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    1. What are the oldest games you still regularly play?

      For the purposes of the question, I want to ignore official remasters/rereleases since those are essentially separate, newer full releases. I'm interested in old, original games. Titles that you...

      For the purposes of the question, I want to ignore official remasters/rereleases since those are essentially separate, newer full releases. I'm interested in old, original games. Titles that you can "manually remaster" yourself with mods are fine, since you're still playing the "original" game to some extent.

      Also, "regularly" in the title doesn't have to mean daily/weekly and can instead be "once every couple of years".

      • What keeps you coming back to them?
      • Is your love for the games strictly nostalgia-based, or could an unacquainted newcomer still find similar value in them?
      • If there are any modern games that try to scratch the same itch, do they succeed or fail?
      • Would you want an official remaster of the game (if one isn't already available)?
      25 votes
    2. What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

      What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was...

      What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

      If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

      5 votes
    3. Friday Security Briefing

      Friday Security Briefing Hello there! I hope you're all looking forward to something this weekend. Today's briefing will cover a captivating tale of scheming against financial centers, woes of...

      Friday Security Briefing

      Hello there! I hope you're all looking forward to something this weekend. Today's briefing will cover a captivating tale of scheming against financial centers, woes of virtual networking, and the possibility of Russia behaving quite unnecessarily.

      "Listen, or your tongue will make you deaf." ~ Unattributed proverb


      Wall Street targeted by new Capital Call investment email scammers

      The tactic of exploiting enterprise email systems remains a successful and active attack vector for bad actors. The emerging development is the use of "capital call" style scam, wherein scammers pretend to have investor or insurance business with the business.

      "In an example shared by the researchers, the scam email attached a Capital Call Notice for US $970,357.00 to be deposited into a bank account under the fraudsters’ control."

      "If the targeted investor was duped into wiring the funds, then it is likely that money would be quickly moved into other accounts and withdrawn by mules to prevent the payment from being returned to the victim."

      The flexibility that cryptocurrencies provide to discreetly rearrange money may actually be disadvantageous for banks in certain situations.

      Source: Tripwire, Wall Street targeted by new Capital Call investment email scammers



      High severity Linux network security holes found, fixed

      (CVE-2021-26708) Alexander Popov of London has discovered five security holes in the Linux kernel's virtual socket implementation. This is concerning, my personal use of virtual networking systems could be a lot more thought out. I do tend to keep my use of libvirt to a minimum but ideally I would be running my virtualization workstation on a separate box optimized for safe practices.

      "These holes entered Linux when virtual socket multi-transport support was added. This networking transport facilitates communication between virtual machines (VM) and their host. It's commonly used by guest agents and hypervisor services that need a communications channel that is independent of the VM network configuration. As such, people who are running VMs on the cloud, which is pretty much everyone these days, are especially vulnerable."

      Source: ZDNet, High severity Linux network security holes found, fixed



      Ukraine: DDoS attacks on govt sites originated from Russia

      Ukraine is proposing that information on the threat actors responsible for a DDoS on Ukrainian government websites originated from Russian domains.

      However, they did not claim that the threat actors were affiliated with the Russian state.

      I am curious about the motivations if this was sanctioned by Russia. Are they testing their capabilities against a softer target in order to learn from the European and American Cyber-Defense response? Perhaps this was a way for Russia to demonstrate it's competency at cyber warfare.

      "The National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity (NCCC) at the NSDC states that these DDoS attacks have been massive and have targeted government websites in the defense and security sector."

      Possible retaliation?

      "Last week, news leaked that Ukrainian law enforcement, in cooperation with the US and French police, arrested alleged Egregor ransomware operation members.

      Three days later, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) issued a press release about the Egregor arrests and seizing the ransomware group's equipment."

      Source: Bleeping Computer, Ukraine: DDoS attacks on govt sites originated from Russia


      8 votes
    4. Call For Submissions--Writing Club #2 (March 14)

      Lay it on the line in our March club posting! This time, let's submit short stories, chapters, essays. @eve suggests that the optional theme be "liminality/liminal spaces. It could be about them,...

      Lay it on the line in our March club posting! This time, let's submit short stories, chapters, essays.

      @eve suggests that the optional theme be "liminality/liminal spaces. It could be about them, the creation of one, a dissection, the destruction of one, or just take place there. Anything and everything liminal."

      Liminal is a sort of between. The definition is: relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

      You can also look into liminal spaces. These can be real places (like a train station that's simply a point people transfer to other trains to) or even the emotional betweens; coming to realizations or on a precipice of something. Like, summer vacation could be a liminal space even!

      If you're not into borders and transitional spaces, or if you've been incubating a polemic all pandemic long, you are still encouraged to share your writing! You may draw inspiration from any theme (fictional or real).

      Just follow these easy guidelines:

      1. Produce a short story, essay, or chapter of a longer work. Your submission should not exceed 7,000 words. Let's aim for pieces 350-3500 words.

      2. Watch for the March 14 submissions thread to appear... on March 14! Reply to it with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may provide questions for readers in hidden expandable text, if you like.

      3. You must provide feedback on 3 submissions if you are posting a submission. Only one needs to be a substantial critique. Our first outing was a trial run, and the offerings were extremely short. I anticipate proportionally longer responses to come easily this time. If you see a post without feedback, consider giving it preference in the order of your responses. No one likes to be left hanging.

      Feel free to post questions in this topic. We had a stimulating and moderately edgy trial run. I'm excited for the longer prose to come!

      12 votes
    5. What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

      This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's...

      This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

      7 votes
    6. Fortnightly Programming Q&A Thread

      General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads. Don't forget to format your code using the triple...

      General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

      Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

      Here is my schema:
      
      ```sql
      CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
        article_id   INTEGER
      , warehouse_id INTEGER
      )
      ;
      ```
      
      How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?
      
      6 votes
    7. Does anyone have, or has had, an addiction to music?

      It might sound silly to most, but I have had one for years now. I started to really listen to music on my own volition in the early 2010s when I was in my early 10s, and I was really big into EDM...

      It might sound silly to most, but I have had one for years now.

      I started to really listen to music on my own volition in the early 2010s when I was in my early 10s, and I was really big into EDM at the time (big room house, brostep, electro house, progressive house, etc).

      At some point in 2014 I wanted to expand my tastes so I ended up on rateyourmusic.com which is the kinda place you always end up on at some point if you go down this path the way I see it, and at first I just checked the overall charts and shrugged since it wasn't my kind of music at all (The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Miles Davis, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Radiohead, etc), but at some point it started bothering me; "why is all that crappy old music so highly regarded?" and I started giving the stuff a try. Didn't like it at all, but I somehow starting feeling compelled to try and understand/appreciate it.

      Eventually, I fell down a sort of rabbit hole when I started reading discussions on how some music is "objectively better" than others and I completely believed it. Pushed around by the extremely harsh disdain towards the EDM I loved and godly praise of the type of thing I just mentioned, I just kinda felt like I was supposed to move on and basically listened to a lot of stuff like that.

      Another while later I eventually realized that the whole "objectively good/bad" thing is one ugly sack of false shit, but I've been really burned out since then, and now I don't even really feel the music I used to like. Problem is, at this point the act of crawling through the charts looking for new music, constantly listening to new stuff, thinking about genres, etc, is so deeply ingrained in my behavior that I can't seem to stop. I have music on at nearly all times, and I force myself to listen to everything in full despite not feeling it at all.

      Something that's also gotten me is the whole repeated listening thing, I've always really loved the idea of being able to enjoy something you initially didn't care for or were lukewarm towards by simply repeatedly listening to it. That also caused me to disregard my own impressions and force myself to repeatedly listen to almost everything. I'm mostly out of that phase now, but I sometimes still find myself digging through random stuff I've given low ratings and listening to it again purely to see if I suddenly like it, but it has literally never even worked once. I also think this has been a contributor to me being burned out on music.

      At this point I kinda feel like I'll never truly enjoy music again like I used to and it's really sad. Sometimes it does return a little, but if have to explain it with a rating, I can't say I've ever really felt anything above a 7/10 again, most of the time it's between a 3/10 and 6/10. I totally realize I just need to take a break, but I simply can't seem to stop (through a lot of effort I have actually managed to take a full break last month, but I immediately relapsed when I resumed this month, and even without that it doesn't seem like it helped all that much). What a lot of people have with things like gaming and food, I basically have with music.

      Does anyone else have anything like this?

      10 votes