whoops
July 21, 2019
505 Doesn’t Publish Games (apparently)
July 21, 2019
So if you've been following along, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was supposed to have a native Linux release - which was cancelled due to unspecified "middleware" problems. No refunds were offered or given, and people who asked were directed to the online forum operated by 505 Inc.
I filed a complaint with the CA DOJ over the publisher's behavior, and got this response from them, which says some surprising things:
1 - 505 claims to "not be a party" to the Kickstarter, despite being responsible for delivering rewards, and so I should have to sue Iga directly if I want a refund (which is of course impossible as I am American and he is in Japan);
2 - They claim that they PUBLISH NO GAMES!
3 - They claim that since the game runs (and use MY instructions as evidence) that the promise has been met, despite it being unsupported.
While it should go unsaid that I will never buy anything from 505 ever again, it's quite disgusting to see them try to take credit for the game but simultaneously claim to be nothing but a distributor.
Next Time, Remember to Look Both Ways
July 16, 2019
How White Nationalists See What They Want to See in DNA Tests – The New York Times
July 12, 2019
TL;DR: You can't unracist someone by showing them their actual lack of purity. Racists are stupid, and will disbelieve the science.
Kind of like with antivaxxers.
What happens when white supremacists on the hate site Stormfront learn that they're not as white as they thought? Two researchers investigated.
Source: How White Nationalists See What They Want to See in DNA Tests - The New York Times
wait that’s FIVE kills tho
July 9, 2019
Outbreak: Epidemic on Steam
July 9, 2019
Linux support, cross-platform co-op, and continuing the plot and world of previous releases, Epidemic is free to play and the DLC is worth every cent.
I helped beta test this game and found it to run flawlessly on Ubuntu. <3
Return to the world of free-to-play 4-player co-op survival horror with classic gameplay, strict inventory management, crushing enemies, horrific difficulty and more as you and a group of survivors try to survive the epidemic.
Source: Outbreak: Epidemic on Steam
But You Were Never Really My Friend
July 9, 2019
Conspiracyland: The Russian connection to Seth Rich conspiracies
July 9, 2019
To every QAnon retard that's ever said "but but but Seth Rich," congrats, not only are you a retard, but you're a Russian patsy too.
In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and
Source: Conspiracyland: The Russian connection to Seth Rich conspiracies
What a gang of fucking numbnuts tools you traitorous pricks are. Maybe I WILL start 3D-printing guns for ANTIFA.
Sigh
July 6, 2019
I really hate it when someone describes a security mitigation as a "fix," like there's some easily quantifiable problem, a hole that you can just shove your thumb into until it's patched, without actually investigating the issue any further.
The Insights blog talks about CVE-2019-11479, an "attack" caused by someone setting an unreasonably low TCP transmission size, which forces TCP to break packets up into ridiculously-small blocks to send them, wasting memory. I have a real problem with this statement though:
Additionally, a third SACK related issue, CVE-2019-11479, does not have a Livepatch fix available because it is not technically feasible to apply the changes via Livepatch.
No, it's not that it wasn't "technically feasible," it's that there was a more correct mitigation for the issue, and the "fix" from upstream was a stupid one that I disagree with. The 48-byte minimum in the kernel is a TECHNICAL limitation, the absolute minimum that could ever be used, and not meant to enforce "reasonableness" - which is what the patch modified it to be. I can easily think of situations where a low TSS makes sense, especially with limited-bandwith devices like long-distance radios for instance.
Furthermore, there was already an easy "fix" available, that required no patching whatsoever. The correct solution for unreasonably-low TSS is to have the firewall - preferably, the firewall on your internet connections - enforce your minimum reasonable TSS by dropping packets that are under that size. If you want a 300-byte minimum, for instance, you should configure that restriction. This number is sure to vary from place to place and there's no common definition of "reasonable" that is actually reasonable.
Further, the patch caused breakage in other places, most significantly Steam - which couldn't connect all of a sudden after the "fix" was put in. :|
Anyway, it makes me mad when people act like something was too hard to fix when they don't know shit about the problem, and just gloss over it like that.