Melody Fwygon

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I’m not accounting for State laws; which may in fact be stricter. I’m talking about Federal Laws which might not explicitly forbid such things; so long as they’re done in an actually safe manner by professionals.

    But, as I said before, if the DEA believes it has the power to stop that none-the-less; that’s what they will do, without respect to if the law is actually legally unclear or borderline. Unfortunately many pharmaceutical places don’t care to invite the wrath of the DEA; even if what they’re doing could be considered permissible; so long as they do not synthesize an exact drug that the Feds specifically name as a controlled substance.

    Again; IANAL either. But I do think there’s a lot of room for small compounding pharmacies to synthesize various drugs to meet a patient’s needs quickly while waiting for proper shipments to arrive. There’s lots of compounds that are life-sustaining that do not fall under the DEA banner of authority.



  • I firmly think this would be a boon for many people; owning one of these is likely a lifeline that even small town physicians could utilize to dispense drugs freely or cheaply to patients in need.

    This is something that I think small-town pharmacies could use to create compounds in cases of drug shortages. I think tools and programs and small labs like what are discussed in the article are a positive force for good; and that they should be not only allowed, but encouraged, for many drugs that are expensive, unavailable to someone in need and can be readily synthesized safely with a basic college level of chemistry training by someone in a pharmacy.

    I think the potential risks and downsides are small right now; and I think more of it should be encouraged gently so that we can find out quickly what the flaws and limitations are so that we can put regulatory guardrails around it so that people do not harm themselves.


  • It feels like this vulnerability isn’t notable for the majority of users who don’t typically include “Being compromised by a Nation-State-Level Actor.”

    That being said; I do hope they get it fixed; and it looks like there’s already mitigations in place like protecting the authentication by another factor such as a PIN. That helps; for people who do have the rare threat model issue in play.

    The complexity of the attack also seems clearly difficult to achieve in any time frame; and would require likely hundreds of man-hours of work to pull off.

    If we assume they’re funded enough to park a van of specialty equipment close enough to you; steal your key and clone it; then return it before you notice…nothing you can do can defend against them.



  • No; Piracy won’t stop.

    Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.

    Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in ‘missed profits’.

    Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing “lost sales”; but that’s provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?


  • To be clear; the Nintendo Switch tends to trade fluently in cryptographic certificates.

    The MiG Switch has one of these certificates; one it’s creators likely copied from a legitimate Nintendo Switch game title. All games have such certificates and they are uniquely serialized; much like a GUID or UUID would be. These certificates are signed by the Game Dev studio, and then Nintendo in a typical certificate signing chain scheme; Nintendo signs the Game Dev Studio cert, which signs the Title certificate, which signs the unique cart or digital copy cert.

    This banning is usually achieved by banning either the lowest certificate in the chain or the one directly above it; or even the Dev Cert if it was compromised.

    So the MiG Switch carts are likely hardware banned. Your Nintendo Switch probably advertises to Nintendo which cart(s) were inserted into it recently by sharing the fingerprints of the certificates. Then Nintendo can basically kill the certificate assigned to your Switch system and prevent you from connecting online; as your Switch uses it’s own system cert to identify itself to Nintendo services.

    In all cases this is un-evade-able when connecting to the internet; as Nintendo Switch system certs are burned into a PROM chip on the main board at manufacture. This chip is a WORM chip, which can only be written once and read many billions of times.

    A critical part of the way they try and curb cheating in online play is checking the integrity of the runtime environment; which includes checking what titles were launched recently; and if that happens to include a certificate they’ve banned for being cloned by the MiG Switch; then you’ll quickly be banned by their anti-cheating hammer.

    Most important is those checks typically don’t take place naturally; they only occur when you’re connecting to the EShop, or connecting to NN to play multiplayer online. The devil therein unfortunately lies in the details; and if you’ve ever purchased a Digital Title that means your Switch is regularly connecting to the EShop to renew Digital License Tickets needed. They tend to expire every 72 hours and must be renewed by presenting an expired Ticket, a valid Ticket Granting Ticket (given to your Switch when you buy the title) and contacting “Mommy Nintendo” and asking “Mommy, May I?”. Yeah. DRM sucks.

    If all goes well; your Switch gets a shiny new set of tickets. Unfortunately Nintendo was paying attention to requests and will issue out regular waves of bans for systems detected cheating. You won’t know when this will happen, and it won’t prevent Nintendo from letting you play your games; you’ll just suddenly find your Switch banned from online play after such ban waves.





  • She’s such a narcissist that she couldn’t stay out of the spotlight. lol.

    Regardless; I doubt that any game she could develop would be any good; and I shudder to think of what deranged DRM scheme she will cook up to protect her own game. It’ll probably be worse than Denuvo, knowing how unstable she is.

    Genuinely, the scene is better without her hate filled screeds polluting the web. Her abilities might be appreciated more if she got some mental help and she could rejoin the scene as a positive force; not someone who lets their ego run rampant and spews hate at the slightest provocation.

    Unfortunately the scene is too cowardly to NUKE her output into obscurity until she cleans her spew up.


  • Honestly, there are low-touch/low-fuss distributions that exist that can be installed with some assistance from a more techy person in one’s life.

    But I will admit that Apple is more usable across the board.

    However, not everyone can really afford the extra cost of an Apple system; which genuinely does require re-buying a lot of other devices in order to get basic compatibility.

    For some, yes, Apple does solve the problem. For others, Linux can be accessible and easy to use; particularly if hardware being used is older, and the workflows are common enough.


  • The problem with PPA wasn’t anything to do with the method it uses. Given enough announcement, discourse and investigation by the community; it’s entirely possible that users in general would have accepted it.

    However; Mozilla did something very wrong by deploying this without asking the greater community. Point blank. That’s not good faith; and that did not allow for the community to go over the code and suggest fixes and express their concerns with how it works.

    Instead Mozilla took the lead and decided it will exist; quietly. Without consulting the community. Given that this is how most companies turn selfish, that alarms MANY people who are knowledgeable about how Mozilla typically operates, and it undermines public trust in Mozilla.






  • I can already see how Advertisers AND Websites will collude and break this one.

    • Specifically placed ads; targeted at specific website pages which a majority of their target grouping will visit.
    • Generate an ad that will specifically reside on a page deep inside of the site; think 4+ clicks deep; which is intensely personalized to their target. 1
    • Ad will trigger; register “Impression” and be boxed up into Differential Privacy set by the DAP.
    • Since that’s the only ad targeted for that specific page, any impression is an answer of 1 or ‘True’.
    • Through microtargeting of these deep pages they can learn a lot about what people do online and could potentially break Differential Privacy.

    1 - In this example the URI being targeted could be something like https://www.example.com/zhuli/do/the/* in such a way that when you visit https://example.com/zhuli/do/the/thing/order.php is always recorded.


  • All research based on smartphones is based on anecdotal evidence.

    It’s even worse if phones are on even without any sort of notification, like vibration.

    This is false. There is minimal acceptable evidence that a phone that is online, in a pocket or purse, in a complete silence mode configuration, with no vibration or sound, affects anyone negatively.

    I thought you were for banning use during instruction time.

    All time spent at any K-12 school institution or local country equivalent; including transition time; is considered instructional time. At least it was by any school principal I’ve ever spoken to, many of whom were holders of American PhDs in education. Laws in all 50 states reflect this typically.

    I think children must be taught how to self-regulate with phones for sure. Much like anything and everything; children must be taught how. I personally never struggled with this because all campuses in my home town would confiscate it at least until End of Day. Sometimes they’d attempt to hold the device longer; but that just resulted in parents going to the police and them being forced to return the item. They’d sometimes hold the item until your parent retrieved it however; and that was allowed as long as they returned it the moment the parent requested it. So you really couldn’t rely on parents retrieving it too many times.

    I did however get the entire district policy hard limited from “on school grounds” to “In building, from bell to bell” because of the aforementioned involvement of police.

    Similarly I will point out we had devices like Game Boys and other portable consoles growing up in the 90s.


  • Having a smart phone in their pocket is damaging.

    There is not enough scientific evidence of this; and oftentimes studies of this nature are not randomized and controlled; but instead rely on anecdotes and self-reporting by parents.

    Outside of class time sounds good, but it really means that students become fixated on checking all their notifications between classes. This is an experience blocker. Instead of engaging with their peers or teachers, they’re screen zombies caught in addictive dark patterns, generating anxiety constantly all day.

    If you read; you would know I already advocate for the students being unable to use their phone during school hours. Their phones would remain locked up; much like the article mentions; for the entire school-day.

    The only thing I advocate for is for them to have a phone in general so that they have it for when they need it; either in case of emergency or otherwise. Yes; that does mean they have access to it before the schoolday begins and after the final bell rings. That’s intended.

    I do believe it is possible to raise children to resist the addiction; but it has to start early.

    As for inflicting a ‘dumbphone’ on a child; I do think that’s not necessary all the time. it depends on the child and is definitely one way a parent can control a child’s screen time.