realitymonster’s Comments

• Feb 9th, 2022 @ 6:51am

  Re: Remember thin clients?

  on Google Stadia's Failure Is Almost Complete

  So I work in the industry, and I can tell you that Stadia had better performance and less latency than me sitting at a PC at my desk in the office. There were some other problems: setup was honestly a bit of a nightmare, and the process wasn't well established, so I could never attach a debugger to my remote session, for instance. I'm sure it was possible, we just didn't seem to have a setup for it.

  But as a dev that's still working from home (and hopes to keep working from home forever) I hope that this tech makes it way out into the industry more broadly and I'll be able to connect to a game instance on a cloud server and play the build directly on my Mac and still connect remotely to my Windows PC to debug it.

• Jan 11th, 2022 @ 4:53am

  Aren't all NFTs a joke, tho'?

  on Olive Garden At It Again Enforcing Its IP Instead Of Letting Anyone Have Some Fun With Joke NFTs

  Frankly, NFTs and the Olive Garden deserve one another. A pox on both their houses.

• Nov 8th, 2021 @ 3:10pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  on Killing Website Comment Sections Wasn't The Brilliant Move Many Newsroom Leaders Assumed
  What in the WORLD does the Canadian blank media tax have to do with whether or not the CBC is a state funded, but not state run news organization? The CBC and Radio Canada (the French side) both exist for perfectly good reasons, incidentally: Canada is a huge country and even today, it's not guaranteed that anyone wants to build a news outlet for a remote location. In the past, it was the only way to get any news at all, but now the CBC may honestly represent the only local news source. It is a government service that serves the broader national good of having an educated and informed populace. It works for the same reason the bureaucracy in any Western democracy works. Everything is at arm's length; the media organization (theoretically) favours no particular government, in much the same way someone given a contract to pave a road (theoretically) favours no particular government.
• Oct 26th, 2021 @ 12:04pm

  As a dev, Stadia could be very useful to me

  on Google's Stadia Pivots To Being Some White Label Game Streaming Platform For Others To Use

  I work in games, and I work at a big studio. Last year, when we were trying to ship, some of the bugs that I was getting were only reproducible on Stadia builds.

  Okay, so, debugging on Stadia was a bit of a nightmare. We don't have tools and processes set up to do that very easily.

  But PLAYING the game was amazing. Like, running the game on Chrome on my Mac Mini was smoother and looked better than running the dev build on my PC at work.

  The toolchain is a major issue, IMO, though I haven't actually gotten a chance to work on it in depth since last year. (What you basically needed to do is have a running and working game, and then bring it to Stadia. You couldn't run the Unreal/Unity/In-house toolset and build a game from scratch, AFAIK. I could be wrong; maybe that's better now.)

  But now that working from home is common and many people aren't going to want to change that, I think Google should also set themselves up as a way to do AAA game development with full fidelity without needing as much on-site hardware. Right now I run RDP to a PC in the office, and if it hard locks, I need to find someone at the office to go find it and power-cycle it.

  Long story short, Stadia works way better than I ever expected, and it could be a great tool for devs.

• Oct 20th, 2021 @ 11:56am

  This system isn't the problem

  on Report: Client-Side Scanning Is An Insecure Nightmare Just Waiting To Be Exploited By Governments

  Ugh, look, this is actually kind of a bad take.

  Photos already does client-side scanning of your library. It would be easier to build in a back door to that than to repurpose a system that's built for CSAM scanning that theoretically has protected sources. If China is looking for pictures of Winnie the Pooh, it's a million times easier for Apple to train their photo scanning system on existing Winnie the Pooh pictures than find a way to integrate it into their CSAM system and then generate a whole bunch of strikes against the account so the police get called.

  Everyone keeps talking about how foreign governments will demand that Apple add pictures that they want to use to trump up charges against people, or to hunt down dissidents. Well, bad news:

  1. Those governments can already compel Apple to do anything they want, irrespective of these image databases. They'll just tell Apple to hand over the unencrypted backup and they'll scan it (or modify it) directly.
  2. In the case of China, they already have all the users' data in servers that are located in China. Why waste time scanning on the phone and having it report back?
  3. If a government is going to gin up some fake crime and throw someone in jail, they don't need Apple there to do it. They'll simply confiscate the victim's phone and CLAIM that they found images on it. Due process doesn't matter to them, so why spend time pretending that it does?

  I'm not saying that Apple's client-side scanning system is good or without problems, it's that it makes no sense to use it even if it does exist. For a government that's a bad actor, data security doesn't matter. This is like the XKCD about the wrench: governments that don't care about your digital rights will also beat you with a wrench until you confess anyway. https://xkcd.com/538/

  This discourse around Apple's system pretends like it's the most obvious way to scan someone's photo library and find incriminating data and it absolutely isn't.