Wait does that mean I can only have up to 4 billion games on my client before the game list overflows and I start losing games at the end of the list?

And this is one of the ways to filter random scams. If a legitimate business or public entity is reaching out to contact you about an issue you need to deal with, they will know some identifying information about you. Especially the ones claiming that there’s a warrant (or will be). If that was the case, they would definitely know your name and other specific details.

That said, there are targeted scams, too, so don’t assume that if someone can tell you your name that they are legit. Ask them for a callback number (don’t call it, ask because they might be dumb enough to give you a number linked to them that you could pass on to investigators), then hang up and call the number you looked up online.

I’ve got Gran Turismo 7 and it’s great in some ways but they ruined the pacing of the game. It hands out cars like they expire in less than a week. It can be fun to try out a whole bunch of different cars, but there’s not much sense of progression like the older ones gave.

I remember building a connection to some of the cars in older games. When you bought a car, it was meaningful because it took time to win enough money to afford something, and then I’d spend a while upgrading it until eventually hitting a ceiling and needing a better car to upgrade to progress to more races. And then add some variety with a few races with rules or restrictions along the way to give a reason to buy some other cards in the same tier, but then then it would be a big decision.

In GT7, all except the top end supercars feel like an afterthought, my garage gets filled for free as I win races, and any time I want to try a different car, first thing I do is buy most or all of the upgrades because it’s all trivial. Race with limiting rules? Ok, give me 5 minutes and I’ll find, buy, and max out another car to win this one.

Granted, it has more of an emphasis on the driving than the older ones did (where you could usually take your super car into whatever races your wanted and see how many times you could lap everyone), but I think I like the progressing through cars part more than the racing part and GT7 is disappointing in that regard compared to GT4 or GT3.

Yeah not to mention it’s not that hard to detect a shadowban if you’re aware of the possibility. Lemmy doesn’t even fuzz vote totals, so it would be trivial to verify whether or not votes are working.

I wonder if there’s a way for admins to troll back. Like instead of banning the accounts, send them into a captcha loop with unsolvable or progressively harder captchas (or ones designed to poison captcha solving bots’ training).

I’m just tired of people trying to sell me shit. Or beg. Like I know I’m not interested 3 words in to the spiel but still feel like an asshole if I just say no and close the door or hang up the phone.

Though I did eventually tell my phone provider to put me on their no call list for their internet marketing because I got tired of them trying to get me to switch to their less good internet package.

Hoping (but not holding my breath) that we, as a society, squash the whole data broker thing sometime relatively soon, though.

I remember a time when the phone or doorbell would ring and I would get excited to know who it was.

Now I seriously consider setting up a series of mirrors so that I can see who is at the door without giving up my ability to pretend like no one is home and my phone ringing causes an emotion somewhere between worry and rage.

A representative 300 sample would give a more accurate result than a biased 2.4k sample. Bigger number doesn’t mean better results.

That said, I’m not sure how to get representation from certain subgroups of the population, like the “never engages with polls” or “lies specifically to fuck with your data” subgroups.

Yeah, if they are able to intercept traffic or access the logs, they probably already have other access to the account without needing the password. If you don’t reuse passwords, then your other accounts will be safe from that.

Yeah no worries and agreed. I hate seeing commercial sites using worse password sanitization practices than I used for my first development website that wasn’t even really intended for anyone else to log in to and any max length suggests the password is either stored or processed in plaintext.

IMO it should even be hashed on the client side before being sent so that it doesn’t show up as plaintext in any http requests or logs. Then salted and hashed again server side before being stored (or checked for login).

Correct, hence the sentence after the one you quoted :)

If any service can recover your password and send it back to you rather than just resetting it for you to set a new one, don’t rely on that service for anything you want to keep secure. And certainly don’t reuse a password there, though you shouldn’t be reusing passwords anyways because who knows what they are and aren’t storing, even if they don’t offer password recovery.

Once upon a time, battle.net passwords weren’t case sensitive. I used upper and lower case letters in my password then one day realized I didn’t hit shift for one of the caps as I hit enter out of habit, but then it still let me in instead of asking for the password again.

It was disappointing because it takes more work to remove case-sensitivity than to leave it. I can’t think of any good reason to remove it. At least the character limit had a technical reason behind it: having a set size for fields means your database can be more efficient. Better to use the size of a hash and not store the password in plaintext, so it’s not a good reason, but at least it’s a reason.

Most of them were cases where I wasn’t surprised they had data but a bit surprised they shared it.

I think my phone came with a sonos app installed, though not certain about that. I got rid of it if it was, though I can’t say if the most recent update from them was before or after that.

But a few of them I’m not really sure why they are on there. There was another one that I didn’t list that just had the label “IDK”, not sure if that’s a real name or “I don’t know”. I’m assuming they came from effective fingerprinting/tracking.

I might look into an addon that fakes some of the information the browser sends like OS version and resolution. Maybe that will make fingerprinting harder.

Some examples from mine if anyone is curious. I never use the fb sso or any of that shit, nor did I ever explicitly consent to any of these services sharing anything with fb.

• Spotify
• bookings .com
• ebay (haven’t touched my account there in over a decade but they still had data to send this year)
• windy .com
• duolingo
• tinder
• my bank
• opera
• sonos (I can’t think of any time I’ve ever even interacted with this one)
• samsung wallet (another one I never even set up)
• Uber eats
• calorie counter
• mediacom usa and euro (?)

Also, if you remove access via messenger app, it will show a confirm message without closing the screen. Clicking x goes back and it’s not on the list anymore. Whether they are actually leaving it disconnected or just hiding it, who knows.

Some of these services I didn’t use the same email that I used for fb, too, or any email at all.

I really don’t want it to become worthwhile for the Russian troll farms that want every discussion to turn into a shitfest.

Sounds like the first was made with the mindset of, “it would be cool to make a game that does x, let’s do that and see if it will make money” while the second one was more of a, “all we gotta do is make a game that does x and we’ll make a ton of money!”

Someone set up a script to automatically create daily backups to tape. Unfortunately, it’s still the first tape that was put in there 3.5 years ago, every backup since that one filled up failed. It might as well have failed silently because everyone who received the email with the error message filtered them to a folder they generally ignored.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie should be required reading for everyone. It’s full of things that are so obvious in hindsight but go against our natural instincts so we blunder through attempts to persuade not realizing that we might be increasing resistance rather than decreasing it.

Like the whole, “you might be right but you’re still an asshole” thing. Being correct just isn’t enough. In some cases you get crucified and then after some time has passed, the point you were trying to convince others of becomes the popular accepted fact. And they might even still hate you after coming around on the point you were trying to make.

That book won’t turn you into a persuasive guru, but it will help avoid many of the pitfalls that make debates turn ugly or individuals stubborn.

Or, on the flip side, you can use the inverse of the lessons to become a more effective troll and learn how to act like you’re arguing one thing while really trying to rile people up or convince them of the opposite. I say this not so much to suggest it but because knowing about this can make you less susceptible to it (and it’s already a part of the Russian troll farm MO).

When I first heard of the MS feature, my first thought was that there’s gotta be a more efficient way to do this than taking screen shots and analyzing the image. The window manager has all of that information plus more context (like knowing that these pixels are part of a non-standard window that uses transparency to act like a non-rectangular shape, while this thing that looks like a window is actually an image because the user was looking at someone else’s screenshot).

Even better would be integration with the applications themselves; they have even more contextual information than the window manager has.

For a while Amazon would estimate a time range and the delivery guy would never show up during that window. But sometimes it would do something like this: original estimate was 11am - 4pm, 4pm would pass with no delivery, then at 6pm, it would update to like 2pm - 5pm. Then it would show up at like 8pm.

They seem to have gotten better lately though.