Skip Navigation
Jump
Apple keeps flogging 8GB of RAM for its Mac computers but it's still a dead horse
  • The affordable Sony Xperia 10 series is really good. My new Xperia runs circles around my OG Pixel, costs basically nothing, is waterproof, has upgradable storage and a headphone jack, and besides Apple, Google and Intel, Sony is the only manufacturer that actually has working bluetooth.

    1
  • Jump
    Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux
  • Note what other people in this thread are saying.

    Sorry, but being a developer I can tell when players are just repeating half-truths they read online.

    There's no reason why strategies that work in any other kind of computer science shouldn't work in gaming.

    In fact, it sounds like you think a 'ban' is something bad to these players or will stop them. If it did, I'd probably be enjoying Rust still.

    The difference between an attack costing $0.00 and $$0.01 is enough to reduce attack volume by orders of magnitude.

    Even just costing the attacker 30 seconds is enough to have a massive effect, which is why captchas exist.

    Game keys tend to be in the $1 - $5 range, which makes bans an extremely useful tool.

    1
  • Jump
    Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux
  • This is also the same for radar hacks. Or if you play a MoBa, screen alert hacks. All they do is boost player performance without being detectable. Most server side anti-cheat can only pick up on certain things, I don’t know Minecraft’s solution but I doubt it catches disguised cheating via code injection.

    The real question is: why does the client even know about players who aren't visible to them?

    The solution with Minecraft PvP is simple: if you can't see a player, the server won't even tell you the player exists.

    If you use a wallhack you can see players walk behind a wall and then just disappear as if they had logged out, and suddenly reappear from behind the wall on the other side as if they had logged in.

    What Minecraft anticheat systems do is relatively simple:

    1. They only send information to clients if the players should have that information as well
    2. after every movement, action, etc they calculate whether the movement you did would have been possible by a real human given the information you should have had at that point, and if not, you're banned
    3. all actions and movements are compared over minutes of gameplay and, if your actions are too different from all other players, sent to review by a human (and potentially banned)

    You don't need to install anticheat on the player's computers. The players can run all the mods and cheats they want, but cheaters can only see the same information as all other players, can only move the same way as all other players, and can't shoot faster or more precise than any other player.

    So while some people may still be cheating, at that point you can't tell the difference anymore.

    For comparison, this is btw how all other software outside of gaming is written. In all other parts of computer science you'd get fired if you did what game developers do.

    Imagine if reddit would send all DMs to all users and only make the DMs invisible on the client. That'd be an immediate lawsuit. Instead, the server validates who should be able to see what and only sends that information.

    Or imagine if banks allowed anyone to make any transaction they wanted, only the banking app verifying that you've actually got that much money. Utterly ridiculous. Of course the servers validate whether you should actually be allowed to do that.

    As result, writing third party apps for most websites is allowed, the EU even requires banks to support third party apps, but modded clients for videogames are considered a security risk. What the fuck.

    3
  • Jump
    Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux
  • Of course we can restrain them into playing like humans. That's the entire point.

    But doing that costs a few cents more for the server operators, which is why most PvP games aren't doing that.

    Minecraft PvP servers are running entirely server side anticheat, and there's still a competitive PvP community in that game.

    Now if we could restrain them to playing like normal people, I’d still hate them because I don’t play PvP to play against bots.

    Again, if you can't tell the difference, why does it matter if it's a bot or a person?

    2
  • Jump
    Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux
  • If you're always reacting perfectly, that too can be discovered and used to ban people.

    Also, regarding cheap game keys, those would be useful for one or two matches before they'd be banned.

    For reference, all Minecraft PvP anticheat is 100% serverside, and yet a competitive PvP community exists.

    1
  • Jump
    Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux
  • That's still not gonna help at all. There are already hardware cheats using an nvidia jetson nuc, an hdmi splitter, and a usb interceptor plugged between mouse, keyboard and computer.

    Using just image recognition and slight adjustments to your mouse movement you can already get an impossible to detect aimbot.

    Now the real question is: why are cheats bad? If a cheater is flying in godmode, sure, that ruins the game. But if the game forces cheaters to play the same way top human players are playing... If you can't tell the difference, does it matter?

    By just running all simulation server side and banning superhuman reactions you can easily ban all superhuman cheats. Matchmaking will just sort players by skill and you'll have a peaceful game again.

    If you're playing chess, you don't know if your opponent uses a chess computer or not. And it doesn't matter. The game is still fun.

    4
  • Jump
    Riot Games talk Vanguard anti-cheat for League of Legends and why it's a no for Linux
  • Honestly, supporting linux makes absolutely no sense for vanguard.

    If you use vanguard, it's because you're fine with a company taking full control of your system, installing a rootkit tracking your every move.

    If you use Linux, at least part of the reason is because you want to take control over your computer back.

    To support vanguard on linux, you'd have had to run vanguard as hypervisor with linux running in a para-VM, or you'd have had to modify most of the linux kernel to add tracking and control capabilities that'd never get merged upstream and would break with every update.

    The resulting system would be closer to android or a playstation than to actual linux distros.

    21
  • Jump
    A German state is ditching Windows and Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice on the 30,000 PCs it uses for local government functions
  • It's not just office, SH and many other parts of the German government have been slowly replacing the entire O365 suite with OpenDesk, which is an open source product based on Matrix, Jitsi, LibreOffice, and a few other tools.

    The goal is to have a fully integrated solution for calender, chat, calls, documents, cloud storage, etc.

    My employer is developing parts of that solution and we recently switched our internal communication over to it, and tbh, it's working really well.

    Now is the perfect point in time to do it, with the GDPR ruling regarding O365 and Microsoft fumbling the migration between old teams and new teams.

    17
  • Jump
    We should count in base four
  • You're absolutely right on that count. If you switch fast enough, everything has a capacitance. That's why with CMOS designs once you go above a few kHz you start worrying about fan out.

    It's also why, once the ceiling is reached, everything starts using modulation tricks previously used in RF. Ethernet started with 1GbE, USB with 3.0, DSL did it from the start, with PCIe even gamers have probably seen eye diagrams in riser tests, and coax is the very definition of pushing RF over a wire.

    2
  • Jump
    We should count in base four
  • Yes, of course there is error correction. Also, while the SSD is on power, it'll constantly go through all data and fix the areas that are starting to deteriorate.

    But this does mean an SSD left without power will slowly lose data over months and years.

    This also means that writing data is much slower and the SSD can handle far fewer writes. But the tradeoff is that TLC and QLC SSDs can handle 2× and 4× more data than MLC SSDs for the same price.

    That's why MLC SSDs are primarily used for professional use and TLC and QLC is primarily used for gamers.

    Some TLC and QLC SSDs even allow you to choose how much of the SSD should be used as SLC/MLC space (4× less data, 4× faster writes, 4× more endurance) and which part should be used as TLC/QLC (4× more data, 4× slower changes, 4× less endurance).

    4
  • Jump
    We should count in base four
  • SSDs aren't just that simple. All of them have at least some SLC area, usually as cache, that's in base 2. But the rest of the SSD can be SLC base 2, MLC base 4, TLC base 8 or even QLC base 16.

    And overall it's still base 2 because each SSDs pretend one block of base 4 is just two blocks of base 2, and accordingly they pretend a block of base 16 is just 8 blocks of base 2 storage.

    4
  • Jump
    f-droid just requested permission to update other apps?
  • Fdroid only gained the ability to auto update apps a while ago, so that's why you got that prompt.

    Also, if the permissions an app requests change, fdroid can't always auto-update it.

    12
  • Jump
    temperature
  • In timekeeping, there are so called stratums to describe how correct a clock is.

    Stratum 0 is a physical process, an inherent property of the universe. An atomic clock would be stratum 0.

    Stratum 1 is a clock defined based on a stratum 0 clock. For example, GPS clocks are usually stratum 1, so are timeservers at universities with atomic clocks.

    Stratum 2 is a clock defined based on a stratum 1 clock, for example, your router's ntp server if it syncs its time based on gps or a university's timeserver.

    So if we adopt this jargon for units:

    Meter is a stratum 1 unit, defined based on the stratum 0 properties of lightspeed and cesium resonance.

    Inch is a stratum 2 unit, defined based on the stratum 1 meter.

    23
  • Jump
    PSA: Docker nukes your firewall rules and replaces them with its own.
  • You need to be able to have multiple nodes in one LAN access ports on each others' containers without exposing those to the world and without using additional firewalls in front of the nodes.

    That's why kubernetes ended up removing docker support and instead recommends podman or using containerd natively.

    5
  • Jump
    PSA: Docker nukes your firewall rules and replaces them with its own.
  • That assumes you're on some VPS with a hardware firewall in front.

    Often enough you're on a dedicated server that's directly exposed to the internet, with those iptables rules being the only thing standing between your services and the internet.

    14
  • Jump
    This is probably a dumb question, but if we eliminate the hydrophobia caused by rabies, would it increase the survival rate of active rabies?
  • No. You can fix the dehydration relatively easily by just giving the person liquid intravenously.

    But the primary way rabies kills you is liquifying your brain, which is independent of how hydrated you are.

    132