Just a regular Joe.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Another technique that helps is to limit the amount of information shared with clients to need to know info. This can be computationally intensive server-side and hard to get right … but it can help in many cases. There are evolving techniques to do this.

    In FPS games, there can also be streaming input validation. eg. Accurate fire requires the right sequence of events and/or is used for cheat detection. At the point where cheats have to emulate human behaviour, with human-like reaction times, the value of cheating drops.

    That’s the advanced stuff. Many games don’t even check whether people are running around out of bounds, flying through the air etc. Known bugs and map exploits don’t get fixed for years.


  • Not everything will be open source. For whatever reason, they decided to make this obfuscator open source. It might also just be an interesting side project that someone got permission to release.

    Obfuscation can make it harder to reverse engineer code, even if the method is known. It might also be designed to be pluggable, allowing custom obfuscation. I haven’t checked.

    We also know that obfuscation isn’t real security … but it’s sometimes it is also good enough for a particular use case…


  • ALSA is lowest level, and is the kernel interface to audio hardware. Pipewire provides a userspace service to share limited hardware.

    Try setting “export PIPEWIRE_LATENCY=2048/48000” before running an audio producing application (from the same shell).

    Distortion can sometimes be related to the audio buffers not getting filled in time, so increasing the buffering as above gives it more time to even out. You can try 1024 instead of 2048 too.

    There is no doubt a way to set it globally, if it helps.

    Good luck!


  • Except my crazy relative (just 1, thank dog) also has telegram and feels the urge to forward every damn whackjob conspiracy theory reinterpretation of truth that they find to me and my wife, despite us never replying except to ask them to stop. eg. Cloud seeding, windmills and electric cars are responsible for destroying the atmosphere (not co2 and other greenhouse gases); Bill Gates etc. are spreading microchips through vaccinations; judges ruling that measles doesn’t exist; Ukraine is full of nazis; and yes, even regurgitated feelgood fairy tales and random cat pictures from Facebook. So glad they are in a country far far away from me. They “do their own research”, of course.

    So bloody sad that so many people are in a similar situation of avoiding friends and family for their own sanity (and sometimes safety).


  • In many countries the onus is on the connection owner to point the finger at the next person, or to otherwise prove it wasn’t them / their responsibility. Even if they can, fighting off lawyers who are experts in this area is costly (time & typically money).

    Exactly the same problem exists with a VPN. What makes it personal? It’s just a service you bought, which can be used by multiple people and devices. The source IP typically links it to the user. So … back to the point of picking a trusted VPN provider in a trusted region.

    For civil matters (like copyright infringement in most jurisdictions), a standard VPN (with egress in another jurisdiction) and client-side precautions will be fine, crypto or no crypto. Frankly, it’s quite normal for people to use VPNs these days. My employer even recommends employees use personal VPNs for their personal devices.

    For the despicable shit, espionage etc., onion routing and crypto might be better. The police and agencies have many more tools at their disposal, and any mistake could be one’s undoing.

    A firm dropping crypto is hardly a reason to declare a holy war against a VPN provider. For those who care, they already do.


  • There is near-zero privacy when a VPN has your real IP address and could log connections (source/dest/proto/port). Don’t fool yourself into thinking that using crypto payments adds much, unless you are constructing your own VPN onion OR you are concerned about what shows up on your CC bill directly (eg. to hide it from your family)

    When you use a VPN provider, you are trusting them with your anonymity - that they don’t keep logs of connections that could lead back to your identity, and/or they won’t hand that info over to others (law enforcement, courts, some spook slipping an employee $500).

    It’s also quite likely that your the average VPN user uses the same webbrowser (full of fingerprints and tasty cookies) to identify themselves in 10 different ways as they visit their shady torrent/porn/zuckerberg/fetish/gambling/bezos site, removing another layer of the obscurity onion.