Only HR, IT, and management are believed to be unaffected by the cuts, which reportedly would see the developer’s title, 2016’s Disney Magic Kingdoms, transferred to Gameloft’s studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Kharkiv? Damn. I mean, Kharkiv is an active war zone. As in “I read regular news reports about fighting there”.

This was today:

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-attacks-kharkiv-with-fab-500-bomb-for-first-time-injuring-4/

Russia attacks Kharkiv with FAB-500 gliding bomb for first time, injuring 4

searches further

And it’s not just casually using the term to refer to Kharkiv Oblast, either. The studio is in the city, slightly on the Russia side.

10 Nezalezhnosti Ave, BC Kvartal, 61022 Kharkiv, Ukraine

EDIT: They aren’t in the district that was bombed above, but they’re one block away from said district.

I mean, the whole thing doesn’t need to be destroyed for a bunch of pieces to be broken off.

I haven’t used it recently, but last time I did, I used MO2 with vanilla WINE, just setting my WINE prefix to the Skyrim Proton prefix. WINE and Proton would convert the registry in the WINE prefix back and forth each time one launched. I haven’t used SteamTinkerLaunch.

Prior to that, I used Wrye Bash, which was a mess to get working in Linux – but could run natively, at least at one point, with some prodding. I’ve also run it under WINE. It took a lot of massaging. I don’t recommend that route unless you can program, know Python and are willing to get your hands dirty.

And I also had a stint where I wrote my own scripts to reconstruct the modded environment from scratch.

My most-recent attempt for Bethesda modding was in Starfield, with a much-simpler CLI mod manager, this. I have gotten some mods working but not others; don’t know if it’s a case-folding issue. Will need more experimentation. It doesn’t have the conflict-diagnosis tools that Wrye Bash does, or I assume MO2 probably does (though I haven’t run into). I don’t think it supports Skyrim, Fallout 4, or Fallout 76; that probably matters at least insofar as mod managers for those need to merge leveled lists. My (brief) impression is that the Starfield modding community is heading down the direction of avoiding needing the mod manager to do that, having a mod that merges that stuff dynamically at game runtime.

the performance is not great.

Uh. The performance of MO2 or Skyrim?

MO2…I don’t recall, it might not have been snappy, but I don’t recall it being especially unusable. Certainly not at the level that I wouldn’t use the software. I was using a reasonably high-end system, but I don’t think that it’s particularly resource-intensive. I was running off SSD, and maybe some of the stuff might have been I/O intensive.

Skyrim was fine from a performance standpoint. I mean, you can obviously kill performance with the right mods, but I assume that you mean “modding at all”.

EDIT: If you put a lot of mods into Skyrim, like, hundreds, it can take a while to launch. IIRC, one problem – not Linux-specific – there is that loose files aggravate launch performance issues. My understanding is that, where possible, use mods that merge files into a .BSA rather than loose files. A number of mods have multiple versions; pick the .BSA one.

EDIT2: Skyrim, Fallout 4, and the Fallout 76 versions of Bethesda’s engine don’t really take much advantage of multiple cores the way the way the Starfield version does. I get buttery-smooth performance in Starfield; Fallout 76 invariably is a bit jerky when loading resources in a new cell. I don’t get a pretty consistent framerate at 165 Hz in Fallout 76 the way I can in Starfield. But I don’t know if that’s what you’re running into, without specifics of the performance issues. And that’s not gonna be a Linux-specific issue or anything that can realistically be resolved short of forward-porting the Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 games to the Starfield engine.

Unison might be worth a look, provides bidirectional merging and command-line operation. It’s what I’d use if I were mostly working with binary files and didn’t want a history.

Rsync, which someone else recommended, is really aimed at efficient unidirectional replication, not keeping two directories on computers that are both being changed and are intermittently connected in sync.

config files

If there’s mostly text and you’re going to want to review changes, want to keep a history, and do a lot of merging, I’d use git, symlink files to aim at the git repo. I have a custom helper script, but stuff like GNU stow is aimed at this, and I’d probably recommend that someone look at it before rolling their own. Here’s an example of someone using it with git in this role:

https://ratfactor.com/setup2

I agree with that guy about using bare git repos as the “master” copy, even if one of the machines in question also hosts the bare repos and technically you have some redundant information on it. Makes life easier, no machine is “special”.

If I had both binary files (say, a music collection) that I wanted kept in sync without a history and text files that I do (say, my dotfiles), I’d use both.

Most of California has a Mediterranean climate where the summers are dry and the winter is when the rain comes.

Would be better if some holiday around February or so, at the end of the winter, was when the “big fireworks holiday” was.

Does he ever offer any reasoning behind these veteos?

I haven’t followed this issue, but if I were governor of a state that had a major beach tourism industry, I probably wouldn’t be out trying to increase the profile of any pollution issues.

There is, but that isn’t why I split it – comment #2 was an afterthought, dealt with a peripheral issue.

Well, I’ve called for it on here. Now this’ll put it to the test – we’ll see how Californian students perform before-and-after the introduction of the classes and relative to states that don’t make it part of their core curriculum.

I hope this works.

Skimming their material, looks like it also deals with countering some sales tactics and the like, like companies aiming to exploit fear-of-missing-out to sell product.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this

There are only 52 organizations that Firefox trusts to act as CAs. An ISP isn’t normally going to be on there.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates

https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport

If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.

They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)

Ukraine has a navy. The navy just – for the moment – doesn’t have any ships, just boats and anti-ship missiles and USVs and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Navy

Also, regarding Russia knowing what’s up there and being able to talk to it, apparently earlier in the week Ukraine attacked a Russian satellite communication facility, so I dunno what secondary implications that might have, whether it could relate to this satellite situation.

https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-attack-atacms-space-radar-fire-1916340

Crimea Videos Show Fires Blazing As Space Radar Targeted with ATACMS—Report

Ukraine has struck a Russian deep space network hub in annexed Crimea—allegedly used by Russian Aerospace Forces—using U.S.-supplied missiles, according to local reports.

Kyiv’s forces launched the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) attack across Crimea on Sunday night, and “successfully struck” Russia’s Center for Long-Range Space Communications in the village of Vitino in the Saky region, open-source intelligence X (formerly Twitter) account OSINTtechnical said.

“Multiple areas of the facility are burning,” the account said.

The center is one of three complexes that make up Russia’s Yevpatoria Center for Deep Space Communications, which supports manned and robotic space missions. The facility was reportedly previously struck in December 2023 with British-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles.

If it’s a “radar” site, then it presumably deals with stuff nearby.

I don’t think that Russia needs deep space communications facilities to talk to stuff in LEO – hobbyists can do that with simple setups – but it was apparently a military facility, and I think that most military applications today are for LEO. Maybe GLONASS, which has military applications and is in a larger orbit.

And Ukraine presumably isn’t gonna be expending limited weapons on it unless it’s got military significance to Ukraine. So maybe it was also being used to talk to satellites in LEO, dunno.

Also, stuff like constructing transport infrastructure for military logistics or more fortifications or revetments in airfields or any number of things may have significant military effect, even if they aren’t fighting.

considers

If North Korea is going to directly be involved in Ukraine, that maybe changes the calculus for what kind of stuff we send in. North Korea isn’t China, but it is East Asia. A lot of the argument from people who don’t want us committing more heavily in Europe is that it’s a waste of resources relative to what we’d like to do, which is pivot to Asia. But if East Asia is going to be fighting in Europe, that might make this an “Asia conflict”.

Satellites don’t just spontanously burst into 100 pieces.

Well…

There are at least three possibilities that occur to me, and two of them probably aren’t done by Russia intentionally.

One is that they tested it as a target for some kind of anti-satellite weapon. It was decomissioned and probably expendable, so that’d be consistent with targets of past anti-satellite weapon tests. Russia has been talking about anti-satellite weapons and is not happy about us providing satellite reconaissance data to Ukraine. US intelligence also believes that Russia has been considering deployment of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pentagon-official-warns-russian-anti-satellite-nuclear-weapon-devastat-rcna150314

A senior Defense Department official told lawmakers Wednesday that Russia is developing an “indiscriminate” anti-satellite nuclear device that would pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the world.

"The concept that we are concerned about is Russia developing and — if we are unable to convince them otherwise — to ultimately fly a nuclear weapon in space which will be an indiscriminate weapon” that would not distinguish among military, civilian or commercial satellites, John Plumb, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said at a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing.

He said the threat was “not imminent” but that the Pentagon and the “entire” Biden administration were concerned about the program.

This isn’t that – that’s in earlier stages and we’d know immediately if something like that were used – but I suppose it’s probably a fair bet that anti-satellite stuff is being discussed in Moscow. That’d be on Moscow, if they did that.

The second is that it got hit by some kind of debris too small for us to detect. If we don’t know about it, the Russians probably don’t either, and probably couldn’t avoid it.

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/measurements/radar.html

NASA’s main source of data for debris in the size range of approximately 5 mm to 30 cm is the Haystack Ultrawideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR). The HUSIR radar, operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, has been collecting orbital debris data for the ODPO since 1990 under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. HUSIR statistically samples the debris population by “staring” at selected pointing angles and detecting debris that fly through its field-of-view.

The data are used to characterize the debris population by size, altitude, and inclination. From these measurements, scientists have concluded that there are approximately 500,000 debris fragments in orbit with sizes down to one centimeter. The NASA ODPO also collects data from the Haystack Auxiliary Radar (HAX) located next to the main HUSIR antenna. Although HAX is less sensitive than HUSIR, it operates at a different wavelength (1.8 cm for HAX versus 3 cm for HUSIR) and has a wider field-of-view.

Since 1990, the Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar has collected orbital debris data for debris as small as about 2 mm in LEO for the NASA ODPO. It is located in the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California and is operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar is an extremely sensitive sensor capable of detecting a 3-mm metallic sphere at 1000 km, which makes it an incredibly useful tool in the characterization of the sub-centimeter-sized debris population.

Even with all that, my guess is that there’s probably debris up there that can cause a lot of damage. The example above is small, but also a metallic sphere. I’d bet that there are some materials that are a lot more transparent to the radar that they’re using.

Low Earth Orbit objects are moving at a pretty good clip:

https://www.space.com/low-earth-orbit

In very simple terms, low Earth orbit (LEO) is exactly what it sounds like: An orbit around the Earth with an altitude that lies towards the lower end of the range of possible orbits. This is around 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) or less. The majority of satellites are to be found in LEO, as is the International Space Station (ISS).

In order to remain in this orbit, a satellite has to travel at around 17,500 miles per hour (7.8 kilometers per second), at which speed it takes around 90 minutes to complete an orbit of the planet.

The most common handgun round is 9mm Parabellum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9×19mm_Parabellum

7.45 g at 360 m/s for one type of ammo, about 4.6% as fast.

So something that weighs 0.34 grams will have the same energy as a 9mm round.

A paperclip weighs maybe 1 gram. So something in LEO a third the weight of a paperclip will hit as hard as a bullet from a Glock.

It could also be a micrometeor not in Earth orbit coming in from outer space. I don’t know if we can detect those. Those could be moving a lot faster (and hence could be even smaller to cause a given amount of damage).

A third possibility is that something on the satellite exploded. It’s got maneuvering fuel with oxidizer…I’d guess that there are probably ways for that to blow up. If there’s something that has a lot of kinetic energy, that could fail. Flywheel failures can be pretty exciting in terms of shrapnel going everywhere, and if they use gyros to do orientation, it might be possible for one of those to shatter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel

A reaction wheel (RW) is used primarily by spacecraft for three-axis attitude control, and does not require rockets or external applicators of torque. They provide a high pointing accuracy,[1]: 362  and are particularly useful when the spacecraft must be rotated by very small amounts, such as keeping a telescope pointed at a star.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

High performance flywheels can explode, killing bystanders with high-speed fragments.

If ISP routers are anything like the west that means they control the DNS servers and the ones on router cannot be changed, and likely it blocks 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 and so on, as Virgin Media does (along with blocking secure DNS) in the UK for example, which definitely opens up a massive attack vector for an ISP to spin up its own website with a verified cert and malware and have the DNS resolve to that when users try to access it to either download the software needed to access this Grid System or if it’s a web portal - the portal itself.

Browser page integrity – if you’re using https – doesn’t rely on DNS responses.

If I go to “foobar.com”, there has to be a valid cert for “foobar.com”. My ISP can’t get a valid cert for foobar.com unless it has a way to insert its own CA into my browser’s list of trusted CAs (which is what some business IT departments do so that they cans snoop on traffic, but an ISP probably won’t be able to do, since they don’t have access to your computer) or has access to a trusted CA’s key, as per above.

They can make your browser go to the wrong IP address, but they can’t make that IP address present information over https that your browser believes to belong to a valid site.

They also have sharp hairs they can stick in you if they don’t like you like one of those awful cacti that have the little tiny needles you can barely see.

I think that that’s only some tarantulas. Urticating hairs, or something like that.

kagis

Yeah, I had it right. Firefox’s spelling checker apparently doesn’t know about “urticating” by default.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urticating_hair

Urticating hairs or urticating bristles are one of the primary defense mechanisms used by numerous plants, almost all New World tarantulas, and various lepidopteran caterpillars. Urtica is Latin for “nettle” (stinging nettles are in the genus Urtica), and bristles that urticate are characteristic of this type of plant, and many other plants in several families. This term also refers to certain types of barbed bristles that cover the dorsal and posterior surface of a tarantula’s or caterpillar’s abdomen. Many tarantula species eject bristles from their abdomens, directing them toward potential attackers. These bristles can embed themselves in the other animal’s skin or eyes, causing physical irritation, usually to great discomfort. The term “hairs” is technically a misnomer, as only mammals possess true hairs.[1]

In tarantulas

Urticating hairs (setae) are found in about 90% of the species of tarantula (spiders of the family Theraphosidae) found in the New World. They are not found in tarantulas from other parts of the world.[11]

New World tarantulas will, at the moment of danger, turn toward the attacker and briskly rub their hind legs against the opisthosoma throwing the urticating hairs in the direction of the enemy. The cloud of small bristles can get into the mucous membrane of small mammals and cause edema, which can be fatal. The bristles cause both mechanical and chemical harm to the skin and membranes.

Reaction and the degree of irritation to a defensive urticating hair barrage can vary tremendously, based on the species in question. Some, such as those of the Chilean rose tarantula (Grammastola rosea) and the pinktoe tarantula (Avicularia avicularia), are fairly mild and innocuous to humans. Others, such as those of the Brazilian giant white knee tarantula (Acanthoscurria geniculata), are moderately irritating. Still others, such as the Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), are far more severe. These bristles can result in painful rashes, and have been likened to sharp shards of fiberglass.

After kicking urticating hairs, the tarantula will have a bald spot on its abdominal region.

I feel like I’m reasonably tolerant towards GNU Hurd.

I don’t really care that much about tarantulas, but IIRC from some videos on tarantula-handling, tarantulas are big and heavy enough that unlike some smaller spiders which have a terminal velocity that isn’t going to hurt then – they can fall as far as they want – tarantulas can’t really handle being dropped very well. So throwing a tarantula probably is kind of a dick move from the tarantula’s standpoint.

kagis

https://spidersplanet.com/what-happens-if-you-drop-a-tarantula

Unfortunately, dropping a tarantula poses serious risks to the spider, with potential consequences influenced by factors such as fall height, landing surface, tarantula species, and the spider’s health and age.

The higher the fall, the greater the impact force, making even a small drop potentially fatal.

A solid landing surface, like concrete, increases the likelihood of severe injuries compared to softer surfaces.

Different tarantula species exhibit varying affecting levels and their ability to survive a fall. Young or molting tarantulas with soft exoskeletons are more vulnerable.

If a big tarantula falls, it can go really fast, and its belly might break open, causing internal damage and, in the worst case, death.

That is why heavier spiders usually stay on the ground, while lighter ones prefer living in trees to avoid serious injuries from falls.

Potential consequences of dropping a tarantula include:

Abdominal Rupture: The gravest consequence, often resulting in fatality. The tarantula’s soft abdomen houses its internal organs, and a rupture can lead to organ spillage and death.

Internal Injuries: Even without abdominal rupture, the tarantula may experience internal injuries, such as bleeding or organ damage due to the impact.

Broken Limbs: The fragile legs of a tarantula can easily break upon landing on a hard surface.

And that’s aside from what a (large, powerful) human who suddenly gets a large spider thrown at them is likely to do to the spider in instinctual self-defense.

Tarantulas aren’t native to Minnesota, so this was probably someone’s pet. I don’t have a lot of affection for large spiders, but to someone, that was probably kind of like a dog or cat.

I’d also add, on an unrelated note, that if the concern is bandwidth usage, which is what the article says, I don’t see why the ISP doesn’t just throttle users, based entirely on bandwidth usage. Like, sure, there are BitTorrent users that use colossal amounts of bandwidth, will cause problems for pricing based on overselling bandwidth, which is the norm for consumer broadband.

But you don’t need to do some kind of expensive, risky, fragile, and probably liability-issue-inducing attack on BitTorrent if your concern is bandwidth usage. Just start throttling down bandwidth as usage rises, regardless of protocol. Nobody ever gets cut off, but if they’re using way above their share of bandwidth, they’re gonna have a slower connection. Hell, go offer to sell them a higher-bandwidth package. You don’t lose money, nobody is installing malware, you don’t have the problem come right back as soon as some new bandwidth-munching program shows up (YouTube?), etc.

I don’t really understand the attack vector the ISP is using, unless it’s exploiting some kind of flaw in higher-level software than BitTorrent itself.

A torrent should be identified uniquely by a hash in a magnet URL.

When a BitTorrent user obtains a hash, as long as it’s from an https webpage, the ISP shouldn’t be able to spoof the hash. You’d have to either get your own key added to a browser’s keystore or have access to one of the trusted CA’s keys for that.

Once you have the hash, you should be able to find and validate the Merkle hash tree from the DHT. Unless you’ve broken SHA and can generate collisions – which an ISP isn’t going to – you shouldn’t be able to feed a user a bogus hash tree from the DHT.

Once you have the hash tree, you shouldn’t be able to feed a user any complete chunks that are bogus unless you’ve broken the hash function in BitTorrent’s tree (which I think is also SHA). You can feed them up to one byte short of a chunk, try and sandbag a download, but once they get all the data, they should be able to reject a chunk that doesn’t hash to the expected value in the tree.

I don’t see how you can reasonably attack the BitTorrent protocol, ISP or no, to try and inject malware. Maybe some higher level protocol or software package.