Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?
Dark Arc @ Dark_Arc @social.packetloss.gg Posts 78Comments 2,258Joined 2 yr. ago
Dark Arc @ Dark_Arc @social.packetloss.gg
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78
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2,258
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2 yr. ago
Hm... I'm not sure if this is enough to defeat the strategy.
It looks like even with that service, you have to sign up for Form 1583.
Even if they're willing in incur the cost, there's a real paper trail pointing back to a real person or organization. In other words, the bot operator can be identified.
As you note, this is yet another additional cost. So, you'd have say ... $2-3 for the card + an address for the account. If you require every unique address to have no more than 1 account ... that's $13 per bot plus a paper trail to set everything up.
That certainly wouldn't stop every bot out there ... but the chances of a large scale bot farms operating seem like they would be significantly deterred, no?
How would you feel if it was an independent third party (kind of an OAuth flow) with a well established presence and data policy?
(i.e., one with a face and name that you could sue if they did something bad with your address?)
I've been thinking postcard based account validation for online services might be a strategy to fight bots.
As in, rather than an email address, you register with a physical address and get mailed a post card.
A server operator would then have to approve mailing 1,000 post cards to whatever address the bot operator was working out of. The cost of starting and maintaining a bot farm skyrockets as a result (you not only have to pay to get the postcard, you have to maintain a physical presence somewhere ... and potentially a lot of them if you get banned/caught with any frequency).
Similarly, most operators would presumably only mail to folks within their nation's mail system. So if Russia wanted to create a bunch of US accounts on "mainstream" US hosted services, they'd have to physically put agents inside of the United States that are receiving these postcards ... and now the FBI can treat this like any other organized domestic crime syndicate.
DOOM Eternal was like a ... crazy adrenaline pumping high for me that I normally don't get out of single player games, so that's why it's arguably my favorite.
I never really played the original DOOM games (they're almost too simple for me ... I didn't grow up with them but I did get into PC shooters with Xonotic -- a fast paced Quake derivative, so DOOM Eternal kinda makes sense for me).
DOOM Eternal or maybe the original Crysis
I think this is the main technology behind that and it is open source... I heard something about it years ago too. I've similarly never used it and am curious now that you mention it if anyone has. I'm unsure how to actually "use" ipfs and/or what tools might use it.
I'm kind of inclined to believe it doesn't work (or doesn't work well) otherwise it probably would be a bigger deal by now and there would be a lot to show off on the ipfs website.
Edit: It looks like this provides S3 compatible storage to IPFS. However, it seems more expensive than B2... So I'm not really sure why one would use it. You'd think IPFS would be attempting to undercut traditional providers.
It's not really beta quality. I hopped on with my brother just to see if I was interested in the game (we both played black ops, the original back on the PS3). It was actually extremely stable and pretty fun. He noticed a UI glitch but ... it's not like there was even a feedback or bug report button.
It's just early access with the disclaimer there might be something wrong... Which isn't that different from buying a release day game anymore unfortunately.
rclone or rsync is probably better but see my reply a few comments down (the very long one) about protocol aware cloning vs just cloning things at the file system
It predates nfts and probably will live on for... Many years to come if not ever.
They do have versioning: https://docs.syncthing.net/v1.27.7/users/versioning
Of course, you actually have to use that, it has to work, and you have to have a strategy for reverting the state (I don't know if they have an easy way to do that -- I've never used the versioned side of things).
I have had some situations where Syncthing seems to get confused and doesn't do its job right. I ran into this particularly with trying to sync runelite configurations and music. There were a few times I had to "force push" ... and I vaguely recall one time where I was fighting gigs of "out of sync" in both directions on something and just destroyed the sync and rebuilt it to stop ... whatever it was doing.
Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool for syncing things between computers; but I would not rely on it for backup (and prefer having a backup solution on top of the synced directories). There are real backup tools out there that are far better suited to this sort of thing. I suggested Kopia, you should get some integrity checking using its builtin sync (as it won't be able to figure out what to sync if your origin is corrupted); you won't get that with a straight up rsync or a syncthing, they're not application-aware enough to know they're about to screw you over.
Restic has a similar feature but I've always found Restic's approach much more frustrating and not-at-all friendly for anyone less than a veteran in systems administration. Kopia keeps configuration in the repository itself, has a GUI for desktop use that runs jobs for you automatic, automatically uses the secrets manager appropriate for your operating system, etc ... Restic you kind of have to DIY a lot of basic things and the "quick start tutorial" just kinda ignores these various concerns.
Even if you plan to just use cron jobs, Kopia will do sane things with maintenance. Restic last I checked you still need to manually run maintenance tasks and if any job maintenance or otherwise fails, you need to make sure to unlock the repository (which if you haven't set up notifications ... well now you've got a silent backup failure and your backups aren't running).
I just kept running into a sea of "oh this could be bad" footguns with Restic that made me uncomfortable trusting it as my primary backup. I'm sure Restic can be a great tool if used in expert hands with everything appropriately setup; but nobody tells you how to do that ... and I get the feeling a lot of people are unaware of what they're getting into.
The folks making Kopia ... they seem like they really know what they're doing and I've been very happy with it. We're moving from rsnapshot to Kopia at work now as well (rsnapshot is also fairly good you've got a bunch of friends with NASes that support hard links and SSH, but it's CHATTY and has no deduplication, encryption, data integrity verification is basically left to the file system -- so you better be running ZFS -- etc).
Duplicati's developer is back too, so that might be something to keep an eye on ... but as it stands, the project has been bit rotting for a while and AFAIK still has some pretty significant performance issues when restoring data.
I firmly believe that publishers, in an attempt to cut costs, tell the game studio to not prioritize performance
So, I agree there's some amount of that. You also have things like Dice (the studio that makes Battlefield) where they lost their veteran development team to poor internal management.
There are also some (now fairly large) studios that are just absolutely terrible at game performance like Studio Wildcard (makers of the Ark games).
while trying to rely on software like super resolution algorithms, to make their games run.
There's definitely some of this too. I believe the bigger issue is that games have gotten so much bigger and more expensive to develop. Making and shipping a game that runs with 4k textures, dynamic (possibly ray traced) lighting, variable rate shading (instead of manual level-of-detail systems), etc is a lot to get right.
A common thing with any software development is to take advantage of newer abstractions that make your life easier. For instance, I'm fairly confident Hunt Showdown 1896 has moved to some form of variable rate shading instead of level-of-detail (in pre-1986 when you zoomed in on some of the trees they'd literally change shape when they flipped between the models in the worst case; I've yet to see that post-1896). Not having to make a bunch of models and having the software "just figure out" good lower-poly models for things that are sufficiently far away is presumably a huge productivity boost. Similarly, when ray-traced lighting becomes the standard a lot of game development will get easier because setting up lighting won't (per my understanding) require as many tricks. In both cases, it's both less work for developers and a better result for players with the hardware to run it.
In some instances they reused old game Engines for a new and bigger game, for example with Cyberpunk, Stellaris and Elden Ring.
Old engines aren't necessarily a bad thing (if they're appropriately updated) and I think people focus too much on the engine vs the game play. Take Starfield, I've heard a lot of people complain about it on forums for copying a similar formula as some of Bethesda's past titles.
The issue almost certainly isn't the engine used, but the design choices associated with using that engine (and the decision to not make new things work).
Linux, Darwin (MacOS), Windows, Chrome, Firefox, etc are all long running software projects (as are Unreal Engine, Unity, Source Engine, CryEngine, etc). Occasionally, someone throws out their current product entirely and replaces it, but normally there are incremental upgrades made to provide the new functionality that's desired.
Smaller developers are doing everything they can to make a game run smoothly. The best example for this is Factorio.
The performance profile of something like Factorio vs Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, or Hunt Showdown is extremely different.
No it's literally how software works. New hardware comes out, you do more with the hardware, old hardware can't do the new things and runs worse.
You could use kopia for this (but you would need to schedule cron jobs or something similar to do it).
The way this works with kopia... You configure your backups to a particular location, then in-between runs there's a sync command you can use to copy the backup repository to other locations.
Kopia also has the ability to check a repository for bad blobs via its verify function (so you can make sure the backups stored are actually at least X% viable).
Using zerotier or tailscale (for this probably tailscale because of the multithreading) would let you all create a virtual network between the devices that lets them directly talk to each other. That would allow you to use kopia's sync functionality with devices in their homes.
Syncthing is not a backup tool and may very well destroy all your data on its own (though this is rare).
but the performance just keeps getting worse
That's just the nature of PC gaming; as time goes on games look prettier but run worse.
but I want to see it implemented before I believe any of it is real
As you should, they've let players down many many times before (myself included) making promises for things to come that never happen. A prime example is the player owned house rework that was promised in one of the original Rune Fests.
The tick rate improvements and client side prediction they demoed ... they said they may never happen; however, let's face it, they could happen they're just unwilling to commit to hiring the developers that would be needed to make that happen.
Good to know!
We've been through a lot.
This was the final straw for me. Asking for feedback about MTX and then leveraging that to raise prices. Even if that's not what they did, their timing is beyond stupid.
Those things normally get shutdown for copyright related claims though, no?
True, though presumably users in those places would be stuck with the "less trustworthy" instances (and ideally, would be able to get their local laws changed to make themselves more trust worthy).
It's definitely not perfectly moral... but little in the world is and maybe it's sufficient pragmatic.