Melody Fwygon

Keybase is better than Signal. You may not like it’s current owners but it still works, still functions, and can be used to chat privately. It’s entirely OSS on the client side; and server-side software isn’t provided; but with an open Client; it’s likely trivial to reverse and re-implement your own. (Keybase itself doesn’t provide their server code; it’s private due to abuse constraints)

Keybase is End to End Encrypted. It may not be as “feature rich” but all features are private.

I’m not sure if it’s indev anymore though; and it does allow you to be as public or as private as you’d like to be about your identity.

It occurs to me that adding a visual watermark might actually serve to obscure a visual watermarking scheme that is otherwise invisible by providing data that scrambles or breaks the watermark decoder itself.

Audio watermarks can be distorted in any number of ways; and it could be that some of the wildly poor audio quality in most cam-rips is probably the only way you can defeat the watermark; by using a LQ microphone and encoding the audio to a very limited bitrate and then re-upsampling; to defeat any subtle alterations a digital watermark might make to the audio waveform.

Watermarks are only an issue in-as-much as it is used to trace down which copy was leaked.

With modern digital projection systems; you don’t get a reel of film; you get a briefcase of [SS/HD]Ds containing the raw, encrypted, footage. The digital projection system will decrypt using provided keys. There’s no output except the standard ones for the theatre projectors and sound systems…so capturing the output is difficult.

If you do intercept the signal; the projection system might detect it; and refuse playback or wipe the decryption keys. Watermarking is also a danger; since your theater can get identified as the leak source and sued.

I’m not accounting for State laws; which may in fact be stricter. I’m talking about Federal Laws which might not explicitly forbid such things; so long as they’re done in an actually safe manner by professionals.

But, as I said before, if the DEA believes it has the power to stop that none-the-less; that’s what they will do, without respect to if the law is actually legally unclear or borderline. Unfortunately many pharmaceutical places don’t care to invite the wrath of the DEA; even if what they’re doing could be considered permissible; so long as they do not synthesize an exact drug that the Feds specifically name as a controlled substance.

Again; IANAL either. But I do think there’s a lot of room for small compounding pharmacies to synthesize various drugs to meet a patient’s needs quickly while waiting for proper shipments to arrive. There’s lots of compounds that are life-sustaining that do not fall under the DEA banner of authority.

Depending on how Vyvanse is Scheduled; it might be legal to privately make. If it’s not scheduled like a standard amphetamine; the DEA is powerless.

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not illegal to compound this stuff. But IANAL; and it doesn’t matter if the DEA thinks it is and will hassle anyone trying.

I firmly think this would be a boon for many people; owning one of these is likely a lifeline that even small town physicians could utilize to dispense drugs freely or cheaply to patients in need.

This is something that I think small-town pharmacies could use to create compounds in cases of drug shortages. I think tools and programs and small labs like what are discussed in the article are a positive force for good; and that they should be not only allowed, but encouraged, for many drugs that are expensive, unavailable to someone in need and can be readily synthesized safely with a basic college level of chemistry training by someone in a pharmacy.

I think the potential risks and downsides are small right now; and I think more of it should be encouraged gently so that we can find out quickly what the flaws and limitations are so that we can put regulatory guardrails around it so that people do not harm themselves.

I’m certainly concerned that now that this software has been covered in PopSci; that it will certainly suffer a needless onslaught of DMCA and other lawsuit-related shenanigans. >_>

No; Piracy won’t stop.

Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.

Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in ‘missed profits’.

Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing “lost sales”; but that’s provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?

To be clear; the Nintendo Switch tends to trade fluently in cryptographic certificates.

The MiG Switch has one of these certificates; one it’s creators likely copied from a legitimate Nintendo Switch game title. All games have such certificates and they are uniquely serialized; much like a GUID or UUID would be. These certificates are signed by the Game Dev studio, and then Nintendo in a typical certificate signing chain scheme; Nintendo signs the Game Dev Studio cert, which signs the Title certificate, which signs the unique cart or digital copy cert.

This banning is usually achieved by banning either the lowest certificate in the chain or the one directly above it; or even the Dev Cert if it was compromised.

So the MiG Switch carts are likely hardware banned. Your Nintendo Switch probably advertises to Nintendo which cart(s) were inserted into it recently by sharing the fingerprints of the certificates. Then Nintendo can basically kill the certificate assigned to your Switch system and prevent you from connecting online; as your Switch uses it’s own system cert to identify itself to Nintendo services.

In all cases this is un-evade-able when connecting to the internet; as Nintendo Switch system certs are burned into a PROM chip on the main board at manufacture. This chip is a WORM chip, which can only be written once and read many billions of times.

A critical part of the way they try and curb cheating in online play is checking the integrity of the runtime environment; which includes checking what titles were launched recently; and if that happens to include a certificate they’ve banned for being cloned by the MiG Switch; then you’ll quickly be banned by their anti-cheating hammer.

Most important is those checks typically don’t take place naturally; they only occur when you’re connecting to the EShop, or connecting to NN to play multiplayer online. The devil therein unfortunately lies in the details; and if you’ve ever purchased a Digital Title that means your Switch is regularly connecting to the EShop to renew Digital License Tickets needed. They tend to expire every 72 hours and must be renewed by presenting an expired Ticket, a valid Ticket Granting Ticket (given to your Switch when you buy the title) and contacting “Mommy Nintendo” and asking “Mommy, May I?”. Yeah. DRM sucks.

If all goes well; your Switch gets a shiny new set of tickets. Unfortunately Nintendo was paying attention to requests and will issue out regular waves of bans for systems detected cheating. You won’t know when this will happen, and it won’t prevent Nintendo from letting you play your games; you’ll just suddenly find your Switch banned from online play after such ban waves.

Like a Hydra; You cut one head off; and two grow in it’s place.

The CEO is oftentimes a company policymaker; I think it would be foolish to ignore that fact.

I’ve been boycotting C-f-a for at least 15 years now; and I don’t tell my friends or suggest that my family eat there either; except as an emergency uber last resort. The gas station (burritos/sushi/hot-dog-warmer) would be suggested first.

My current partner(s) know and respect my feelings for the company and they feel roughly the same anyways; and so we never eat there.

She’s such a narcissist that she couldn’t stay out of the spotlight. lol.

Regardless; I doubt that any game she could develop would be any good; and I shudder to think of what deranged DRM scheme she will cook up to protect her own game. It’ll probably be worse than Denuvo, knowing how unstable she is.

Genuinely, the scene is better without her hate filled screeds polluting the web. Her abilities might be appreciated more if she got some mental help and she could rejoin the scene as a positive force; not someone who lets their ego run rampant and spews hate at the slightest provocation.

Unfortunately the scene is too cowardly to NUKE her output into obscurity until she cleans her spew up.

This is why technologies like DoH and DoT are needed. To prevent this kind of tampering.

With all likelihood; it would have been 3 to 5 whole years before anyone could have purchased a localized, legitimate copy of the movie in Lat.Am.

So no; I do not blame them for doing this. Considering that this movie was even broadcast as a “Public Screening” and likely nobody paid anything in admission but for food and drink…I’d even argue this was a 100% non-commercial use. Depending on the laws in Brazil it might even be “fair use” for a city official to do this; as informational and educational arguments can be made for it depending on the audience.

…Assuming the flash drive isn’t loaded to the gills with malware alongside of every game it offers to install…that sounds fair.

But let’s be real; No legitimate company stands a chance of doing this without getting sued into oblivion. Unfortunately that means the risk of getting viruses and malware with your purchase, likely ransomware or cryptominer droppers, is really high.

…but let’s assume you’re technical enough that you can disarm all the malware on the USB stick and clean the cruft out of it. Then; yeah…maybe you’ll get your value’s worth.

This actually doesn’t surprise me. Valve is getting greedy.

But; to be clear; by using these tools, to unlock the DLC without paying for it, you are cheating in the game. That’s a mere fact; and not a moral judgement of anyone choosing to do so.

Personally, I don’t judge anyone for doing so; and would use these tools myself if I thought a DLC were too predatory, expensive or otherwise unfair to not have it available.

That’s not saying it’s fair or right for Valve to do so; nor is it saying the VAC bans or account suspensions are deserved. If you get hit by this; you absolutely should pirate every title you already own/purchased via Steam right away, and pirate anything else you want in the future.

The only way to make them regret doing things like this is voting with your wallet; and asking others to do the same. Stop spending money on Valve. Once their earnings fall they’ll be forced to hear people’s concerns.

In most sharing channels you could possibly just report those to the channel ops (@/&/!/~) and get them kicked or devoiced (removing their (+ or %) state depending on the channel)

I don’t know any channel that would put up with people who wasted your time with DRM’ed files back in the day. It’s less problematic now yes; but still something they don’t want people doing…since you have to be signed in as the purchasing account to de-drm something.

What happens is what’s intended.

Everyone is going to do it; and it will cause companies, artists and creatives to step back and rethink a bit on how they monetize their creations responsibly. The ones that refuse to rethink and adapt will fail and flounder under the tiny handful of straw that Piracy adds to the load.

That’s a GOOD thing.

What’s unfortunate is that companies and people still think it’s productive to worry and handwring over piracy as if it’s killing someone; instead of being the thing you “don’t fly too close to, lest your wax wings get melted off and you plummet to the ground.”

You can automate this; but you have to make sure that the automation you create is going to respect the ratelimits. I’d recommend something simple like using a command alias or short script written for your specific IRC client.

It’s what I used to do with that sort of thing; and there are plenty of well known Open Source scripts in the wild as well

As an example; I would use mIRC with it’s scripting system and write my own event trigger scripts to automatically request, wait for and then accept the DCC chat requests and route them appropriately in the interface. There were also scripts that helped with getting the lists; unpacking them, and displaying those lists in my client…so I didn’t have to extract the text from the zip myself, and could select what I needed from the bot.

All of this was lightweight automation that was intended not to flood the bot with commands and fed into command queueing modules that let the bots have time to process.

Sometimes in those days you could get actually (+b)anned, Auto/KILL’ed or /(G/K):LINE’ed for causing a bot to crash…so you had to be careful and respectful with regard to scripts.

TL;DR; know your bot, source channel & network rules, and write your own scripts for safety or read any scripts you import in carefully and understand what they’re doing.

Aye; I remember GPM, and before they enshittified it into the ground, it was damn near comparable to Spotify.