Melody Fwygon

  • 0 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • Can it? Maybe. It’s not impossible; but it isn’t practical and most ISPs limit their shenanigans to grabbing your unencrypted DNS requests.

    Will it? Probably no; aside from the previously mentioned DNS redirections; they’re not interested in most people’s packets, only in how many they deliver.

    Should you care? I won’t tell you not to take precaution, but I do urge you to consider your threat model carefully and consider the tradeoffs. When Security & Privacy goes up, Convenience and Functionality WILL go down. Balance your needs. Don’t put yourself in a state of Privacy fatigue.

    Are there easy fixes? Maybe. I think a VPN or using Tor would solve your concerns here anyways; it’s not required that your modem be running OSS that you can control. If you can achieve it; that’s still good for you; but it’s not something to be sweating if your modem isn’t capable and your invasive ISP is the only effective option.


  • I’m not accounting for State laws; which may in fact be stricter. I’m talking about Federal Laws which might not explicitly forbid such things; so long as they’re done in an actually safe manner by professionals.

    But, as I said before, if the DEA believes it has the power to stop that none-the-less; that’s what they will do, without respect to if the law is actually legally unclear or borderline. Unfortunately many pharmaceutical places don’t care to invite the wrath of the DEA; even if what they’re doing could be considered permissible; so long as they do not synthesize an exact drug that the Feds specifically name as a controlled substance.

    Again; IANAL either. But I do think there’s a lot of room for small compounding pharmacies to synthesize various drugs to meet a patient’s needs quickly while waiting for proper shipments to arrive. There’s lots of compounds that are life-sustaining that do not fall under the DEA banner of authority.



  • I firmly think this would be a boon for many people; owning one of these is likely a lifeline that even small town physicians could utilize to dispense drugs freely or cheaply to patients in need.

    This is something that I think small-town pharmacies could use to create compounds in cases of drug shortages. I think tools and programs and small labs like what are discussed in the article are a positive force for good; and that they should be not only allowed, but encouraged, for many drugs that are expensive, unavailable to someone in need and can be readily synthesized safely with a basic college level of chemistry training by someone in a pharmacy.

    I think the potential risks and downsides are small right now; and I think more of it should be encouraged gently so that we can find out quickly what the flaws and limitations are so that we can put regulatory guardrails around it so that people do not harm themselves.


  • (As if spoken by the King to Simba:)

    Rust: Everything from the bottom of this cliff to the acacia tree there is ours. Make sure you ask permission before you take something, take nothing you are not permitted to take. We don’t go beyond that tree; and if you even think about the elephant graveyard beyond it; I’ll kill you myself.

    C: Everything the sun touches is yours. I caution you to not venture into the shadows; but I will not stop you, for you are a king, and nothing a king can do is unnecessary if it is for his people.


  • I think there’s a problem with the ‘C only’ devs refusing to be accomodating to the Rust developers. Instead of being stubborn; why not provide them what is needed and help the Rust team learn how to maintain what is needed themselves?

    None of the reasons I’ve seen mentioned are legitimate reasons for refusing to at least help them a few times, and helping them to learn how to do the onerous task themselves so they can keep it off the main plate for too long.

    C devs do not need to learn Rust to provide critical information; they need only be present and cooperative with Rust devs to help them find, convert, and localize data structures for Rust use. They can stand to sit and pair code with their Rust Dev counterparts long enough to teach a Rust Dev counterpart how and what they need to look for in C code. It’s not that big of an ask, and it’s not something that really is a large ask. Provide the bindings for a short period of time, and work on training a team of Rust Devs to maintain the bindings.

    That way both sides are stepping up to meet the others and the data isn’t being sat on by the C-only Devs.



  • No; Piracy won’t stop.

    Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.

    Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in ‘missed profits’.

    Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing “lost sales”; but that’s provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?


  • To be clear; the Nintendo Switch tends to trade fluently in cryptographic certificates.

    The MiG Switch has one of these certificates; one it’s creators likely copied from a legitimate Nintendo Switch game title. All games have such certificates and they are uniquely serialized; much like a GUID or UUID would be. These certificates are signed by the Game Dev studio, and then Nintendo in a typical certificate signing chain scheme; Nintendo signs the Game Dev Studio cert, which signs the Title certificate, which signs the unique cart or digital copy cert.

    This banning is usually achieved by banning either the lowest certificate in the chain or the one directly above it; or even the Dev Cert if it was compromised.

    So the MiG Switch carts are likely hardware banned. Your Nintendo Switch probably advertises to Nintendo which cart(s) were inserted into it recently by sharing the fingerprints of the certificates. Then Nintendo can basically kill the certificate assigned to your Switch system and prevent you from connecting online; as your Switch uses it’s own system cert to identify itself to Nintendo services.

    In all cases this is un-evade-able when connecting to the internet; as Nintendo Switch system certs are burned into a PROM chip on the main board at manufacture. This chip is a WORM chip, which can only be written once and read many billions of times.

    A critical part of the way they try and curb cheating in online play is checking the integrity of the runtime environment; which includes checking what titles were launched recently; and if that happens to include a certificate they’ve banned for being cloned by the MiG Switch; then you’ll quickly be banned by their anti-cheating hammer.

    Most important is those checks typically don’t take place naturally; they only occur when you’re connecting to the EShop, or connecting to NN to play multiplayer online. The devil therein unfortunately lies in the details; and if you’ve ever purchased a Digital Title that means your Switch is regularly connecting to the EShop to renew Digital License Tickets needed. They tend to expire every 72 hours and must be renewed by presenting an expired Ticket, a valid Ticket Granting Ticket (given to your Switch when you buy the title) and contacting “Mommy Nintendo” and asking “Mommy, May I?”. Yeah. DRM sucks.

    If all goes well; your Switch gets a shiny new set of tickets. Unfortunately Nintendo was paying attention to requests and will issue out regular waves of bans for systems detected cheating. You won’t know when this will happen, and it won’t prevent Nintendo from letting you play your games; you’ll just suddenly find your Switch banned from online play after such ban waves.



  • Typically, using your own VPN should suffice. Depending on your situation you can do other things as well. If you are unable to download these tools on the school network in question; do not attempt to do so again. Use a public or other network connection elsewhere to obtain the tools you need to bypass their crap.

    For example, NextDNS could be helpful. By running their client app; ( https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki/Windows ) you can make sure all your DNS requests are encrypted. Similarly you could simply set up a local DNS server that you point Windows at which can redirect those requests over DNS-Over-(HTTPS or TLS) to a DNS provider of your choosing.


  • She’s such a narcissist that she couldn’t stay out of the spotlight. lol.

    Regardless; I doubt that any game she could develop would be any good; and I shudder to think of what deranged DRM scheme she will cook up to protect her own game. It’ll probably be worse than Denuvo, knowing how unstable she is.

    Genuinely, the scene is better without her hate filled screeds polluting the web. Her abilities might be appreciated more if she got some mental help and she could rejoin the scene as a positive force; not someone who lets their ego run rampant and spews hate at the slightest provocation.

    Unfortunately the scene is too cowardly to NUKE her output into obscurity until she cleans her spew up.






  • Even if the punishment is largely symbolic and Google only pays a tiny (compared to it’s massive size) fine; I’d still call that a significant win.

    • Google can be REQUIRED to give users A CHOICE of Search Engines.
    • Google can be FORBIDDEN from giving their OWN ENGINE an advantage in search results or advertising
    • Google can be FORCED to ALLOW THIRD PARTIES access to the SAME APIs used in Chrome and Chromium.
    • Google can be FORBIDDEN from BLOCKING THIRD PARTY FRONTENDS from using Google Search, Youtube and more.

  • I use SimpleLogin; and for the most part they don’t show up like this most of the time.

    That being said; I also don’t deeply do investigation unless the emails being sent from the alias vary from that alias’ purpose.

    Typically as long as the emails remain from the same relative sender (From: field in header) and the subject matter of the emails do not materially differ from what I initially get on the alias; I don’t really fiddle with them.

    But since the alias typically is a fixed sender; I also have them configured to include the actual From: header in the alias From: fields. This allows me to quickly block with granularity from my inbox any stray emails that might wander onto an alias without making it necessary for me to kill the entire alias. (Assuming the alias is still in use and worthy of preserving)

    But then again I don’t have nearly the spam problem that most do. I have segmented inboxes for various needs; and my GMail catches most of my crap being the biggest inbox. Between SL and GMail spam filters alongside of additional inbox filters I have setup there; most of the spam I get is generally funneled to the correct place and spam is minimal.



  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.onetoPrivacy@lemmy.mlThreat Modelling 101
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    While I don’t understand how people could possibly fail to remember ONE PASSWORD; since it is brilliantly easy to remember whole sentences and phrases that resonate with you; I do understand that laziness is profoundly common.

    For this kind of laziness; I do think Password Managers should routinely scan the local disk(s) for documents with strings that can hash into being the ‘master passphrase’. When found; you’re instantly greeted with a requirement to change your password to a new one that isn’t one you used in the past.

    We do need to punish laziness like that in password managers at least. Similarly; OSes need to do this too with their own passwords.