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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Completely agree with you on the news vs science aspect. At the same time, it is worth considering that not all science researches are evergreen… I know this all too well; as a UX researcher in the late 2000s / early 2010s studying mobile UX/UI, most of the stuff our lab has done was basically irrelevant the year after they were published. Yet, the lab preserved and continues to conduct studies and add incremental knowledge to the field. At the pace generative AI/LLMs are progressing, studies against commercially available models in 2023 is largely irrelevant in the space we are in, and while updated studies are still important, I feel older articles doesn’t shine an appropriate light on the subject in this context.

    A lot of words to say that despite the linked article being a scientific research, since the article is dropped here without context nor any leading discussion, it leans more towards the news spectrum, and gives off the impression that OP just want to leverage the headline to strike emotion and reinforce peoples’ believes on outdated information.





  • Another possibility: the console vendors are catching whiff of the whole gate keeper mess, and they don’t want to be at risk of being forced to open up their physical cartridge DRM mechanisms to allow third party cartridges for the relatively small EU market (compared to the rest of the world). Moving towards digital is much easier as result.

    It is also clear as day that they’re testing the waters with Nintendo players who are generally deemed to be more casual, and lesser likely to push back compared to the more savvy other major consoles. Once this blows over, they will just move to digital everything across the board, citing successes and cost savings on the other platforms as basis for the move.



  • API are secure only if you can secure the authentication details. A modified app (be it as something modified and distributed on a unsanctioned channel, or custom injected by another malicious actor/app) can easily siphon out your authentication tokens to a third party unbeknownst to you the user. However, if the app verifies it came from the approved source and have not been tempered with, then it is much easier to lean on ASLR and other OS level security to make it harder to extract the authentication info.

    Multiplayer game operators have obligation to curb modified clients so their actual paying clients have a levelled playing field. By ensuring their apps are only distributed via approved channels and unmodified by malicious players, this improves their odds at warding off cheaters creating a bad time for those that actually pay them to play fairly.

    These are just simple cases where this kind of security is beneficial. I am glad Android is finally catching up in this regard.





  • No, they’re mostly correct; basically no one except Android users in the USA cares. Everywhere else has it figured out with third party messaging platforms that’s geographically favored, and Apple users in USA will continue to use the superior iMessage protocol with each other. Only the Android users in USA are left out from sending/receiving messaging, so they’re salivating over the update like it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

    RCS is janky, inconsistent, and carrier dependent. Can’t wait for Android users in the USA to join the better rest of the world. Until GSM consortium mandates end to end encryption and force all carriers to adopt certain version of consistent minimum, RCS is and will continue to be a garbage inferior protocol that should be avoided like the plague.





  • In the old days, it used to be a problem because everyone just connect their windows 98 desktop with all their services directly exposed to the internet because they’re using dial up internet without the concept of a gateway that prevents internet from accessing internal resources. Now days, you’re most likely behind your ISP router that doesn’t forward ports by default, and you’re only exposing the things you’d actually want to expose.

    For things you’d actually want to expose, having a service on the default port is fine, and reduces the chances of other systems interacting with it failing because they’d expect it on the default port. Moving them to a different port is just security through obscurity, and honestly doesn’t add too much value. You can port scan the entire public IPv4 space fairly quickly fairly cheaply. In fact, it is most likely that it’s already been mapped:

    https://www.shodan.io/host/<your-ip-here>

    Keeping the service up-to-date regularly and applying best practices around it would be much more important and beneficial. For SSH, make sure you’re using key based authentication, and have password based authentication disabled; add fail2ban to automatically ban those trying to brute force. For Minecraft, online mode and white listed only unless you’re running a public one for everyone.


  • Yep :(

    The only reason Apple had gotten traction with it is because they focused all of their users’ purchase power in one unified place. Which became a powerful driver to drive for change. Samsung/Android/Google Pay/Wallet thing never gained traction despite having access to the chip is exactly what we’ll see if the chip just get opened up free for all. All the larger players will push for their own standard, demand for the coveted hardware invocation sequence, while no one else wants to adopt theirs, and ultimately get no where while littering our phone with useless apps.

    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


  • If you didn’t read the article, Apple Pay is the ubiquitous one; Google floundered, flip and flopped but can’t get traction until Apple came around with it. Old or not, having a feature that no one cares about so you can’t use it anywhere makes it pretty useless.

    Also, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I don’t want PayPal to launch one, then Walmart decide to push theirs, then local transit authority one, and all of them compete for the coveted hardware invocation. Instead, all of them should consolidate into one unified place via standard set of API + UI so none of them can make a mess. Guess that’s something Android users wouldn’t understand, judging from the piss poor IOT ecosystem and all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯