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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.

    Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.

    I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.

    Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).



  • Haha. I sent them an opt-out notice by email, and it bounced!

    They are using Google email servers for discord .com and Google has apparently shadowbanned me. It gives an error message saying “The account [my email address] is disabled.” but I have never created a Google or Gmail account, and my email address is on a domain not associated with Google at all.

    So I’ve completed my obligation to opt-out. Discord will have no record of it, but I have the email server logs to prove I sent it.

    If, in the future, anyone needs to sue Discord and forgot to opt-out, feel free to use this same excuse.


  • Microsoft has enforced mandatory digital signatures for drivers, and getting a digital signing key from Microsoft costs a ton of money. So, presumably they do care.

    In contrast, consider nProtect GameGuard, the anti-cheat system in Helldivers 2. It is a rootkit, and runs in the kernel. Why does Microsoft permit this? Shouldn’t this be blocked? It must be using either an exploit like the article, or a properly signed driver. Either way, Microsoft could fix it – by patching the exploit, or revoking the signing key.

    The fact that Microsoft hasn’t done anything about malicious anticheat rootkits is a sign that they really don’t care. They just want their payment.