schizo @ schizo @forum.uncomfortable.business

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1 yr. ago

Depends. Can I easily make the AI hallucinate and give me free shit/tell me something I can later use to get free shit?

I mean, it wasn't a shockingly large amount of software or anything, but they always had a good selection of software.

The store opened here in like 1993 or 1994, and they always had a full selection of OSes and software for them: Dos, Windows, OS/2, Linux, BeOS, and so on.

Still open and still a cool place, but mostly just computer hardware bits and a section full of games and maker stuff now and not really any more software.

I remember playing Q3 at home before graduating high school, and that appears possible (though barely), but uh, it maaay have been on Windows at that point since I did swap between Linux and Windows.

My brain just kinda lumped it in to the '90s games on Linux' group, I guess.

A tech company that prioritizes money over security?

Well that's certainly a new and unexpected twist!

(I don't know if /s is necessary, but just to make sure: /s as fuck)

I'm going to argue that, yeah, probably, but it depends.

Are you at risk of just losing your personal data, or is this hosting services other people upload shit to?

If you've got other people's photos or documents or passwords or whatever, then no. You need more than one backup, you need to automate testing of your backups, and you need to make damn sure that you can absolutely recover from BOTH sets of backups.

If it's just your shit, then you do what you're comfortable with: if you lost your home server and it's backups, then are you okay with that outcome?

If that's a 'no', then you need more than the one backup, and testing, and automation blah blah blah.

I have the live server data, archives on a different drive in the system, and archives uploaded to the cloud.

About once a week or so I burn the local backup files to a BD-R, chuck that in a media-rated fire safe (an aside: a paper-rated fire safe is not sufficient for plastic disks, so make sure you buy one that actually will keep your backups from being melted otherwise, meh, you didn't really do anything).

The cloud versions are on a provider that claims 99.99999% durability, which is good enough, and I keep 60 days of backups in the cloud so that I have enough versions to rotate back through.

I also built a 2nd little baby server that'll grab the backups and do an automated restore and stand up my entire stack once a month, just to verify that the backup archives are actually backups and actually can be downloaded, unarchived, and automatically bring up all the stacks and populate the databases and have everything just appear up and running.

They're thinking "This doesn't improve shareholder value, so we're not going to put it on a sprint this quarter", same as every other commercial piece of software does.

Also, this quarter becomes "ever" after about six months of it sitting in a backlog waiting.

As a note: you did notice this is from the BBC, right? As in the British Broadcasting Company?

I'm not entirely sure the BBC is Republican-captured media, though I'll tend to agree that their style guide leads to reading an awful lot like conservative media.

Been trying to go through the several hundred free games Epic has given out that I've never played.

Mostly spent this week on Redout II, which is good if not great. But it's also the closest I've played to a modern F-Zero or WipEout, so it might even not end up uninstalled when I'm done with it.

I didn't even bother to look since, well, I just moved to compose files sitting in a folder instead but uh, $150? Seriously?

That'd be the most expensive bit of all of my stacks, including hosting and power costs.

I had to go look this up since I don't use Discord, and I think I just had my first old person moment. $10 for a freaking frame around your avatar? What in the hell?

I mean, if it were 1994 I'd agree that maybe we shouldn't hop on this newfangled email thing, but uh, a bit's happened in the last 30 years y'know?

Though I'd take paid-for school and universal health care and a social safety net over being able to get an email from my doctor so, uh, tradeoffs I guess?

Perhaps I'm just old, but picking the color of your profile is all zoomers wanted?

I mean shit, I'm not going to be happy until I can have auto-playing music on my profile.

Well, people are trying to do just that. Small team and moves slowly, but slow progress is still progress.

The captcha stuff is customizable, but yeah, you have to pay. The issue is that they have, in the past, shipped breaking changes in their default rules that made huge messes, and a huge portion of their customer base just uses the defaults. They've gotten better at this, but again, there's nothing other than their testing to prevent it in the future.

Also based on experiences doing infosec stuff, I can also say that there's ABSOLUTELY a huge portion of "admins" that think more security is more betterer, and configure shit in a way that breaks so many things then get mad that they did that; there's a LOT of depth you have to understand to configure something like Cloudflare's WAF properly, and way too many admin types just don't fully understand the impact of any particular thing is and get way way way waaaay too restrictive and then get mad that it breaks things.

The SSL offload requires you to trust your vendor, and agree that the odds that they're doing anything suspicious is likely zero: their business would damn near instantly implode if they got caught. But, again, you're trusting policy and procedure to keep people out of data.

I think there's a LOT of bias against "MITM" meaning "malicious", and Lemmy ranging from very left to leftish, a huge bias against big tech (which, imo, is 100% warranted and totally earned by decades of shitty behavior) which shows up as a 'Cloudflare is bad because the MITM your traffic' lacking the nuance that, well, every WAF and a heck of a lot of caching CDNs do that because that's how it works.

90's Linux gaming was a lot of Freeciv, Doom, Quake 3, and Tux Racer.

Wine really didn't work for shit for AT LEAST another decade, and even then, didn't really really work for a further decade after that. It took a very very long time for Wine to get to where it is now with Proton and playing basically everything that doesn't need a rootkit to run.

As for finding Linux games, I could just go to Microcenter. They had a whole shelf full of Linux software ranging from distros, to games, to commercial office suites, to just random shit that looked like it was boxed up in some guy's garage and contained just... stuff. I miss being able to buy software in big shiny boxes, though :(

#1 is by and far the cause I see when people ask me 'why did thing break?!'

There's a lot of 'Well, I edited the registry and then deleted these two files and installed this 3rd party software so that it looks like it did in Windows XP!' floating in my circles, which almost entirely correlates to the people who are mad that their install is, yet again, broken/not working as expected/having weird problems.

Of course, people are doing this because Microsoft can't stop shitting up Windows in a way that annoys people, and thus leading them to do things that maybe aren't the best idea.

So, in summary: it's a land of contrasts, but stop adding bullshit nobody wants Microsoft.

I'm not opposed to them, but a lot of people on Lemmy have pretty strong opinions, primarily around the centralization around, and potential of MITMing data.

I don't think they're wrong, because the centralization has given Cloudflare a shocking amount of power over who sees what and how: they, for example, will put you in captcha hell if you're using certain browsers, connecting from certain networks, or using TOR. I don't ever run into those issues, but they're certainly ones that happen to people often enough that a quick search will find story after story of people that run into this mess, and that it's sometimes annoying and painful to dig out of when and if it happens.

And, due to how their service works and the way the certificates are handled, they are essentially MiTMing your traffic. The certificate chain between your client and cloudflare and cloudflare and your server, depending on how exactly you've configured it, can be done in such a way that there's a re-encryption happening with them in the middle, and thus, Cloudflare can see all your data.

I've met their CEO and VP of Safety and worked extensively with them in a previous job and don't actually believe they're doing anything untowards, but the fact is that they, if they so desired, absolutely could.

I use their stuff on anything I setup for public access, either via an argo tunnel or their more traditional CDN stuff, but I can understand why other people concerned about user blocking and privacy (which are less of a venn diagram of users impacted, and more of a single circle: the privacy people are usually using browsers, addons, and VPN connections that are directly the cause of the block) wouldn't be Cloudflare fans.

Ah yes, the (in?)famous mWave cards come to mind here.

So shitty they not only didn't work in Linux, they ALSO never fucking worked right in Windows, either, and got IBM sued over what utter trash they were.

Yeah this makes me so very very happy I do not use Facebook or Instagram, because that sounds like an absolutely awful experience which would make me very very annoyed.

You can also install modern Linux on an old piece of hardware too! https://www.adelielinux.org/ is pretty shockingly compatible, back to a Pentium-class system. (A P166 was the oldest I've personally installed it on).

I wouldn't uh, say it was all that useful, but it's still sitting on the retro computer pile doing retro computer stuff.