Joe

This was similar to a trick that a few smaller (less serious) hobby-ISPs did back in the days of 14.4k/28.8k modems to take advantage of the “reasonably priced” business plans for ISDN. They’d register multiple businesses at a single address to qualify for the plans, then balance new egress connections across the pool using squid and other magic. Fun times…

I find it pretty useful to help get me over mental hurdle of starting something. So it’s faster than me procrastinating for another day. ;-)

Hmm. You are right, but they might not need it for every region. Steam is probably big enough that existing regional companies would come to it and be eager to form partnerships. They could become more of a payment processor aggregator, focused on a low risk market segment. And of course they can do CCs directly too - that’s the easy part.

The challenge will be to get consumers on board. I know that I groan every time I need to enter my CC details online these days.

They would face anti-competitive behaviour from Peepal though. So it’s a risk.

Internally, they are probably already working on ways to appropriately segment their catalog based on payment provider. “Sorry User, you cannot purchase title X using Paypal. We recommend $Competitor instead.”

It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.

They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.

With apparmor, you could enable and disable profiles that could restrict access to files and paths by name.

For network traffic, it’s possible to use dnsmasq to blacklist or whitelist some domains.

I use labwc … it’s basically OpenBox as a Wayland Compositor. Some things/programs work better than Hyprland, other things worse. No animations - just get out of your way functionality.

I found a patch that allows manual tiling and focus (eg. alt-tabbing just for windows in the left half of the screen), which is cool.

Scriptability isn’t there, but the code looks pretty clean.

The config file is similar to OpenBox. I miss multi-layer keybindings though.

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).

But not Fire tablets (kids profile) or Samsung TV or many others that Plex currently supports.

JellyFin android phone app’s UI is a little weird at times, but does work pretty well for me.

…

What I would adore from any app would be an easy way to upload specific content and metadata via SFTP or to blob storage and accessible with auth (basic, token, or cloud) to more easily share it with friends/family/myself without having to host the whole damn library on the Internet or share my home Internet at inconvenient times.

Client-side encryption would be a great addition to that (eg. password required, that adds a key to the key ring). And of course native support in the JellyFin/other apps for this. It could even be made to work with a JS & WASM player.

Don’t they know that the kids deserved it, because they like Hummus. Yes, I’m sure that was it.

I used to love Pocket … I remember they changed something, and then I refused to use it since. I don’t remember what it was now, though. I assume enshittification of some kind.

Yeah, at that point I wouldn’t worry. If someone has docker access on the server, it’s pretty much game over.

Encryption will typically be CPU bound, while many servers will be I/O bound (eg. File hosting, rather than computing stuff). So it will probably be fine.

Encryption can help with the case that someone gets physical access to the machine or hard disk. If they can login to the running system (or dump RAM, which is possible with VMs & containers), it won’t bring much value.

You will of course need to login and mount the encrypted volume after a restart.

At my work, we want to make sure that secrets are adequately protected at rest, and we follow good hygiene practices like regularly rotating credentials, time limited certificates, etc. We tend to trust AWS KMS to encrypt our data, except for a few special use cases.

Do you have a particular risk that you are worried about?

Normally you wouldn’t need a secrets store on the same server as you need the secrets, as they are often stored unencrypted by the service/app that needs it. An encrypted disk might be better in that case.

That said, Vault has some useful features like issuing temporary credentials (eg. for access to AWS, DBs, servers) or certificate management. If you have these use-cases, it could be useful, even on the same server.

At my work, we tend to store deployment-time secrets either in protected Gitlab variables or in Vault. Sometimes we use AWS KMS to encrypt values in config files, which we checkin to git repositories.

It would be naive to think this isn’t already in widespread use.

Challenge accepted.

wg-quick takes a different approach, using an ip rule to send all traffic (except its own) to a different routing table with only the wireguard interface. I topped it up with iptables rules to block everything except DNS and the wireguard udp port on the main interface. I also disabled ipv6 on the main interface, to avoid any non-RFC1918 addresses appearing in the (in my case) container at all.

edit: you can also do ip rule matching based on uid, such that you could force all non-root users to use your custom route table.