Serves a need. As in meets some other need. Which I’ve already addressed. Further I even addressed what SPECIFIC needs that it could possible be serving.

Religion isn’t the need. Social interaction and the feeling of belonging and belief are the needs. Religion can and does fill that for many.

Social interaction: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/we-are-hard-wired-to-be-social-248746
Feeling of belonging: https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/is-having-a-sense-of-belonging-important

I’m done with you. You’re either purposefully obtuse, or a troll. It’s people like you who ruin actual discussion with people who could actually be educated and turned away from the fictitious man in the sky. You make up shit to address that nobody said. You ignore EVERYTHING other people post just to post your own drivel. It’s fucking useless and pointless. 3 seconds of googling could have saved yourself from looking like a fool.

Edit: you even go out of your way to somehow “break” the definition of clearly when in the previous fucking sentence I literally commit what amounts to the ultimate sin in nearly every abrahamic religion all while implying I somehow care about those religions. You’re special, and not in the good way.

Remember when russia had a star gate and then the US broke theirs so they had to use the russian one? Ah yes.

SGC had the BC-304 at that point. They could have just grabbed a gate and DHD from any uninhabited planet.

It’s actually a major plot flaw that Russia was given anything at all since there was no DHD at that point (and thus any DHD obtained would have overridden any other gate on the planet). Russia had no pull, other than jumping the gun and telling the public at large.

God… Why do I know all of this so readily?

Well that’s just not true, but ignoring that…

No. Let’s not ignore that. If you’re going to call someone a liar, own up to it. The comment that spawned this chain says verbatim

It serves a need.

It being “religion” and “a need” would imply another, different “need”. Otherwise it would have been simpler and more direct to say something like “Religion is a need”.

I didn’t scream anything

Coming back and repeating the same shit that I just addressed from the previous comment … Constant repetition is literally someone shoving fingers in their ears and scream “LALALALALALA”. You even did it again in this post by stating “no one needs religion” when I already addressed that and even agreed with that sentiment, but wanted to specifically caveat why religion would count for “It serves a need”.

Nobody said that anyone “needs” religion. Quite the contrary. The statement is “religion fills needs” to put it another way. I even clarified and made it clear that if you can find something else that fills the needs for those people that you could likely replace religion. But for some reason you keep trucking forward with your comments acting like someone said something they didn’t.

The only reason I could think of that you would want to argue against that position is if you believed it wasn’t true.

What the fuck logic is this? So I must believe that Religion is a need then? I’m atheist. I stated that outright from the beginning in my first post on this thread. Fuck “God”, “Yahweh”, “Mohammed”, or any other god that you or anyone else believes in, they’re all fake. I clearly don’t believe that religion is a “need”.

Nobody said it was. Just that it does meet some needs.

Until you somehow convince those who have those needs that religion isn’t the correct way to meet those needs, you’re not going to get anywhere screaming that religion isn’t necessary. Those people firmly believe it is as it meets those needs for them and don’t have something else to do so.

Religion isn’t the need. Social interaction and the feeling of belonging and belief are the needs. Religion can and does fill that for many.

And before you attack me, I’m atheist.

Does no one care about power consumption?

It takes several SSDs to make up the capacity difference between an HDD.

I run 62 16TB HDDs. To make up the same capacity in SSDs I need 2-4x the bays. I don’t know of any cheap systems that can hold ~250 bays of ssds.

So an SSD that may only take 1-3w all day… 2-4x that is already equal to the HDD regardless. You’re not going to make any ROI metric here.

My guess is that it’s the easiest and cheapest way to set up “MFA”.

TOTP is cheaper.

SMS is actually expensive at scale. An example would be Signal, the messenger app that doesn’t use SMS. They have overhead for sending backup codes/new account creation/Verification/etc… https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/ 6 million a year. API integrations for SMS messages/codes are still like 1-5 cents per message.

TOTP’s requirements? A reasonably accurate clock on the server, and storing the shared secret in a database.

and will just pop off fast solutions to things like the deep human need for connection like “use zoom, duh.”

There are other needs as well. Like not being imprisoned. And thinking about why you fled from the country in the first place and searched for additional citizenship might have helped make such a decision to not find yourself in such a situation.

I love that you glossed over the actual argument though! All while assuming that you were right. You don’t know why she was there… But assuming that telecommunication wouldn’t have been sufficient in order to maintain her freedom… That’s just silly.

Stopping processes is actually a user space action.

Now you backpedal and say

Pretty much all code is making requests to the kernel.

But I don’t know what I’m talking about? Sure. We’ll go with that if it makes you feel good. I only literally taught it at a post-grad level at an R1 institution, but what do I know.

It’s side stepping the kernel. That’s the whole point.

You’re getting it! Kind of at least. The anti-cheat actually modifies the kernel (in an extension kind of way, like drivers do). That’s the point though. Which seems to have repeatedly whooshed over your head. But I can only say it in so many ways and be ignored. Good luck. Hope I don’t run into your code.

Stopping processes is actually a user space action. You can do it without admin rights btw. Even if it popped the admin screen that’s still not a kernel level action.

Absolutely not. Task management is the job of the operating system/kernel. You can request to end a job/task. The kernel will do it on it’s own time. UAP prompts are attempts to elevate permissions so that you can access higher kernel calls.

https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/lectures/syscalls.html#linux-system-calls-implementation

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/111625/how-does-linux-kill-a-process

You can make requests the to the kernel. If you have permission/ownership to the process the kernel will work through the sigterm/sigkill to meet your request. It is not a user space action at all to kill a process, you make requests to the kernel to do it. Hell in linux it’s even more obvious as you can instruct the kernel on HOW you would like to kill the task and even then it may not follow your direction. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/kill.1.html with kill being a kernel tool. If you spawned the process, then you have permission/ownership to the process. But my point in the previous post was that anti-cheats can reach into the system, reading dlls and such that are absolutely NOT user space to begin with, require elevation beyond user space to install.

Yeah that it’s considered malware. I did Google it and there’s nothing saying that.

Seriously? You can’t find anything? You sure about that? Cause I can literally pull up thousands of articles and forum threads by literally typing “is vanguard anti-cheat malware?” or “is easy anti-cheat malware?”

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/288793-easy-anti-cheat-launcher-detection/

Heuristics detect these things for what they are. Anti-virus software have to whitelist them because people choose to play the games anyway.

https://www.techguy.org/threads/is-valorant-vanguard-a-malicious-rootkit-or-not.1267682/

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-controversy-over-riots-vanguard-anti-cheat-software-explained/

The name is appropriate, because Vanguard doesn’t just sniff around for cheats when Valorant is running: It starts up with Windows and keeps an eye on other processes whether or not you’re playing Valorant at the time. […] Vanguard detects software with vulnerabilities which could be exploited by cheat makers, and blocks some of it.

https://www.sp-cy.com/article/is-valorants-anticheat-spyware/

Vanguard cannot be easily fully disabled since after manually quitting the process, a system reboot will be required to be able to open Valorant again.
The EULA prevents any legal recourse against Riot Games.
Valorant/Vanguard sends encrypted data to Riot. Which is Chinese owned by a giant corporation called Tencent.

Let’s attack this question from another perspective. Do you trust a games developer to properly develop kernel code? Most people BARELY trust Microsoft to do it these days. And you can’t review/evaluate it yourself at all. You have no fucking clue what they’re doing and never will. We’ve seen what happens when random companies inject shit into the kernel like crowdstrike did. You think that these anti-cheat softwares are acting in your interest when they’re being implemented and paid by a corporation? How can you look at these anti-cheats that have made backdoors on systems, cause people everywhere unstable kernels/BSODs, send data about your system without permission, interacts with software on your system that isn’t their code, etc… and say they’re not malicious?

Visiting family perhaps? Oh well then I guess she deserves it for having the audacious stupidity to visit her parents in a shitty country where shitty things happen?

Honestly… Yes. You left the country. Obtained a second citizenship. And donated to the opposing side of an active war. If you have something in between your ears you stay out of the country. I’m not here to victim blame at all. If you need to see family, I get it… but Zoom exists. You can’t argue

There are also family, professional opportunities, and cultural ties to consider.

While in the very next sentence identifying that she did exactly that and moved anyway.

This is already a risk whether via the existing thumbnail storage

Not anymore. You can opt out of it for the most part.

# Leave images unchanged, don’t generate any local thumbnails for post urls. Instead the the
# Opengraph image is directly returned as thumbnail
“None”

Yeah that was 19.4. It’s doesn’t proxy everything unless explicitly set to. Just thumbnails I believe. But I could be wrong. And many instance owners would be allergic to that as it leaves them on the hook for storing content. For example… someone posts CSAM… a copy of that is now on your server. You get police raided and you’re fucked.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/705e86eb4c0079d0775f0c1490968f1183095fcc/config/defaults.hjson#L51

Actually going over it briefly looks like it has a few available options for what it will cache…

I refuse to enable it myself for the above reason. I would venture 99% of instances out there would also refuse for liability and bandwidth costs.

Can you see which communities I follow?

Wouldn’t need to see it directly. If someone was to tag enough posts they could deduce it over time. Eg, I could post on every community on every lemmy in the fediverse and over time I can be reasonably sure which communities you follow as you’d see these post in your feed and tracking images would populate your view of them as you scrolled. Would take very little automation to do it.

Which feeds I watch (and when I do that)?

Yes… because it’s possible to use “normal” images to track who’s downloading those images, what addresses/user agent/referrers over time is powerful. After enough time, it’s entirely possible to deduce which feeds/communities you’re watching. Eg, if I post 10 different items, and 3 of them come back to your specific IP address, I would have a really good estimate on which feeds you’re likely on. Do this at scale and I bet you could deduce it completely and probably with much less time and hassle than you’re thinking. Hell because of my reverse proxy I can see EVERYONE who loads my profile picture. I see ALL the users to run into my posts on complete fucking accident. Lemmy loads /inbox to pull that data.

Hell this is the core reason why everyone pushes back on 3rd party cookies these days. It made this tracking trivial. Tagging every page with some image or asset that forces a connection is effectively the same thing.

Who I interact with through DMs?

I’ve already stated clearly that this would be the hardest thing. Just because there’s one or 2 things that would be hard or impossible to obtain (even over time) passively or as a complete outsider doesn’t make the rest of the argument wrong. All it would take is either site operator to leak the data, any type of MITM, etc… to leak the plaintext content of your DMs. Hell federation leaks where it sends data outside of the expected subscribers has happened. Then you have to also realize that many instances use services like Cloudflare or other WAF solutions to stop DDOS’s and such… Those nodes can read the plaintext DMs and all federation data. Any malicious actor that manages to break any single part of the chain has access to it all… and it can be quite trivial in many instances to do so.

The Lemmy system is not “secure”. It’s not meant to be. Everything on the fediverse is public and all of your actions here are trackable by many parties in many ways even outside of the operators of both ends of the federation action itself. Including how you’re connecting and using the system.

DMs alone, and actual hashed passwords are not really needed for a third party threat to act malicious and get all of the aggregated data they’d ever want. You pointed out specifics, I answered those specifics. Then you pivoted to other shit that I ALREADY outlined. This argument is super disingenuous.

Source for what in specific?

That stopping processes is a kernel action? Go ahead. Open powershell and ask it to close some other system process… The UAP prompt (if you’re on windows, linux will just fail silently most of the time unless you sudo or are root) that shows up is the kernel validating that you even have permissions to do that. The kernel handles ALL task scheduling/management. When you close something you’re asking the kernel to do it. The kernel also handles ALL file management and driver management (drivers being extensions of the kernel). So the fact that it can read other active DLLs and such hooked into other processes (say your graphics drivers) is literally proof.

That industry agrees that it’s malware? Depends on which part of industry I suppose. But if it’s able to do all these actions at the kernel level, and attached itself it to other software to install, often doesn’t uninstall when you remove the game it was attached to, AND gets flagged by anti-viruses that don’t have it whitelisted yet… It’s definitionally malware. Go search for “Is <insert anticheat> malware”. Very few people will argue that they’re not.

Hell it’s possible for anti-cheats to write to UEFI if they really wanted to. There’s no legitimate reason for that level of access, 0, none.

I’ve addressed the points you’ve brought up. I run my own instance. I can collect just about everything in the DB tables I’ve seen without being logged into the instance with some external work.

Are you trying to get my point? If you have a specific item that you believe is stored on a lemmy server that you think isn’t possible to obtain. I’m all ears. otherwise I think this conversation is done. This kind of response is pointless and I’m not interested in continuing if you’re going to act like that.

The hardest thing to collect would be private messages, and login information (which is hashed btw, so even your server operator doesn’t really know it). But messages are plaintext and openly federated. All the other information is really really easy to collect through other means.

They have kernel access… They can control anything since they’re in the kernel. And yes, I’ve seen it.

If you remember back in the late 2000’s early 2010’s there were a boatload of apps that would hook into games to do things like display overlays for chats (Teamspeak for example, overwolf as another.) some kernel anti-cheats would stop those processes from starting up.

But don’t take my word for it.

https://www.pcgamer.com/according-to-experts-on-kernel-level-anticheat-two-things-are-abundantly-clear-1-its-not-perfect-and-2-its-not-going-anywhere/

I’m less worried about developers abusing kernel access, and more concerned with potential vulnerabilities introduced for third-party actors to exploit. Rigney cited two examples: the infamous Extended Copy Protection (XCP) from Sony, which bad actors used to compromise affected systems, as well as a backdoor vulnerability introduced by Street Fighter 5’s kernel level anticheat. In 2022, a ransomware developer also took advantage of Genshin Impact’s kernel level anticheat to disable antivirus processes.

Introduces backdoors to be used by malicious actors.

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-controversy-over-riots-vanguard-anti-cheat-software-explained/

Vanguard detects software with vulnerabilities which could be exploited by cheat makers, and blocks some of it.

Blocks external softwares that it deems “vulnerable”

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/xf1cwr/the_insanity_of_eas_anticheat_system_by_a_kernel/

This is far from the first time that boot level firmware or kernel mode code inserted via patches or drivers have been used to install spyware, but every time I see it happen I want to warn users about the consequences, and provide some information about the danger.

Kernel devs beg users to not allow this shit.

Just look it up. All sorts of articles and experts have spoken on it.

Taking kernel level actions to stop processes on YOUR machine is absolutely taking control of the system.

Kernel level anti-cheats meet every requirement. Just because you think there’s gymnastics going on doesn’t make it so. It’s actually well established in the security field that they count.

but that instance owners have even more, probably more valuable info, like IP addresses from which not just geolocation but also wake times, device usage patterns and other gnarly stuff could be extracted, that could - together with other personalized surveillance info (like the usual adware stuff) - be aggregated to give a bigger picture.

I have IP behind the geolocation. How do you think that I know the geolocation? It’s an IP lookup. My interface that I shown in the image just doesn’t publish it because I don’t care personally. What I use that service for is simply to track where sensitive emails/documents go. Not to track lemmy. I don’t need specific resolutions. Just to know if they leak outside of what I expected.

Device patterns? The app you use is the app you use. That would be given away via your browser header. I also collect that with the tracking image. Just once again. Not shown in the graph cause I don’t care to track it personally (I’m only doing this as an example, not to actually aggregate data).

If you use lemmy over the web browser, browsers don’t really give up that much information unless you’re google themselves. In which case apparently chrome gives up a boatload of information to google’s domains.

not-so-public information

You’d have to give me an example of any of what you’re referencing. I can collect IP, web headers, access times, and if I tag enough pages or mark the image as non-cacheable could even see multiple views/accesses (you see views higher than actual visitors) I can track your movement across all of the fediverse.

that one can get some info about me through my (public) actions

Simply “viewing” the page (which pulls the image and is not necessarily “public”) is a direct rebuttal to obtaining data that isn’t “public”.

Malware isn’t defined by its privileges but what it does.

Correct… and anything that intercepts all system calls and forces closed applications that it deems “not safe” even if I the user specifically run it is malware. You bet your ass they feed back information to the mothership too.

And btw, if you’re accepting the “Spyware” moniker from the other comment chain. Spyware is a form/category of malware.

Definition from Malwarebytes:

Hostile, intrusive, and intentionally nasty, malware seeks to invade, damage, or disable computers, computer systems, networks, tablets, and mobile devices, often by taking partial control over a device’s operations.

Hostile - it’s not meant to help you at all. If you’re doing something deemed “unsafe” in their eyes. They will take action up to and including stealing your money that you paid for the game. intrusive - embeds itself in the kernel Intentionally nasty - Well it’s not accidentally nasty.

invade - attached to games with little to no input on what you’re installing. disable computer systems - specifically the software you paid for Taking partial control over a device’s operations - the whole fucking kernel.

I’d say meeting the VAST majority of the definition and at least one portion of each category is sufficient to call them all malware.