The DMZ

6:41 AM

@JsupportsPalestine Morning - are you deleting your entire SE account, or just chat account?

I think @FireQuacker is correct about the chat account - if you go to the Contact Us link at the bottom of any SE page, you can contact employees who can then do as you ask

Alternatively, if the aim is just to avoid logging in, can you simply change your password to something you cannot remember?

djsmiley2kStaysInside

7:33 AM

Well I'll miss our discsussions @JsupportsPalestine, good luck!

3

MechMK1

9:55 AM

25

Q: How was it calculated that Dream cheated on his Minecraft v1.16 glitchless speedrun?

The speedrunner Dream has recently been accused of cheating in his Minecraft Java v1.16 glitchless speedrun. How did the Minecraft Java speedrunning mods calculate if Dream cheated?

This is my favourite cheating story ever. First, Dream claimed "People are witchhunting me because I got lucky in one run."

Then, people said "no, you got extraordinarily lucky over the course of many runs in several days"

Dream said "You're just jealous of my success!" - People replied "No, we want fair competition"

djsmiley2kStaysInside

What I don't understand, is why isn't there a speed running mod, that disables all other mods, etc

shows they're disabled, verifies it etc.

MechMK1

@djsmiley2kStaysInside Because you could mod that speedrunning mod

djsmiley2kStaysInside

true, i guess :|

MechMK1

The problem is that once speedrunners have a certain following, they have financial incentives tied to their performance

djsmiley2kStaysInside

you saw the conclusion I presume?

MechMK1

9:59 AM

It was very obvious

djsmiley2kStaysInside

Turns out some of the mods on the server, that he 'presumed' didn't affect something, affected something.

/me mixes up his effects/affects

MechMK1

You play locally, not on a server

But what I love the most is that he claimed he "never had any software that would affect drops, ever!"

djsmiley2kStaysInside

he didn't play locally tho

or rather the local server was modded

eitherway.

MechMK1

Of course he did

When you play minecraft "singleplayer", you internally run a local server

djsmiley2kStaysInside

Whole thing was big lols

MechMK1

10:01 AM

This changed at some point in minecraft, that you always run on a "server"

So you could just click "open server to multiplayer" and easily play with people in the same LAN

And then, when he was still banned because the evidence was overwhelming, he "confessed"

"""c o n f e s s e d"""

He said he "accidentally" had that mod installed and running

And he apologizes "for the confusion that that caused"

djsmiley2kStaysInside

and had accidently already asked the dev of the mod previously, about it affecting drops, I'm sure

MechMK1

Even though that directly contradicts previous statements

djsmiley2kStaysInside

yah

:D

MechMK1

He complained publicly about drop rates prior

djsmiley2kStaysInside

Now he's running for London Mayor :D

MechMK1

10:03 AM

Saying he feels like a ton of his runs are going nowhere, just because he's not getting the luck he needs

djsmiley2kStaysInside

There was a statement, that he'd spoken to the dev of said mod, prior, about drop rates and some other things, and the dev had said that he didn't believe it'd be affected

MechMK1

To quote Karl Jobst: "Speedrunners don't cheat to get a faster time. Speedrunners cheat to get a time, faster."

@djsmiley2kStaysInside Oh he did? Hilarious :D

djsmiley2kStaysInside

but, dream was running some new untested version of the mod, and the dev then found that DID effect drops

'found'.....

yeah, so he KNEW he was running the mod, all along

MechMK1

Isn't it weird, that it just so happened to affect the exact two items that happened to be relevant for speedruns?

djsmiley2kStaysInside

he also knew the mod had the ability to affect drops

MechMK1

10:04 AM

me doing a big think

djsmiley2kStaysInside

but claims he believed it was disabled, because it was, in previous versions... (as confirmed with the dev)

but he wasn't running the previous versions

MechMK1

I man, some games have "speedrunning mods"

Bioshock Infinite, for example, does

djsmiley2kStaysInside

and lets be honest, if anyone is going to notice a increased droprate, it's a speedrunner.

Nod

MechMK1

@djsmiley2kStaysInside I agree. I mean, if he got really really good luck with them, he should have noticed

djsmiley2kStaysInside

And if it's a speedrun category with certain mods allowed, that's cool too.

MechMK1

10:06 AM

An I will be honest: Once someone asked him about it, he could have said "It could have something to do with a mod I've installed. I'll investigate this, but for now, remove my current PB from the leaderboards because it may not be legit"

And if he then came forward and said "Hey, I screwed up here. I think this mod ______ I've used affected my drop rates unfairly, so all my speedrun attempts between ___ and ___ are invalid", literally nobody would have considered it "cheating"

@djsmiley2kStaysInside In Bioshock, the reason for the mod is that there is a certain item you can get from one of 3 chests, that make you run faster. The first possible chest is 30 minutes in. And people hated the fact that they could play 30 minutes, not get the drop and having to reset. So the mod ensures you always get that item in the first possible chest.

djsmiley2kStaysInside

Ah yes

MechMK1

Some purists said that that "wasn't how the game was originally intended", but I personally feel like nobody would have run the game at all without that mod, so I think it's better for the community as a whole that that mod was introduced

djsmiley2kStaysInside

having enjoyed all the bioshocks, I spectacularly enjoyed watching them beaten so much.

yeah, I mean, I get that it's not the 'same' as the original game, but a change like that to me, is fine

some speedrun games have so many mods it makes my head spin

MechMK1

I've never been such a huge fan of the games. No idea why, but I never felt "gripped" by them

Conor Mancone

@djsmiley2kStaysInside Yeah, it's pretty obnoxious, although there is an easier way than having to delete everything: terraform init -upgrade

djsmiley2kStaysInside

10:10 AM

@ConorMancone my problem is, I only want to re-fetch 1 thing

of the 20 or so repo's I'm referencing, only one has changed...

Conor Mancone

Yeah, in that case you're definitely screwed :)

MechMK1

Especially Infinite. I played like an hour of it, and still felt like I had no idea what was going on, and the combat wasn't super engaging either

djsmiley2kStaysInside

upgrade grabs em all, so right now, I just delete the vpn-ha directory from modules and it re-grabs just that.

Conor Mancone

I like terraform, but it has so many "quirks"

djsmiley2kStaysInside

@MechMK1 I do think Infinite was the weakest of the 3.

@ConorMancone Yes!

Conor Mancone

10:11 AM

I'm not actually convinced hashicorp is very good at code. We also had a lot of troubles with Hashicorp vault

djsmiley2kStaysInside

Like wtf... just now

I've changed the IP subnets on some router interfaces

it fails, because it expects the router interfaces to have the same IP's on them

that we're now assigning

Conor Mancone

Unfortunately, IaC is a must for me, and the only other option I have fouke.nd is CloudFormation. I don't really consider that an option since it only works with AWS. There is definitely a lot I like about terraform, but there is also a lot I don't li

djsmiley2kStaysInside

destroy the whole thing? That fixed it :D

Conor Mancone

Goodness, I can't tell you how much trouble I had when I was trying to launch an Aurora database...

djsmiley2kStaysInside

Basically we're only doing IaC here, to simplify rolling out customer environments

because for many a year, it's all been done manually, and always gets screwed up in some way or another.

Conor Mancone

10:13 AM

There was an endless number of race conditions that gave me endless issues trying to roll out the database cluster.

djsmiley2kStaysInside

It's funny, because, for the last 5 years or so ,I've seen saying I could write scripts to do various parts of it, but it just got ignored mostly

Conor Mancone

Yeah, IaC is absolutely worth the effort, but IaC in its current iteration is workier than it should be.

djsmiley2kStaysInside

At least now we're finally embracing new things, with some new management etc.

Conor Mancone

@djsmiley2kStaysInside That is good news.

djsmiley2kStaysInside

Problem now is, people who think in the old ways and don't get it...

And the fact I've been given the job of writing the whole network side into terraform

Conor Mancone

10:14 AM

@MechMK1 Yeah, in the 30 seconds I have read about this, I found the word "accident" very dubious

MechMK1

@djsmiley2kStaysInside I loved the Art Deco artstyle though

djsmiley2kStaysInside

If you like maths... Matt Parker did a excellent investigation into it

@MechMK1 oh yup

Conor Mancone

@djsmiley2kStaysInside My kids use the word "accident" like that all the time. More specifically, when they use it, it actually means "I meant to hit him, I just didn't mean for him to be that upset and me to get in trouble"

djsmiley2kStaysInside

yup same

My two, end up fighting

MechMK1

@ConorMancone You see how the story shifted from "I didn't modify anything, I just got lucky" to "Okay, maybe I did modify it, but it wasn't on purpose"

djsmiley2kStaysInside

10:16 AM

youngest punches eldest, and he's got a good swing on him

she cries, he goes 'it was an accident!'

MechMK1

I would have believed the "accident" story if he was way more open with the possibility that there was an accident

Conor Mancone

@djsmiley2kStaysInside Yeah, I have one or two teammates who get very nervous about managing production infrastructure with Terraform - I remember doing a terraform destroy on development infrastructure and they were very nervous that it was going to destroy production (which is managed by a completely different terraform repository and in a different cloud account)

MechMK1

"Hey you got unusually high luck" - "Huh? Weird. I'll look into it" => Plausible.
"Hey you got unusually high luck" - "I'M NOT CHEATING! YOU'RE CHEATING! YOU'RE JUST JEALOUS OF MY GODLIKE SKILLS!!!!!" => Less plausible

@djsmiley2kStaysInside I also like Borderlands 1 the most

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 Less plausible? :) That sounds like exactly the response I would expect

MechMK1

@ConorMancone Cheaters across all speedrunning categories react the same when caught

1.) Accuse the accuser or anyone believing the accuser of "just being jealous"
2.) Claim that your unrealistic times stem from your incredible skill
3.) Claim that you don't have the time or obligation to prove your innocence

Conor Mancone

10:19 AM

@MechMK1 I'd go with the old joke about how everyone who is in jail is innocent, but I'm always worried that isn't really a joke and most people in jail actually are...

MechMK1

@ConorMancone Some people certainly are

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 Seems like a solid game plan

I remember, a long time ago, watching an entire documentary about the world record in donkey kong. Accusations of cheating abounded

MechMK1

Once you're caught, you have several ways to go. There is the "Confess and leave" option, the "Nonpology" option and the "It was an accident" option

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 Denial is always an option, now matter how incontrovertible the evidence :)

MechMK1

Confessing and leaving is just what it sounds like. Confess that you cheated, offer no explanation as to why you did, and stop speedrunning.

Conor Mancone

10:21 AM

It was actually a pretty entertaining movie...

The King of Kong

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a 2007 American documentary film about competitive arcade gaming directed by Seth Gordon. It follows Steve Wiebe in his attempts to take the high score record for the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong from Billy Mitchell. The film premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival and was released in U.S. theaters in August 2007. It received positive reviews. == Summary == Walter Day is the founder of Twin Galaxies, an organization dedicated to tracking high scores in arcade games, especially those from the golden age of arcade games of the early 1980s. Restaurateur...

MechMK1

Oh yes, of course

"Sue everyone"

The nonpology is pretty much saying you did it, but making up tons of reasons as to why it wasn't a big deal, or why you shouldn't be criticized. "I had depression" is usually given there as a reason

The "It was an accident" is the typical denial strategy of those who believe that they can get away with it. They confess that it happened, but will claim it wasn't on purpose and that they just never noticed it.

The fun thing is, Billy Mitchell and Todd Rodgers are both cheaters, and everyone knows.

djsmiley2kStaysInside

@MechMK1 for speedruns?

MechMK1

@djsmiley2kStaysInside No, just as a casual game. I liked the atmosphere a lot more

Borderlands 2 seems like a parody of borderlands 1

I don't know who they are still trying to fool with their "But I swear my records are legit" attitude, but I doubt anyone is still believing them

And those who do couldn't be persuaded otherwise even if they themselves came out and explained why this record is impossible

Or rather, not obtained legitimately

I think Todd submitted so many fake records, some for games he never even played

For example, Todd claimed to hold a high score of 1,110,500 points in the game Fathom for the Atari 2600. You would need to stay awake for 13 days to achieve this.

In other games, the scores he claimed were just straight up impossible. The game gives you scores in increments of 5 and 10, so the final score can only ever end in a 5 or a 0. Yet his ended in a 3. How? No explanation.

Like, as I said, he probably never even played some of the games he claimed to hold world records in.

And his fans take the outlandishness of his records not as a sign of them being fake, but as a sign of them being legit. "Todd is just that good!"

nobody

10:47 AM

1

Q: Is there a way to record CPU operations for a given process as they occur in a standard, production OS environment?

Doing malware analysis I'm interested in being able to log every instruction the CPU executes for a given process. I was hoping this was perhaps possible in a standard VM environment, even if not possible in a bare-metal execution scenario. I'm interested specifically in Windows 10 for now. To be...

malware antivirus antimalware

To me, this person appears to be saying that it is ok for the attacker to know they are being watched as long as they are not being watched by a debugger. That makes no sense to me. Am I missing something?

MechMK1

Great...an application I was supposed to test stopped responding and the 3 people given to me as contacts all don't pick up their phone

nobody

11:18 AM

@MechMK1 That's a DOS, no?

A mighty powerful one too... it makes humans stop responding too

MechMK1

12:26 PM

@nobody It was a configuration issue, it's fixed now

0

Q: How should a company manage physical 2FA tokens?

Physical 2FA tokens, such as smart cards or YubiKeys, are becoming more popular in large companies for authentication purposes. However, one issue with them is availability: When a physical 2FA token is lost or gets broken, the user is by design not able to authenticate anymore. How should a comp...

multi-factor

forest

11:43 PM

RIP, JJ's account is officially gone.

Just read a great quote:

> CVSS is the phrenology of security metrics

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