data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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  • 565 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Persistence should be near impossible; you most likely have a bad habit or other factor that makes you vulnerable. As others have said, check your router settings; make sure your router firmware is the latest to patch any vulnerabilities. Check devices on your network to make sure none are compromised.

    My first guess, like others, is you’re doing something horribly wrong with your port forwarding, followed by you’re installing suspect software. Don’t go installing from random Github/Gitlab repositories without at least doing a bit of background research. Also, sometimes even legitimate open source projects get compromised. Ultimately, try to stick to the bare minimum, just stuff from the Debian repos, and see if it still happens.

    If you still have the problem, then my last resort is to ask this (and this is really paranoid, hopefully an unlikely scenario for you): do you use your computer in a safe environment where only people you trust can access it?

    I mostly ask because if not, maybe someone has physical access to your computer and is pulling an evil maid attack, installing the software when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s a jerk coworker. Maybe it’s a creepy landlord. A login password is not enough to defend against this; it may be possible for the attacker to boot off a USB stick and modify system files. The only way to prevent this is to reinstall and use full disk encryption, which I do on my laptop. You can try to use Secure Boot and TPM1 to add further protection, but honestly, your attacker just sounds like some script kiddie and probably won’t perform a complex attack on your boot partiton.

    1: Despite their obnoxious utilization by Microsoft, they can actually be quite useful to a Linux user, making it possible to set up auto-decryption on boot that doesn’t work if the boot partition has been tampered with (in which case you use a backup password).




  • I think I largely agree with your points.

    I’m also really annoyed that the choice tree required a website that no longer works. Additionally, for the overall results of the graphics, I’m rather bugged the game is that hardware intensive and think they could have easily optimized to make this game more accessible to lower-end hardware. I did my entire playthrough on an AMD laptop with iGPU (on Linux through Proton), and it was mostly playable.

    spoiler

    One of the worst parts graphically was the tractor beam at the mining facility; if I looked away from it, I could do around 24 fps, but the moment I looked at it, the game game became a slideshow.

    However, it was still really fun, and I only payed $12.50 for it.

    spoiler

    I wish I didn’t have to hate Bedrosian, but the universal hate is deserved. She suggests genocide with the frequency Worf suggests firing phasers or Shaxs suggests ejecting the warp core. I really wish they would have toned it doen a bit or written her differently.

    Also, I wish we had more time with Urmott; as good an officer he was, he had less chance to impress me than Westbrook, and thus I couldn’t choose him as first officer. Part of this is just an inherent structure issue with Starfleet (as summed up in Eddington’s “you don’t get to be captain wearing a gold uniform” or the story of Harry Kim), but honestly, for being the first officer you meet (besides Ensign cannon fodder), his story underwhelms.

    Though really, if I could really choose, I’d try to make the doctor my first officer, though I’m not sure she would have accepted.

    I did really enjoy the starbase and Resolute environments, and I wish more games would immerse the player in a Starfleet ship that way.

    Also, anyone else think the space British empire aliens all just looked like a realistic rendering of Squidward?
















  • This is more a comic/graphic novel than a proper Trek novel, but I think Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way is possibly the best Star Trek comic I’ve ever read.

    It stays true to the source material, and unlike a lot of IDW stuff I’ve read, doesn’t completely shark jump from the source material in an attempt to be mysterious, cool, or interesting just for the heck of it.

    Probably the only other piece of IDW Trek I enjoyed this much was the TNG Mirror Universe, which did really well to achieve a “keep me on the edge of my seat” feeling.

    I still need to read some other Trek comics, though, especially the TNG/Doctor Who crossover, which a local library branch of mine has. I also have a ton of PDFs from the recent Humble Bundle to burn through.


  • What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

    However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

    Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

    As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

    Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.