Yeah, motherboard-level tracking is scary because even the OS won’t be able to detect it. The truly paranoid people (and security researchers) go as far as desoldering chips to ensure nothing phones home.

It’s absolutely possible to moderate. But doing so would require more payroll than the tech companies are willing to spend. So instead, they simply let CSAM ads run rampant.

If your system uses systemd, it has an etc/machine-id, which is used for a lot of different things. And changing it will break a lot of stuff, probably until you reboot. I guess you could write something to randomly shuffle it every time you reboot? But it is the go-to way for lots of programs (including browsers) to identify themselves. Which means (unless you have done the work to scramble your machine ID) you can be tracked on Linux as well.

The single worst couch instance I’ve ever seen was actually for one of my favorite childhood games. Tomba! (or Tombi! if you’re European) was the first game I ever owned on the PS1, and I still play it once or twice a year. It’s a cute little 2.5D side scrolling metroidvania. It wasn’t super popular when it launched, but it has a sort of cult classic following nowadays. I’ve gotten to the point that I can 100% the game in about a day. Not professional speed running levels, but decent enough for a casual like me.

The sequel (Tomba! 2) was released a little while later, and I still play through it occasionally as well.

I was excited to see Tomba! 2 on the lineup back in 2014. It was in a pretty bad timeslot (the bigger, more popular games always get the better prime time slots), but I made a point of waking up early to tune in. And I got to witness the most cringeworthy couch interaction in GDQ history live.

For some context, the dude in the striped hoodie (Chibi) basically invited himself there. Chibi just sort of showed up, and the rest were too nice to tell him to fuck off. What’s the worst that could happen, right? Turns out, he was pretty consistently annoying for the rest of the couch, didn’t really vibe with the runner, had a few social faux pas moments, (like calling his own hype, which is generally considered very cringe unless the announcer calls it for a donation announcement), and all of this was while everyone was sleep deprived from being awake at like 4AM for the awful timeslot.

It wasn’t even Chibi’s first time doing stunts like this. He also invited himself to several other couches that year, and annoyed several other runners before this run started. So by the time this run happened, lots of runners were already pretty annoyed with him.

Yeah, hex is only a few obtuse angles away from being a circle. And that means it strips into a circle surprisingly easily.

The funny part is that there’s effectively zero reason for them to do it. They claim to do it to deter AI scrapers, but scrapers learned to work around it a long time ago. So the only real reason they do it is to call attention to themselves.

Or set up Home Assistant on a dedicated VLAN for all your IoT stuff. I know that’s a few extra steps that not every router will support, but it is a way to be more privacy focused (Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted) while still maintaining a lot of the IoT functionality.

I mean, my brother and I use Steam Family Sharing to access each others’ games. It’s a really generous policy nowadays. And if one of us died, I can see how being able to pass those games on to the other would be nice.

I’d settle for something ironic, like falling out a high rise window.

You just make an account on a different instance. Lemmy instances are kind of like email providers. You can have a slickgoat@lemmy.world, slickgoat@lemmy.dbzer0.com, slickgoat@lemmy.ml, etc… Different instances will tend to have very different admin styles. You also still need to follow the rules for whatever local community you’re on as well. So using this thread as an example, I’m on lemmy.dbzer0.com but I still need to follow the local mod’s “no celebrating death” rule. As long as they’re federated with the same instances, you’ll be able to see all the same content.

lemmy.world tends to be many users’ first instance, simply because .world was one of the few instances that kept open registrations during the biggest Reddit migration. So it’s the largest, simply because it’s where most of the new users landed. But it is also frequently looked down on by other instances, because the .world mods tend to skew farther right than lots of Lemmy users prefer.

Yeah, I was going to post this if nobody else did. At least Sony was forced to acknowledge the issue and issue a patch. But then the patch was such a bad bodge (it didn’t even remove the rootkit, and introduced more vulnerabilities) that the punishment wasn’t anywhere near enough.

Adware is a form of malware. Malware is a broad term that encompasses a lot of other types of software. Adware, bloatware, spyware, etc are all forms of malware.

Like someone saying they like metal music. It’s a very broad term. What kind of metal? Thrash metal? Death metal? Black metal? Power metal? Nu metal? Prog metal? Etc…

That’s the joke. A common talking point among conservatives is that they are actually broadly supported by a silent majority.

Absolute can remotely track (and can even remotely brick) the motherboard regardless of what you’re running on it. Even security-focused OSes like Tails and Qubes would be affected, because the tracking is running below the OS level.

And good luck running anything on a bricked motherboard. The motherboard will literally refuse to boot anything. You can’t even get to a BIOS menu to flash something new onto it. At that point, if you were determined to keep using the device, you’d be attaching probes to motherboard leads like a security researcher to try and reset individual chips.

And because of Persistence, even wiping the BIOS isn’t a guarantee. Because it will simply reinstall itself back onto the BIOS as soon as you connect a drive that has Persistence embedded on it.

The truly paranoid hackers will even unsolder the motherboard-level tracking hardware that the manufacturer adds. Cuz that shit runs below even the OS, and will track you even when you’re using something like TailsOS.

Even basic BIOS settings can be easy to miss, like Dell/HP/etc using Absolute Persistence/Computrace tracking. That one is particularly common with refurbished corporate fleet machines, because corporate IT will enable it to be able to track employees’ laptops. Then IT will upgrade the office computers, sell the old ones off to an refurbisher, and then the refurbisher never bothers disabling it when they’re prepping the machines for resale.

And old corporate fleet machines are extremely popular with hackers, (ThinkPad and ToughBook, for example), because they tend to be decent hardware for super cheap. But it means that the machines are still phoning home to Dell/HP/etc regardless of what OS the new user installs on them. Even completely swapping out the drives (ensuring a clean OS install) won’t solve it, because it’s happening directly at the BIOS level. And because of Persistence, even wiping the BIOS isn’t a guarantee. Because it will simply reinstall itself back onto the BIOS as soon as you connect a drive that has Persistence embedded on it.

I couldn’t take Oblivion Remastered seriously because of the goofy sprint animation. Every single time I zoomed out to third person, (which I usually do for melee combat) the goofy sprint had me cackling. The character runs like you’re out of lockpicks and trying to bash doors down with your skull.

The Fifth Circuit has entered the chat.

For the unaware, the fifth circuit court is packed with the most conservative judges in the country. Packing it was part of the Southern Strategy, because it allows conservatives to appeal liberal laws and reliably get in front of a batshit crazy conservative judge. Pretty much every time you see some sort of “federal judge overturns liberal law” headline, it is from the fifth circuit.

My very first thought was “Again? Is this a recycled article?”

I actually just updated it slightly, and may continue to do so if I think of things. So you may simply want to check back here instead of printing it.