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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer.

    There’s potential for a very dystopian future where we see people assassinated, not via car bomb but via the their cars being hacked to remove braking functionality (or something similar). And then a constant game of security whack-a-mole like we see with anti-virus software. And then some brilliant entrepreneur will start selling firewalls for cars. And then it’ll be passed into law that it’s illegal to use a vehicle that doesn’t have an active firewall/anti-virus subscription.

    It almost feels like the obvious path things will go down. Yay, capitalism…

    I’m not totally opposed to software being used in cars (as long as it’s tested and can be trusted to the degree mechanical components are) but yeah, OTA updates just seem like a terrible idea just for a little convenience. I’d rather see updates delivered via plugging the car in (and not via the charging port - it would need to be a specific data transfer port for security reasons). Alert people when there’s an update, and even allow the car to “refuse to boot” if it detects it’s not on the latest version. But updates should absolutely be done manually and securely.



  • The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.

    I do think “global warming” struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we’re seeing, I’ve come across far too many comments from people saying things like “global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to” and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.

    Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn’t matter much either way!







  • I’m kind of surprised Apple is willing to fragment things so much just to avoid these consumer-friendly rulings as much as they can. Obviously it’s profit-driven - I get that - but it seems to go against their branding a little, where the Apple ecosystem is typically very simple to use and has parity across devices.



  • You’re right about osu! Although it’s probably one of the few competitive games where there’s no gameplay interaction between players - if another player is cheating, it hurts the overall competitiveness, of course, but it doesn’t directly affect your gameplay experience.

    It’s not like playing a shooter where someone has an aimbot and wallhacks, or a racing game where someone can ram you off the track without slowing themselves down - those things directly ruin your gameplay experience as well as obviously hurting the competitive integrity. I don’t think those kinds of games would work at all if they were open-source and without anti-cheat unless there was strict moderation and likely whitelisting in place for servers.


  • loobkoob@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    9 months ago

    Is open-source compatible with competitive games? As much as I love open-source in general, I feel like cheating would be a serious problem if the source code is available for everyone. That’s not really an issue in single-player or co-operative games (outside of cheating leaderboard positions) but it would absolutely cause problems in a PvP game.



  • Well I’m just glad Harry Mack managed to release his 100th episode of “Omegle Bars” this week. He decided to take a break from doing Omegle-based content at the right time, it seems.

    For anyone who doesn’t know, Harry Mack’s a freestyle rapper. He has (had) a series where he’d ask strangers on Omegle to give him a handful of words and then create a full song out of them on the fly. And not just saying those words then immediately moving on like most freestyle rappers do; he actually creates entire verses on the topics he’s given and really raps around them. Plus he’d be calling out things the people were doing as they react to him, responding to things they say, mentioning things he can see in the room, etc, as he raps.

    Here’s one of his freestyles that’s really stuck with me ever since I first saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcA4zCeaPI

    He takes what are some fairly negative, “cry for help” words from the girls and turns them into a really beautiful, positive rap overall. He’s a very positive guy in general, and I’ve watched him consistently since I discovered him. Binging his videos got me through a breakup, in fact.


    My own experiences with Omegle have either been penises or just bland, and it’s not something I’ve used for many years as a result. But videos like Harry Mack’s show what wonderful things could come from it and I do think it’s a huge shame it’s gone. It feels like another part of the old internet’s gone, and that we’re moving even closer to the sanitised, heavily-monetised internet run by megacorporations. I hate that.




  • About 20 yeses ago - pre-smartphones - my sister lost a phone to water damage. It was in a backpack pocket during a camping/hiking trip and the backpack got rained on a lot. Everyone else’s phone was fine because they were kept either in waterproof backpack compartments or in trouser/waterproof coat pockets.

    Around the same time, I also had a friend whose phone was broken when we were rafting and the raft capsized. The rest of us on the raft had left our phones at home because _why would you risk bringing a mobile phone on a homemade raft?!_

    Those are the only two instances I know of personally where someone’s phone has been destroyed by water damage and it hasn’t just been an “oops I dropped it in the toilet” situation (I’m still not sure how people manage that). And even the second example was still due to stupidity, I think - there’s a reason the rest of us didn’t rake our phones on the raft. My sister’s phone being damaged in the backpack is the only one that didn’t feel preventable, and where a water resistance phone would genuinely have been a good thing.