Just your normal everyday casual software dev. Nothing to see here.

People can share differing opinions without immediately being on the reverse side. Avoid looking at things as black and white. You can like both waffles and pancakes, just like you can hate both waffles and pancakes.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I agree with this. However, I wanted to add in that in many cases, even without the disclaimer, the volunteer company could legally be able to disclose those pictures.

    Because in order for something to be commercial, it needs to be promoting a product or an organization. So a big company just posting pictures, saying, look, this is our volunteer work, doesn’t necessarily require any type of disclosure notice.

    As long as the volunteer work was being done in a public location(or even a private location with signs), then it’s free game. It’s more of a cover the grey areas in the law policy and remove the extra work if the intent is to promote a product( like you mentioned.)


  • a few ways to be honest.

    They already have steam wallet cards at most electronic retail stores which operate the same as gift cards

    but I was thinking more along the line of the payment processor is still there, but the goods being purchased is no longer the game itself, just adding currency on, which more-or-less removes the problem all together. Payment processors are no longer being used to buy NSFW content, its being used to purchase wallet funds. So the association is no longer valid.

    Alternatively they could go the Mullvad approach as well, and allow for cash, check and wire transfer over if they really wanted to. Heck honestly like what PC said, with how big they are, they could even make a low transaction fee(seller side) savings card and could probably rival the companies themselves. I know a few people that would happily switch to said card if it meant ease of access buying games.

    Additionally, a mix of these could be done, at some point card companies would fold because its threatening their bottom line. I personally think if they went the steam wallet route, the companies wouldn’t want to engage big stores such as walmart, as a good portion of their revenue is via the transaction fees those companies provide.

    this is all hypotheticals though


  • I was under the understanding that they cared only about their image and the fact that their service was being used to purchase those items. If that’s the case, then they shouldn’t have an Issue with it existing in the first place, just that people can associate their platform with those type of games. If Steam went out of their way to make it so you can’t use third party(or even second party tbh) merchants with adult-only and NSFW style games, then consumers wouldn’t be able to relate their service to those type of games.

    If what you said is correct there, that’s a massive overstep on the payment processors, but I don’t think that’s the case here.

    For example, when visa stopped accepting advertisements on Pornhub, it was because it wasn’t able to control whether or not it was being depicted next to CP, which is against its rules. They entire quote was as follows: "It is illegal, and Visa does not permit the use of our network for illegal activity. Our rules explicitly and unequivocally prohibit the use of our products to pay for content that depicts nonconsensual sexual behavior or child sexual abuse.”

    If this is the same case, just disabling the payment processor’s ability should more than suffice.

    Having said my main concern about all this is, currently steam is rolling over, but as people have said previously, steam is a large company. They could just decide full stop that you can only pay for video games with a steam wallet, which will make it so you have to add the funds to your wallet ahead of time. This also will remove quite a bit of protections that consumers have when using a credit card because at that point the service is Steam providing you money for your wallet instead of Steam providing you a functional game which means that any type of argument consumers would do with chargebacks of like this game isn’t functioning on my system would be immediately thrown out because steam only charged you to add funds to your wallet instead of buying a game like it currently is.


  • This is a sticky situation if you try to implement it. At best you temp hide it from the uncle, at worse you double down the ideology because of conspiracy theories and end up hurting your relationship with your uncle, plus Anything you can do locally he could find workarounds for if he wanted to, especially since his friends will know the sites still exist.

    He would likely accuse you immediately though as the last person to touch the system is always the one at fault, and you are the one setting it up.

    To answer the question though, you could edit the host file to block known propaganda networks(by directing them to invalid ip’s which would make it look like its down) but, that setup is not very effective and unless you can block all of them, hes just going to find ways around it or alternatives, and this system likely wouldn’t survive most current day browsers that are pushing secure DNS such as firefox since cloudflare is going to know how to access it still.

    I still don’t think it’s a good idea though, too many things that could go wrong out of it, plus hard pushing an agenda has never been a good way at convincing someone their mentality isn’t right, this will just re-enforce his mentality out of spite.


  • It’s referencing the type of operation being done on the drive. A write operation being changing the information on the drive, a read operation being reading something from the drive. A write few read many indicates that most operations on the device are read operations/not changing the data on the device. Some examples of this would be a thumb drive being used for presentations or being used as a source to copy files to another system. These setups are fairly low write count when compared to read count. An example of a write many read many would be using the drive as a swap drive, or as an OS drive such as tails where the intent would be keeping the OS on the drive instead of just copying it to make the actual file system


  • Honestly, this vastly depends on the type of drive, and who made it. I have had cheap drives fail after 6-7 months of usage before but, that was because I was using it for external storage for an RPI so it was doing a lot of writes.

    Using it for a write few read many style system(like bootable OS images via ventoy), I had had flash drives that have lasted 10+ years now. but I wouldn’t recommend using them for anything that was super write heavy.


  • I’m in this same boat as well. As someone who ran an XMPP server in the past, then stopped and eventually moved onto Matrix. I have to hard agree, in my experiences, XMPP was so much better administration side than having to deal with matrix, and its quite a bit more fleshed out(not to mention the sheer amount of clients available) Being able to just log into a management panel and have the panel do everything administration wise for me was super nice, instead of having to ask “is this only available via the API or is it available via a client or is this config only”, these types of tools from what I’ve seen don’t really exist for matrix.











  • hard agree

    People act as if the everyday person has this imaginary power. That’s going to make things better. No. Collected efforts have this power that makes things better. And for some stupid reason, at least in the US, we are extremely against using that power.

    people would rather try to support it as an individual instead of support it as a collective, so instead of it being an actual impact, it’s only like a drop in the bucket that the companies can ignore. all for a pittance of extra income.


  • They only expose approximate, not precise, locations, so they shouldn’t be a risk like GPS that exposes precise locations?

    Be aware, this is VASTLY dependent on your ISP. Smaller ISP’s especially DSL based ones in rural areas are notorious for giving almost exact address when you reverse look up it.

    My old ISP used to do that. like I had to try super hard to mask my IP if I went somewhere like IRC or Chatango that disclosed the full address to people joining, because if someone wanted to they could have looked up my address down to the house just by following the remote lookup because it would show my address instead of their nearest hub.

    Thankfully now it shows me somewhere in NY which I feel a lot more comfortable with, but still don’t take for granted that it’s only an approximate.

    As for actual privacy risks? It really depends on how private you want to get. A reverse lookup will give you your provider, and sometimes as I said above more. And if you have any forwarding enabled they can also try to get through your services using any exploits or misconfigurations you may have.

    Additionally, some routers will disclose a worryingly large amount of data if misconfigured, for example ATT modem/routers will give customer information, connected devices(including names) and VOIP phone configurations if you can get the router to think you are a local device or manage to misconfigure the management port to allow external connections. This is all without the requirement of a password/no auth


  • It likely is going to fall under child neglect. I don’t know of an actual law specifically for locking a kid in a car.

    As for the exceptions thing, that is the same in the states, it usually falls under law(s) categorized as “Good Samaritan laws”. They are moreso meant to protect the bystander if they see someone in peril but, breaking the window to save a kid or pet that is clearly in distress would normally fall under that. Personal injury also usually fall under these laws, like if you accidentally injured someone getting them to safety (like after a car accident) when it was clear they were in a dangerous location, it helps relieve the bystander liability.

    It’s also supposed to be the reason that EMS/Fire/Police have Qualified immunity. because when the call to action arises, you don’t want your first responders first thought to be “How will this negatively affect me” you want it to be “how can I do the most in this situation”