lerky @ lerky @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Contains: water, meat, stink, salt, yellow dye #42

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4 days ago

Agreed. The chaos is just for kicks and PR so the pundits and politicians can claim with a straight face that he said he wouldn't. No doubt on my end that he ultimately intends to do it.

CNBC changed the title and article contents. Version prior to the change: https://web.archive.org/web/20250716153251/https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/16/trump-powell-fed-fire.html

Though if you read through either version it's a chaotic bag of both denying and confirming. Ultimately seems like he told a room of Republicans he would, then denied he would after? So who knows.

It's also implemented as an actual feature rather than purely marketing fluff though, so the deception/ineptness goes further than just being an ad in my opinion. It clearly works for certain use-cases (e.g. disconnect the VPN and try to connect somewhere via browser or ping), but definitely not in the absolute way it (and particularly the "Advanced" setting) implies.

May I add a post-shoutout shoutout for the ones that have >1KB worth of custom encoded data in the URL when the actual tracking number is only ~10 digits (cough8bitdocough)? 'Cause those aren't shady at all.

Good to know! I've avoided docker for years, but if there was a time to learn now would be it.

Had either of us known about it beforehand we certainly would have. The lack of binding was definitely not an intentional choice.

Though as I've mentioned in a few other replies the biggest shock was how worthless the killswitch feature was. The presumption was that this screw-up is the exact kind situation that feature was designed to prevent, but clearly it's either broken, total nonsense, or poorly/misleadingly described.

Yeah it was a useful find! No idea about how trustworthy ipleak is though so do use with caution. There were a few other similar services I found while going through this, but I'm not having luck finding my notes on it at the moment... ipleak was just an easy one to remember the name of.

Iduno how we both managed to miss that part over all these years. Neither of us are new to any of this and we're both privacy fanatics... but somehow it slipped through the cracks. Enough tech-shame for a lifetime, condensed and consumed in a singular moment.

Most of our shock was from how useless the so-called killswitch turned out to be since the assumption was that any potential mistakes or bad configurations in an application would at the very least be outright blocked from connecting to anything.

I think it was also a massive gut-punch for them because they'd been heavily torrenting both privately and publicly for decades without ever hearing about this particular step of the process, so to realize their ass had been waving in the wind this whole time... oofph. Kinda surprised this is the first letter they've received, considering.

Definitely learned a lot, just wish it had been "on the tin", so to speak.

I have in a few very specific cases, though I'm not sure whether you'd define that as performance or compatibility. Also, the versions I use in those situations are so old that significant differences between them could be reasonably expected. Nowadays we're at a point where there probably won't be a noticeable difference.

Normally I just use the latest GE, in part out of a misguided superstition that newer may equal faster. If issues (usually video codec-related) crop up I test with a handful of older GE versions (7-55, 8-25, and 9-2) that I've found to be "magic bullets" of sorts for common issues I've run into due to regressions that exist in later builds.

No harm in doing your own testing though. Well, unless it's a Denuvo'ed game since you can potentially max out your activation allocations from swapping Proton versions.

Yep, it was a Linux setup. I don't know if they ever used Proton when they were still using Windows though so I'm not sure if the issue was happening on there as well.

For the record the "Advanced" killswitch mode is what was used, so their assumption was that nothing would be able to leak and would, in worst case scenarios, just not connect at all. Which was definitely not the case.

Oh look, the toilet from my nightmares, and I don't mean that figuratively. It's so annoying.

"and then sang another god. damned. song."

That's what depresses me most regarding stunts like this: it does work on a portion of the populace.

I wasn't aware it was going to be an MMO, super cool energy you've brought though.

My impression had been that it was going to do the same nonsense that the THPS 1+2 remake did. An MMO is far worse, though given your response I suppose bringing up the absurdity of turning a historically singleplayer (and sometimes optionally multiplayer) series/genre into a 99%-likely-to-fail boondoggle is moot.

Also, it's neither here nor there but just to be pedantic there actually are a few (though admittedly rare) examples of games that had MMO modes in addition to full singleplayer versions. Hellgate: London comes to mind, as do some ARPGs depending on how you want to define MMO.

Last I heard it was going to require a persistent internet connection anyways, so just another coffin nail for me (assuming that's still the case).

Many of its mechanisms effectively forced entire industries to require a ton more identification, record-keeping, and access by law enforcement... particularly financial and telecom companies. Or at least that's how courts and corporate lawyers ultimately interpreted it. Potato, potato.

Though you are right that the act itself was not reauthorized in 2020. I must have missed the final vote, after its initial passage. That said, plenty of its impacts remain as they've been spun off into their own bits of legislation. I suppose "post-Patriot-Act America" would have been more accurate for me to say. Apologies!

Sounds like good ol' too-good-to-be-true honeytrappery to me, but that's pure knee-jerk speculation on my part. Army+Palantir = massive alarm bells in my book, and Proton has a growing number of issues that have tainted their reputation.

I also don't know how it would even be possible to legally operate a privacy-centric carrier in the US given the requirements of the Patriot Act/etc. To say nothing of how deeply intertwined they all are with alphabet agencies and data brokers.

At the very least I'd use extreme caution and operate under the assumption that they're not being 100% truthful.

They'll fall in line, they always do. There is no bottom.