Latest Comments by BlackBloodRum
Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages
1 Nov 2024 at 12:34 pm UTC
You have been legally prevented from using a product you have paid for with updates which intentionally block your usage, this is no fault of your own and thus you should demand a refund until you get one.
Remember the terms of sale changed *after* you paid your money, not before. Thus, you were unaware this change was going to occur.
1 Nov 2024 at 12:34 pm UTC
Quoting: adolsonThis is a good step, of course. But my only real problem with all this anti-cheat stuff is when it's added after release, after many people have purchased the game already, and then it makes it incompatible with Linux. I don't run Windows on my personal computers, and have not for over 22 years. If valve wants us to continue buying Windows games, when they allow the developer/publisher to implement stuff that completely breaks it on Linux, they should enable refunds in these circumstances, regardless of amount of play time or how long ago the purchase was. That's my opinion. And valve shouldn't be the ones to put that bill either, but the publisher who made that decision. It's the least they can do for taking away a game that I am enjoying. If they say, we don't support Linux so you shouldn't have bought it, then you wouldn't have had my money in the first place, so then just give it back and pretend like I never bought it in the first place then.Just keep submitting refund requests with valve until eventually you get a real person. If that fails, open a support ticket. If that fails, social media.
You have been legally prevented from using a product you have paid for with updates which intentionally block your usage, this is no fault of your own and thus you should demand a refund until you get one.
Remember the terms of sale changed *after* you paid your money, not before. Thus, you were unaware this change was going to occur.
Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered may need a workaround on desktop Linux
31 Oct 2024 at 10:24 pm UTC Likes: 1
https://www.gog.com/en/game/horizon_zero_dawn_complete_edition [External Link]
31 Oct 2024 at 10:24 pm UTC Likes: 1
Quoting: StellaWhile I do agree about the delisting being shameful, I like that they made it a separate package and not a forced upgrade for the original + PSN requirement. I hated the Witcher 3's forced Next Gen update because it broke all my 100+ mods…For now, the good news is you can get the original, still:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/horizon_zero_dawn_complete_edition [External Link]
Beelink have open-sourced their Multi-Functional EX Docking Station for mini PCs
30 Oct 2024 at 10:39 pm UTC Likes: 1
30 Oct 2024 at 10:39 pm UTC Likes: 1
I'm sorry, but I find it comical that the GPU is bigger than the entire PC in that setup. :grin:
Steam games will now need to fully disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages
30 Oct 2024 at 10:29 pm UTC Likes: 1
30 Oct 2024 at 10:29 pm UTC Likes: 1
Good! They shouldn't be able to hide something like this. :grin:
Steam Beta removes option to globally disable Steam Play plus Game Recording improvements
27 Oct 2024 at 3:54 am UTC Likes: 4
27 Oct 2024 at 3:54 am UTC Likes: 4
Quoting: Liam DawePoor wording on your party? is that the same as poor wording on your part? :whistle: :grin:Quoting: tarmo888Steam Linux Runtime 1.0 (scout) isn't exactly "newer", it's the most compatible.Poor wording on my party, amended. Yes it's an older one, but how they now use it is newer (in terms of desktop anyway).
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/container-runtime.md [External Link]
Croc Legend of the Gobbos remaster will be a GOG exclusive
24 Oct 2024 at 11:56 pm UTC
24 Oct 2024 at 11:56 pm UTC
You see Denuvo? This is how you get my money. This is will be an instant buy.:grin:
Raspberry Pi launch their own SSDs and SSD Kits, along with SD Cards
24 Oct 2024 at 11:20 am UTC
24 Oct 2024 at 11:20 am UTC
Good to know! :grin:
Intel and AMD join up to form the x86 ecosystem advisory group to shape the future
21 Oct 2024 at 7:21 pm UTC Likes: 4
21 Oct 2024 at 7:21 pm UTC Likes: 4
Quoting: F.UltraHoly quote tree! :woot:Quoting: LoudTechieThe thing you have missed with PRISM is that it was leaked (on several occasions), now show me the Intel ME / AMD PSP leaks. And please show me a single university with this capability.Quoting: F.Ultraduring that period [External Link]they grew 6 percent [External Link]and made faster chips [External Link], while when they still had market dominance, but slower chips and their competition had AMT too it cost them 10% market share. [External Link].Quoting: LoudTechieIntel added ME in 2008 and AMD added PSP in 2013 so both have had this for 11 years now, and those 5 years in between was Intel taking 100% of the company sales due to AMD not being viable here, Intel breaking that advantage by moving it to Xeons only would be an insanely stupid move.Quoting: F.UltraA. For at least a decennium AMD didn't have their own ME/AMT alternative(yes, it does now, but that is much later), so there would still be little reason and on the workstation devices AMD was never a real alternative anyway(, because no seller of prebuild workstation devices includes them, allegedly because intel pays them to).Quoting: LoudTechieOffice desktops outsells consumer desktops by orders of magnitude and is where the money is for companies like Intel. Them removing ME from their consumer grade CPU:s and trying to get companies to upgrade to Xeons would only lead to one outcome: every single company would switch to AMD.Quoting: F.UltraQuoting: LoudTechieok, had somehow missed that boot guard was part of ME, thanks for pointing that out. Yes XEONS are for server and workstation use but 99% of office machines are not Xeons and remote management is something that large companies use to manage their large fleet of office machines. Myself I only use the server side version (so a full BMC on Xeons and Epycs) since where I work we let every one manage their own pc as they see fit, but the servers we have in a remote location and ssh is not fun when the machine is stuck in bios, powered off or kernel hang.Quoting: F.UltraIn the modules section of the wikipedia BootGuard(bios signing), Protected Audio Video Path, frimware TPM(fTPM) and Secureboot(os signing) are explicitly mentioned as ME modules together with AMT(remote management feature). [External Link]Quoting: LoudTechieThe PlayReady drm does not use Intel ME, it uses SGX which is a completely different thing. fTPM exists only on AMD so again not Intel ME. Nor does it do bios signing.Quoting: F.UltraME is also what powers fTPM, bios signing and PlayReady drm.Quoting: PublicNuisanceSo the companies that screw me over with Intel ME and AMD PSP are joining forces ? Consider me wanting to get off X86 to RiscV or Power9 even more than before.yes it is popular to scare people that have no clue on how things work that these are somehow secret spy things when they in reality are nothing but managing devices for enterprise IT departments (just like how we in the server space have full on BMC cards instead).
These are all used to restrict your freedom to use your device how you like right now.
ME has been used by Israelian hackers to hack devices.
The procedure for using it requires you to receive an identification key from Intel based on information Intel generated, there is no indication that you can lock Intel out.
Maybe the American government isn't using it as a back door right here, right now, but the only reason we have to believe that is Intels' word.
ME is the reason modern devices can't install coreboot.
Also if it was just for remote management they would've put not such ridiculous amount of effort to counter all the efforts that have been done to remove it, because this is how it went: first you could simply remove the hardware, than they patched that and you could only remove the software, than they patched that and you couldn't, but someone found the secret government switch to turn it off and than they patched that and now the we have clean room reverse engineer it to turn it off without bricking our devices.
Also I'm not an It department and Intel knows that, because they sell a different bussiness and consumer line.
This is a feature they know I will never need, but they added it anyway.
Various hackers around the world have used every single piece of hw and sw to hack devices so not sure why Intel ME should be singled out for that reason. And for that matter I cannot find any information at all about anyone having hacked Intel ME, Israeli or otherwise, is this you confusing this with something else again or do you have any links?
You also seem a bit confused about coreboot, there are no Intel ME mechanism to prevent the installation of coreboot. The only connection between Intel ME and coreboot is that since Intel ME have it's firmware stored in the BIOS, Intel ME is disabled by coreboot since coreboot does not contain the necessary firmware.
Intel ME have never been a separate piece of hw, it have always been builtin to the cpu and it really have to be in order for it to function the way it's supposed to work.
I think that you are confusing Intel ME with TPM here since TPM started out as a separate chip and was then moved into the CPU after it was discovered that the connection between the TPM and the CPU could be eavesdropped and manipulated in a way that rendered TPM useless.
Intel ME is builtin to every single cpu since #1 Intel does not know which specific cpu a business tends to purchase for their office machines that their IT department wants to perform remote administration on and #2 it would be extremely expensive to have two separate chip fabs for non-ME and have-ME line of CPU:s of the same core design.
I would hope that people would understand that IF intel decided to put some hidden backdoor into their processors that they would have done that _hidden_ and not in a piece of hw that they openly advertise (and with complete guides on how to use like this one: Getting Started with Intel® Active Management Technology [External Link]. Also to date not a single person have been able to see any Intel ME trying to communicate with the outside world (aka phone home), had this ever occurred you would not have missed it since it would have been screamed from rooftops.
You seem to be right about your playready thing though.
I'm not confusing ME with the TPM. That's why I specified it served fTPM(the f stands for firmware).
I was though conflating Coreboot with Libreboot. Libreboot/Canoeboot can't run on modern devices, because it doesn't include the properietary ME code.
The problem with the hacking, is that I can flash a new os when my os is hacked, but not a new ME.
wikipedia explanation of how Intel bootguard prevents coreboot. [External Link]
Intel sells the Xeon line for enterprise applications and the I line for consumer applications they can simply only include it in Xeon processors.
The lack of phoning home is indeed the best proof we have about it not being a backdoor, which to me proofs mostly that they're not listening in on the devices of the kind of people who monitor and publish their web traffic.
Intel publishing it isn't that surprising.
Several researchers pull processors apart for new undocumented features finding something new without an explanation is really suspicious, while "we're trying to compete with openssh" is a lot less suspicious.99% of office machines are not Xeons: extra reason for Intel not to include enterprise specific features in them. A Xeon is an upsell(more expensive), you want those precious enterprise features, pay for them.
On the SSH point:
A. SSH is only not fun in those situations when it's not on a separate already booted controller(just like intel AMT), but that is actually quite easy to build.
Most server racks already have separate controllers.
B. Well, yes that's why they can argue it to be an attempt at competing with SSH. SSH might be free as in freedom and free beer and have more features, but it requires to set up your own separate microcontroller to manage ring 0 crashes.
Also a more generic reason I have against, "but it's for enterprise IT".
In enterprise IT the users don't own their time and/or devices any limitation of software freedoms makes sense in such a situation, because it would directly cost the one who does own these things the software freedom they get from owning these assets.
As a private buyer I do own my time/devices as such I want to control them.
B. Also Office desktops don't need the, "but I can edit the bios" feature, since there will always be someone who can follow simple instructions behind it and the os can flash the bios if you want to run an update.
For servers it's needed, because you might need to flash a new custom and unsigned bios, but for workstations you don't need that.
Edit: They included the option to turn it off for the American army, they could have simply left the option when it was discovered and used.
It required a special motherboard, so enterprise workstation devices could have avoided it easily by simply not blowing that fuse.
Residential consumers aren't an as profitable market as big enterprise contract, but they're the size of American Army contracts.
Also this "they could not have hidden it" is kinda moot, the number of people that can scan down to nanometres AND also make some sense out of interconnections among 4.2bn transistors are easily counted and those same people would be far more capable of finding any nefarious design in the small area of the ME thanks to Intel showing exactly where on the chip it is. This whole fear mongering that it was put there due to demand from NSA was shutdown when we got the Snowden files since there isn't a trace of this there plus that it also showed that this is not how they operate, they instead perform targeted attacks where they capture hardware in transit and modify it before it reaches the customer (which is much more logical since it reduces the number of possible whistleblowers).
There are not "it can edit the bios" feature, not more than what you can do from userspace.
I can find no information on that the US army required Intel ME to be disabled. What I do know happened however is that the NSA requires that it is disabled to meet their "High Assurance Platform Mode" standard but that is not strange, that is simply them requiring all venues where code can be injected and run that is not neccessary for their operation to be disabled, in a HAP the very term remote administration is a big nono to begin with.
To date no one have found a shred of evidence that Intel ME or AMD PSP is used as a backdoor for anyone despite having existed for 16 years and it's not that people haven't tried to find any.
I internally explained that with people buying faster cpus, but maybe you're right and the only feature the profitable customers care about is AMT or AMT is needed feature for faster chips.
If any of those is the case I would be quite sad, but maybe you're right.
I don't need to scan down to the silicon level to activate an option in the bios. This is a feature they disabled later when users like myself started using it. [External Link]
On the ease of hiding
A. Universities have access to such ability and they publish most to all things they find.
B. Also you don't need to scan up to silicon space to find software(and you need software to keep it updateable, which they need and did for something with full control of the entire device).
C. Also it's always active, so it could've been easily detected by power draw.
Generic storage chips take quite a lot more space than a few hard wired instructions and storing it on existing chips means someone only has to scan that chip
I've personally used the permanently disable feature on my older computer where this was still an option. [External Link]
There are not "it can edit the bios" feature, not more than what you can do from userspace.Than it has no advantage to openssh in workspace machines and as such they should make it Xeon specific.
On the backdoor question:
A. Bootguard, secureboot and drm are backdoory enough for me personally(they took control of my bios/computer).
B. Distinquishing an actively exploited vulnerability from a backdoor is really hard especially when the attacker has resources on par with intel. It has at least been actively exploited by the PLATINUM group.
C. Often western government attacks are aimed at specific targets(often called "spear fishing"), so just because the kind of people who actively publish their internet traffic aren't currently under attack doesn't mean nobody is and all the other signs are there.
All you need for AMT access is a code provided by intel(I read in on the public procedure).
They put real effort in sabotaging all removing efforts.
We didn't get access to the source code(not even source available).
It has access to the entire device.
The thing was introduced 3 years in the PRISM program(changing the fabs for new chip features costs 2 years).
(Also if you want to get truly paranoid:
For as long they only had it they made the fastest chips in the world and once that stopped they didn't, it doesn't sound like a very speed inducing feature, so maybe they got heavy R&D funding or access to classified technology from the government for introducing it.
I don't think it's the case, but it's an argument someone might use.)
NonSteamLaunchers gets booted from Steam Deck plugin store Decky Loader
14 Oct 2024 at 7:58 am UTC Likes: 2
14 Oct 2024 at 7:58 am UTC Likes: 2
Nothing new, if you don't fit the mold you are not welcome. :neutral:
Internet Archive hit with DDoS attacks and hacked with 31 million accounts hit
11 Oct 2024 at 2:34 pm UTC Likes: 4
But, it's totally plausible when you consider the span of time and how big of a website it is.
11 Oct 2024 at 2:34 pm UTC Likes: 4
Quoting: pbIA has been running since 1996. To put that in perspective, that's 28 years. It's not hard to imagine that in such a span of time 31 million accounts could have been made. Some of those could be duplicates, others simply upload one file and go and of course possibly junk / spam accounts.Quoting: dubigrasuYes, that part is obvious, but I didn't think 31 million people would upload stuff to the IA. To megaupload, maybe.Quoting: pbI just wonder why did 31 million people need an account on archive.org. Genuinely wonder, because I've been using it (occasionally) for 25 years and never needed an account. :huh:You'll need it to upload files to them.
But, it's totally plausible when you consider the span of time and how big of a website it is.
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