Yeah, we have those things called safety regulations that protect people and don't allow anyone to just deploy whatever software they call "full self driving" that doesn't really full self drive the car.
Except regulations have nothing to do with this as Tesla doesn't follow those. Tesla update their cars with software changes in areas that by law requires the cars to be re-certified. For example if I go out now and do something that add 50 hp to my car or change the way its braking system functions (even if it makes it better) it is instantly illegal to drive the car until it has been approved (like an MOT test in the UK). Tesla don't give a donkeys arse about those rules and no government so far have dared do anything about it (Sweden almost did, then didn't). All updated Teslas are illegal in the EU as far as I can tell and that isn't even considering the whole GDPR can of worms that is their cameras.
Man, I swear sometimes I feel like I’m on a forum full of wanted criminals, state actors, and/or felons.
I’m not saying I’m against privacy. I am all for not being tracked, but we are approaching absurdity.
I really want to see all of you who praise “privacy” go fully offline and use only cash. No cards. No bank account. Nothing.
Salary? Cash, because earnings could also be sold and used for advertising. Groceries? Cash. Gas? Cash. No checks also, as they can be tracked /s
Also, while we are at it, no Android, no iOS, no Windows or Macs. Only Linux, because we can’t trust UE vendors.
Really, maybe we should start spending our energy in convincing legislators that PII should not be sold along with transaction data/histories. Matter a fact, let’s rally for universal privacy laws. How about that?
Let’s not go 50 back in evolution just because “visa bad”. I’m happy not to lose cash or reach for my wallet anymore.
Agreed. I'm all for privacy too. But trying to solve social problems with technical solutions seems optimistic at best. Even if everyone on this website uses cash only, the issue of data privacy still exists for the other 99.999% of society - and we should try to solve it for them too.
Cash decentralises power to the extent possible. E-currency centralises it to an absurd degree. That's the point. The slope of convenience though is gradual and slippery indeed. Institutions we've had for centuries crumbling in a matter of decades is a matter of concern. They worked more or less. There is no guarantee what is replacing them will work but we seem to have blind faith they will, since we're throwing the baby & the bathwater very gleefully out the window.
I never said “remove cash”. It should continue to exist nevertheless, because it’s a level of system redundancy and backup. I just said that I shouldn’t have to sacrifice quality of life improvements and STILL have my PII data sold from other channels.
How do you go from ‘Apple is offering a new payment method’ to a rant about how you don’t care about privacy?
Why would people have to choose between using only cash and sharing their data with everyone? The normal thing to do is limit who can access the data as much as possible. And if people don’t do that, why would legislators care?
> "How do you go from ‘Apple is offering a new payment method’ to a rant about how you don’t care about privacy?"
Because some other people started ranting about cashless payments, payment processors and their privacy.
> "Why would people have to choose between using only cash and sharing their data with everyone?"
Because that's how other people put it. I was just raising the point that we shouldn't have to give up QoL improvements, instead push for more privacy-focused laws, like limiting PII-data being sold along with transaction histories.
Apart from your comment and its replies there’s only one other conversation containing the word ‘privacy’ and its about how people want to be able to use cash so the credit card company can’t see all of your purchases. Doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me (nor does that appear to me to be limiting you in any way) and I don’t quite understand why you didn’t reply to them instead of posting an apparently ‘opposite’ rant.
Not 100%, but we can outlaw PII selling, and therefor everybody wins. I get “peace of mind” knowing IKEA doesn’t get targeted information, and IKEA still gets some level of anonymous demographic data from advertisers.
I did a lot of cheat development and always read the related forums.
Let me tell you that kernel anti-cheats are the funniest and ugliest pieces of software out there.
Almost ALL exhibit rootkit behaviour. Capture all OS events, dig through system and user directories, list all processes, fetch DNS and browser histories, block certain system calls, and more just to name a few. But hey! Their software (including drivers) are signed by Microsoft, so that’s alright :))
Funny part is that all those drivers are created by no other than ex-community members, under no advisory from system specialists or security experts. So guess what? Security vulnerabilities all around. Pretty much all their drivers are wide open and unsecure.
Nice fun having persistent, kernel-level, system-trusted exploits auto-installed on your system!
Oh, almost forgot, BattlEye has the ability to download custom bytecode from their servers and execute it. RCE baked right in. Good stuff.
So your frustration is more than reasonable..
EDIT: I will try to find the posts pointing to all vulns that I mentioned, and cite them.
As a person in the industry: Everything this person is saying is true.
We need a real solution to this honestly, it’s not enough to just kick up a fuss about game devs including anti-cheat and ever-more-invasive anti-cheat, but actually providing solutions people can use.
The economic incentives do not exist on consoles to cheat, so publishers are convinced that control of the platform is the problem.
As someone in the industry, would you mind weighing in on Vanguard, the kernel level anti-cheat used for Valorant?
On release they made a big deal about how small the kernel level portion is and how most of the complexity of the anti-cheat was still in user space. I'd be interested to hear how true that is and if that makes much of a difference in your mind how trustworthy it is.
I don’t have the code for that and it might require my studio to open a deal with vanguard to get access to the source.
Generally speaking though; the size of the components that run in the kernel is not important. The kernel mode software can act as a window to the rest of the system.
They did make one. It was called FairFight[1] and was mainly used by EA in the Battlefield franchise. It also was a dumpster fire: bans were applied to legit players all the time, moderators were overwhelmed and manual review took too long and many times resulted in nothing.
Behavioural anti-cheats are not the answer. Implementations are crap and under-developed, and I don’t blame them: you would need tremendous (server-sided) power to correctly process the models considering how complex multiplayer games are, and it just isn’t worth the investment and complexity to them.
It’s just cheaper to pay rootkit developers (like EAC or BattlEye) and knowingly infect client devices. Hell, their drivers are even WHQL signed by Microsoft.
And when false positives hit? Just blame the anti-cheat vendor. Potential HR problem dodged.
Fuel pumps have backup pumps. Matter a fact, the whole fuel system is a lot more complex than this.
And as for “the wings fall off” part, makes me remember a quote of an engineer I once read that goes something like this: “The wings are the strongest part of the airplane. If you worry about them ripping apart or falling off, you have way bigger problems than that, like the rest of the plane missing”.
Yes, I know! I don’t remember what video I saw but the wings were bent beyond imagination. Made me realise that what I saw while flying wasn’t even 30% of what they can withstand. Incredible engineering.
The Lockheed Elektra was infamous for its wings mysteriously coming off. Much research finally revealed that dynamic instability (flutter) was the cause. A great deal has been learned about how to prevent this, and a lot of effort goes into designing a wing that isn't susceptible to flutter.
I did the calculations for the 757 elevators to show it wouldn't flutter. And yes, it was also verified on the test stand.
