chameleon

joined 2 years ago
[–] chameleon@kbin.social 19 points 2 years ago

OpenSSH's server login component (the authorized_keys checking) can't properly respect XDG_CONFIG_HOME because it won't be set at the time it's reading the authorized_keys file. The user's home directory is stored in /etc/passwd but the XDG variables have a million different ways to set them, none of which are truly standardized. Best you could really do is hardcoding .config or the like, which you can do by changing the AuthorizedKeysFile in sshd_config.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 40 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You haven't been able to give them nothing for over 2 years now. For this particular bundle, the minimum split for Humble is 30% and the default split is an insane 45% to Humble, 50% to the company and 5% to charity.

Humble is unfortunately still coursing by on their old reputation of being charity-friendly, but they changed to be one of the worst players around years ago. That goodwill from back then has really been depleted.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 12 points 2 years ago

Yeah on second thought it's maybe a bit more vivid than intended, but it fits what I think is going to happen. Below the top 1-2% of mobile games, it's one big pile of endlessly recycled advertising money. Spend a million in ads, make $800k in ads and $500k in microtransactions, and the $300k is where you have to pay everything else from. Unity is about to bite into that hard and doesn't care if it leaves behind some wounds.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 75 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I think this one will work. Most of these games are already "multihomed" on different ad networks and display the one that is most profitable to them at any given time, or a semi-random mixture. The differences in profitably aren't that huge, and it will get even worse if advertisers run away from Unity too. Unity is making an absolute killing from their ads division, and this is now being threatened.

And who are the advertisers? Other game devs. The whole mobile game advertising scene is one gigantic ouroboros with the ad platforms cutting off a huge portion in the middle. If you leave, you're going to both stop showing ads and stop your advertising there.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Unity aren't exactly in the DRM business, and there is really no chance they're going to do something silly like licensing Denuvo for every single one of their clients just to obfuscate a piece of analytics code designed to make them money; stuff's far more expensive than what they'd earn from it. They're not going to build something remotely Denuvo-like, the best you can hope for is obfuscation that only has to be cracked once that gets cracked in days.

My guess is they're not even going to bother doing HWID-ish nonsense and will just hope that identifiers from the previous install hang around, which will often be the case on Windows PC anyhow (a little more complicated on other OSes). Hitting the uninstall and reinstall buttons in Steam doesn't do much other than deleting the game's files and re-running redistributable installers the first time you play the game.

But on Android/iOS where this is really targeted at, that approach simply doesn't work. The only stable thing apps can get across a reinstall is the AAID/IDFA advertising identifiers and that can be turned off or changed at will. Either Unity has found a novel solution (which is a one way trip to Apple's shitlist) or they're just bullshitting this change to appease the population while not actually changing anything. Since they did their prep work so badly that they couldn't even answer whether app updates would count, my money's on the latter.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago

Even if the source is kept decently preserved, the build environments are usually not. If they still have a machine in the exact state it was in at the time the game was finished, it might be as easy as Project -> Build, but... they almost certainly don't. So that likely has to be rebuilt from scratch, and you'd be very lucky to find any kind of documentation on how things worked.

Game studios tend to have it particularly bad because of how much binary-only engines/middleware (standalone bits like Havok physics/Bink video/etc) they used, how often the game's data and code builds were mixed together in some way and how in some cases the project is designed to build things like console releases at the same time. If you lost the install files for your physics engine, you're probably straight up screwed.

By the time you've figured all of that out, you can be easily hundreds of hours in, with tons of weird little issues that might require different people to solve. Some examples: you might end up needing to build it in Windows XP because no other OS runs all of the software used during the build, any sysadmin is NOT going to be happy installing WinXP on their network so the machine has to stay offline, getting code onto that machine might be a pain due to how Perforce or whatever is used by them, even things taken for granted like a particular version of the DirectX 9 SDK might be hard to find, etc. Sometimes licensing/activation of tools used in the build process is an impossible to solve problem because it needs some DRM dongle or activation server that no longer exists and the software was never publicly available, so there is no crack.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If such a process existed, the entity in question would almost certainly end up being shut down by that process, unless they find a funny technical loophole around it, in which case that would be a failure of the law that should not be rejoiced by anyone.

But as it stands, that law and process does not exist; ISPs already can and will shut you down for things like downloading copyrighted content (with or without complaints from the copyright holder), tethering without approval, being a technical nuisance in the form of mass port scanning, hosting insecure services and other such stuff. "Hosting a platform solely dedicated to harassment and stalking and ignoring abuse complaints about it" absolutely deserves to be on that list.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 39 points 2 years ago (11 children)

"If we don't let the oppressors roam freely, they might try to oppress you" is not something I expected to read from the EFF today. But well, here we are.

It has been standard internet behavior that if a platform does not have the proper response to abuse complaints, you move up a layer higher until you find someone that is receptive to it. This has been standard operating procedure for more or less for the entirety of the current millennium, and this article has done absolutely zero work to provide a good reason it should be anything otherwise, other than bringing up generic "free speech" stuff.

You should not get a path out of that process because one layer immediately above the problematic entity is actively choosing to disregard abuse complaints. You simply move up to the next step. And this process simply must keep existing, as doing anything otherwise is to allow people to pull off all kinds of bad things; scams, spam, illegal activity and far more.

And if you abolish the non-legal form of that process? Well, there's still a legal process - and as soon as someone that wants to censor minorities gets control over the legal process, they will simply change the rules in their favor, as has happened countless times in the past.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago

All of this stuff is A/B tested, region/locale divided, edition divided, hardware divided, based on what other stuff you've agreed to and more. You don't have to do anything to encounter this stuff.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago

I find it strange Nebula is both the cheapest streaming sub I have as well as the one I get the most use out of. I will say I'm slowly getting tired of it though, it's getting to the point it needs a block creator button. Getting rid of clickbait was a selling point but it's starting to creep in hard, there are stupid red arrows pointing at random things and obviously poor titles all over the recent videos page. It wasn't like this a year ago.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's a somewhat unknown subject given the way personality rights are written across the globe (they are not consistent and some are built on an invasion of privacy scenario only). Deepfake porn lives in extremely muddy largely-untouched ground. But if it is illegal, it would simply never happen under copyright law, and this ruling does not affect it.

Let me put it this way: If I break into your house and film you doing whatever then post it on YouTube, it'll end up getting me penalized for breaking and entering, property damage, violation of privacy and who knows what else; probably a huge laundry list that'll land me locked up for a good chunk of time and you'd win on all those counts. But one you're extremely unlikely to win is copyright, unless I happen to film something like some piece of art you've made yourself in the process.

[–] chameleon@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Personality rights are not copyright. At all. It's just that simple. Entirely different branch of law, enforced at an entirely different level in the US (state-specific instead of federal). Something can be totally free of copyright while also still being illegal to distribute for entirely different reasons.

view more: ‹ prev next ›