• 128 Posts
  • 887 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 10th, 2024

help-circle



  • I don’t remember the statement in the bug report verbatim, but it indicated that they intend to fix it, which is about what I had previously seen on other issues that they did subsequently fix. I expect it’s mainly a matter of prioritizing a long to-do list.

    I can’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t be possible. The protocol is continually evolving, after all, and they already moved message content to an encrypted channel that didn’t originally exist. Moving other events into it seems like a perfectly sensible next step in that direction.




  • There are a few that do a good job of protecting our messages with end-to-end encryption, but no single one fits all use cases beyond that, so we have to prioritize our needs.

    Signal is pretty okayish at meta-data protection (at the application level), but has a single point of failure/monitoring, requires linking a phone number to your account, can’t be self-hosted in any useful way, and is (practically speaking) bound to services run by privacy invaders like Google.

    Matrix is decentralized, self-hostable, anonymous, and has good multi-device support, but hasn’t yet moved certain meta-data into the encrypted channel.

    SimpleX makes it relatively easy to avoid revealing a single user ID to multiple contacts (queue IDs are user IDs despite the misleading marketing) and plans to implement multi-hop routing to protect meta-data better than Signal can (is this implemented yet?), but lacks multi-device support, lacks group calls, drops messages if they’re not retrieved within 3 weeks, and has an unclear future because it depends on venture capital to operate and to continue development.

    I use Matrix because it has the features that I and my contacts expect, and can route around system failures, attacks, and government interference. This means it will still operate even if political and financial landscapes change, so I can count on at least some of my social network remaining intact for a long time to come, rather than having to ask everyone to adopt a new messenger again at some point. For my use case, these things are more important than hiding which accounts are talking to each other, so it’s a tradeoff that makes sense for me. (Also, Matrix has acknowledged the meta-data problem and indicated that they want to fix it eventually.)

    Some people have different use cases, though. Notably, whistleblowers and journalists whose safety depends on hiding who they’re talking to should prioritize meta-data protection over things like multi-device support and long-term network resilience, and should avoid linking identifying info like a phone number to their account.




  • So you are basically saying that root CAs are unreliable or compromised?

    Not exactly. They are pointing out that HTTPS assumes all is well if it sees a certificate from any “trusted” certificate authority. Browsers typically trust dozens of CAs (nearly 80 for Firefox) from jurisdictions all over the world. Anyone with sufficient access to any of them can forge a certificate. That access might come from a hack, a rogue employee, government pressure, a bug, improperly handled backups, or various other means. It can happen, has happened, and will happen again.

    HTTPS is kind of mostly good enough for general use, since exploits are not so common as to make it useless, but if a government sees it as an obstacle, all bets are off. It is not comparable to a trustworthy VPN hosted outside of the government’s reach.

    Also, HTTPS doesn’t cover all traffic like a properly configured VPN does. Even where it is used and not compromised, it’s not difficult for a well positioned snooper (like an internet provider that has to answer to government) to follow your traffic on the net and deduce what you’re doing.




  • I think it’s a bit of a stretch to describe games with loading screens of that kind (whether disguised as choke points or not) as open worlds. Sure, they might allow more freedom than a game that stays on rails for every step of the journey, but to me, “open world” suggests something more.

    Continuity while exploring the landscape, unimpeded by artificial barriers or immersion-breaking interruptions, is a big part of it.

    Almost as important is that the world be interesting and diverse enough that I would want to spend my time exploring it. This is one of Skyrim’s great strengths: It’s full of unique things to discover, most of which aren’t marked on the map (except sometimes when you’re already there), and some don’t even stay in the same place. It ensures that exploring the world and paying attention is rewarding and satisfying. The Witcher 3, on the other hand, is weak in this area: Its world is mostly open, but practically everything in it is a copy/paste instance of a handful of events, and clearly marked on the map. Exploration quickly becomes a tedious exercise in running from dot to dot, doing the same few things over and over again. It doesn’t deliver the satisfaction I expect from an open world game. In a world like that, I get bored fast.


  • Ironically, one game that’s handled open worlds a bit better is on a console less capable of handling them.

    This is even more interesting when we consider that BotW was not developed for the Switch, but for an even less capable console: the Wii U.

    Hardware limitations haven’t been a real barrier to open world continuity for a long time, if ever. (Seven Cities of Gold allowed you to sail from Europe to the New World, and then explore it over land, with no loading screens along the way. That was on 8-bit computers with 48KiB of RAM, loading data from some of the slowest floppy drives ever, back in 1984.) Doing it on lower-end machines does require some planning ahead, but the effort is worthwhile, IMHO.

    Breath of the Wild uses it to promote exploring towards vantage points and then interesting sights.

    Not only that, but to incorporate verticality into the game mechanics. Reaching things that are surrounded by hazards, or taming especially wild horses by gliding to them from a mountain, for example.




  • Thanks. This looks like about the best we’re going to get, given what PBS says about the debate moderation and hosting:

    It’s being moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS’ “Face the Nation.” CBS News is airing the debate on its broadcast network live and will livestream it on all platforms where CBS News 24/7 and Paramount+ are available. It’s also being made available for simulcast, and networks like PBS will air it.

    Edit:

    It looks like this PBS news stream will also have the debate, and at nominally higher resolution than the CBS stream:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5g_ObRA4Y4

    I’m watching this one, since I generally prefer the in-between segments on PBS to those on CBS.




  • Anything that emulates something else is an emulator. That something else could be hardware, or runtime behavior, or services, or a combination thereof. (It could even be a turtle, although we’re talking about computers in this case.)

    Wine is an interesting example despite that silly backronym that was abandoned years ago, or perhaps because of it. It not only translates system and API calls, but also provides Windows work-alike services and copies Windows runtime behavior, including undocumented behavior. If it were just an API wrapper or “translation layer”, a lot of its functionality wouldn’t work.

    The shape of a business envelope might not be an equilateral rectangle, but it is still a rectangle.

    But go ahead and believe what you want. I’m not looking for an argument.