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.

This saved my mom just the other day. She sat for an extra second at a green, and the car behind her whipped around to pass her. That car almost got t-boned by the fucking bus that ran the red light. If she had gone as soon as the light turned green, she would have been directly in front of the bus. But she noticed the bus wasn’t slowing down at all, so she waited.

You’re correct. Pihole works at the DNS level. Since YouTube hosts their ads on the same servers that host their videos, blocking the ads with DNS would also block the videos. Which I guess it technically works to block YT ads, but that’s a little like saying “set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”

I agree with you on that. My original point was simply that expecting every single parent to run their own blocking isn’t feasible, nor effective under real world situations.

And a proxy site doesn’t require installing third party software.

I’ve been saying for a while that we should start presenting lawmakers with secure ways to do age verification, instead of relying on lobbyists to do it. Lawmakers will inevitably pass these kinds of things, so at least make sure the groundwork is there for it to be done securely instead of just bitching about it when Meta lobbies to be the third-party age verification system.

Have the government set up a database with every single name, DOB, ID number (SSN, for the Americans), and a password that the individual has set up on the provided site. Then have them use a known hash for each one, essentially turning the password into a salt. And the hashes can be stored in a simple database that determines whether or not someone is old enough.

Next, the device hashes the user’s inputs for name, DOB, ID number, and password. If you want to require an ID, that photo can be verified directly on the device, because even phones are powerful enough to do things like OCR nowadays. Now the device sends that hash directly to the government, and asks “hey, does this hash match someone who is over {age of majority}?” The government’s system automatically responds with a simple yes/no.

Your device can now automatically respond to any age verification checks, so there’s no need for individual sites or apps to ask for your personal info. They can simply ask your device, and your device can respond automatically. The user never even needs to see an “are you over {age}” prompt, because it all happens before the site or service even loads.

It’s essentially the same idea that Tor uses, where routing your traffic through three nodes helps ensure security. The first node (the site, in this case) only gets the verification from your device. The second node (your device) can keep your info entirely on the device, so it never needs to send it to any third party. And the third node (the government) never sees your browsing data. The only device that actually sees both your personal info and your browsing data is your device, which you control. You didn’t need to send a third party any extra data about yourself to verify every individual site or service. Everything about your info stays entirely on your device. And the government didn’t get any of your browsing info, because the device was simply asking if you were old enough to be verified.

For shared devices (like desktops) this could be done on an account level. Same basic concept, except the “is over {age}” flag could be set on the user account. “But my privacy” folks start to rabble about this, (because it usually implies something like a Microsoft account) but I can guarantee Microsoft already knows roughly how old you are. So parents can log in with their verified account to watch porn, and kids will get unverified accounts that redirect them back to a “hey it looks like you’re unverified. If you’re old enough to view this content, here’s how to verify your device” page.

For parents, protecting your kids is now as simple as refusing to verify their devices/accounts and protecting that password (so they can’t just use your info to verify themselves behind your back). Hardware verification can be done securely.

Exactly. There are so many people in this thread who really seem to underestimate how much time and effort it actually takes to keep kids from playing the games their peers are playing. Keeping a teenager from looking at tits is a full time job by itself, which would require all kinds of invasive privacy violations. As the old adage goes, the strictest parents make the sneakiest kids.

but free ones really suck IMO

Kids don’t care. They’ll use whatever is available. Free ones are almost undoubtedly collecting and selling your browsing info too, but kids won’t care about that either. Now your attempts at blocking them have made their browsing less private.

and they aren’t very obfuscated so they can be easily blocked too

And now you’ve fallen into the whack-a-mole trap, which is exactly what most parents don’t have time for.

there are methods to detect VPN traffic so that could be blocked too

Methods available on residential ISP-provided modem/routers? That’s the only “networking gear” that most households have. I think you may be falling for the Average Familiarity trap.

If you wanted to go ballistic you could even set a whitelist of services and everything else gets blocked

Sure, and your kid can just buy a cheap prepaid SIM card to keep under their mattress. Data plans are stupid cheap, and kids are resourceful. Hell, I can walk down to the corner store and buy an entire android phone for like $50. Will it be a good phone? Fuck no. But it’ll get access to the internet. And if a neighbor or nearby business has unprotected WiFi, I don’t even need the prepaid SIM card.

If you’re trying to stop a 14 year old from looking at tits, you’re already in a pitched battle against an opponent who will never run out of determination. My original point was simply that parents don’t have the time or resources to constantly play cat and mouse with whatever kids are using to jork it. There are entire private companies and government departments with hundreds of full time employees who specialize in parental controls, and they still struggle to keep up. Parents who work full time (and who probably aren’t tech literate enough to do anything more than click the “Enable AdGuard” button when setting up their router, if their router even supports AdGuard) simply won’t have the time or resources.

Hah, I typoed. Fixed now. I shouldn’t comment before I’ve had my coffee.