Melody Fwygon

Beehaw alt of @melody@lemmy.one

@fwygon on discord

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  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • Welp; It’s easy enough to download Deno.

    Anyone caught with their panties down after they make it a requirement is responsible for downloading Deno to fix it for themselves.

    I’m glad they’re doing what they must to keep the project going; and moving this function to a more powerful engine isn’t a bad idea…I hope other YT extracting tools will follow in these footsteps as well; leveraging a more powerful tool ain’t a bad idea…and it might solve some of their own papercuts.


  • I’d say they’re getting desperate to extort the few victims they manage to infect with this crap if they’re adding an extortion/blackmail component to this that isn’t your bog standard “oh files are now encrypted” malware.

    Since ransomware is pretty much known to be common enough; it’s clear that people are backing up data on a regular enough basis to be resistant to it; especially if the criminal is demanding far more money than any data they managed to take hostage is worth to the person. Since cloud services are ubiquitous now; it’s likely they already have critical documents and photos backed up safely and the ransomware fails if all the user does is find someone techy to just nuke the whole system and reinstall everything from their cloud backup.

    Using browser activity and webcam spying might seem clever but it’s just a reaching maneuver to extort people who would ordinarily just shrug off a ransomware infection but whom still have poor enough opsec online to be affected greatly by such blackmail.


  • If it’s a tool, you aren’t necessarily able to control what it does under your direction.

    This is false. A tool, by definition, is controlled by the user of said tool. AI is controlled by user input. Any AI that cannot be controlled by said input is said to be “misaligned” and is considered a broken tool. OpenAI lays out clearly what it’s AI is trained to do and not do. It is not responsible if you use the tool they created in a way that is not recommended.

    Any AI prompt fits the definition of a tool:

    From Merriam-Webster:

    2b: an element of a computer program (such as a graphics application) that activates and controls a particular function

    In my opinion; the AI should not be equipped to bypass it’s guardrails even when prompted to do so. A hammer did not tell you to use it as a drill; it’s user decided to do that.

    The user alone has the creativity to use the tool to achieve their goal.



  • Looks harmless on the surface; but yet, is still in fact, boiling a frog.

    Thankfully the rollout seems fairly slow; should be enough time for most of you who find this concerning enough to switch to a custom ROM which eschews this safeguard.

    With luck this will be even something we can turn off. I certainly would demand the ability to turn this security setting OFF even if it ships “Default - ON” to protect normal users who do not have a need usually to sideload unsigned apps.

    I don’t like it myself. If we are not given a choice; I will likely flash my device over to an Open Source ROM that respects my privacy more.

    For developers; this might be a good time to make sure that there are people who can “register” semi-anonymously and share the signing keys. Genuinely, I think something could be figured out; and private registrations could become a thing; Where one person capable of registering simply vouchsafes a number of developers they personally know by sharing necessary signing keys where they too contribute to an app project.

    I think the whole implementation can’t be immune to key sharing, and I do think it’s possible to have one dev deal with the devil…Google in this case.

    While I understand some projects will rightfully not want to hand information over to Google; usually because they’re being legally attacked by Google; I believe it will be possible to simply use wider shared keys to misdirect and deflect any unwanted legal action.


  • With the Obvious exclusions being mentioned here, where you should see them first...
    • IGNORANCE, regardless of if it was willful or blissful unawareness of the dangers
    • AI researchers…and other research interests
    • Science involving intelligence
    • Other Computer Science tinkering and experimenting…

    I can’t imagine why anyone would allow an AI to interact with files that have not been thoroughly backed up and secured on a disk that is detached from any system the AI is running on.

    Secondly, I cannot imagine why one would ever permit the AI to use move commands when getting files from a directory that is external to the directory you explicitly designate as the AI’s workspace.

    Third, why would someone not make sure all the files are in the right places yourself? It takes maybe 5 minutes tops to crack open a file explorer window and do the file operations exactly as you intended them; that way it’s ensured that a ‘copy’ operation and not a ‘move’ operation is used on the files, while doing any versioning, backing up or checkpointing that is desired.

    Last of all; why would someone use an LLM to make simple commands to a machine that they could easily do in one CLI command or one GUI interaction? If one can type an entire sentence in natural language to an AI, and they are skilled enough to set up and use that AI agent as a tool, why not simply type the command they intended, or do the GUI interaction necessary to do the task?


  • Again; I must iterate how wrong you are.

    People can and do travel and move to different countries with their consoles. There can be multiple accounts per console. People can feasibly have two consoles right next to each other connected to different networks and swap carts between them. People can change consoles because they upgraded or because they have multiple consoles in the household. And people can and do resell carts all the time.

    These situations do not matter as the logic for detection is very simple. Is cartrige A with serial ABC in more places than is reasonably expected of that cartridge? With physical copies that limitation is exactly 1 place, 1 system at a time. Irrespective of who it’s registered to or who owns it. Any cartridge that has been in more than one place at one time and your system cert is logged and inserted in the next upcoming ban wave / wave of system cert revocations. This revocation goes live on Nintendo’s servers. Your system will not get the Online Service kiss of death until after this happens.

    Other checks such as location, account, how often it happens and such can and may happen after this check to automatically limit false positives and prevent you from being instantly banned. But their system works; and it’s consistent as to which condition triggers it; that’s when the identity of any physical or digital game title is in more places than it is licensed to be in. (Actively caught piracy).

    And there is no way to differentiate those scenarios even if you can/could track each cart individually.

    Except that they can, and do. See other comments around for the how and why…it’s related to Nintendo Gold Points.

    There could be a record of which consoles have played which carts, but that gives you exactly zero information about how many owners the cart has had.

    There absolutely is. An unmodified Switch console reports this sort of telemetry on a regular basis to Nintendo; and it’s clear that they can ban your system based on bad Title IDs; (basically fake title headers, or dumped cartridge headers used to conceal flash cartrige usage)

    Switch accounts aren’t associated to consoles and physical game entitlements aren’t associated to accounts. Any account can be in any console at any time and instantly show in in multiple places and while you could account for travel times it’s a pretty pointless thing to do that, to my knowledge, Nintendo is not doing.

    They don’t have to be. Just have to log that your System Certificate reported a new title. This System Certificate is used in all traffic to Nintendo as it authenticates your system to it’s network.


  • They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.

    This is absolutely not true; it’s absolutely possible and even suspected that individual game carts themselves are signed with unique serial IDs or even full certificates or cryptographic signatures.

    I think it’s more likely the previous owner did dump the cart on to a MIG Switch or similar ROM cart. While the NS1 cannot tell the difference; it can still be updated to do so.

    I think it’s likely that in order to play titles online; your Switch 1 has to get the Cart Serial number from the cart and package it all up nicely and sign it neatly with the certificate from the system. So if said Nintendo Switch 1 already transferred that title out to a Switch 2, then there would be a record on file with Nintendo saying “NS1 with Serial XYZ transferred Title cart ABC with serial DEF to Switch 2 with serial GHI”. Then when you put that cart into a different Switch 2 it notices and informs Nintendo of the new title and cart serial…which then immediately picks up on the change of ownership.

    That might not raise red flags if you handed the cart over to your friend next door; but it certainly might raise red flags if you air-mailed the cart over to your buddy a few countries over.


  • In general, I disable the ability of getting a ‘read receipt’ if at all possible. In the case of some rare platforms that don’t allow this; I also warn people that "Seeing a ‘read receipt’ indicator does not mean I was available to reply.

    In general; people who hang on to this little indicator are also committing a larger social faux pas, and you should { [(yellow/red) flag] / address / handle } it accordingly based on your relationship to that person, your goals and the situation.

    Whether that means ‘calling them out’ or kindly explaining what it actually means or explaining your approach to communications; the behavior of expecting something to happen on the receipt of a read receipt needs to be discouraged in my personal opinion.





  • The change in EULA was the hint; I have not; and will not be buying any Switch 2 games, consoles or related merchandise. Nor will I be paying any further into my Switch beyond NSO as I have or buying any games for the Switch that are not explicitly on a physical cart.

    I don’t buy games often anyways and would rather support Pocketpair and Palworld and Valve. So that’s where my discretionary spend and gift requests will go henceforth.

    In general Nintendo is having it’s villainous arc; and I don’t believe they will survive it…given that they’ve run out or demoted their creatives and visionaries to workers. Nintendo is dead; what’s left is a greedy and soulless shell that behaves more like a gang or mafia. Given their History; that doesn’t surprise me.




  • Nintendo is clearly hiding something; they clearly are highly afraid of critical reviews and this is clearly a strategy that is not unlike what Nvidia, led by Jensen Huang, does.

    What they are hiding will remain to be seen. I’m sure that the bad reviews will not go away…only be delayed by a week or so.

    If you are wise; you will avoid buying the Switch 2 for at least a month. If you can’t wait a month to see what Nintendo is hiding; just be advised; you bought into it blind and have no right to complain about the bad reviews later, nor should you take it personally when people start talking poorly about the Switch 2.


  • In a perfectly reasonable, civilized and rational world; this would be seen as an additional feature in “Bad taste”.

    There is no rational reason for the company to permit any kind of detailed filtering; the longer you’re swiping through photos, the longer you use the app and the chance that you potentially give them money for services remains.

    There is no rational reason to discriminate against people based on their height either. While it’s quite natural to have preferences, generally speaking, you know when you find someone attractive. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone genuinely only attracted to specifically only tall or short people; there’s usually something else there behind the reason. That reason could be any number of things from feelings to experiences and more.

    Attraction, much like people, is a complicated and not so straightforward thing. It’s reason for being isn’t based on rationality always, we don’t always size up our mates the way a computer would. In general it’s oftentimes emotional, and attractiveness can be something that happens when someone manages to emotionally convey an appearance or vibe that matches something the one feeling the attraction might be looking for.


  • This is a good a start as any to market Linux to the common end-user. It’s not about the software being better; it’s about the software offering the user some advantage, like not needing to buy new hardware.

    Linux is, far from perfect still. It has a metric ton of “foot guns” that cannot be pointed anywhere away from the feet; the user MUST move their feet away to avoid these “foot guns”. It has a lot of pain points and still lacks polish in some ways. Most things mostly just work; but may the gods and goddesses help you if something for some reason does not work, or does not work as expected for any reason. Coaxing it to work exactly as expected might seem impossible for average users.

    Then there’s the issue of Linux having only volunteer support in most cases. Getting help from an overworked and under-interested FLOSS developer is like pulling teeth; even when they’re literally the only person on the planet who can solve your problem

    That being said; Linux is free and mostly usable. 9/10 times it does work and can save you a lot of hassle and headache if all your computing needs are basic and predictable.



  • Most anti-cheat software can’t do much on the client side. Really all it can do is look around at it’s environment where it’s allowed to look and see what’s going on.

    Most Cheat Software will run on a higher privilege level than the game; whether that’s as an “Administrative” user or as “root” or “SYSTEM” in a context where it’s running as an important driver.

    In any case, the only thing the Anti-Cheat can reliably do on the client side is watch. If it’s cleverly designed enough, it will simply log snippets of events and ship them off for later analysis on a server side system. This will probably be a different server than the one you’re playing on, and it won’t be sending that data until after the match has ended properly.

    Sometimes it might not even send data unless the AC server asks it to do so; which it might frequently do as a part of it’s authorization granting routine. Even when it has the data there may not be immediate processing.

    Others have also mentioned that visible action may be delayed for random time periods as well; in order to prevent players from catching on to what behaviors they need to avoid to get caught, or to prevent cheats from getting more sophisticated before deeper analysis could reveal a way to patch the flaw or check to ensure cheating isn’t happening.

    Since cheat software can often be privileged, it also has the luxury of lying to the server. So clever ways to ensure that a lying client will be caught will probably be implemented and responses checked to ensure they fit within some reasonable bounds of sanity.