Children and young people want spaces for social interaction without adult supervision. They will in any case find other places to interact, and companies will develop new services that do not formally fall under the category of “social media”. The alternatives are not necessarily better.

I mean, I’ve made the “there are fundamental enforceability issues” point myself, but I suppose that for some politicians, if there’s enough public demand for censorship, it’s easier to just engage in whatever theater is required to show that they’re being responsive to public concerns.

I remember when we discovered that militants in Afghanistan were monitoring Predator video feeds because apparently nobody had ever put in a requirement that the video stream be encrypted.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/769321/insurgents-intercept-video-feeds-from-u-s-drones-using-26-software-report-says.html

Militants in Iraq and Afghanistan have intercepted live video feeds from unmanned U.S. Predator drones using $26 off the shelf software made by a Russian company, says a report in the Wall Street Journal.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/camera-cars-detects-drinking

A team of Australian scientists have cooked up a new AI-driven camera system that can detect whether you are too drunk to drive a vehicle.

But the project isn’t quite ready for wide use with only 75 percent accuracy, according to the researchers out of Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, who had presented this camera project at a computer vision conference earlier this year.

Should be interesting.

I mean, Nintendo probably does benefit, but I can’t see how there’s a case here.

The government does have an obligation not to impose illegal tariffs on importers.

Nintendo doesn’t have a legal obligation not to raise prices. They, as with pretty much any vendor, can charge whatever they want. You can’t win a court case unless they did something illegal.

What limits them from doing that is that they’ll lose sales, especially if competitors don’t.

Companies could have gambled on the tariffs being overturned in court (as they were) and eating the losses with the hopes of recovering them later. That’s a risk, but some companies did do that. They benefited from gaining sales from their competitors. Nintendo didn’t take that route; they probably lost sales, but they also avoided the issue of taking losses on a per-sale basis.

EDIT: Well…okay, if you could show that Nintendo tried to get the tariffs imposed and then overturned as some sort of intentional mechanism to cause many vendors to increase prices without incurring actual costs to themselves — which I am confident that they didn’t do, but using it as a hypothetical — you could maybe make some kind of antitrust case on price-fixing. But it doesn’t sound like that’s what the lawsuit is claiming, and in any event, what would be illegal there wouldn’t be collecting the refunds.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/valve/steam-controller-shipment-leak

14 tons of Steam Controllers appear to have just arrived in the US, hinting at imminent release date

deleted by creator

I mean, you will almost certainly be able to build machines that outperform the Steam Machine 2 in bang-for-buck if Valve isn’t subsidizing it, which they said that they won’t. If not at release, then a few years in, because a console-style periodic hardware release model will lag whatever’s at the bleeding edge.

The desktop I’m typing this on isn’t gonna be cheaper than the Steam Machine 2, but it is unquestionably going to be more powerful.

But that’s not gonna be what the Steam Machine is for — you could always build a DIY gaming PC, unlike with consoles. It’s an open platform. I had a media PC plugged into my TV with a TV interface card a quarter-century back. What Valve is gonna be aiming for is going to be ease of use, the “you plug it into your TV, plug it into power, turn on gamepad, play games that target Steam Machine 2” thing. That’s where consoles have been able to pick up users that haven’t done the PC.

I don’t have a YouTube account, and have no interest in getting one. I hid shorts with this browser add-on:

https://github.com/Vulpelo/hide-youtube-shorts

Honestly, a lot of people are probably posting in [email protected] when their questions really are better-suited to another community. Not just on hardware, but on other technical questions. I don’t think that it’d be a bad thing if they posted in the other places.

However.

End of the day, you need to split up a community when either (a) the traffic is too much of a firehose of content to be able to identify the most-interesting stuff, which isn’t the case for me for this at all or (b) there’s too much unrelated stuff showing up and people are getting a lot of stuff that they don’t want thrown at them. I think that there’s enough overlap between the interests and knowledge of most of the subscribers here and what’s covered that it’s probably not producing a lot of stuff that they aren’t interested in or where their knowledge isn’t relevant.

Like, we have a handful of video-game-specific communities, but they see so little traffic that just using general-purpose video gaming communities like [email protected] still works pretty well. Maybe some genre-specific communities, like [email protected].

I think that if we, say, grew the Threadiverse userbase by a factor of ten, then some of the higher-traffic communities that exist now really should split up. But as it is, I personally am not too fussed about having more-centralized stuff from a user standpoint. As things stand, I tend to say “I’d like to have more traffic in the communities I’m in” than “there’s too much traffic and I need help in filtering it down”.

Paul Krugman pointed out that opaque approval processes are fertile ground for corruption.

change the default SSH port

Any port scanner — take nmap — is going to turn this up. $ nmap -p0-65535 <hostname> takes a little longer than checking a single port, but what’s the threat that you’re worried about? Someone brute-forcing a password? That’s going to take a hell of a lot longer than that, and you use strong passwords that will make that wildly impractical, right? A zero-day remote exploit in OpenSSH’s sshd? If someone gets one of those, they probably aren’t going to waste it on you.

SSH is also trivial to fingerprint as a protocol. Here’s me running netcat to my local SSH instance:

$ nc localhost 22
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u2
^C
$

It ain’t rocket science to identify an SSH server.

I personally think that port-knocking isn’t a great idea and just adds hassle and brittleness to something, but I’d do a port-knocking setup before I tried running sshd on a nonstandard port.

If you honestly don’t trust SSH, then okay, fine, wrap it with a VPN or something with real security so there’s another layer (of course, that raises the issue of whether you trust the VPN software not to have remote exploits). Or have one host that you can reach and bounce from there to another host or something.

There are ways that I’d say are useful to try and secure an SSH instance. Use keys rather than passwords. Whitelist user accounts that can be connected to remotely.

But anyone who is likely to be a real risk to your system is going to be able to find an ssh server running on a nonstandard port.

Yeah, I thought about changing it, but…the problem is that while the base game is playable now for $0, the overwhelming bulk of the game’s content is in expansion packs. Like, I don’t think that people really buy and play just the base game; it’d be more like a demo.

EDIT: A similar game might be DCS. I mean, yes, technically the base game is free, and you get (checks) a WW2 fighter and a Soviet ground-attack jet. But…basically that acts as a demo, and everyone is going to go out and get at least their favorite aircraft, and most of those aircraft cost about as much as a full-priced video game does. Hell, a couple of them are $80 each.

Yeah, but thanks for the heads-up!

I should totally put release date on there too. Just a sec, will add on a column with that.

I think that a bigger story there is the dominance of F2P games.

EDIT: Added release year after @[email protected] mentioned age.

EDIT2: And country of origin, while I’m at it.

EDIT3: Note that the release dates on some of these are a bit apples-to-oranges. For example, Escape From Tarkov only had its 1.0 release in 2025, but had been widely-played well before that, so maybe “availability” would be more interesting than “release”. World of Warcraft Classic only split from World of Warcraft in 2019, but both games have an origin in World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.

Followed by a lot of Jira.

It was clear that more use of Bugzilla would cure many of society’s ills.

Yall know that ‘Fallout’ was originally turn-based?

And there’s still the Wasteland series, which is what the isometric Fallout games heavily derived from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jo2BKNtKDI

This guy recommends Overload. I haven’t played it, but…

My main requirement was for the touchpad to actually have physical tactile buttons, fuck that whole solid slab of touch thing, I want 2 proper clicky buttons.

I’m in the same boat, except I want three for Linux, where the third button is more-useful than in Windows, and there are very, very few laptops that have that any more — a few Thinkpad models. I finally gave up on it, just accepted that I was going to have a laptop without same, though you can get USB touchpads with physical buttons if you want to haul one around (and I keep one in my car for just this reason — sometimes it’s worth hauling out).

But I want a Kenshi like game set in Morrowind.

Honestly, I’d like a Kenshi-like game set in damn near any setting.

Like, the Kenshi setting is interesting, but in terms of gameplay…it’s essentially unique from a gameplay standpoint. I’m still a bit amazed that nobody has made other games in the genre.

There is a sequel that is being worked on and will come out someday…