helpimnotdrowning.net (eternally unfinished)

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  • 18 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • yes, it’s mostly things like games or software

    though, I have seen more & more reports of people finding malicious disguised LNK files in their downloads and torrents, which will run some arbitrary command if you open that: Windows does not ever show the LNK extension, so a file could be named “.mkv.lnk”, and you would only know if you checked the “file type” column in Explorer (which would read “Shortcut” instead of something like “Matryoshka file”), or when you see the cmd.exe window flicker open and close.

    bonus edit: LNK is the native file extension that Windows uses to link app shortcuts, such as the shortcuts on your desktop.




  • I started about September or October 2021, when clips of Myth and Pikamee began showing up in my YouTube Shorts feed when I was trying that out. I would watch a stream or clips here and there, but I would really only consider myself a casual fan.

    That was until late February when it was announced Rushia’s channel would be deleted at the end of March '22 after her “graduation”. As someone who would have considered themselves a novice “datahoarder”, I felt the need to save her channel. This consisted of waiting to buy a 4tb hard drive and getting it about mid-March, the next week-ish mainly fine-tuning my downloader, then the last week purely downloading for days on end.

    And throughout all this, I would watch clips of her or pick a VOD that had downloaded; this was where I really fell down the rabbit hole. People from Hololive, Phase Connect, (then) WACTOR, idol, indies, etc. were popping up and I gleefully watched along.

    Strangely also, it seems that most of my oshis have graduated at some time (Rushia, Vesper, WACTOR ES’ Luna Rurine and Neon Kuroyuri, VOMS’ Pikamee) but I still watch them now in their new forms.

    (And the Archive grows.)


  • TLDR; No

    It hasn’t been necessary in a long time, unless you’re a developer who frequently needs to type in filenames in everywhere (since the command line needs extra protection against spaces and other symbols)

    The OS (Windows, Mac, Android, etc) handles thar all for you so you don’t have to worry about it (unless you happen to use a badly-written program that doesn’t understand spaces, but this is super rare to begin with, and more protected against as time goes on)






  • Basically, the idea is that a server can refuse to serve you (or degrade your experience with captchas/heavier restrictions) unless you (your device) complete a “challenge”. This could be something like the browser (through a system API) checking some device details like

    • root/admin
    • unlocked bootloader
    • extensions (either bad extensions or something like an Adblock)
    • VPN (potentially “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”)
    • installed apps (Adblock via DNS like blokada,
    • device emulation
    • TPM (generate secure key to make sure device is “real”)
    • OS state (heavily modified?, untrusted OS?)

    etc. Basically making sure the “environment” is clean and not tampered with (trusted).

    The problem is with what defines a “trusted” environment. It could start at just making sure the device isn’t rooted (like Android’s Safetynet/Play Integrity check; most people don’t root their device & don’t/won’t care, also easily justifiable since it can be a security vulnerability because the device is “wide open”).

    Then, like the article mentions, the device makers (Google (phones, chromebooks), Microsoft (Windows, Xbox), Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS, etc), Meta/Facebook (Oculus), etc) could change their terms for attestation and deny approval on stricter, potentially anti-consumer criteria such as device age (forcing you to buy more things).