askesisdev (u/askesisdev)

askesisdev commented on “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says niemanlab.org/2021/11/the... · Posted by u/spzx

kieloo · 4 years ago

Same thing with The Guardian. Subscribed online and was then told I can’t cancel via email and have to endure a pushy sales call if I want to cancel. Similar experience with The Economist except it was via live chat instead.

These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a newspaper again.

askesisdev · 4 years ago

I told the person at the The Economist's live chat that I was unsubscribing due to that dark pattern. The other reason is that even if the content is great their app isn't. The saved articles feature isn't shared between different devices. Another reason is that you need to get into an article and then get out instead of doing continuous reading. Ended up reading/annotating downloaded PDFs because it was a better experience than using their app.

askesisdev commented on In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games waywardstrategy.com/2021/... · Posted by u/aw1621107

javajosh · 5 years ago

I found the SupCom 1 controls uncomfortable in the first 20 minutes of the tutorial, and chose not to continue. Life is too short to finish bad books or punishing games; however for me SupCom 2 was a huge ergonomic improvement and if not for that game I wouldn't be playing the series at all.

askesisdev · 5 years ago

That's something I didn't notice but I understand. As an Emacs user that had to end up using Vim mode (evil) due to such concerns.

As I said, spent a lot of effort getting good at SupCom and didn't feel like learning everything again for the expansion.. For me a perfect SupCom would be a SupCom 1 with better performance and graphics. Prefer games that are focused on economics and construction than rushing and getting some land resources, which was the focus in SupCom FA and I guess is better for most people. SupCom 2 I played like 5 hours so I don't even remember much other than I didn't like it.

Haven't played any games, other than VR, in years but I will install SupCom and play a few hours for the memories..

askesisdev commented on Google launches new vulnerability reward platform security.googleblog.com/2... · Posted by u/theafh

ds · 5 years ago

There must be something I am missing, because I dont understand how underpaid most bug bounty programs are.

If I ran Googles program, I would immediately 10x all payments, unironically. Yes, that means paying 1 million bucks for something you previously paid 100k for. Drop in the bucket. You also get a ton more eyeballs on you, letting you patch everything ASAP.

But they dont do this. I dont know why. Security through obscurity? I suppose that works if you are myspace.com in 2021. Nobody likely gives a shit to try and hack it, but at the end of the day this is still google so that really doesn't apply.

The downside of not paying handsomely is people realize they can make more money selling to third party vendors, (which some do) then every once in a while you get a bad PR story showing that your stuff was hacked and exploited for months/years and it potentially knocks a few points off your stock price.

Money is really the end all be all. If you pay more than third party vendors, I can see almost no reason people would sell to them. At that point, your only adversary's are gov employees of nation states and the staff of companies dedicated to finding vulnerabilities.

askesisdev · 5 years ago

Third party vendors don't buy vulnerabilities on Google's infrastructure and web services. Third parties like Zerodium are interested in 0days on Android, iOS, Windows, Chrome...

You could try to sell it to criminal organizations or monetizing the vulnerability yourself, but it doesn't make any sense to be in that situation if you are making six figures as a bug bounty hunter.. even if you didn't have any ethical qualms regarding such acts.

askesisdev commented on In defense of hard counters in real time strategy games waywardstrategy.com/2021/... · Posted by u/aw1621107

tobyhinloopen · 5 years ago

FaF is great and basically the most modern RTS I regularly play. (Using FAF Forever or something) but technically it’s a buggy and slow mess that performs bad.

askesisdev · 5 years ago

I was in the top20 worldwide ranking of the original Supreme Commander when I was a teenager, never got over the changes they did to the economy and gameplay on FA. The performance of the original was even worse, you had to apply a patch to get multithreading.

Found an SQL Injection too, reported it and got a license for Supreme Commander 2 as a bounty. That game was way worse than the original, too simplified but I guess it was the logical path as people complained about SupCom's difficulty/complexity.

askesisdev commented on Bitcoin miners are buying power plants nysfocus.com/2021/04/13/n... · Posted by u/throwaway888abc

caf · 5 years ago

The Greenidge team told potential investors last month that the plant had mined 1,186 bitcoins at an average net cost of about $2,869 for the 12 months ending in February. At this week’s Bitcoin price, that would translate into a profit margin of about $60,000 per mined coin.

Surely this cannot last. This kind of outsize profit ought to be bringing online enough new mining capacity to increase the block difficulty until that margin erodes away - is it the worldwide chip shortage preventing that from happening?

askesisdev · 5 years ago

Yes, the chip shortage must be preventing the manufacture of enough ASICs.

The same can be said for Ethereum. The shortage of GPUs is preventing the difficulty to raise fast enough. The profit margin has been like 5-10x the electricity cost for the last few months. If you bought a RTX 3080/3090 it would have paid itself and the electricity by now.

askesisdev commented on Bernie Madoff has died bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/cwwc

lordnacho · 5 years ago

What were they coding? Sounded to me like nothing at all was going on inside.

askesisdev · 5 years ago

They built software to create a fake history of the trading and also imitated certain software from other companies and regulators so the customer could check the trades were real. There is a decent book on Madoff called 'Wizard of Lies'