So the local machine doesn’t really need the firewall; it definitely doesn’t hurt, but your router should be covering this via port forwarding (ipv4) or just straight up firewall rules (ipv6).

You can basically go two routes to reasonable harden the system IMO. You can either just set up a user without administrative privileges and use something like a systemd system level service to start the server as that user and provide control over it from other users … OR … if you’re really paranoid, use a virtual machine and forward the port from the host machine into the VM.

A lot of what you’re doing is … fine stuff to do, but it’s not really going to help much (e.g. building system packages with hardening flags is good, but it only helps if those packages are actually part of the attack surface or rather what’s exposed to the remote users in someway).

Your biggest risk is going to be plugins that aren’t vetted doing bad things (and really only the VM or using the dedicated user account provides an insulation layer there – the VM really only adds protection against privilege escalation which is pretty hard to pull off on a patched system).

My advice for most people:

• Make a new user on the system to run each game you want to run
• Run the game using systemd and that user
• Use something like kopia + the root user’s crontab (easier than systemd timers, but systemd timers also work) to backup the files on disk

For Minecraft in particular, to properly back things up on a busy server you need to disable auto save, manually force save, do the backup and then enable auto save again after your backup. Kopia can issue commands to talk to the server to do that, but you need a plugin that can react to those commands running on the server (or possibly to use the server console via stdin). Realistically though, that’s overkill and you’ll be just fine backing up the files exactly as they are periodically.

Kopia in particular will do well here because of its deduplication of baked up data + chunking algorithm that breaks up files. That has saved me a crazy amount of storage vs other solutions I’ve tried. Kopia level compression isn’t needed because the Minecraft region files themselves are already highly compressed.

Do you happen to have a time-stamp?

I didn’t feel particularly safer in Europe… About the same… Watch your wallet, don’t go down dark alleys alone, etc.

Some things definitely felt more grandiose, but on average things felt like they could be in an American city if not for their vintage.

Public transportation was definitely the biggest difference I observed, trains in Germany were an all but fantastic experience.

I was surprised how heavy German food was and how much smoking folks in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria do. It seemed elevated compared to the average US city.

They had console players before. They just updated the game to support the latest generation of consoles properly.

They’re still in a separate queue from PC players, no cross play or cross save currently.

I got banned from signal’s subreddit for talking about how telegram works and the case for it.

So most dorms don’t want you using your own routers because a bunch of student routers causes A LOT of inference.

You should probably reach out not to the dorm folks but the university networking folks as they’re the ones that will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to turn things off/disconnect you.

A cheap networking switch would probably be okay by them to get some more wired connections in your dorm room (routers aren’t really a great way to do that).

https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Business-LGS105-Unmanaged-Enclosure/dp/B00FV12VSW/ref=mp_s_a_1_1_sspa?crid=3PUXDK6TFLZIT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zm2b2eGNCSReGFJuUskv6-s3cUVDK12lfqOmf729Jjx1nw8mI07xRjx4RZCcnWDhplIUW-7IOfSn6R7TMu0yVy_k9hGXtOs0SNS7RO8sN4RI5aa_8-iwSOXz6biaUH5pE27eM8eYyBzJl9tkYxX4erfrbMwkWwhSrqIKQGOSqx1DQ1z5ZiDGCyQ_u0k8IhaN1Ra-Zpsr07cg-ZjJnDz6lA.iHHYMOhPc6OW0LmOOPkf8taxFxWnD5Sbwy_NxZwTQbU&dib_tag=se&keywords=network+switch&qid=1725717407&sprefix=network+%2Caps%2C186&sr=8-1-spons&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9waG9uZV9zZWFyY2hfYXRm&psc=1

As a secondary concern, using a router will cause a double NAT for all your connected devices (universities don’t operate in the way ISPs do). That could cause some weird networking shenanigans, particularly for anything peer-to-peer like online games.

I mean there’s quite clearly a victim here, the child.

I’ve been reading her book, the truancy thing is interesting. She had data that showed that kids that weren’t showing up at school, particularly young ones, didn’t learn how to read sufficiently well, and then fell behind in school and struggled to catch up, they then ended up struggling later in life, and often ending up either as victims or perpetrators of crime.

So, she used the California DA’s office to enforce truancy laws across California, encouraged reaching out to fix the problems at home if at all possible, and also encouraged reaching out to folks that had been written off as “not caring” (she cites an example of a father that hadn’t been paying child support but upon learning that his daughter wasn’t going to school, started taking his daughter to school every morning, and volunteering in her classroom).

Of course this is all by her account, but that sounds overall quite positive to me.

Sure, there’s a cost to breaking things up, all multiprocessing and multithreading comes at a cost. That said, in my evaluation, single for “unity builds” are garbage; sometimes a few files are used to get some multiprocessing back (… as the GitHub you mentioned references).

They’re mostly a way to just minimize the amount of translation units so that you don’t have the “I changed a central header that all my files include and now I need to rebuild the world” (with a world that includes many many small translation units) problem (this is arguably worse on Windows because process spawning is more expensive).

Unity builds as a whole are very very niche and you’re almost always better off doing a more targeted analysis of where your build (or often more importantly, incremental build) is expensive and making appropriate changes. Note that large C++ projects like llvm, chromium, etc do NOT use unity builds (almost certainly, because they are not more efficient in any sense).

I’m not even sure how they got started, presumably they were mostly a way to get LTO without LTO. They’re absolutely awful for incremental builds.

Slow compared to what exactly…?

The worst part about headers is needing to reprocess the whole header from scratch … but precompiled headers largely solve that (or just using smaller more targeted header files).

Even in those cases there’s something to be said for the extreme parallelism in a C++ build. You give some of that up with modules for better code organization and in some cases it does help build times, but I’ve heard in others it hurts build times (a fair bit of that might just be inexperience with the feature/best practices and immature implementations, but alas).

There’s no precompiler in C++. There’s a preprocessor but that’s something entirely different. It’s also not a slow portion of the compile process typically.

C++ is getting to the point where modules might work well enough to do something useful with them, but they remove the need for #include preprocessor directives to share code.

Have you ever seen a vacuum chamber? Science does suck … and it’s fucking awesome at it. 🥁

Basically TikTok has been proven to serve the Chinese Communist Party (via influence over what users see and data collection). Additionally, the Atlantic article goes on to explain how the United States has a long history of protecting its citizens from foreign influence campaigns going back to the early radio days (and trying to ban TikTok is not a divergence from the status quo or an attack of free speech, rather the continuing of policies that have largely worked and served the public good).

Here’s the big difference. Automated assembly lines do a job better than the average human can. LLMs do the job consistently worse than the average human would.

A fact I struggle with on an almost daily basis…

EILIF: TikTok is like that “friend” that says they’re your buddy, but you have a lot of reasons to doubt they actually have your best interest at heart.

From my notes:

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/dec/28/tiktok-data-collection-inquiry-australia-privacy-watchdog-marketing-pixels
• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/briefing/tiktok-ban-bill-congress.html
• https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/A-Tik-Tok-ing-Timebomb_12.21.23.pdf
• https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-israel-gaza-hamas-war-a5dfa0ee
• https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bill-foreign-influence/677806/
• https://protonvpn.com/blog/is-tiktok-safe/
• https://www.engadget.com/doj-says-tiktok-collected-users-views-on-issues-like-abortion-gun-control-and-religion-201617503.html

Oh wow, that’s quite the backstory!

At this point I’d say no. Most people are playing the game more or less single player and Jagex continues to get more money hungry. I wouldn’t be surprised if OSRS gets micro-transactions at some point.

Personally, I’ve stopped playing and cancelled following these changes … in no small part because as a part time RS3 player, I feel like my relationship with Jagex has gotten to the point of being abusive (I say something, they never listen).

A co-op infamous game for PC I would drop full price on, no questions.

Full disclosure: I never played the sequels (I play co-op almost exclusively now), but I absolutely loved the original game. It would be great to be able to go back to that dystopian world and rediscover my powers (or maybe other variants of them that appeared from disasters) in say … London, DC, or LA (instead of NYC) with a friend.

True, though presumably users in those places would be stuck with the “less trustworthy” instances (and ideally, would be able to get their local laws changed to make themselves more trust worthy).

It’s definitely not perfectly moral… but little in the world is and maybe it’s sufficient pragmatic.