ah the old debunked story "but crypto is used only for crime"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/haileylennon/2021/01/19/the-fal...

what chance are we even talking of a false positive?

> it doesn't make sense to use NetGuard

unless you use any other phone that is not a google pixel running GrapheneOS

Which is literally the meaning of "With GrapheneOS, [...] it doesn't make sense to use NetGuard", isn't it?

LineageOS has this too, and it’s available on a fair bit of non-Pixel phones.

LineageOS doesn't really cut off the INTERNET access properly. Graphene's approach is more robust. I still wonder why such an important feature is not in the AOSP itself

Hmm, I haven’t looked much into it, but I assumed they both expose the same mechanism from AOSP?

> still wonder why such an important feature is not in the AOSP itself

Really? Remind yourself who works on Android. Google have been removing functionalities that benefit privacy for ever, and then put half backed alternative buried under tons of settings.

I am well aware of that. AOSP still has quite a lot of contributors outside of google

Which company decides which contributions get accepted?

defeats the whole point of changing identity if you reveal who you were

You reveal it to a single (trustworthy) party that you want to reestablish contact with.

Of course, this assumes you wouldn't want to reestablish contact with a non-trustworthy party.

A trail of evidence is still a trail of evidence.

creating an account seems to fail

Thanks for notifying. Could you tell me which browser do you use? And if you also use an adblock or something similar

sorry for the late reply, i am using Chromium for android with the adblock enabled

Hey! No problem at all. The mistake was mine... The "create" button was disabled, you needed a tester code... Now you don't! So you can try again if you want :)

there is no deeper level, they want to stop soccer streaming, simple as that.

it already is, the entire protocol is reverse engineered, there are tools to automatically deobfuscate the code and there is already a full reimplementation of minecraft that also supports servers

If that's the case, how come nobody seems to be writing improved Minecraft clients?

Ever since I started playing it in the beta days I've been frustrated with how poorly Minecraft performs relative to what it's showing on the screen. (Not that that stopped me from pouring hundreds of hours into the damn thing.)

Well, they do? Sodium, for instance. It's a mod, not a full rewrite, rewriting the client from scratch would mean a lot of boring work like speaking with Mojang's server, but I understand Sodium basically rips out and replaces the entire graphics pipeline of the client.

There are tons. There are mods that rewrite graphics rendering, chunk loading, multi-threading, ...

Yeah, it was always weird how 32x32x48 extreme reactors lagged the game whenever you looked at them, but the moment you looked away everything was fine.

Does that mean there are open source clients that can connect to servers without a microsoft account?

the client has to authenticate with a central server and present a ticket to the server it wants to connect to. otherwise clients could impersonate each other easily.

There are server mods that remove this requirement though.

sure, iirc it used to even just be a setting? online-mode=false

most servers leave it enabled because preventing player impersonation is pretty important so people can't just easily grief each other. some piracy servers implemented their own auth on top.

If the server is configured to not require server auth.

a very big amount of european news websites are doing this anyway and it seems it's not being enforced, so i think it's more grey area

Illegal in Europe: https://www.cookieyes.com/blog/cookie-wall/

All major German newspapers still do it

i have a C906 running linux, how can i mitigate this vulnerability?

Most likely you have the mitigation already in place, that is disabeling the XTheadVector extension. The regular distributions don't enable it, since it's a non standard incompatible vendor extension based on a draft spec.

When I wanted to benchmark their implementation last year I patched a kernel to enable it, and needed to consult the open source part of the core [0] to figure out that they placed the enable CSR bit in a different location than the final ratified spec. [1]

[0] https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc906 (doesn't include XTheadVector extension)

[1] https://github.com/camel-cdr/rvv-d1

From the article:

> No, software updates or patches cannot fix this vulnerability because it is a hardware bug. The only mitigation is to disable the vector extension in the CPU, which unfortunately impacts the CPU’s performance.

This almost won't impact CPU performance at all, because basically no software/packages use the XTheadVector custom extension.

Do you let people run arbitrary code on your linux box? If not, you don't have anything to worry about, as far as I can see.

the price difference from usb to usb-c is less than 2 cents

You would be surprised at the amount of effort and success $0.01 represents at BigCo. Even when projected sales are in 6 figure range.

devil's advocate: cables for an average user is a different story. also not to forget the vast range of cables already existing out there.

also "proper" usb-c support is another can of worms, and maybe sticking to an older standard gives you freedom from all that.

A USB-C port that only supports USB2 data and power only needs a few resistors across some pins to trigger legacy modes and disable high current/voltage operation. All the extra bits are the things that jack up the cost.

USB3 and altmodes require extra signal lines and tolerances in the cable.

High-voltage/current requires PD negotiation (over the CC pins AFAIK)

Data and power role swaps require muxes and dual-role controllers.

That's all the stuff that makes USB-C a pain in the ass, and it's all the sort of thing RPi Nanos don't support.

You're confusing USB C and USB 3.1+. USB C is just the physical spec. You can design a cheap device that will only support USB 2 if you just connect ground, Vbus, D+ and D- and gasp add two resistors. It will work just as well as the micro-usb plug.

completely valid, but i would like to think the org is still designing for accessibility for newbies in mind.

like you said, the connector does not have to follow the standards. i have seen hdmi ports being used to carry pcie signal (not a good like but here is one such device https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/cards_adapter/pce164p-no6-ver...) amgon other things. it is still non-standard behaviour.

Using an USB C port to carry an USB 2.0 signal is perfectly within the standards.