kbal

joined 11 months ago
[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It looks like your opinions about Linux are outdated and need an update.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 4 points 1 day ago

Indeed. But cups-browsed isn't necessary in order to be able to print things, it's for automatically discovering new printers on the network.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

cups-browsed <= 2.0.1 binds on UDP INADDR_ANY:631 trusting any packet from any source

Well that would explain why I didn't have it installed (although I did have other parts of cups until jwz coincidentally reminded us two days ago that it can all be removed if you don't have a printer.) I clear out anything that opens ports I don't need to be open. A practice I would recommend to anyone.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 1 day ago

It's the "always will" where I disagree. This society we've built isn't anything close to sustainable no matter how much lip service is given to the idea that it should be. What can't go on forever, won't.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 13 points 2 days ago

It's amazing how much of 21st-century politics consists of badly-disguised attempts to reconstitute fascism. Maybe that's why people like Elon Musk are so quick to accuse everyone else of "communism" — they're still living in the ideology of 1939 and so they naturally assume that everyone else must be doing the same.

[–] kbal@fedia.io -1 points 2 days ago

Wait, what? You think they're not planning on getting paid for providing this data to advertisers?

P.S. It looks like Mozilla's Data Privacy FAQ is going to need updating. It doesn't even mention this stuff. As the noyb complaint points out:

  1. The Respondent does not provide any information at all in its privacy policy with regard to "PPA". Neither in the general privacy policy (enclosure 9) nor in the privacy information for Firefox (enclosure 10) is any relevant information apparent.
  1. The last update of the Firefox privacy policy took place on May 13, 2024.
[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I would say it's more of a desperate attempt to continue the current paradigm of online advertising which deems indispensable the kind of data about conversion rates to which the industry has become accustomed, despite the recognition that their current means of collecting it must come to an end.

But either way, it's incompatible with the principles of free software. Users are not meant to put up with features that are there for the sole benefit of someone else; someone they might normally consider an adversary. The only incentive we're given to participate in this scheme is one that resembles blackmail. Except it isn't even advertisers saying "do this, or we'll spy on you like usual" — it's Mozilla saying "do this, and maybe we can persuade a few of them not to spy on you as much, and to give us a cut."

They are selling behavioural data about their users to advertisers. People are not going to be happy with that no matter how they try to spin it.

[–] kbal@fedia.io -4 points 2 days ago (4 children)

They added a feature to track conversions among Firefox users for online advertisers. Selling it as a "paradigm-shifting boost to online privacy" while accusing others of pushing a misleading narrative is absurd.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 11 points 2 days ago (7 children)

There certainly are many people who seem suspiciously eager to find fault with Firefox. But it's not really a surprise when its authors do things like this. They chose not to make this feature opt-in because they know that nobody in their right mind would opt into it. There is no benefit to the user in it, only risk. Mozilla seems to be leaving us to go off and join the advertising industry instead. People feel betrayed, and it feeds the cynical nihilism that comes so easily to social media users under the conditions of late capitalism.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 2 days ago

Fucking garbage article and headline.

You got me to read the thing, just to see what could possibly be so offensive about it. It's a pretty good summary of the situation for an audience that might not be too familiar with Canadian politics. Don't blame the messenger.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's still operating for now, right? Because if I look at random government pages in a browser that profile that doesn't block the social media widgets I can see links to facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, youtube, and threema. There seems to be no mention anywhere that a mastodon server exists.

They're complaining about the low number of users. Did they bother to tell people that it exists?

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago

The consequences for users of this thing in itself are fairly minimal for now. It's the consequences for Mozilla which are something of a disaster.

 

If you routinely start #steam in offline mode and it suddenly stopped working in the past few days (first time I ever saw such a thing), you may be able to fix it by temporarily taking it out of offline mode as described on github.

 

https://github.com/Abev08/VolumeControlExtension

That's two longstanding items on my firefox wishlist taken care of by an extension: Actual working volume controls on the built-in media player, and a volume control for other crappy web players that don't have them.

#firefox

 

Act 1: It started with some fun little quests to introduce you to the narrative style. The fights were too hard, so I improved my character stats until I could handle them. It's not easy to know when there's no choice but to go along with whatever is suggested, and when you can do something else, but I guess I got it more or less right.

Act 2: A nice meaty dungeon crawl. My efforts to make my character stronger paid off, the difficulty was just right.

Act 3: Holy shit it's too hard suddenly. One does not level up quickly in my version of Skyrim, maybe that's why. At one point there's an option that suggests you can skip the whole thing, but I didn't take it and would guess it probably isn't so easy. I had to resort to stealth archery and I didn't bring a lot of arrows. Some horror game stuff of a kind I don't normally enjoy, but it was well-executed. It was a pretty long slog.

Act 4: Okay we're in Dark Souls now. Except the boss fights are even longer. I had a legendary weapon, shiny superhero armour, lots of magic resistance, a good healing spell, all the equipment a skyrim paladin could want, and yet even some of the non-boss fights took a lot of time and effort. Hit, dodge, run, heal, repeat. Forever. To be fair I do have the difficulty settings turned up pretty high. I wandered around lost for a very long time. Some of the battles were epic. There was only one area I had a really hard time with: There doesn't seem to be any resisting the tentacle attacks so they were pretty much instant death.

The ending was quite good and made it all seem worthwhile.

 

Well here's a linux modding tip: Turn off ESYNC and FSYNC when running DynDOLOD. If it randomly goes wrong in the middle of its hour-long run, that could be the problem.

 

First time since March 2023!

 

Here are some mods I can recommend that directly affect game balance, feel free to suggest more. For the most part I've listed only things that directly affect the basic variables in simple ways, not including survival mode stuff, combat overhauls, perk tree changes, the paraglider, and many other things that obviously do also affect game balance but aren't only about that.

*Skyrim Skill Uncapper for SE and AE - Adjust rate of level up for each skill individually. I like level-ups to be way slower than the base game, like 10 times slower, but with skills where tedious grinding is already the only way to train them left closer to normal but contributing less to character level advancement. Enjoy being level 1 for a meaningful amount of time.

*Armor Rating Overhaul - Makes early-game armour not completely useless. Getting some should be the priority it normally is in such games. The base game armor rating algorithm seems weirdly broken, any of this mod's options is better.

*Yet Another Difficulty Mod - Adjust damage dealt/damage taken, optionally changing it automatically as you advance. In my current game it's set to start with 1.0/2.0 at level 1 and smoothly progress to 0.5/5.0 at level 30 (compared to 0.25/3.0 for default legendary mode) and so far that seems good.

*Extra Encounters Reborn - Encounter more problems when wandering around the world.

*High Level Enemies - Make those you encounter more dangerous. Many of the people and animals who live only to murder passing strangers scale to higher levels than previously possible.

*NPC Regen Nerfed - Taking away their infinite magicka supply makes things a little easier.

*Simple No Health Regen - If you don't go full survival mode, maybe at least have no health regen.

*Smart NPC Potions - They might use two or three healing potions during a fight. Also they might poison you.

*Maxsu Combat Escape - When fights are actually difficult you might want to be able to run away without that stupid ogre continuing to be angry at you forever from the far side of a mountain.

*Simply Better Movement Speeds - My current choice of movement speed mod.

*Encounter Zones Unlocked - Probably helps if you're going to have a playthrough that goes on for a while.

 

Why didn't anyone tell me that Papyrus Tweaks NG is mandatory once you have too many other mods?

Too many being probably about four hundred in my case. Script lag was getting ridiculous and then it started locking up, and now suddenly with that one addition, it's smooth and solid again. With that I guess my personal version of Skyrim is pretty much done, or at least ready for play testing.

 

Under the slogan ‘Think of the children’, the European Commission tried to introduce total surveillance of all EU citizens. When the scandal was revealed, it turned out that American tech companies and security services had been involved in the bill, generally known as ‘Chat Control’ – and that the whole thing had been directed by completely different interests. Now comes the next attempt.

 

Oblivion remade in the Skyrim engine. Thats our goal. With our planned 2025 release date we’re showcasing gameplay systems, a part of the world map, a new city, Ayleid dungeons and much more.

Despite our progress, we can’t do this alone: we hope with your support to finish the final steps in completing Skyblivion. Does that sound like something you can do? Then please visit our website to apply: https://www.skyblivion.com/volunteer/

 

nexusmods.com is blaming their current outage on Fallout:

We are experiencing much more traffic than usual due to the popularity of the Fallout TV series [...] this extra traffic could cause a degraded experience across the website and our applications.

10
(fedia.io)
 

you’re invited to a special program that lets redditors purchase stock

I loaded a page on reddit due to a search result and found out that I'm among the chosen few. Message sent yesterday. They must've gotten fewer takers than expected on the first round of invites if they're now offering shares to people who haven't posted, commented, voted, or done anything else on the site for the past 8 months.

 

The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, was supported by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs (the cabinet voted against, signalling it is not supported by the government). The bill raises significant concerns with the prospect of government-backed censorship, mandated age verification to use search engines or social media, and a framework for court-ordered website blocking

This bill passed second reading in the House of Commons. It is a serious threat. The age verification lobby is making its push, trying to bring this arrant nonsense to Canada before we and the rest of the world realise how little good and how much harm it can do.

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