Posts made by Nemesis

@cheesegrater said in Anyone familiar with Twine?:

@nemesis said in Anyone familiar with Twine?:

Just programming advice in general: if (x < 6) only requires testing the first 4 bits at runtime, while if (x <= 5) may start with the first 4 bits and any time you're actually equal to 5 it requires testing all 32 or 64 bits in the underlying value, depending on the platform's CPU mode.

That hasn't been true since the early 90s. Every processor on the market these days will do either version in a single clock cycle.

A valuable tip if Auspice decides to switch from Twine to Atari 2600 homebrew, though.

When $x < 5 fails to be true the additional = test introduces a 2nd clock cycle regardless. 1 + 1 = 2.

When $x < 6 is true, you accomplished the exact same thing in that single clock cycle. 1 + 0 = 1.

So don't wait for the class on 8088 Assembly programming.

Edit: Looked it up and cheesegrater is correct. JGE. Derp on me.

Just programming advice in general: if (x < 6) only requires testing the first 4 bits at runtime, while if (x <= 5) may start with the first 4 bits and any time you're actually equal to 5 it requires testing all 32 or 64 bits in the underlying value, depending on the platform's CPU mode. Both statements are functionally identical except for the performance issue.

Your particular issue is probably that (set: $operations to it - 1) is equivalent to (set: $operations to $operations - 1) while (set: $operations to operations - 1) is bad syntax.

https://twinery.org/wiki/harlowe:set

http://drivethrurpg.com/product/210728/Slasher-Flick-8th-Anniversary-Bundle-BUNDLE

@Haven How'd you know Bugs Bunny was my CB handle as a kid? Have you been pixelling my IP Address?

There are dozens of such issues known with Chrome (not just on your phone, but on any platform Chrome runs on). It's a browser whose functionality reflects the mentality of the company that provides it.

You can try clearing Chrome's cache data https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/twVSkMVdwSM

You can double-check your Chrome javascript settings and make sure javascript is enabled. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/OGS9kiVKiSE

That last page also recommends disabling Browser Extensions and links to instructions for clearing the cache, so probably try clearing the cache first. This might/probably will erase any stored credentials for websites, any saved session cookies, etc.

@nemesis said in What's your identity worth to you?:

In fact he's probably lost a lot more than 2 with the proliferation of IPv6 in major metropolitan areas (which is pretty much the entire US Eastern seaboard)... unless he sprang for the $120 router upgrade that he argued with me about after I told him that's all he needed.

@surreality said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Someone making demands is behaving inappropriately, especially if it entails the person you're demanding something of investing a significant amount of time or money in order to meet your demands for the sake of meeting your demands.

The fact that you take what I said (quoted at top) and twist it into what you claim I said (quoted just below that) is all anyone ever needs to read from you. The fact that you contribute nothing but disinformation with explicit support for other posters of disinformation is my problem.

Probably be more helpful if you folks specified what browser you're using and/or what version of Android (which you can probably find by Settings->About Phone->Software Info).

I'm using the default app called "Browser" on Android 5.1.1 and (unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "Menu Button" - I'm clicking on the 3 horizontal bars in the upper left, just aside of the MU Soapbox text in the blue top-banner, which brings up the Categories/Recent/Tags menu for the website) it's working fine.

@arkandel said in Life... in outer space!:

But I mean! From the scenarios described in the Fermi Paradox (the OP link!) which one would you say is closest to what you subscribe to?

I kind of like the ant-hill theory; you have ants living next to a super highway. How would the ants know to recognize it for what it is or figure out the reasons for which it had to be built? Even if the ones who're building it wanted to communicate, how would they? What would there be to talk about?

Ants!

I honestly stopped reading it (or I kept reading but stopped paying it any attention as a legit article) when I came across the "math argument" which is overdone so much it's become a cliche.

Over 100 years ago Nikola Tesla said: "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." That not only hasn't changed but it's gotten worse.

In this particular case there are just too many unknown elements. Sure, there are (conservatively) 500 billions of billions of sun-like stars and math doesn't lie. That is based on our current knowledge and understanding, which means that the 2018 definition of 'a sun-like star' may or may not represent anything resembling a star that is sun-like in full reality. What if gravitational factors play into the formation of life? What if, for example, the exact distance of our sun from the supermassive black hole at our galactic center and the exact distance of our planet from our sun and the exact distance of our galactic center from the (theoretically plausible) supermassive black hole at the center of the whole universe and even the relative distances of our galactic center from other galaxies (and those galaxies' distance from the center of the universe) all played a part in the formation of life on this specific planet? What algorithm reduces 500 billion-billion plausible sun-like stars to the number of sunlike stars with earth-like planets in Milky Way-like galaxies? So even though the math doesn't lie, we could very well be simply doing the wrong math.

So we're sitting here passively listening with projects like SETI instead of actively transmitting our own signals in every direction on all those possible communication vectors. Why? I think it's because the people who decided whether we were going to passively listen or actively seek asked themselves these questions:

Would we even seriously want to be in contact with sentient extraterrestrial life if they were going to turn out to be just like us philosophically but much further advanced technologically?

Would you broadcast your home address on a HAM radio knowing that the signal might be picked up by a psychotic dictator or religious extremist or bored serial killer in the market for fresh meat?

Would you really (be well-advised to) trust anyone who deliberately contacted you based on such a transmission?

I think if there actually were any intelligent life in the universe they'd be passively listening just like we are and for the same reasons. I think debating it is a little bit pointless until or unless we start actively seeking. I think anyone who wants to start actively seeking is suicidally stupid at best and deliberately suicidal/genocidal toward our own planet at worst.

I don't really believe there isn't intelligent extraterrestrial life in the universe, I just don't at all believe intelligent life would make any attempt to interact with humanity on earth.

@ghost said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@nemesis said in What's your identity worth to you?:

This type of network trickery is used in DoS attacks

DDoS. Distributed Denial of Service attack.

DOS is a term for Disk Operating System

Thank you, Comic-Book-Guy, for proving that you know less about IT than my 4 year old niece does.

A single individual can commit to a DoS. To be successful, they just need to have more outgoing bandwidth than you have incoming, or they need to be able to connect successfully/repeatedly to overspawn command execution instances, thus denying service to anyone else who tries to connect either by flooding out your bandwidth or making your server incapable of handling new successful connections.

A DDoS requires either a bunch of people or a botnet. It uses the exact same tactics as the DoS but comes from dozens or hundreds of vectors at once rather than just 1 remote client.

To suggest that 1 person is proxying around the world to attack your game is to suggest that a DoS is in progress.

@surreality said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@faraday Ghost isn't the one displaying the entitled attitude at all.

That was in one of Nemesis' posts: "All you need to do is get this $120 router in order to allow this!" (which would allow them to play through the style of connection they are using, which the game owner did not want to do for reasons).

You shouldn't cite YouTube as evidence to contradict an article published by cisco.com and written by a CCNA, but for everyone who actually doesn't understand the technical aspects and why the latter is much more accredited:

The admin at SR2064 thought that a perfectly valid IPv6 address issued by Arin to AT&T broadband was a "BOGON" because his router was so outdated that it didn't even know what an IPv6 address is. He and other inexperienced admin are also clearly unaware of the fact that if there were such a thing as a "BOGON" in the actual IT world (which I'm re-classifying as someone simply spoofing an IP Address, as that's what it actually refers to), the spoofer or BOGON transmitter still wouldn't be able to receive any responses back to their terminal because that "BOGON" wouldn't be routed to anywhere at all by anyone at all. This type of network trickery is used in DoS attacks, not in "identity obfuscation," and it takes someone lacking technical expertise in this related field to think that one guy connected to and playing the game from their home IPv4 would attempt a DoS attack using 1 or 2 spoofed addresses at the same time. I tried explaining to this admin, just like I've explained here, that nobody was spoofing IP Addresses or attacking his game - the problem is/was his outdated equipment. To classify this as "entitlement" on my part is unfair as I was correcting technical misconceptions.

Claims have been made about Cisco networking device defaults that are plainly disproved by Cisco documentation - not just in the first paragraph but in the article title itself.

From 2008 to around 2014 there actually may have been devices and even operating system updates providing IPv6 compatibility which left those compat functions/features disabled by default. This was never due to "security concerns" but due to the fact that IPv4 exhaustion was not quite complete by 2010-2012 and IPv6 was a brand new thing that wasn't actually in widespread use yet. Forwarding IPv6 requests to network servers that hadn't yet been updated to support it would have resulted in false connection errors and may have erroneously triggered automated blocking/banning protocols as a result. These false-flag positives in no way represented security holes, only issues that would have been difficult to troubleshoot and might have forced legit IT guys to have to update/upgrade equipment to support new OS features before the agency was really prepared for it. By 2017/18 it's safe to say that anyone who isn't IPv6-ready isn't providing any "services" worth consuming in the professional world, and when anybody puts themself forward as a highly experienced and skilled IT guy it is utterly absurd for them not to apply the same standards to any publically-available service they provide including hobbyist endeavors.

Edit: Thanks to Apos for PRT

@killer-klown said in What's your identity worth to you?:

As far as IPv6 security vulnerabilities? Yes. All of our firewalls have 'block ipv6' enabled by default for just that reason. That's not something we set, that's manufacturer default (And before you ask, this is corporate level stuff - Cisco, Palo Alto, Symantec/Sygate, etc - not exactly Zone Alarm here.)

You are completely full of shit.

https://blogs.cisco.com/enterprise/disable-ipv6

@arkandel said in What's your identity worth to you?:

But yeah. The future is an encrypted one. I also always loved the idea of coding a MUSH that somehow generates private keys for each user then signs everything that gets said or posed, so there's no chance something might be faked or altered in pasting without being able to know for sure.

PennMUSH 1.8.6p1 has a config option that allows logging of all commands that are input which I assume includes pages/says/poses regardless of player/object location. And every MUSH since the original MUSH itself has the NOSPOOF flag which will tell you what object is responsible for sending the message you just saw.

That won't do you much good if somebody with a Wizbit wants to @force some player bit (or a player wants to @force some puppet object) to start spouting wtf-ever in the OOC room since the nospoof will show you that the player is saying things, not that they're being @forced to say them. At the end of the day NOSPOOF just guarantees that you'll know who sent every @emit even if they didn't include their @name in the pose.

As always, logs can be edited (or manufactured wholesale) with a simple text editor at which point the log is only as good as the person who was NOSPOOF (or claims to have been NOSPOOF) at the time the log was made... or in the case of Penn v1.8.6p1, the person who has access to the shell.

I was asked a similar question by a "student newspaper reporter" doing a survey in high school. My answer has not changed in the 20 years since.

Q: "Is there intelligent extraterrestrial life out there somewhere?"

A: "I sure hope so, because there isn't any on Earth."

@ghost said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Bogons are widely used tech terminology

"Bogons" may be a widely used layman's term referring to technology the same way "Cloud" is a buzzword that means nothing but generically references "a computer network." Actual tech terms in reference to "a cloud" include "LAN" and/or "WAN". The actual tech term referencing "the cloud" is "The Internet." Similarly, IP Addresses (v4 or v6) are classed into A/B/C/D/E categories. Any IP Address that isn't assigned by an RIR is totally imaginary. It doesn't exist. Even if an OS let you set it or if you had the actual programming chops to put together a spoofing tool that allowed you to transmit raw IP packets with any IP Address you like, you wouldn't be able to transmit over the internet using it because it'd stall out on the way through your ISP's routing system. Even if you used a spoofed IP successfully, you would never get a reply to it (so you could never establish a bi-directional connection such as TCP - you could simulate one by sending connect packets and then waiting a few milliseconds before sending an ACK packet, if you had some way to predict or control certain parameters that would be set in by the server-side of that connection, but replies from the server would never, ever, in a hundred million eons, reach you).

Wikipedia is not your friend. Actually knowing wtf you're talking about is your friend.

@Arkandel There are a huge number of TOR proxy addresses available for download specifically for people who want to block proxy users. There are probably a huge number of TOR proxies that aren't registered, too. Running a TOR proxy and registering that proxy with the reporting service are two different things, and both are optional.

Game admins need to remember to be cautious but not paranoid/stupid about this.

Awhile back I was playing on that Shadowrun RP MUD while a friend was in Austin (on AT&T fiber optic, with IPv6 addressing only) and when he was unable to connect to the game and I reported it the assclown who hosts that MUD on his home Comcast internet service, the assclown accused me and my friend both of TOR Proxying... I didn't fully understand his point in a lot of what he said but it seemed pretty clear to me that this moron thought I was me and the guy in Austin and a 3rd completely unrelated party in Amsterdam who had connected to his forums at around the same time that my friend was unable to connect. He used some ridiculous term "BOGONs" which was apparently in his cheap-o router's documentation, with a wikipedia article posted by the same fucktard who made up that bogus word, to describe IP Addresses which aren't in any RIR database. Because even if that was a legit tech term, a spoofed IP Address would totally work to get you connected up to a game. Pure brainless boob: Paranoid with delusions of grandeur toward his skillset and dumb enough to think anyone with a lick of sense wouldn't recognize his nonsense on the spot.

In reality, that fucktard lost 2 players because he's an idiot (who masquerades as a techie) and his router's too outdated to handle IPv6 addresses. In fact he's probably lost a lot more than 2 with the proliferation of IPv6 in major metropolitan areas (which is pretty much the entire US Eastern seaboard)... unless he sprang for the $120 router upgrade that he argued with me about after I told him that's all he needed.

@arkandel said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@ixokai said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@arkandel I disagree. The 'I wont give you an email' crowd is nothing at all like a silent minority, from what I've seen/remembered. They'll vocally and viciously not give you their email more often then not.

I would like to understand the moral qualm about this, that's all.

I will never as much as log into any MU that demands an email registration just to connect. Not because it's shady or a privacy concern but because I won't know until I've looked at the +news and recent bboards (or how recent the last bbpost is anywhere) if the game is worth creating an address for or clumping in with half a dozen others or if it's just a waste. I've seen a hundred quality ads that turn out to be shitty MUs or MUs populated with shitty people or MUs that just aren't that interesting or MUs that are just plain not active.

When a MU allows guest connections without email registration or if it allows character creation but not necessarily character approval without email registration, I will always look around. If the game is active and the bbposts are generally literate and there isn't juvenile bullshit like flame-warring going on right out on front street, I will give them an email address. If it passes the last 2 but not the first then I will usually ask staff if I can get a char @pcreated without giving up an email address. If it doesn't pass the last 2, I won't waste my time. I've had some staffers seriously lose their shit as if I was being vocally and viciously against email reg when I said something like, "Hey, can I just skip the email reg part?"

@arkandel said in Good TV:

We already were in the golden age of television, and then Netflix threw a ton of money into the mix to up the ante... which is causing others to do the same.

What I hope for is that the market doesn't eventually crash. We really don't know yet (there's no way to tell since this is all so new) if these streaming service behemoths will make their investments back in the long term.

All those Republican investments in television networks finally explains the repeal of Net Neutrality legislation, even to the point of shielding cable companies from standard corporate regulation.

1: I typically never share my real name online. Even my github account has a business name, not a personal name. All the email addresses that I use for anything but business have no name or a name that reflects the email address (for gmail and yahoo, where a First/Last name are required). I even pay extra to my domain registrar for that "anonymous registration" protection service.

2: I don't really care about gender/religion/etc. I'm vocal about the fact that I've been an ordained minister since 2000 and that I don't subscribe to canonical or secular "religion" as much as spirituality. I'm also vocal about my politics. That said, I wouldn't want it advertised by a 3rd party unless that 3rd party is a dating site.

3: I don't trust anyone who won't voicechat. This may be oldschool because that's where I learned it - staffing IRC and MU* servers in the mid to late 1990s. As often as not a phone conversation was required as part of the staff interview for MUs, and more often than not it was required to become an IRCop. Moreover, a 5 minute voice chat tends to accomplish as much or more than a 5 page email. I don't post pictures of myself online except at freelancing sites where I make real, actual money, and then it's just a head-shot attached to my profile. I don't facebook or twitter and I never did.

4: I was email stalked by Red Queen after quitting as her coder at RER. Over a decade before that, the first incarnation of WORA got hold of one of my email addresses (which was also my IRC nickname everywhere I was an oper) and used it to create a puppet account by that name which they then trolled their own boards with. This resulted in a problems for me over a few years, whenever I used that email address for registration MUs, and wasn't resolved until somebody on a MU staff corps finally acted like an adult and pointed out what WORA had been up to. So the email addresses I use for MU "registrations" or MU-related forums now are always created for that purpose on the spot, or a few at a time may be consolidated into a single throwaway account.

5: I've always held the opinion that anyone who wants or needs to hide who their alts are is up to no good. Whenever I have a wizbit or access to the shell, I will also siteban or lock out via iptables any IP Address which turns out to belong to a relay/proxy agency for the same reason.

@fatefan said in Comic Noir Game:

appears to be incredibly similar to the logo image from the United Heroes wiki

Is this game being run by the same set of people?

A guy who played a few characters at UH once claimed that the UH logo was almost identical to the logo from a game he'd run/shut down years earlier. The one in your links looks identical to the one he linked me to (I almost think his was even Two Tone Tales for some reason). He was annoyed because he paid somebody to build his logo, so it looks like they all just use the same graphic artist.

@surreality said in Skills and Fluff in WoD:

WoD is the example I know we're discussing here, but... damn, it's such a bad example in some ways.

This is a company that basically went, "Game balance? ...is that like, weighing the book on a scale? How do you do that with pixels?" years ago, and I'm not talking about 'decided to switch primarily to pdf'.

I don't think that's really fair.

The oWoD (not nWoD 1.0 but the really really old thing with V:tM and WW:tA etc) started out in the late 80s, before public internet was even a thing. The V:tM core book(s) always had "sample NPCs" for werewolf/lycanthrope types and in that game system the lycanthrope always had Potence and Celerity and anything else a GM deemed fitting, if in "werewolf" form which WW:tA would call Crinos, and some other set in "wolf" form which WW:tA would call Lupus, and should be treated as a normal/average mortal during daylight. I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure V:tM also only allowed for lycanthropes to shapeshift during the full moon, without any trace of "auspices." V:tM never allowed for lycanthropes to have a Glabro or Hispo form. WW:tA and M:tA were exactly the same - their Vampire/Werewolf/Mage samples used stats such as Rage and Gnosis or Arete and Paradox, always drawing powers from the same core book that the template/sample appeared in.

Nobody ever expected tabletop troupes to run a V:tM chronicle crossing over with a WW:tA or M:tA story (because Mage and Werewolf goals such as the use of areas suitable for a Node/Caern would pit those PCs against each other in PvP pretty constantly), so "game balance" was never relevant. The oWoD also had a Rule Zero printed in every corebook, reprinted in every Player's Guide and Storyteller's Handbook, so if you want to blame somebody for bad game balance in MU crossover environments, you have to blame the game God/Sphere staff at any individual MU.

The oWoD's definition of Rule Zero was literally the same as Faraday's last post in this thread: Everything presented in canon was intended as a rough outline for GMs to build on or expand, not as gospel.