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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • No, it’s not dead. The number of players is irrelevant.

    A “dead game” is a game that needs work but is not under any development. It could be in Early Access, and incomplete. Or, it could be released, but still incomplete (looking at you, 7 Days to Die). Or, it could be an MMO that needs ongoing server maintenance, but they shut the servers down.

    A game that is being worked on and making good progress isn’t dead. A game that is complete and relatively bug-free, but not being worked on, is not dead. An MMO getting no new content, but just enough labor to keep the lights on and the servers up, is not dead.

    I guess an MMO or multiplayer game that has mandatory multiplayer aspects could be considered Dead if there aren’t enough players available to reasonably play the game. But Palworld is a single player game, or co-op with friends, not really an MMO.


  • Yeah, it’s definitely a problem, and genetic information could end up getting linked. Even if a person thinks they might not have DNA in any existing database, whether criminal, medical, or otherwise, there’s no telling what might happen in the future. I can think of a few different ways a person might involuntarily, through no fault of theirs, get their DNA forcibly taken with no legal recourse.

    Every path here will have some tradeoffs. But the odds of getting linked are probably much lower outside your home country.



  • My best recommendation would be to go to a testing lab and provide a fake name. It should work. I’ve never been ID’d at any doctor’s office, and one time did even receive healthcare under a fake name with no trouble. Of course, that means your insurance won’t cover anything, but that’s the unfortunate reality of US healthcare. Also, they probably won’t delete your data. HIPAA includes no right to be forgotten, and in some cases, may even mandate retention for several years.

    Sorry I don’t have a better solution. I think your best bet is to distance this genetic data as much as possible from your real identity.

    Alternately, you could try going somewhere outside the US.

    I completely agree that HIPAA is dead. One time when I went to a new doctor’s office, totally unaffiliated with any doctor I’d ever seen before, the doctor instantly pulled all my medical records from several other places. They didn’t even get my verbal permission; they just did it. If that’s the level of security on these databases, and doctors are allowed to access them on old unsupported Windows computers, then it’s almost certain that the databases have tons of undetected data breaches. They’ve probably been scraped completely by multiple attackers.


  • I cannot recommend any USB-connected drive for long-term use. (Only for portable devices that get plugged in for a little while at a time.) In the long term, any USB drive will randomly reset during periods of heavy use – including heavy writes, meaning some data will get lost.

    USB enclosures tend to just crap out completely after a year or two, if used continuously on a server. I know because I twice used 1TB external drives with OpenWRT (home router) devices. The data will be safe on the drive, but you’ll have to replace the enclosure.

    1. My first recommendation would be to look very carefully at the chassis and see if there’s any way at all to fit another SSD inside it. 2.5" SSD’s are usually thinner than 2.5" hard drives, so it may be possible, and most motherboards have more SATA ports than they need.

    Is there possibly an NVMe slot on the motherboard? Or an open PCIe slot where you could put an NVMe adapter?

    1. My second recommendation would be using a 2.5" hard drive. Newegg has a 5TB one for $135, but unfortunately that’s as large as they seem to go. It will be a bit slower than an SSD, but still probably around 150MB/s for sequential access.

    2. My third recommendation, if money is really tight, would be an additional server, with a large 3.5" hard drive. This will be a lot cheaper than an 8TB SSD, but adds complexity, electricity use, space use, and possibly fan noise.



  • Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

    My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

    My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.


  • So are you able to view content, but pay to download? If that’s the case, I could probably write a scraper for the site.

    If you have to pay to even see the content, then you may have a bigger problem. Try pooling resources with some of your fellow students, to have one person download all the content, and then make it available to everyone else.

    Another option is to expose your instructors. There’s a high probability that they are getting kickbacks, especially if this is at college level. Maybe in the form of 10% of each dollar spent by one of their students. Or, they might be getting free equipment or content from Docsity, in exchange for forcing students to use it, and offloading the costs to students.

    When I was in college, one of my instructors used these “clickers” that cost students $40 per semester to rent. They used radio to allow submitting realtime quiz answers during class. Students were scored on how many questions they answered, not whether they were correct. If you didn’t pay the clicker fee, you lost that 10% of your final grade.

    I was suspicious, so I looked into it. It wasn’t hard. The clicker manufacturer advertised kickbacks on their own website.


  • Seeds shouldn’t be covered by patents. When you buy a patented item from a patent holder (or a manufacturer that licensed the patent) then First Sale Doctrine says that you can do whatever you want with it without needing to pay for a patent license. In the case of a seed, that means you could resell it to someone, you could roast and eat it, or you could plant it in the ground. But unlike other inventions, a seed’s purpose is to create more of itself. By buying a seed, you are implicitly buying the ability to make more seeds. If First Sale Doctrine allows you to use the patented product how you want, then it allows you to grow more seeds, because that’s just what seeds do.