the crack is basically installing a rootkit

So is denuvo.

I trust the random cracker’s rootkit more than denuvo’s.

Potential evil is less risky than proven, official, completely intentional evil.

Still, I have no interest in playing games infected with this shit. Their developers have evidently no interest in making good or even playable games, or they wouldn’t infect them with this performance and usability killing malware, so to the blacklist they and their whole publisher go, cracked or not.

In jail.

Well, a particularly jarring one is the USA’s refusal to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Everyone else, including Israel, has ratified it, except them.

Because they want child labour, and to be able to keep executing children, and bombing schools, apparently.

No. Get out.

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

can we acknowledge that what happens on the internet today is harmful to children?

For 99% of what happens on the Internet? No. No, we can’t. That would be malicious fearmongering.

For the remaining 1% (or less)? Fine and impose sanctions on any companies that produce content intended to harm children (mostly Meta, and any company that makes games with lootboxes), and their CEOs and boards.

Educate parents so they can prevent their children from accessing that harmful 1%. Fine any that refuse, and take their children away as you would any other abusers’.

But this age tracking shit will do absolutely nothing to protect children, it will do absolutely nothing to educate parents, and worse of all will do absolutely nothing to stop the companies that intentionally harm children.

Its only purpose is to control access to the Internet, and to establish a foothold to justify a slippery slope of ever worsening spyware measures, that will harm not only children but the whole population.

your friends can paint all your faces the same

No they can’t!

That would be plagiarism!

One clown, one egg!

Scam. We’re being sold an autocomplete tool as a search engine.

Or fraud, since some of the same companies destroyed the functionality of their search engines in order to make the autocomplete look better in comparison.

Journalists need to bring back the good old art of monstering.

Do you have bite scars on your penis, Mr. President!?

Show us your penis, Mr. President!

Project Icarus it was called, the fourth space program of that name and the first for which it was appropriate. Long before Jacob’s parents were born—before the Overturn and the Covenant, before the Power Satellite League, before even the full flower of the old Bureaucracy—old grandfather NASA decided that it would be interesting to drop expendable probes into the Sun to see what happened.

They discovered that the probes did a quaint thing when they got close. They burned up.

In America’s “Indian Summer” nothing was thought impossible. Americans were building cities in space—a more durable probe couldn’t be much of a challenge!

Shells were made, with materials that could take unheard of stress and whose surfaces reflected almost anything. Magnetic fields guided the diffuse but tremendously hot plasmas of corona and chromosphere around and away from those hulls. Powerful communications lasers pierced the solar atmosphere with two-way streams of commands and data.

Still, the robot ships burned. However good the mirrors and insulation, however evenly the superconductors distributed heat, the laws of thermodynamics still held. heat will pass from a higher temperature to a zone where the temperature is lower, sooner or later.

The solar physicists might have gone on resignedly burning up probes in exchange for fleeting bursts of information had Tina Merchant not offered another way. “Why don’t you refrigerate?” she asked. “You have all the power you want. You can run refrigerators to push heat from one part of the probe to another.”

Her colleagues answered that, with superconductors, equalizing heat throughout was no problem.

“Who said anything about equalizing?” the Belle of Cambridge replied. “You should take all excess heat from the part of the ship were the instruments are and pump it into another part where the instruments aren’t.”

“And that part will burn up!” one colleague said. “Yes, but we can make a chain of these ‘heat dumps,’” said another engineer, slightly more bright. “And then we can drop them off, one by one …”

“No, no you don’t quite understand.” The triple Nobel Laureate strode to the chalkboard and drew a circle, then another circle within.

'Here!" She pointed to the inner circle. “You pump your heat into here until it is, for a short time, hotter than the ambient plasma outside of the ship. Then, before it can do harm there, you dump it out into the chromosphere.”

“And how,” asked a renowned physicist, “do you expect to do that?”

Tina Merchant had smiled as if she could almost see the Astronautics Prize held out to her. “Why I’m surprised at all of you!” she said. “You have onboard a communications laser with a brightness temperature of millions of degrees! Use it!”

Enter the age of the Solar Bathysphere. Floating in part by buoyancy and also by balancing atop the thrust of their refrigerator lasers, probes lingered for days, weeks, monitoring the subtle variations at the Sun, that wrought weather on the Earth.

— David Brin, Sundiver, 1980

Here’s an interesting discussion about the concept, with Brin himself explaining his reasoning.

None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres.

Except for Titan. Titan has a lot of atmosphere.

Ah, doing your best to break the Therac-25’s record, I see.

Story goes that Reagan got freaked out after watching the film and asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff if it’d be that easy to hack into the US military. After a week of looking into it came the answer: “no, the problem is much worse than that”, and fifteen months after having watched it signed the confidential directive “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security”, starting the implementation of cybersecurity measures in the country’s institutions.

No need to reinstate it, the 13th amendment already allows penal slavery.

Just need to redefine who is a criminal, which they’re already doing, by declaring ever widening sectors of the population as criminals and getting away with it.

Do you want to collect less in taxes?

I’m sure they plan to make it up with civil asset forfeiture (i.e., theft).

If the victim has their cash under the table they can steal it more easily than if it’s in the bank. And with a harder to track paper trail. Easier for it to get lost and end up in Trump’s pocket.

No need for the /s. In the Land of the Free the swine can just keep it. Legally.

(Technically it has to be involved in a crime, but ICE are criminals, so anything they do is by definition involved in a crime. And it’s not like technicalities have ever stopped other pig breeds from stealing people’s cash anyway.)

That picture is horrifying, though.

Trump’s puppeteers should fire their taxidermist.

More people should honour Punch a Nazi Day.

(In case of doubt, Punch a Nazi Day falls on any day that ends in ‘y’.)

More public money syphoned off to the parasitic corporations and dumber, easier to exploit proles.

Seems like a massive win for capitalism, really.

Until it all blows up on our faces, obviously, but when has capitalism ever cared about anything beyond the next quarter?

Everything starts with good intentions.

No it doesn’t.

When it comes to privacy, politics, and capitalism, almost nothing starts with good intentions.

Most everything starts for the short term benefit of whoever starts it and any investors putting money into it, at the expense of everyone else and ignoring any future negative consequences unless profit can be extracted from them.

It hurting people the starter doesn’t like (even if it will come back to hurt the starter in the long time) is also a very important factor, though secondary to the short term profit one.

Anyone remember RAMdisks?