is very nice.
I think the Gnome devs made a lot of good choices. I just wish they could have done so without removing so many features or trying to force a paradigm change in how I use my computer. I appreciate their work, I really do, but damn…
Not gonna lie, I’ve submitted tiny feature requests to the dev team for Cinnamon and Mate before. One or two of them got implemented, and I was so … happy? proud? idk
I was such a cool feeling though. Being able to participate is very underrated.
I’m still following an open bug report from a year ago where the desktop does weird stuff with AMD GPUs, like randomly scramble graphics or unmap half the screen for no reason.
Don’t be fooled. The real issue here is that Nintendo is trying to use this case as a wedge to eventually outlaw or effectively ban all emulation software because they think it somehow massively affects their bottom line, or they want to have a scapegoat for weak profits.
I’ve never once in my life had a Gamecube, for example. I never will. So if I wanted to pirate Gamecube games and play them on my computer, it is literally victimless, and has zero negative affect on Nintendo’s profits. In fact, I might love the games and decide to buy official merch. Same with the Swtich. I haven’t pirated either, but you get the idea.
Even if you can somehow prove how many people pirated a game over the years, that tells you absolutely nothing about lost potential profits, because people that pirate probably never had the money to buy your hardware and games to begin with.
Most of the stuff is already gone, but Alekon looks adorable. Reminds me a bit of Slime Rancher graphics with Pokemon Snap gameplay.
UPDATE: I got the code for the game and have played it for about 10 hours. It’s very cute, and the mental break from daily stress that I needed. Thank you again @EssentialCoffee
Gameplay mechanics were also a lot better with more replayability. (lemmy.world)
Ignoring the lack of updates if the game is buggy, games back then were also more focused on quality and make gamers replay the game with unlockable features based on skills, not money. I can’t count the number of times I played Metal Gear Solid games over and over to unlock new features playing the hardest difficulty and with...
Will antivirus be more significant on Linux desktop after this xz-util backdoor?
I understand that no Operating System is 100% safe. Although this backdoor is likely only affects certain Linux desktop users, particularly those running unstable Debian or testing builds of Fedora (like versions 40 or 41), **Could this be a sign that antivirus software should be more widely used on Linux desktops? ** ( I know...
Inside the failed attempt to backdoor SSH globally - that got caught by chance - Kevin Beaumont (doublepulsar.com)
FF Evangelists (lemmy.ml)
WARNING: Malicious code in current pre-release & testing versions/variants: F40 and rawhide affected - users of F40/rawhide need to respond (discussion.fedoraproject.org)
backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise (www.openwall.com)
Your first distribution
What was the first ever distro you installed and used? For me, it was Mint as I seemed like the closest thing to Windows minus all the forced updates and chappy changes....
VLC - App stores were a mistake (archive.is)
VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
Lay them on me (slrpnk.net)
What lesser known free and open source software do you use daily to improve your life?
For me it is the note taking/PKMS tool SilverBullet.
Google Allows Creditors to Brick Your Phone (lemmy.world)
I installed NetGuard about a month ago and blocked all internet to apps, unless they’re on a whitelist. No notifications from this particular system app (that can’t be disabled) until recently when it started making internet connection requests to google servers. Does anyone know when this became a thing?...
People Hate the Idea of Car-Free Cities—Until They Live in One (www.wired.com)
Round 2 🚢 (jlai.lu)
She did her best ok? (lemmy.world)
Steam :: Introducing Steam Families (steamcommunity.com)
Valve announced a replacement feature for both Family Sharing and Family View. Currently in beta....
COSMUnity (lemmy.world)
It will be possible to configure COSMIC to look like Unity out of the box. There’s only a few panel applets that need to be implemented to make the experience 1:1.
Liking an OS isn't a personality trait ❌ (lemm.ee)
Open-source ChatGPT Alternative (jan.ai)
COSMIC: More Alpha, More Fun! (blog.system76.com)
AntiMicroX - Anyone with experience using controller remapping applications?
Hi Beehaw! I’ve finally made the switch to Linux, I’m using Nobara OS based on Fedora. It’s been very nice so far (I had tried to go with Arch but Nvidia drivers ehhh). I’m running into issues remapping controls to my Xbox Adaptive Controller. Was hoping someone here might have some input....
Switch 2 is crunch time for Nintendo and backward compatibility (www.polygon.com)
What the Cursor? - An introduction to the new hyprcursor format (blog.vaxry.net)
ISP junk generator
Is there something that can generate random Internet usage to make the real sites I go to a bit obfuscated?...
How do atheists who direct all their ire against religious belief think about religions that don't emphasis le believing things, e.g. Zen?
Linux hits 4% on the desktop 🐧 📈 (gs.statcounter.com)
GNOME 46 is Coming in Hot With These 6 Features (news.itsfoss.com)
Tears Of The Kingdom Was Pirated 1 Million Times, Nintendo Claims In Lawsuit (kotaku.com)
Steam Code Giveaway
Edit: If one of my codes has been claimed, please check out this comment. /u/neurospice@lemmy.dbzer0.com also has Jingle Jam 2023 codes available....
Warframe Finally Getting Cross-Platform Save and Android Closed Beta Registration Available Now (techraptor.net)