They’re destroying whatever credibility they might’ve had by acting like trolls. Like at this point they might as well be posting racist wojak memes in these cards.

It really doesn’t help their cause or make people want to believe them, and even to normies it comes off as extremely hard grasping. It makes them look weaker. It only helps the cause for people who already onboard, which is useless because those people are already onboard, it’s preaching to the choir.

In Markdown you need to add a blank line between the quoted section and your response to it otherwise your response will be included in the quote.

Something to consider is that they don’t consider people not buying their games as revenue loss in these studies because most of these studies are deliberately fudged to support their narrative. They can’t do anything about people just not buying their games, they wish they could but they also aren’t going to say it out loud because it doesn’t help their cause.

Seems like a honeypot to me, telling people to use something other than their home’s connection. Kind of difficult to prove. Really seems like they want that information specifically for the purpose of going after those people, since you know, ISP subscriber ID, can’t get that if they use the Library, a friend or acquaintance’s house, or an Inn or AirBnB, not saying you couldn’t track someone down with those if you wanted to, but it’s not as convenient.

Yeah that’s why it would be good to make deleted threads still show up for all users, they would be unlisted but the comments would all still be there.

It used to be that this would also happen with comments both deleted and removed but this functionality was changed and comments which are deleted or removed no longer error like that.

That’s mainly just the way the backend and UI handles the post, the thread and replies are still there, admins and mods can still see it, it just errors for users. We could potentially modify the Lemmy software (or it could be changed in an update) to allow viewing the deleted thread with the post saying *Deleted by User* just like it does with comments.

Sorry let me clarify, when I say unlicensed I meant that they are using Google Play services without Google’s permission or certification.

Even that is pretty limited since it can be disabled, and even if they changed it to not be officially able to be disabled by users, ROM makers can still disable it in various ways, and since their problem is TV boxes, including those shady unlicensed ones, I’m betting those would simply disable the feature via their unlicensed Android Roms.

Edit: Clarification, when I said unlicensed I didn’t mean Android itself, I mostly meant their use of Google play store and services which Google does require permission to use legitimately in your own Android product. Obviously it’s super easy to get them without google’s permission, it just won’t be licensed by them though if a company does that. And many TV boxes you buy cheap these days do indeed do that.

You’d probably need to monitor the computer’s network for a long time to get a detection, also something important is that if you’re on a System with AMT disabled/not present, you won’t ever get any, since those IntelME versions come without any network stack whatsoever.

In fact that’s one of the primary reasons why I haven’t tried it yet, almost none of the Intel computers I own even have the Intel AMT component enabled in the IntelME firmware, meaning they just won’t do it, like ever. The only one I have which supports AMT is an old Laptop with a slow AF intel Centrino, it’s so slow that it struggles with XFCE alone and no other apps running, I don’t know if I could use this computer long enough to get any readings from it because it’s just too slow to do anything really.

If you want to try it out I’d suggest building a copy of IntelMEtool and testing your Intel Machines to see if they have AMT enabled or present before trying yourself.

The same way you would do it with a black box while optionally taking as many shortcuts as one is comfortable with by virtue of assuming having a better understanding of it’s been built?

You can audit IntelME a similar way, it’s just more annoying and tedious, it’s also been done before by people. Honestly I don’t bother much with the IntelME conspiracy theory much anymore (and yes I will call it a conspiracy theory, more on why later), I did used to be extremely interested in it about 2 years ago, I researched the topic heavily. I met people and colleagues who were also interested in it. However I found when I suggested ways to study or prove the claims made about it, like where it’s communicating to or how it interacts with the system or even just disassembling the rom I would get weird answers about it knowing when it’s being probed and that I wouldn’t consider entirely rational when describing a tiny embedded system like this. Then I came across the 34C3 video and basically I realized then and there that this is a conspiracy theory, as there is a whole great study done by these guys and everyone is ignoring it.

Then there’s the fact that many of the theories out there seem to resist investigation, and people seem to come up with more elaborate ways of it resisting. Example: I presented the idea of sniffing the Ethernet connection of the computer by cutting the cable in half and probing it with a debugger and they claimed that the chip would listen with the microphone and abort, or that IntelME would skew the data collected when loaded up on another computer.

The end result is that I bought a high end PC from System76 with the capability to disable IntelME largely for nothing, which would be fine if the Laptop wasn’t so problematic, like the fact that it gets insanely hot and chews through battery insanely fast (seriously Battery consumption is worse on this laptop than my Steam Deck). Also it chews through power like this even on the iGPU, but it was way worse on the nvidia GPU, like way way worse. I wish I had gotten something AMD based, They’re killing it when it comes to performance and efficiency, more than I can say for Toasty old Intel.

I think that a lot of the IntelME stuff is what people would typically call a conspiracy theory, not like a theory of a conspiracy, but rather where the conspiracy is largely invented for the purpose of being scared or angry, or for attention from others who get scared or angry. Obviously not all of it is, and there are people who do research it, but the videos about it that you usually see on YouTube, most of them are like this.

The thing is that intelME isn’t like a government conspiracy where there isn’t much if any tangible evidence for it, IntelME is physically installed on millions upon millions of Intel PCs around the world, so it’s very easy to test the myths and claims by sacrificing some of these Intel computers. The fact though that most of the people making claims seem to not want to do that, suggests that they don’t think it’s as big a problem as they say it is. There are few people who have tested it though, a notable example from 34C3 where they found that it’s actually much more boring. Honestly the idea that people say it cracks Wifi passwords, or exchanges data home with a server, all this stuff people claim can be easily tested, even analyzing the network packets from a PC to see if it actually phones home when it’s off (can do that by probing an Ethernet cable and capturing the signals externally. The reason I claim the IntelME stiff is a conspiracy is because most of the people making the claims resist investigation, the same way that Flat earth theories and Lizard people theories resist investigation. My example of probing the network cable? Yeah I proposed that to someone already and they claimed IntelME would know the Ethernet is being probed, when I inquired how I was given many nonsensical claims, from microphone listening to talking to IntelME on another computer skewing the results, can’t make this shit up.

So to summarize, a lot of the claims are unsubstantiated claims, which could be easily proven or disproven due to easy access to IntelME based systems, but isn’t because the people making the claims can’t be bothered, and to top it all off many of them simply make arguments to resist investigation of IntelME in the first place, just like classical bad-faith conspiracy theories, and actual investigations like the one shown as 34C3 are swept under the rug. I don’t think IntelME doesn’t have issues or that it isn’t a security risk, it is like any firmware, but the sensationalized claims made about it regularly online don’t hold water, and the people making them should be called out for perpetrating conspiracy theories without merit. I’d leave some links to them but I don’t know if that’s allowed here, could be considered harassment.

The mount method using root will still work since it writes over the app rather than installing it as an update, will still seem like it was installed from play, same way it still thinks it’s google signed in that state.

If one of the steps was leaking the source code then you could say that. Though who knows maybe AI reverse engineering will get good enough that we’ll soon be able to turn the assembly code back into C++ or C. Then you can port the software to whatever you like.

With assembly you’re very much limited to the hardware it targeted and without a huge amount of work the operating system that it targeted as well.

Also tracking protection in the browser to prevent reading browser history and such. Security and privacy practices are absolutely paramount if you’re planning on visiting services like that. Of course the best thing is to not visit them at all but some people feel they need to see it for themselves, if they choose they should be prepared and keep themselves safe.

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It’s not even needed for a tiny single user git instance, they’re grossly over-representing the amount of resources required to host one of those.

This is such a stupid argument considering you don’t need a fucking giant ass data center to host a tiny little git server. I’ve seen this argument time and time again, but the real reason people go with VPSes is convenience and laziness.

I would absolutely agree with the other person that renting your own VPS is not self-hosting, not by a long shot. You could argue that you need a massive host for a large video or music platform, or even a large git platform with thousands of repos, but not for a tiny single user, single project forgejo or gitlab instance or a single static web page.

Yes, but often those countries come with their own huge bag of problems.

Not saying they don’t, everything has pros and cons and you need to decide what’s really important to you and whether or not it’s worth overcoming the challenges associated, many decide it isn’t, and that’s okay, but some decide it is and choose to pursue it.

I’m saying we don’t give the copyright and corporate trolls what they want and act or talk like the enemy states out of their reach don’t exist or that someone couldn’t or wouldn’t go there to do the dirty work, or imply that these places are going away sometime in the near future.

All not that easy and it can get highly criminal very fast.

Of course it is, anyone should know that working in and for an enemy country is criminal. If someone didn’t understand that they need to pick a side in the world they deserve what they get. Most people who are dedicated enough to go that far understand the risks well enough, and are willing to take them.

There are a good amount but of course the copyright trolls would rather people ignore them because they have no leverage there (seriously I’ve seen . Many of these countries are enemy states to the western world and unless that changes it’s unlikely copyright treaties from the west will reach those states, and vice versa.

One common example of a place like that is the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.) it includes Russia and a few other countries.

It can but they have to go through the effort to actually follow through with the end goal. It’s not just an easy automated bureaucratic process to keep stupid safe harbor provisions (that’s why copyright claims are so abusable).