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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • You cannot realistically make it impossible to detect that you’re running on wine. Wine just implements the Windows ABIs. The actual code running is totally different. Even just reading any of the binary code of literally any function would reveal it’s different from the Windows code. How are you going to stop it from doing memory reads on stuff that it needs to be able to read? You can’t. You’d need a full hardware emulator for that.


  • Anti cheat software tries to find cheats running on the computer, and in order to that, so called kernel-level anticheat hooks into NT (Windows kernel) internals, and runs at the highest possible privilege level. It has to do that so it can monitor everything going on in the system. If it didn’t do that, the cheat could just hide from the anticheat software by running with superior privileges.

    Wine does not implement undocumented/internal parts of NT, and neither does it run at an elevated privilege level. It also cannot realistically implement any and all possible NT kernel internals, and it cannot possibly hide the fact that it’s actually wine, and not real Windows, from any program that really wants to figure this out.

    If wine tried to implement a specific workaround for a specific anti-cheat software/version, in order to it trick into thinking it’s running on a real Windows system with elevated privileges, the anti-cheat vendor would likely interpret this as a kind of deception, and they could easily update their software to detect this situation.

    Theoretically, anti-cheat vendors could do kernel-level anticheat for the Linux kernel specifically if the game runs on Linux, but this has problems: First of all a general backlash and complete lack of cooperation from the Linux community (btw, Microsoft isn’t too happy about them doing this on Windows either, and they might at some point do something about this, since it’s bad for security and stability). Also, Linux kernel internals aren’t at all stable, and so just practically you cannot hook into the Linux kernel nearly as easily as you can into NT.

    Some anti-cheat vendors do support Linux though, but only optionally if the game dev allows that. In practice, this just means many checks will just be disabled on Linux, which is presumably why many games do not enable the Linux support.

    tl;dr: No. Only the anti-cheat vendor / game dev can realistically fix the situation, and they may not want to because it’ll be worse at actually detecting cheats on Linux in practice.



  • https://lwn.net/Articles/335415/

    The evince PDF reader ran into this issue back in 2005. It is now rare to find a distributor shipping a version of evince which implements copy restrictions. Xpdf implements copy restrictions unconditionally, but Debian patched that code out in 2002, and that patch has spread to other distributors as well. In general, as one would expect, free PDF readers tend not to implement this behavior. Okular is about the only exception that your editor can find; it’s interesting to note that the version of Okular shipped with Fedora Rawhide also implements copy restrictions by default. Perhaps this behavior is result of the relative newness of this application; as it accumulates more users, the pressure for more user-friendly behavior is likely to grow.


  • Another downside of flatpak is that I don’t trust upstream devs to have my best interests at heart, but I trust Debian developers far more. I’ve seen upstream do some annoying or stupid shit and the Debian maintainers not budging.

    I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out. I’ve seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it. There were many dodgy copyright and licensing problems upstream devs gave no shit about. Debian not including these often eventually put pressure on them to fix this shit or for some replacement to get developed.



  • Man weiß, dass die Ukraine Probleme bei der Rekrutierung hat (Bloomberg). Ukrainische Presskommandos kidnappen Männer mit brutalen Methoden. Viele Männer verstecken sich und trauen sich nicht auf die Straße (BBC).

    Die russische Armee dagegen hat zwar 2022 eine Teilmobilisierung gemacht, aber seit dem werden nur Freiwillige rekrutiert, und die Armee wächst (Reuters).

    Für Russland gibt es eine vernünftige Schätzung der gefallenen Soldaten bei Mediazona. Die Zählen ~96k bestätigte Tote, schätzen aber eher ~165k. Für die Ukraine gibt es UAlosses, aber das geht grad nicht. Meduza hat vor einem Jahr geschrieben:

    If we assume the unlikely scenario in which the UALosses database is complete, the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian fatalities is 1.8-2 to 1. According to Meduza’s calculations, this is the maximum possible estimate “from above” in favor of Ukraine. This estimate, however, does not line up with Zelensky’s positing in a Fox News interview that Russia loses five soldiers for every one that Ukraine loses.

    Also ist ein Verhältnis von 2:1 so was wie eine Obergrenze bei den Gefallenen (vermutlich ist es bei Verletzten ähnlich). Ehrlich gesagt halte ich das Aufgrund der Berichte über den Personalmangel der Ukrainer sowie Berichte zur überlegenen Feuerkraft und Nachschub der Russen für unrealistisch. Zum Vergleich: Die Ukraine hat nach Schätzungen momentan noch 30 Millionen Einwohner, Russland über 140 Millionen (Reuters). Das ist 1:5, die Zahlen gehen nicht auf.


  • Das ist ein Abnutzungskrieg und die Ukraine kann nicht mehr Leute an die Front schaffen als Russland. Da könnten 100% der noch vorhandenen Lagerbestände geliefert werden plus die Gesamtproduktion, die werden verlieren. Dass das scheinbar immer noch nicht bei allen angekommen ist, ist echt nicht zu fassen.

    Ich hoffe alle, die immer noch nicht checken, was seit mindestens eineinhalb Jahren offensichtlich ist, werden mal hinterfragen, wenn/falls sie es irgendwann verstehen, wie es dazu kommen konnte, dass sie in einer solchen Desinformationbubble waren.

    Und ich will bitte nicht, dass jetzt die NATO mit eigenen Truppen in den Krieg eintritt, um das nochmal rumzureißen. Das ist saugefährlich und bringt mindestens hundertausende Tote.








  • Oh yeah that’s where I was getting at, but I didn’t have time to write that out earlier. I agree that OP probably pulled out the usb stick before buffers were flushed. I imagine that direct I/O would mitigate this problem a lot because presumably whatever buffers still exist (there would some hardware buffers and I think Linux kernel I/O buffers) will be minimal compared to the potentially large amount of dirty pages one might accumulate using normal cached writes. So I imagine those buffers would be empty very shortly (less than one second maybe?) after dd finishes, whereas I’ve seen regular dd finish tens of seconds before my usb stick stopped blinking it’s LED. Still if you wait for that long the result will be the same.



  • Ich hab mir die relevanten Teile der Verfassung angesehen, das einzige tangential relevante, was ich gefunden habe:

    Im Falle der Beendigung der Wahlperiode des Parlaments der Ukraine in der Zeit des Kriegs- oder Ausnahmezustandes oder des Notstandes werden seine Befugnisse bis zum Tag der ersten Sitzung des nach der Aufhebung des Kriegs- oder Ausnahmezustandes gewählten Parlaments verlängert.

    Da geht es um das Parlament. Für den Präsidenten gibt es keinen äquivalenten Artikel. Und es steht da auch nichts davon, dass Wahlen irgendwie verboten wären. Ich weiß nicht, von welchen Gesetz da die Rede sein soll, aber die Verfassung muss schon mal nicht geändert werden.