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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

    As an example of this, one of the easiest and most performant methods a nation has of blocking a website is dictating which DNS records its ISPs return for domains.

    This has the advantages that it doesn’t require traffic inspection and doesn’t slow traffic at all.

    But it has the disadvantages that it has an all-or-none effect on the domain e.g. it can’t be used to bock specific pages.

    It can also be bypassed by simply using an international DNS server. There are people bypassing this kind of censorship without even knowing they are doing so.


  • There’s always some sort of excuse with them. Have to go pick him up from the bus stop, have to go pick him up from school because they got in trouble, dance recital during the middle of the day, always something.

    I am a single parent and work the same hours per timesheet and get the same allotment of personal leave per year as everybody else at my employer.

    If I happen to use that personal leave to pick up a kid who threw up in their classroom while somebody else uses it to see their optometrist or attend a funeral isn’t really anybody’s business.

    I take one early afternoon each week to take my kid to an after school activity, this puts a weekly 2 or 3 hour deficit in my timesheet that I either make up by working a bit longer on the other days or if the sheet doesn’t balance I make up the difference by spending some annual leave. (I try to avoid using AL like this because I would rather save it for holidays but it is occasionally required.)

    I don’t telegraph all of this timesheet accounting to my colleagues, they will know which day I’m leaving early that term and the rest isn’t really their business. At the end of the day/month/year I have my schedule OKed by my line manager and work the commitments of my contract.

    But when it comes to ordinary normal people who don’t have kids, it feels like there’s a lot more scrutiny. Why do you need a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day? Why do you need to go pick up a prescription at lunch time, like why can’t you work through lunch?

    If your employer / manager is second guessing your leave thats an issue between you and them and shouldn’t have your looking at your peers with resentment.







  • This wasn’t as general as many people think:

    1. It applied only to “auxiliary games” so anything using the primary engine was ok e.g. running in the fog for assassins creed or practicing moves in a combat game.
    2. It applied only to US and Japan so anywhere else was unrestricted. The entire PAL region was unaffected.

    But also:

    1. The patent was held by Namco / Bandai Namco, they are a prolific publisher but made very limited use of their ability to use loading screen mini games freely.
    2. The patent expired in 2015, despite this very few games have used loading screen mini games since.

    https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632

    I can only conclude that the industry just wasn’t that interested in the idea.









  • I think Iwantmyname may be the worst player in this story.

    Everyone else kind of did what they were expected to do:

    1. Itch provides a platform for user generated content and took down some questionable content when asked.
    2. Funko is an IP based toy company and asked a tech company to protect their IP online
    3. BrandShield is a fucking cancer of a service that acted aggressively to protect its client’s interests

    But:

    1. Iwantmyname is meant to provide a domain name registration service, it’s a cutthroat industry where often times customer service is viewed as an unnecessary cost, but itch was their client and they should have been helping itch respond to the notice in a manner that allowed it to continue to exist. Instead they were willing to shut it down without any real dialog.

    The rest might be decent business partners if you are looking for their kind of service but Iwantmyname isn’t to be trusted.