r00ty

They’re out there and not so hidden. If you look, you’ll find them. There’s definitely an iptv community out there.

This story seems a bit weird to me. A lot of iptv operators don’t sell directly to people, rather wholesale to dealers.

So I bet they got a dealer here is all.

In a lot of places, fast Internet is ubiquitous and cheap.

Yeah there’s going to be a few places that will be problematic. But most can get access to fast Internet now I think.

Also for non gaming the data requirement isn’t so much.

I’m not talking about short term. It’s a medium to longer term thing. But it will start to become commonplace soon I reckon.

I’m also convinced that we’ll be herded ever more toward cloud computing. That is, we’ll all have our “desktop” on the cloud and thin clients to access it.

Don’t get me started on the dystopia I see coming from that.

In terms of the radio rules. The radio has always had its own firmware on android phones. The rules could be implemented using hardware fuses and restrictions on signed firmware updates for those specific systems.

That is they make the “single model for the world” as is generally economically the best option in many cases. And before shipping to distributors it’s stamped with the region and the fuses for that region are blown. Now it doesn’t mean it cannot be used elsewhere. But it means that it will follow all rules for the certification stamped on the device.

That would mean that any firmware for the main operating system cannot command it to do anything outside of the limits defined by those rules. So it’s not really a technical reason not to allow custom bootloaders.

But of course, probably the manufacturers generally don’t want you to be able to remove their firmware that is often filled with sponsored required app installs. So this is a convenient way to pretend their hands are tied.

I actually stopped having problems with steam on Wayland quite some time ago. But, one of the first things I did was turn off scaling (I have 1080 and 1440 screens). There used to be random issues with the menus in steam, and that went away a few months ago.

My only problems (as an NVidia user) with KDE plasma on wayland right now is occasionally discord will just freeze and I need to minimize/maximise to bring it to life. And very very rarely (and actually it might have been fixed, I’ve not seen it in weeks), one screen will entirely freeze and I have to either switch to a console and back or logout/login to bring it back to life. Oh and not a bug, but the OBS issue with global hotkeys. Now I can run it in X mode, but then it will randomly cause an issue where it makes games shudder. Only in X capture mode. It’s most odd.

It brings enough positives compared to X that these really minor problems are worth it.

I think the problem is, to businesses it is very much comparable. Businesses only ever (and don’t listen to anything they say, that’s all a lie) think about short term revenue gains. If they actually ever planned ahead you’d not have the month end, quarter end and year end revenue panics that seemingly every medium to large organization has.

So, being able to make decent looking software fast, is actually way more useful to them than it being “good” long term.

My only hope at this point, is people doing software engineering for as many years as I have can now create “Artisan software” as an art piece or something and get rich from it. :P

No. I fully expect them to monitor the traffic from the UK. And search warrant your premises. People using VPNs are most likely going to have evidence (the keys for the VPN and ways to start it up) on the machines, in their house that they could seize. They don’t need to touch your VPS.

Like I say, it’ll be a rarity. It’s too much work to go after people wholesale for this and the manpower to get the hard evidence it prohibitive. But, they will make a few examples.

For court purposes (and they will be careful to keep these cases in magistrate courts unless there’s solid evidence of more crimes found), there will be enough evidence to show the changing traffic patterns and the proof of a working method of accessing sites from another jurisdiction present on the machines found in the user’s possession. More than enough for well trained magistrates to convict.

But look, this is IF they try to route of banning VPNs too. It’s just the ranting of one or two MPs right now.

But that’s true of any law. They need to prove you broke the law. I doubt they will ban VPS’. They might ban private use of VPN’s and they will occasionally convict someone of it, to keep the fear level up. Just like most hard-to-prove laws.

The thing is, if they’re able to monitor traffic, then they can easily isolate “likely” VPN traffic. HTTPS will almost always be on 443 and to a variety of sites. If suddenly you have a metric ton of encrypted traffic going to a single host and your traffic going to other hosts also drops accordingly. You’ve got a very likely use of VPN.

Now, yes to prove it they’d need to get search warrants and the like. Which is why I think enforcement will be one of those things they make a big noise about when they do. Just to keep normal people scared to do the thing.

Just like IPTV use, normal piracy, and this kind of thing.

I live in the UK and host my own instance (not hosted in the UK). I don’t really have any real active users other than myself and most signups end up being deleted as soon as they post some advertising spam.

So, to that end I ensured I don’t have any communities marked as NSFW on my instance at all. But, I’m one person and cannot moderate the entire fediverse content I carry. When it moves to enforcement time and I see a definite sign of targeting fediverse hosts, or (as I expect will be a first phase) warnings being issued to fediverse hosts. I’ll likely just close registration, go on an account purge and lock out content to logged in users only. Then scale down the operation to a server hosted in my own house and just for me.

If things start to turn into serious enforcement against fediverse hosts, I fully expect the number of instances that will allow UK users to drastically reduce. But, don’t forget this is coming to the EU and US if things keep moving as they are. So, there may be no real way to survive as an independent forum/gathering place. And maybe, maybe that’s been part of the plan all along? Hobbyists like me cannot provide the time or financial burden to perform age checks or moderate everything to ensure there’s nothing that will breach the extremely (and deliberately) vague rules.

We live in interesting times.

I mean, in terms of the age restriction rules, we might get it first. But the EU is setting up for a very similar set of rules, the USA is also working on their own version. France came before us. Australia are also running I think (now, soon? Not too sure). As to whether similar talk (and it’s just talk right now) around banning VPNs will happen elsewhere too. Well, if they pull it off here too without too much of a problem, yes it will likely be rolled out elsewhere.

It’s not isolated in any way and the fact it seems to be very suddenly a thing every country wants to do should make it even more concerning.

Well, if you connect to your own VPS, you’re still “illegally” using a VPN if they ban them. Yeah, you enter a world of how they will enforce it. But, it’s not dodging the law to make your own VPN on a VPS.

That is very likely what they will do, I’m certain of it. Probably worse than that. I bet they will allow VPNs to licensed users (businesses), they will require specific protocols where they are able to backdoor in and snoop if they want to.

This isn’t a good road we’re going down right now.

Oh man, they’re going to come visit everyone that didn’t do the “optional” affirmation thing at his coronation, aren’t they?

Kinda hoping MPs don’t read anything here. But, hopefully they omit socks/http proxies from whatever ban they impose…

I suspect it’s going to depend on the communities you, and/or your instance subscribe to.

I’m on my own instance, so if there’s any instance level removal happening, it’s me doing it. And I find in general people here to be much more polite, much more likely to receive (well made) criticism and useful new information instead of a personal attack than on the other place.

There are likely communities that by their design are going to be antagonistic. But I am unsure even after reading that thread specifically what went wrong. So, I don’t think I’m able to fully comment on what happened and why in this case.

Yeah I wonder if they’re A/B testing on some accounts and old.reddit is generally the last to feel changes.

I thought I’d reply to this with an update. Because, I saw how far the free tier goes, and it’s pretty far.

I had another huuuuge influx of AI/other bots scraping my instance at top speed. Hundreds of requests per second, and it was putting some load on the postgres server.

What I found was, that there was a mixture of traffic. Some was coming from a handful of AS numbers (each hosting hundreds of large IP blocks) controlled by a small handful of the same names. So, those I was able to block outright by AS number.

But then I found a very large number of random requests coming in bursts (and definitely not humans) all on mobile or isp customer blocks… I assume it’s some kind of botnet being used? But they were all valid requests for posts and comments.

I looked at the custom ruleset on cloudflare and, it’s quite powerful. I settled on the following.

1: Allow known fediverse software by user agent (yes, the bots could eventually spoof these. But right now they are not). 2: Allow known instances by IP blocks 3: Allow access to the fediverse inbox specifically. Which is where most inter-instance traffic goes. 4: Allow access to LOCAL users and well known services/other standard ActivityPub urls 5: Everything else, for everyone else. Managed challenge.

The traffic just completely stopped dead. The fediverse traffic continued unfettered. But the traffic coming in was legitimate (it’s mostly me, a handful of others that is so little traffic).

All it adds, is the interstitial page with the “are you human?” checkbox that for most people automatically checks. And the user moves on fine and can interact normally with the site. So for people it’s a very minor inconvenience and it stops bot traffic completely in its tracks.

What is annoying. I could make this MUCH better with regex matches. But, not only do they not allow free accounts to use regex (I understand). But “Pro” users cannot either. It’s only for business or above… Business accounts are eye wateringly expensive for a hobbyist!

Umm. I just tried old.reddit on a “gonewild” subreddit with no login even, and it was fine. Now I’m sure they’ll patch it out. But, seems to be an easy workaround as of right now.

Oh, I forgot about Azerothcore (which is a fork from Trinitycore, and absorbed some changes from certain private server source that has been released in the past).

Which you choose I think depends on what you want.

Trinitycore has a more strict development policy of doing things properly and not for example concentrating too much on getting boss fights etc “right”. It’s more of a technical project than “ready to go private server”.

Whereas (and this is as I understand it, I’ve not done any work for the project directly) Azerothcore is a bit more lax in their requirements. Now, don’t take this to mean they accept bad code. It just means they don’t have the stricter guidelines that trinitycore have.

I could be wrong though. I’ve been out of the game for a while now.

I think so. I would consider perhaps allowing a short time without power before doing that. To handle short cuts and brownouts.

So perhaps poll once per minute, if no power for more than 5 polls trigger a shutdown. Make sure you can provide power for at least twice as long as the grace period. You could be a bit more flash and measure the battery voltage and if it drops below a certain threshold send a more urgent shutdown on another gpio. But really if the batteries are good for 20mins+ then it should be quite safe to do it on a timer.

The logic could be a bit more nuanced, to handle multiple short power cuts in succession to shorten the grace period (since the batteries could be drained somewhat). But this is all icing on the cake I would say.