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New title: Rich guy who has bought his way into everything in his life admits to buying his way into boosting his accounts, internet expresses great lack of surprise.

You say poor opsec, I say free advertising.

Would anyone in this thread have paid ANY attention to this movie otherwise?

No.

I pirate everything, but am very very reluctant to do so with software or games.

I only pirate in cases where the company involved is just too gross to support (looking at you, Adobe), or if there’s absolutely no other option.

But I consider pirated software and games absolutely suspect 100% of the time, because I’m old enough to remember when every keygen was also a keylogger, and every crack was also a rootkit and touching any pirated software was going to give you computer herpes without fail.

So maybe it’s not that bad anymore, but I mean, do you fully trust in the morals of someone who would spend the time helping you steal someone else’s shit to not add just one more little thing to it for themselves?

As far as it matters for this, a hypervisor is a hypervisor.

I use qemu/kvm because it’s what I’m used to on the linux side, but I don’t think it has any particular feature that makes it more safe compared to like virtualbox or vmware or anything else.

Yeah, I don’t let anything that has to be cracked out of an isolated VM until it’s VERY clear that nothing untoward is going on.

QEMU has proven perfectly lovely for a base to use for testing questionable software, and I’ve got quite a lot of VMs sitting around for various things that ah, have been acquired.

I’m not saying it is or is not a false positive, so please read the rest of my comment with that in mind.

But, that said, this is not new: AV has triggered on cracks and cheat software and similar stuff since forever.

The very simplified explanation is that the same things you do to install a rootkit, you do to cheat in a game with or crack software DRM.

Bigger but, though: cracks and game cheats have also been a major source of malicious software for just as long, so like, it’s also entirely likely that it’s a good catch, too.

I’d argue perhaps the opposite: if you want full moderation and admin freedom, running it on your own instance is the only way to do it.

If you run it on someone else’s server, you’re subject to someone else’s rules and whims.

Granted, I have zero reason to think the admins of any of those listed instances would do anything objectionable, but that’s today: who knows what happens six months or a year or two years from now.

Though, as soon as you start adding stuff to your personal instance, you’re biting off more maintenance and babysitting since you assumably want your stuff to be up 100% of the time to serve your communities, so that’s certainly something to consider.

I was excited until the article clearly outlined that it was a multiplayer, online-only game.

Alas.

Cloudflare tunnels are the thing you’re looking for, if you’re not opposed to cloudflare.

You run the daemon on your local system, it connects to cloudflare, and presto, you’ve bypassed this entire mess.

I don’t have a specific place; just some of the private general-purpose trackers I’m on will occasionally have someone come by and dump a pile of STLs from various places on them.

(The private part, unfortunately, means I can’t actually share more, sorry - fight club rules and whatnot.)

There’s some cryptobro projects about sticking distributed file sharing on top of ~ THE BLOCKCHAIN ~.

I’m skeptical, but it might actually be a valid use of such a thing.

There’s a ton of commercial/locked-behind-patreon stuff, usually around things like RPG scenery or figures and such.

Like, an immense library of shit that’s not free.

What, you mean you don’t play games and go “Well that looked great! Well worth my time!” like an awful lot of the AAA game industry appears to think gamers do?

Huh.

Seriously though, I’m curious how we ended up in the make-shit-prettier race and not a make-the-writing-good, or make-the-game-actually-fun, or even things like make-more-than-two-dungeons (looking at you, Starfield) race.

Especially given the cost to me, personally, to keep upgrading my GPU has reached an untenable level: I’m sure as crap not paying $2000 for a new GPU just so we get a few extra frames of hair jiggle or slightly better lighting or whatever.

What platform would you perhaps be interested in?

I’ll admit to having no opinion on windowing systems.

If the distro ships with X, I use X, and if it ships with Wayland, I use Wayland.

I’d honestly probably not be able tell you which systems I’ve been using use one or the other, and that’s a good thing: if you can’t tell, then it probably doesn’t matter anymore.

Sure, but the way this usually works is that the government tells you to do something and if you don’t, they’ll find someone (or a couple of someones) on that list, arrest them, and charge them with a crime.

Doesn’t matter if they did the crime, and it doesn’t matter if they’d be convicted, but the play is to keep your friends in jail until you capitulate to what they want. This is actually something that’s happened with tech companies before, like what they did with GoDaddy’s C-level in India.

The problem is that there’s no damn way I’d want to be arrested by the upcoming US administration, because I’d bet $100 that their playbook will portray not doing what they’re demanding as a national security or terrorism offense, and if you’ve been watching ANYTHING for the last damn near 25 years, that’s a free pass for them to basically just vanish you until they feel like doing otherwise.

It’s fantastic leverage against organizations that have US people and are, presumably, not willing to just let their friends spend who-knows amount of time in prison, and could probably result in some cooperation.

And I’m about to both get downvoted and WELL AKSHULLY’d about how you can’t just vanish people under the US justice system, and sure, you’re technically correct. Except we’ve passed law after law after law since 9/11 that have basically given the government the ability to do any damn thing they please if they call you a national security risk or terrorist, up to and including Gitmo, in case you’ve forgotten that existed: which you shouldn’t have, because we STILL have prisoners sitting there.

This is doomer as fuck, and horribly unlikely, but so is a demand to stuff backdoors into everything. But, if we head down that road, the only safe software will be ones that can’t be blackmailed like this which is essentially none of the major projects.

Well, yes, it does: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization

But the corporation that handles all their funding and owns their trademarks is in the US, so they’re possibly subject to the same pressure. And of course a good number of those people in that org tree are in the US, so again, same issue.

My point was more ‘this is silly, because if you REALLY think that, there’s nobody and no project that’s got any ties at all to the US that can be considered safe, and you should maybe get rid of all your computing devices now’, rather than an intent to say that Debian or anyone there is at more or less risk.

I’m not up on corpo shareholder suits in general, but has there been a high-profile case of shareholders demanding the return of salary from CEOs that managed do nothing useful?

Like, did Carly or Leo have to pay HP back for their blunders? Or Marissa at Yahoo? And so on, etc.

I mean, if you want to carry that line of reasoning out, the Linux kernel is governed under a US-based foundation, so should the kernel itself be suspect?

How about FreeBSD? Or something like Debian? Or Ubuntu, which isn’t US-based but they’re in a typically cooperating jurisdiction?

You’re def being paranoid and somewhat irrational, since it’s unlikely to happen and if it did, it’s not like you could trust anything at all anyways.