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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.

    I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
    I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.


  • My grandpa had developed the habit of falling out of his bed. The first time I was afraid that he was gonna die on the spot as I’d heard it, but it eventually became such a “regular” occurrence that I didn’t think of immediate death anymore. This particular day, he’d fallen twice. They brought him to a nearby hospital to get a check-up. I was worried sick that this time something was actually wrong, or that he might’ve broken a bone or something. Turns out he was fine! No broken bones or anything. Just one teeny tiny minor issue…

    When he was brought to the hospital, he was accidentally placed in the area with people who were brought there with covid. I hadn’t been able to see him in months because of the restrictions, and even when I did go the months prior it was always with far distance, masks and in short bursts. I did everything I had been told to do to “keep him safe”, “ease up the workload in the hospitals” and all those government campaigns and all that, only for him to die because of this (seeming) serious neglect from medical professionals.



  • I once had a screw on a laptop that wouldn’t unscrew and eventually somewhat lost its shape. I had asked my uncle for help, who gave me the solution. I think it was slightly less bad than this, but it might help:

    1. Apply WD40 around the edges of the screw, such that it could enter the hole
    2. Apply it to the screw head
    3. Hold your screwdriver in the hole and gently tap it with a hammer a couple of times
    4. Slowly attempt to screw it out, whilst applying firm downward pressure on the screw

    Note that the amounts of WD40 you have to apply are tiny. We’re talking drops of the stuff. It might be best to attempt to spray something else, and use the residue on the nozzle to apply it













  • I don’t know if this would ‘satisfy’ them (I know it wouldn’t, I’m referring strictly to the legal stuff). From what I’ve heard, the point Nintendo was making wrt the encryption is that aquiring prod.keys in any way, shape or form is illegal. Of course, creating an emulator for a system that only runs games that contain encryption which can only be undone with prod.keys requires the developers to have this file. Since they’ve successfully made an emulator, this implies that the Yuzu team has in fact obtained a copy of this file and done something naughty.

    The problem is that, regardless of whether or not the decryption happens in Yuzu or in another completely separate program, modern Nintendo games do not come unencrypted. This means that someone at some point has to decrypt the files, and thus has to use prod.keys to do so. According to Nintendo, using and creating any emulator for a modern system requires someone to do something illegal at one point in the chain, and therefore emulation (by parties not explicitly authorized by Nintendo) cannot legally exist.

    I say that Nintendo should piss off after I’ve bought something from them and that I should be allowed to do with my property as I please, but even the most legally and morally correct way to emulate is not okay with them.

    This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights? Why go through all the effort of clean room reverse engineering a console instead of blatantly copying as much of the official code base as possible if the legal system punishes you all the same? Why limit yourself to only emulating games you personally ripped from your own cartridges if the act of ripping has already placed your actions into the “illegal” category?