“Welcome to the dark side of cozy.”

It’s important to post these things every so often. There will never be a day when everyone already knows. :)

https://xkcd.com/1053/

It’s a bit of a leap to say the “owner” changed. Ryujinx is MIT licensed, allowing anyone to clone the original code locally, build upon it, and publish it to a public host. Looks to me like that’s what happened here: a fork, but without using github’s built-in “fork” feature, perhaps to avoid being included in a mass take-down. There are others on non-github sites, although I don’t know if they have been getting new commits.

I don’t see any reason to think the original repo was renamed or moved to another user’s account. The top contributor is gdkchan presumably because gdkchan’s commit history was preserved.

For the record, gdkchan’s last commit to the original repo was on 2024-10-01.

Edit: The README confirms what I thought:

This fork is intended to be a QoL uplift for existing Ryujinx users. This is not a Ryujinx revival project.

Beware online “filter bubbles” (2011) - Eli Pariser

https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles

Ah, so it is. I wonder when that happened. I guess .world might have outgrown beehaw’s ability to make up for spotty moderation.

I’m pretty sure they don’t block sdf. That’s where I am, and I’ve had several interactions with Beehaw folks while here. :)

Fun fact: Beehaw and sdf are among the few well-known instances that don’t hand their users’ traffic (all their activity on Lemmy) over to Cloudflare.

I know by having seen it discussed in one or two beehaw communities, but you can look it up here:

https://beehaw.org/instances

One of those is dead.

One is blocked by OP’s instance.

One is hosted on an instance that more than a few people avoid.

One is nearly empty, but maybe worth joining and starting some discussion? !patientgamers@lemmy.world

The security provided by a browser is constantly changing, as the vulnerabilities, attacks, and countermeasures are constantly changing. It’s a cat-and-mouse game that never ends.

The privacy provided by a browser would be difficult to measure, since it depends a lot on browsing habits, extensions, code changes between versions, etc.

There’s no good way to calculate a metric for either type of protection, and even if there was, the metrics would be obsolete very quickly. For these reasons, I wouldn’t have tried what you attempted here.

However, there is a very simple way to compare the major browsers on privacy and reach a pretty accurate conclusion: Compare the developers’ incentives.

The argument against it is founded on copyright.

We fund copyright in order to enrich our culture, by incentivizing creative works.

Blocking creative works preservation strips away the cultural enrichment.

What’s left? People being compelled through taxes to fund profit police for copyright holders who aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.

Edit: Note also that publishers and their lobby groups are not artists. They are parasites. They are paid more than fairly for their role in getting creative works out there in the first place. I can’t think of any reason why they should have continued control after they’ve stopped publishing them.

Yes, it’s safe, because no, they don’t relay it. The brilliant thing about it is that it’s all done locally, on your machine.

Technologies accelerate all sorts of agendas, but to blame this long-standing problem specifically on tech companies is to misunderstand the problem. Corporations shouldn’t have been allowed much influence on governance in the first place, no matter what their tools or line of business might be.

Instead of pointing fingers, how about we stop allowing corporate political donations and lobbyists in democracies, and put some real enforcement behind anti-corruption and bribery laws?

Cryptocurrencies are not reliably fungible, nor stable, nor widely accepted. They have their uses, but they are not suitable replacements for PayPal and not what OP asked for.

There is no privacy-focused PayPal alternative in the US, in part because US money transfer laws and policies (e.g. Know Your Customer) directly oppose privacy.

However, there are a couple of new projects that might eventually lead to something less bad for privacy than PayPal is:

• GNU Taler, if they ever get any exchanges, and they either figure out how to mitigate the high fees for wire transfers or use some other settlement method when people on different exchanges make small payments. (Their plan to use batch wire transfers won’t help until the exchanges get a lot of adoption and frequent use. Of course, high fees discourage adoption and use, so this might not ever happen.)
• FedNow, if banks ever use it to offer appealing person-to-person payment services instead of just using it for themselves and their business customers.

https://www.cgmagonline.com/news/steam-purchase-license-california-law/

https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240ab2426

The Last of Us Part I.

I generally dislike games on rails, but I loved this one.

People in privacy circles do talk about phone numbers, but it’s usually about them being collected in the first place. Most of us realize that corporate promises to delete them later are easily reneged and impossible to verify, and therefore next to worthless. We need laws forbidding data collection. We don’t have them yet.

By the way, that title is useless to people who are browsing Lemmy to see which posts might interest them.

I don’t know why VPN providers promote themselves as like they are going to make your connection more private, everything is already encrypted (except DNS).

It’s true that most popular web sites have moved to HTTPS, but even if all of them had, not all network traffic is web traffic. Also, even if someone uses the network only for web browsing, DNS is not the only privacy-relevant data that gets exchanged outside the HTTPS connection.

You are just shifting the trust from your ISP to the people that run the VPN.

Some people have reason to distrust their ISP more than their VPN provider, so this is a valid use case.

VPN isn’t really comparable to HTTPS. The former protects all traffic, and with a relatively small attack surface, but only up to the VPN edge. The latter protects all the way to the network peer (the web server), but only web traffic, and with a massive attack surface: scores of certificate authorities in countries all over the world, any of which could be compromised to nullify the protection. They address different problems.

as said in computer science it has accepted by most people (for the sake of having categories) that CPU emulation is emulation, and otherwise its not.

It’s important to keep in mind that things said in computer science for the sake of having categories are usually said within the very narrow implicit context of a particular field of study, like microprocessor design. It makes sense there for the sake of brevity, just as arcane acronyms make sense when everyone in the room understands what they stand for in that context. But the context no longer applies when we’re out in the rest of the world using a word that is not so narrowly defined, as we are now.

I think we mostly agree, because you pointed this out yourself:

It’s a “domain specific” language; which means, you have to specify it before in order to make use.

However, I want to clarify my position in response to this:

nobody has the right to act like having a clear definition and saying anyone else is wrong.

I often encounter people on social media chiding or mocking others for referring to Wine as an emulator, which is disheartening for a number of reasons. Importantly, the people reading such comments are being taught that it’s wrong to call Wine an emulator, when in fact it is not wrong at all. Wine’s very purpose is to emulate. This is plainly visible not just in how it is used, but also in how it is developed (many of its behaviors are reverse engineered Windows behaviors, departing from the API docs) and how it functions (it does a heck of a lot more than translating system calls).

The Wine project’s FAQ acknowledges the misunderstanding, a bit indirectly, by pointing out that it is “more than just an emulator”.

Unfortunately, since most people in the discussions I mentioned have no visibility into Wine’s internals, they don’t know any better than to accept what they were told by multiple people on the internet. They are misled by a smug few who love to tell others they’re wrong by repeating that officially abandoned slogan that was never really true (at least not in the context that framed it) in the first place. And then some of the misled people adopt it themselves, so we end up with more of the “you’re wrong” attitude, perpetuation of a ridiculously narrow understanding of the word, and people who publish about the topic performing awkward linguistic gymnastics to avoid simply saying “emulator” for fear of rebuke.

I think all three of those results make the world a little worse, so I’m here to let everyone reading know that it’s perfectly appropriate to call Wine (or Proton) an emulator. Anyone who claims it’s wrong to do so is perhaps a hardware field specialist who has lost sight of the importance of context in language, or (more likely) either honestly mistaken or an internet troll.

Hardware is not the only thing that can be emulated. Here’s an example. To claim that things emulating software components are not emulators is simply incorrect, like claiming that squares are not rectangles. It’s always disappointing to see someone spreading that falsehood.

It’s true that Wine is not a hardware emulator, nor is Proton. But make no mistake: they are both emulators.

The unfortunate backronym made a kind of sense 20 years ago. At the time, lawsuits were flying hard and fast at projects offering APIs and tools modeled after commercial operating systems (Unix variants), and there was no established case law protecting them. The prospect of Wine contributors getting sued into oblivion by Microsoft was a very plausible threat. Rebranding it as “Wine Is Not an Emulator” helped frame it as something different as it grew and gained attention, and although that phrase is inaccurate, “Wine Is Not a Hardware Emulator” wouldn’t have fit the existing name or distanced it from being seen as a Windows work-alike. Also, most emulators of the time happened to be hardware emulators, so it didn’t seem like a terribly big stretch.

That time is gone, though. The legal standing for software based on reverse engineering is more clear than it was then. Microsoft has not sent its lawyers after our favorite runtime emulator. The backronym was thankfully abandoned by the project some years ago. Weirdly, there are still people on social media spreading false statements about what the word does and doesn’t mean.