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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 30th, 2023

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  • You didn’t have to deal with random re-balancing changing your gameplay, spying and tracking embedded in everything, hackers ruining the game or targeting you, invasive DRM (consoles), being forced to update your system for an hour before you can play, being forced to sign up for bullshit accounts in order to play the game you just bought, games that have required updates the day they come out, your games disappearing forever because the publisher changed their mind and removed it from the store, game content being removed to sell as DLC instead, being pressured to link social media accounts, bigger companies buying the game and forcing you to use their services to play it, companies monitoring and recording player interactions, companies going under making it impossible to play the game you already bought…

    Holy shit. I never realized how bad modern gaming has gotten.




  • I hope so. It’s more likely something infected Firefox itself, and didn’t get into the OS. But when I checked the modem logs, it happened up to a couple of months after the fact. That’s worrying.

    What’s even more worrying is that a couple of websites told me I had an IP address that didn’t match my home IP, but would provide the correct one if I refreshed the page a couple of times. So some kind of covert proxy or VPN type of thing was happening.

    I ended up just wiping everything, to be safe. Still a bit paranoid though.



  • I know this story is more-so about a trojan in a trusted place, and not general security, but I have an anecdote to share.

    So, time to fess up here. I previously complained about Google trapping me in captcha-hell for enabling Ublock Origin.

    I was wrong.

    Turns out that I had visited a movie streaming site a while before to watch a season of some show, I forget which. Without any downloads or noticeable input on my part. My Linux box apparently got hacked/malware. All I did was click the occasional “I am a human” box on the website, and sit back with popcorn.

    I found out when my ISP starting blocking IP addresses some time later. I checked my modem’s logs, and they showed some unexplained traffic to impossible “unassigned” IP addresses afterward. I didn’t notice for a while.

    I was stupid. Even worse, my phone also started behaving badly after that. I think I watched the last few episodes in bed, so must have infected that too.

    Don’t assume any system is automatically safe.






  • They can be good quality, yeah. But I’m more worried about having to basically present a digital-equivalent of a driver’s license if I want to sign up for Netflix, or watch porn, or order food. And if ID system routes every request to a central location first, then you get stuck with de-facto tracking on everything you ever do, no matter how good the company’s privacy record is. That’s what I meant by creepy.