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Submission + - Slashdot Alum Samzenpus's Fractured Veil Hits Kickstarter

CmdrTaco writes: Long time Slashdot readers remember Samzenpus,who posted over 17,000 stories here, sadly crushing my record in the process! What you might NOT know is that he was frequently the Dungeon Master for D&D campaigns played by the original Slashdot crew, and for the last few years he has been applying these skills with fellow Slashdot editorial alum Chris DiBona to a Survival game called Fractured Veil. It's set in a post apocalyptic Hawaii with a huge world based on real map data to explore, as well as careful balance between PVP & PVE. I figured a lot of our old friends would love to help them meet their kickstarter goal and then help us build bases and murder monsters! The game is turning into something pretty great and I'm excited to see it in the wild!

Comment Automated Updates (Score 1) 41

This sort of thing is exactly what makes forced automatic updates a good idea.

Whoever set up these email servers should have also configured unattended updates and periodic reboots. And perhaps some automated email when the base operating system reaches the end of support. Or simply shut down. Assume it is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for example. After 2021 it should just refuse to run services.

Because it seems obvious from stories like this that too many people don't know how to maintain technology. The only thing that gets their attention is a boot to the head.

Comment Re:In other words, don't panic (Score 1) 90

ISPs have broken the Internet, which is why new protocols don't work well. They buy crap middleware boxes which only understand IPv4 UDP and TCP, or worse, only HTTP.

In the name of "security" they reject anything they don't understand. And since ISPs are cheap they never update these pieces of junk if they can help it.

And then there's NAT which has to understand the protocol so it can rewrite it.

Since no one can effectively use a new protocol on the Internet, there's no users, so they can point out that there's no demand for new protocols, so there's no need to pay for new hardware or software updates.

The future is what Google's doing with QUIC: encrypt everything and don't give the ISP jerks any chance whatever of screwing with it.

Comment Languages (Score 1) 370

Depends on how you defne "know", but all of these I can get going in and look things up as I need them.

I'm really good with C, C++, Go and Perl.
Decent with Python, Ruby, Bourne shell, C#, Javascript
Forgotten a lot but it'll come back: Java, Scala, Visual Basic, LISP (elisp really).
Still learning: Rust, D, Haskell, F#

Once you've learned procedural, object oriented, and functional styles a particular language is just details. And build tools and libraries and debuggers and analyzers, the whole ecosystem around each one.

Or how you define "language." Does stuff like Make, Ninja, CMake, Autotools, Ant, Maven, Gradle, Cargo, NPM, even count? Or SQL, HTML, CSS? Git, Valgrind, perf, GDB, LLDB? They're almost small languages with all their options and scripting.

Comment Re:Why UDP (Score 1) 258

Most "middle boxes" won't forward unknown protocols. They're too paranoid about security. Sure, they're willing to transmit absolutely anything over port 443. But an unknown IP type might be a HACKER! Oh noes!

Not only that, lots of them break unknown TCP options. Or TCP windows. I remember years when TCP ECN and window sizes wouldn't work on random internet sites because of their short-sighted, STUPID firewall boxes.

That's why QUIC is completely encrypted. Random hardware and software providers have proven they don't know what they're doing. So don't let them see into the protocol at all. They would only break it.

Comment Re:Why? They can't compete? (Score 1) 92

In actually poor countries with actual poor people, some of them don't have tax-funded mass transportation at all. And yet they manage to do it as private enterprise and make money doing it.

Some guy buys an old truck, fixes it up, drives it around the city with people hanging off the sides while his cousin collects fees or kicks them off the truck.

This doesn't require air conditioning, union drivers and union maintenance technicians. All it needs is free enterprise and an appalling lack of safety regulations.

Comment Re:Two reasons all recent Intel CPUs have this fla (Score 2) 79

Because AMD is careful not to cross privilege levels but Spectre attacks are user mode to user mode. So even though they may be two different users they are still in Ring 3. Spectre can only be used against kernel code if the kernel is convinced to run a user's code for some reason. Like an eBPF byte-code, for example.

But it can work really well for a sandboxed program to steal information from outside the sandbox.

So AMD is still vulnerable to speculation attacks.

Comment Re:This is What Happens When Developers Make Busin (Score 1) 304

I can't convince anyone without a copy of Microsoft's Edge revision control. So I guess think whatever you like.

But if they didn't create a new revision history, then yes it is the same browser. Firefox is still Firefox even though there's nothing left of the original. Linux is still Linux. I think there was an old bit of TTY code and some floppy driver code in the latest Linux left from 1993, but all the rest of it changed, and it's still the same thing.

Comment Re:This is What Happens When Developers Make Busin (Score 1) 304

By replacing small pieces of Firefox with new pieces that use Rust, they are avoiding the Netscape problem. They aren't rewriting the whole thing. But one day the whole browser will be Rust, replaced a piece at a time.

You don't think Microsoft Edge still uses pieces of Spyglass or Mosaic do you? And yet, at no point did they rewrite the whole thing.

Comment Re:I can't believe this is considered acceptable. (Score 0, Troll) 322

I've come to the conclusion that there's only about 500 Linux desktop users in the WORLD who have PulseAudio problems. They're all the same people posting on forums about it.

Every other Linux desktop user uses the distro default which is usually PulseAudio, and it works.

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