Yup, they somehow managed to bundle obvious spyware and bold-faced propaganda into a single app, and somehow plenty of people seem okay with that.

Yes, it includes things like a TOTP manager, text file storage, family sharing, etc… Nothing super groundbreaking, but it’s some quality of life stuff that plenty of people have been happy to pay less than a dollar per month for.

Pretty much this. Cloud storage isn’t perfect, but it sure does make proper 3-2-1 backup hygiene easier. 3 backups, on 2 different mediums, 1 of them off site. Cloud storage accomplishes both the 2 and 1, because it is both a different medium and off site.

The fact that you can automatically sync remotely is a big bonus too, because off-site backups historically have a problem where they fall out of date without active attention. For instance, if you have a tape backup system stored in a warehouse across town, those tapes are only as up-to-date as the last time you took the time to drive across town and update them. But with cloud storage, you can automatically sync your folders to keep things up to date in near real time. Plus, your traditional off-site backup is only as secured from things like natural disasters if you’re willing to travel fairly long distances to make them. Those tapes in a warehouse across town won’t survive if the entire town is hit by a natural disaster like a wildfire or flood.

For instance, maybe I make an update on my laptop, and then want to access it on my phone. Even with SyncThing, my laptop and phone won’t sync with each other unless they’re able to find each other on the same network. If I’m not on a trusted network at the time, (e.g. I’m at work on my employer’s WiFi, or traveling and using hotel WiFi) that makes syncing difficult. But with cloud storage, they can both essentially use that as a relay. My laptop updates the cloud, and then my phone pulls that update. Now both devices are up-to-date without actually needing to discover each other on a trusted network.

Yeah. That really jumped out at me. My very first thought was “Americans have privacy protections?” Since Roe v Wade was overturned, Americans have basically no right to privacy.

$3M to a single person. The real headline should be that this opens the door for hundreds of thousands of similar lawsuits, which will use this case as precedent.

FUCK CLASS ACTIONS! Those are made to cater to the defendant, by consolidating a ton of independent lawsuits into a single one. It only makes the defendant’s job easier, while the individuals who were directly affected get a few nickels and a “we’re legally obligated to say we’re sorry” letter. Sue them directly, and make them defend every. Single. Individual. Case. You want to really make them hurt? The best way to do that is with a million individual lawsuits, not one big lawsuit.

Yeah, a “torrented” cassette? That’s called bootlegging or ripping, depending on how you recorded it onto the cassette.

Bootlegging is setting the recorder up against the radio and hoping your parents/siblings stayed quiet long enough for you to record the whole song. Or maybe you simply abandoned the idea of getting a clean bootleg, and recorded a mixtape where you added your own commentary/sang along/etc.

Ripping was running the audio signal directly from the radio into a cassette recorder, bypassing the whole “room noise” issue entirely.

Of course, every radio recording (regardless of whether it was bootlegged or ripped) would always have a few seconds of the goddamned DJ talking over the beginning/end of the track.

And CD piracy was a big deal back when consumer-grade CD burners first hit the market. I remember my dad checking CD albums out at the library and using his dedicated burning setup to copy the albums. He built an entire desktop with the express purpose of ripping CDs for himself and his friends. It had one CD drive, and like five or six burner drives right below it. So he could make five or six copies at the same time. He’d keep two copies (one for the house, one for his truck) and then the rest would get passed around to his friends. He even made custom CD labels with printable CD-shaped adhesive stickers, so he could peel the album art off of the page and stick it directly to the CD. He had a template saved that let him print out like four labels at once.

That’s a shame, because KH2 is pretty widely regarded as the best in the series. If you stopped with Chain of Memories, I wouldn’t blame you. The gameplay for that one is definitely… Uhh… Divisive. But KH2 was when the series really hit its stride.

Yeah, Japan was actually surprised when American game devs started using X for confirm. They never even anticipated that it would happen, because the X/O symbolism is so heavily engrained in their society that it was glaringly obvious to them that O was confirm. Their original intent was always to use the Nintendo layout for confirm/cancel, but then western devs misunderstood the buttons and swapped them.

To them, an O is like a checkmark or thumbs up emoji. Imagine if an American console maker developed a console with a thumbs up button, and Asian devs started using the thumbs up button as Cancel. The American console manufacturer would probably be pretty fucking confused by the decision too.

Out of curiosity, how does it compare to EmuDeck? I haven’t personally used RetroDeck, so I was wondering if it had anything that would make me switch from EmuDeck.

Probably the part where keeping everything local would allow the driver to easily bypass the device. Splice a few wires, and boom. But if it is doing some off-site verification, they’ll be able to immediately know if the device is disabled. Similarly, they could do things like monitor the car’s location in real time, and have it throw up a red flag if the car is moving but the driver hasn’t performed a test. That would be a sign of tampering.

It also allows them to know if the driver fails the test, which is important for probation/parole reasons, where not drinking is often a condition of release. So if they fail the test, it should automatically alert their supervising officer. Can’t do that if it’s all local.

Yeah, I personally prefer to keep things running fairly light. I’m not running a 99.9% uptime server with hundreds/thousands of users, so I can tolerate a 0-5 minute downtime every few days.

What you’re looking for is called Dynamic DNS. I use Cloudflare for my DNS (which feels a little like making a deal with the devil) and Cloudflare-DDNS to automatically update my DNS records when my WAN IP changes. Basically, the container checks the current WAN IP, checks the current Cloudflare DNS records, and pushes a change if they don’t match. It runs every few minutes, and then rests again until the next check. I’m sure other DNS providers have similar ways to set up DDNS.

It’s not a 100% foolproof thing, because your WAN IP changing will take a few minutes to update. But a few minutes of downtime is much better IMO, when the alternative is needing to manually VPN into my server (if the VPN even still works, since the WAN IP changed), and troubleshoot it every time the IP address changes.

It is extremely heavily moderated in favor of communism, so it is a very big echo chamber. Everything seems very calm and respectable as long as you don’t dig too deep, because any dissenting opinions quickly get removed. So there isn’t a whole lot of argument that happens among .ml users. But checking the mod logs tells a very different story.

Also, it’s the only instance that the lead Lemmy dev uses, so anyone who wants to stay up to date on lemmy’s development is forced to federate with .ml. There have also been some controversies about the dev putting dev donations towards running the instance, which ruffled a lot of feathers from people who want to support the dev but not the instance.

Some of us are old enough to remember when your games would sound different depending on which sound card you had installed.

Guessing you’re German? It is used in place of the Palestinian flag, because it has the same colors. Since Germany is terrified of being labeled antisemitic, (and Israel immediately jumps to “you’re an antisemite” whenever anyone disagrees with them,) the German government has their tongue all the way up Israel’s asshole. So the German government labeled it antisemitic, (and started trying to propagandize their population to believe so as well, by equating it with Nazis) because they don’t want any Germans making headlines by using the emoji to support Palestine.

Sorta like how people complain about bots scraping Lemmy, even though federation already exists as a standardized protocol for distributing data. Like any scraper who wanted to efficiently scrape Lemmy would just spin up their own instance and let federation do the scraping for them. It would even have the added benefit that they could set their server to ignore delete requests, so deleted posts/comments wouldn’t get automatically removed from their server. And then they could scrape as much as they wanted without impacting anyone else.

But they don’t want to do that, because it would require the smallest modicum of forethought. They don’t care that scrapers are trashing the Internet and causing massive bandwidth issues for hosters. They just want the data, and they want it now. All of those “bots are flooding my server and eating all my bandwidth, so legitimate users can’t actually access the site” complaints are for other people.

Nope, it’s unfortunately not that easy in the US. Not only can police use your property for this… They aren’t liable for any damage they cause while doing so.

Lech v. City of Greenwood Village is a relevant national case. Basically, police demolished a neighbor’s house while executing a warrant, and then refused to reimburse the neighbor. There is a Takings clause of the 5th amendment, that says the government can claim eminent domain and take private property, but they must provide just compensation for the property that was taken… The homeowner tried to argue that the demolition fell under the Takings clause, and therefore he was entitled to just compensation.

The Supreme Court ruled that the police had no obligation to reimburse, as long as the damage occurred due to official police power. The SCOTUS essentially ruled that official police powers (like executing warrants, chasing suspects during an attempted arrest, or staging standoffs) do not invoke the Takings clause. Even if the powers were not directed at the person whose property was taken.

So the pigs have carte blanche to use your shit, as long as they can justify the use as part of executing an official police power.

Reminds me of what an EMT once told me. She mentioned that every EMT inevitably learns two very important questions to ask whenever you encounter someone who is naked in public:

1. Do you know you’re naked?
2. Do you want to be naked?

Those two questions will shed a lot of light on the current situation, and will let you gauge how the next 15 minutes is going to go.