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Mikina

@ Mikina @programming.dev

Posts
5
Comments
304
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn’t Be Trusted

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  • When I was doing my CS degree in college, I remember pivoting from software development to cybersecurity right after playing Watch Dogs. It felt pretty cool, and my reasoning was basically "Huh, this will come in handy. We will probably need Dedsec soon, better learn what I can.". I did get my first job in offensive cybersecurity, and eventually ended up as a Red Team Lead.

    I guess it's time to also finally learn Parkour and some street art. I've kind of put that off, but those two are important parts of it.

  • Favorite open source game?

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  • Thanks for mentioning NS2, I would've scrolled past this game otherwise. NS2 was my most favorite competitive game, that I never found people to play with for (aside from once being approached by someone at a bar, who overheard me talking about NS2 and that I play Starcraft, that they're looking for an RTS player for their e-sport NS2 team. I... wasn't good at Starcraft, so it didn't work out, but it was a funny random happenstance).

    I love asymmetric games, and the mix of RTS + FPS for the rest seems like a really interesting game from the competitive/meta standpoint.

    I'll check out these two games, sounds like it might be right up my alley.

  • Horror story

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  • I was just about to post this, the fact that it means that there is actually a precedent of astronauts using Teams on a mission, so we may be bringing Teams to the Mars for real, makes it a lot more funnier.

  • Favorite open source game?

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  • I highly recommend Space Station 14.

    It's an amazing roleplaying disaster simulator, where around 100 players are trying to keep a Space Station afloat. From doctors, through police, scientist, engineers, to cargo and barmans. Every role has a way how to blow up the station - Engineers generate energy through a contained singularity or a Tesla ball. If that escapes because you forgot to repair the cage, the station is fucked.

    Scientists experiment with artifacts that give you research for doing stuff with it, and it's generate what does doing stuff with it do, i.e if you wrench it, it does something. Something can be "spawn a monkey", "print money" to "thermonuclear explosion".

    And add to that tower of cards some people getting the roles of antagonists, which can be anything between "Syndycate agent that has to kill the captaion", "a blood cult needing to steahltily sacrifice people to ascend", "pantient zero that turns into a zombie", or a "syndicate deathsquad that has to fight to the station nuke and trigger selfdestruction".

    It's massive fun, and I highly recommend it.

    Oh, and that's basic SS14. There's also a very popular mod - Roundy Marine Crops, which si basically ~ 100vs100 Alien vs Predator, where you play every role imaginable from Marines that are deploying planetside to fight Aliens who are digging in.

    If you need convincing, this is the best short story video that absolutly sold me the game. It's aboslute cinema, the way it's told. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfjz1MnlxzE

    Then there's also the almost legendary video about Space Station 13 from Sseth (SS14 is basically a reimplementation/modernization of SS13 into C#) that can also give you the vibe of the game. But I'd recommend the previous video more.

    Note: There's currently some drama with main maintainer, who had control of the launcher and server hub, starting to act extremely egoistically and hostile, holding the whole game and it's auth database hostage, hacking discord servers, banning random people, and in general being a dick. That is why I have linked the playss14 launcher, which is a fork from the rest of the community to sidestep the demands and general dickery the maintainer is doing. It's pretty ugly. The game is on Steam, just like it has other web pages, but that would lead you to the launcher that's currently being ransomed. You're better off just getting the alt launcher from playss14.com linked above.

  • When Windows users find the Threadiverse

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  • Yeah, what I've been trying to do, on a rare ocassion where I chime in with the whole "just use Linux" (because it's usually not necessary to be 27th person with the same comment), is to at least add more relevant info, or mention misconceptions that I know were reasons why I didn't switch, or what I found cool.

    I.e for me it was gaming, which for a long time used to be considered bad on Linux, especially if you had Nvidia. Which is no longer true in the sligjtest, and I was pretty surprised how smooth the transition was, so I just share a bit of my experience.

    But yeah, it's a balancing act. And as always, if you can't add anything to the discussion that already wasn't said (i.e just use linux), it's better not to add anything :D

  • When Windows users find the Threadiverse

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  • It's what convinced me to make a switch to Linux, two years ago by now.

    I've seen it mentioned for years at that point. Did it feel annoying? A bit, especially when I was trying to solve something. But it was one post that pushed me over the edge. I've probably seen a lot posts/replies like that before.

    I can't say why, I guess the stars aligned, but I'm glad it happened. I probably wouldn't do it, if it weren't for years of constant reminders that Linux is in fact an option.

  • does it really work to wear brand new leggings wet for the first time so they mold better to your figure and last longer?

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  • Oooh, so that's why some clothes could shrink?

    I remember hearing that shrinking clothes could be a problem, but I never actually encountered it in my adult life.

  • What’s the most tone-deaf advertisement or marketing campaign you’ve ever seen?

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  • We've just had a campaign on our city's public transport trams that said "I'm identifying as a trolleybus".

    During pride month, nonetheless.

  • Is Rust supposed to be that hard?

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  • I think that is kind of the main point of Rust, though.

    It's pretty easy to make something in C++. But it will very probably have a lot of hidden issues with memory, undefined behaviors and the like. Rust doesn't let you make those mistakes that much, and forces you to do it correctly and securely the first time, which is why it is harder to get into.

    They are mostly harmless and may never cause problems for you, but that's how you get critical RCEs that are 8 years old in a software that's now widely used.

    If you don't need this kind "ease traded for security", in my personal opinion I'd go with Zig instead.

  • AI remains top reason for US job cuts for third straight month as employers axed 97,000 workers in May

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  • I don't believe they will. The can say and do whatever and nothing will probably happen. .

  • FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers’ IDs

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  • One of the things that surprised me the most when I started working on vishings for a Cybersecurity Red Team was how extremely easy it is to spoof any phone number.

    It's the nunber one tip I give to anyone who asks about security, a lot of people don't know that, and spear-vishings are extremely effective.

    People have learned to mostly not trust Microsoft Support numbers asking for your CC, but when an internal company number that your phone matches to your bosses boss calls you, a lot of people fall for that.

  • Research shows penile fractures are uncommon, with a yearly incidence of one case per 175,000 U.S. men.

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  • If I'm counting right, should be around a 1 000 per year.

    I went with 168 million males in the US, so divide by 175 000 is a thousand, which is ~2.5 per day. But I might be wrong what a yearly incidence meabs.

  • Research shows penile fractures are uncommon, with a yearly incidence of one case per 175,000 U.S. men.

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  • So every morning you can ask yourself, are you going the be one of the today's three lucky US men?

  • Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs

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  • What hardware that needs? My issue with running local models was that it's too much of a resource hog to be able to do gamedev on the same machine, and any sensible model needs pretty expensive hardware to just get a server for it. Especially with current prices.

  • Rsync author responds to online outrage about his usage of LLMs

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  • I can't wait for companies to finally price out most of developers out of AI use, especially the FOSS ones.

    I just hope most of them won't get too addicted to the tech crack they are getting free/cheap samples of currently, and will be able able to find back their motivation and skill to work without a feel-good dopamine machines.

    Also, lol at all the coments being like "if you're 100% against the tech crack, you're delusional. The cat is already out of the bag, it makes you way better at coding, if you use it responsibly!"

    The problem isn't that it's not somewhat good, the issue is that soon you won't be able to afford it, while also being addicted and dependant on it. But I'm sure y'all are able to use crack responsibly and will be fiiine.

  • "Scan to Verify You're Human": Google's reCAPTCHA is trialing a new "experimental challenge type" which requires desktop users to use an Android or iOS device to be able to pass it

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  • I'm out of the loop, what did you find?

    EDIT: I guess you're talking about this? From a first reddit page about why is it down I could find.

    The owner did it to themselves, by mounting a surreptitious DDoS campaign and altering the content of the archives to slander people, thus making it an unreliable source. This prompted Wikipedia to (correctly) remove it from all outbound links.

    It's moot if it's online anymore or not - it's not a valid archive.

  • "Scan to Verify You're Human": Google's reCAPTCHA is trialing a new "experimental challenge type" which requires desktop users to use an Android or iOS device to be able to pass it

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  • I keep hearing about malicious QR codes, but how does it actually work? Unless there's a serious vulnerability, how is it different from clicking on any link?

    It has been a few years since I worked as a junior in offensive security, but that has been something I could never figure out when I looked into it.

    Hmm, I guess you could use it for a pretty good phishing attempt. Just show a fake google login page and you're set, or maybe a fake .apk download "to confirm the captcha", but other than that, I don't really see a vector of attack.

  • You Should Not Update Your Dependencies

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  • Snake-oil vendors are already pivoting to the next moral panic: "Your software is secure, but what if the evil AI agents steal your stuff? Install pink-rubber-band-AI-endpoint-SOC-SIEM today!" Just moving the goalpost to whatever is scary this quarter.

    Sounds true, what else do you have?

    What we are building

    The system we are building at Mendral lives inside the CI. It connects threat information, production event logs, source code, historical CI logs, and any custom signals you want to add, alongside secure sandbox environments and a set of dedicated tools (see Andrea's post on agent harness for how that is wired). The agent operates on triggers, at different stages of the lifecycle.

    Concretely, here is what happens when a Dependabot-style PR lands. The agent...

    Oh ffs it's an ad for some agentic bullshit.

  • Canada is about to end private digital conversation — Bill C-22

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  • PGP exists. If your threat model requires pretty good privacy, the absolute minimum you should do is manually add a second level of encryption with PGP with manually exchanged keys somewhere off-grid.

  • Flatpak’s Future May Leave Non-systemd Distros Behind

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  • I have an atomic distro, and it lets me install apps without having to reboot or spin up distrobox.