• 5 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • I can’t speak to their Password Management as I use Bitwarden for that

    But I am slowly but surely migrating myself away from gmail to (my own email at my own domain routed to) Proton. The webmail is very much comparable to gmail and, if you communicate with like minded people, it has decent support for signing and even encrypting email both to other proton mail users as well as to complete randos with just a password that you can send later. My only real complaint is that (… for some really good reasons) there is no easy to use exchange server and I need to run their mail bridge to use a desktop client like Thunderbird to send and maanage and (one day) back up emails.

    VPN? I switched over to this around the same time I decided I wanted to “take control” of my email and it works pretty well. Very easy to get some openvpn credentials that I can plug into whatever setup I want. And no extra fee for port forwarding unlike SOME providers. That said, my main complaint is that the port is semi-randomized which doesn’t play the nicest with my totally legit linux iso torrenting setup… But a quick docker ps and docker logs and then updating the config is pretty trivial and I only have to do it maybe once a week?

    The big elephant in the room is that, as you rightfully understand, you are still putting a LOT of trust. But that is actually why I like Proton. Because other companies pretend they are going to knife fight the CIA and the US Government on your behalf all while actively not acknowledging anything until we get a post mortem. Proton are VERY open about just how far they are willing to go to protect you (not very) and what YOU can do to mean that Proton can’t provide much useful information once the appropriate paperwork and legal actions have been filed.

    I wouldn’t trust a paid account with anything more sensitive than what really innovative stuff a friend did with a bun in the dumpster behind the Wendy’s the other night. But, hypothetically, if I needed to send an anonymous email? Third party VPN/Tor, clean hardware, and a free Protonmail account works great and I do trust Proton to give the absolute bare minimum in that case.


    And just for a bit of context. My “grand plan” is to migrate the vast majority of my correspondence and accounts to email addresses tied to one or more of my own domains. Currently I plan to use Protonmail for the mail server because I don’t want that smoke. But the point is that I control the email address so I can get my Heat on and walk away in 30 seconds (actually more like a few hours but…).

    Which is why the other aspect of that is that I want to back up the emails I actually want to save (rather than just EVERYTHING like those of us with older gmail accounts do) via a local client that I then archive to an encrypted volume on my NAS and (REDACTED) after that.





  • It still significantly increases development costs over the CRPGs of olde. Especially because BG3 felt like the first game that had:

    1. GOOD voice acting
    2. Significant “choice” and branching narratives
    3. Plenty of content that players will “never” see.

    Whereas POE2 and similar games very much felt like we were “losing out” a bit to support the VO. Because… we were. We have known that ever since Bioware started doing it.

    And yeah. Outer Worlds was basically the same scale as Fallout 3. But people want a giant empty open world. Never managed to finish it (the two times I played I lost interest around the time I got to the capital-ish planet) but had a great time.


  • The problem is that basically EVERYONE has an overwatch game this year. We had, what, three different Overwatches during the Keighleys proper? Fucking Valve have a god damned Overwatch game.

    And… Overwatch 2 failed horribly. So did the Gundam Overwatch.

    A proper CRPG will take years. And, as Owlcat et al have pointed out, it is a lot harder to sell people on a CRPG that is not “fully voiced” which drastically increases costs. But also? Baldurs Gate 3 largely benefited from early access but MS can’t rely on that with how much of a cluster everything has been. Unless POE3 is “as good as Baldurs Gate” in early access? it is a “failure”. So there isn’t going to be a “hey, let’s see if this is still cool in four years” project.

    My hope is that POE getting that patch a few days ago is a good sign. But my money is on Avowed underperforming (because, like Outer Worlds, “Waa, it isn’t Skyrim!!!”) and Obsidian becoming a support studio for Bethesda.


  • I guess I am not getting it.

    If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

    Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

    But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.


  • The indie/pseudo-indie space still has a lot of great games. And the reception to those are vital for convincing the few remaining funding sources to “take a risk” on their next game.

    But that is also not what the keighleys are. They are basically E3 in that it is about the big publishers and platform owners doing big announcements and a select few smaller studios being allowed to pad things out and get cut if Kojima decides he wants another jerk off session.

    But I assume there will be a Steam demo event of some form during this (it feels like we have one of those every week now). There are also actual indie groups that do showcases around the same time. And THOSE are a spectacular time where it is clear people love the games they are working on. Also it is usually a great contrast to “all dudes, all the time” on the keighleys and actually having developers on the indie showcases.







  • Gotta love that Rossman has pivoted from “failed business owner” to “basically James Stephanie Sterling but with less nazi imagery”

    Shit like this REALLY annoys me. I am all for a discussion of the ethics of piracy… if people actually understand what ethics are (and, as has been demonstrated countless times, people don’t). But shit like this is about deciding when it is “fair” to pirate content and when not. And, considering it is Rossman, I assume he is goign to talk about how you should support companies that care about your rights or are small businesses and fuck larger businesses and the New York City government.

    But the reality: Whether you think piracy is or is not stealing is irrelavent. It is piracy whether you are pirating a game from a toddler with leukemia or Amazon after they rebranded to having the website be a giant picture of Bezos’s dong. It just becomes a matter of if you think that matters or if it is okay to hurt/“hurt” one of those companies.

    Which almost inevitably becomes about defining The Tragedy of the Commons.

    At the end of the day: it is piracy. We are pirates. Fucking own up to it.








  • Yeah. I have a LOT of issues with Tor’s design. And the philosophy and its tendency to be used for heinous shit like CSAM makes me just not want to deal with it. Why should I help mask the scum of the earth’s behavior?

    And while it has historically been used to protect some journalists and activists, Signal, twitter, and proper opsec/dedicated hardware have very much taken over for that. In large part because people have realized that masking your route to a destination doesn’t help if you are connecting from home and have been identified at the destination.

    But people get REALLY pissy about Tor. Likely because it makes them feel smart to be “one step farther”.


  • Not what you want to hear but:

    Putting ALL of your traffic through a VPN accomplishes little to nothing… and may actually compromise you. Understand that we all have a digital fingerprint, as it were. A mess of tracking cookies but also lining up “personas” and the like.

    An example I like is that Jim in Botswana is known to login to the same account as Jim from Sweden and Jim from Alabama. Also, Jim from Alabama has used some of the same VERY distinct language as Sophie Smith’s little brother. And Sophie Smith went to Polk High in 1997. And if this sounds crazy: THIS is why there is so much research into how to aggregate and analyze large swathes of data and stuff like LLMs largely came out of this as a bonus.

    If you put all of your traffic through a VPN you are more or less making it easy. Jim from Sweden blah blah blah AND that same IP downloads a lot of copyrighted tentacle porn. Which has now greatly increased your risk vector in the event an example needs to be made.

    Put traffic that needs to be VPN’d through a VPN. Put traffic that needs to be Tor’d through Tor (although, also do some research on the various attempts to compromise that…) and so forth. But the key is to not mix your “good” traffic with your “bad” traffic.