Code that is burned into systems and often never updated. So the belief that it will be patched if the back door is discovered is false. The back door will remain forever.

In a lot of cases, such as the Clipper Chip, hardware will include ROM level backdoors, and bluntly, no replacement hardware will ever become available.

Until we reach a point where AI is basically running everything and we are just enjoying ourselves without any control over our destiny.

Sounds like The Culture. I’m down for that!

(PS, if you need me, I’m gonna be over there building a Dyson sphere for the next few thousand years)

There are a few that are genuinely unpickable. Will they be that way forever? Doubtful. Will they ever be trivially defeated? Hell nah. That forces invaders to resort to less clandestine methods of entry, which leave more evidence, or to spend an unbearable amount of time attempting to pick while neighbors may notice.

Bowley Lock Company has one of the practically unpickable options on the market now, and LockPickingLawyer has a great video on the chain-key lock.

Best case, they’re still just a speedbump in the path of a home invader, but kicking down a door leaves a bootprint, and makes a hell of a lot of noise, which means that you have time to grab earpro, night vision, and your rifle before the attackers make it to the bedroom. ;)

Stadia fan, and brokeass. At the time, I had a dodgy system with a failing GeForce. Stadia kept me sane during the plague when my PC wasn’t stable, and the PC kept me sane when the internet wasn’t good enough for stadia. Near the end, however, I switched to T-Mobile’s 5g internet service, and Stadia became rock solid. (5G should NOT be better than DSL! Fuck!)

I was desperately hoping that Google would resort to a strategy of benign neglect for Stadia, since I had like three or four games that I could play for the rest of my life on there.

I felt like I had a stroke when Ubisoft turned out to be the only ones to handle the shutdown gracefully.

Google did the right thing in the end with the controller firmware, but they should have had that ready on day 1 as a consolation prize. (I also would have liked it if they had some way to continue gaming on a Chromecast, or even better, a virtualized ChromeOS desktop in the cloud, but what I want clearly doesn’t matter to them, lol!) Glad they stepped up in the end, though. Those are still the most comfortable controllers I’ve ever used!

I also feel like Google should have negotiated some approach to license transfers from Stadia to elsewhere. Luna is still a laggy mess compared to the worst days on Stadia (at least, when it would start at allThanks, CenturyStink!) so the best bet would probably be to Microsoft — games available streamed via XCloud or locally on Windows or Xbox, for maximum flexibility. Steam would have been another obvious choice.

Come to think of it, for a while I hoped Valve would buy Stadia

I can honestly say I’ve never paid for a Pokemon product, the games seem OK as games go but I’m not willing to fund Nintendo’s lawsuit happiness.

The first game, ironically, was the best. If you didn’t play it on GameBoy, Let’s Go Pikachu is the same game but prettier.

After that, Pokemon Go was good, and Legends Arceus was innovative, but literally every other game was an increasingly inferior copy of Red and Blue, and are mostly generally skippable.

They’re punishing you for running adblock at all, even if you’ve paid to not see ads.

Goddamn, there was a recent time I was willing to pay for YT Premium, but I’m now so fucking infuriated by their shitty service that I just don’t like using it any more. Combined with the enshittification of their content — at least what’s recommended for me now; all I’m getting is “You’ll never believe what Elon Musk found on Venus!” kind of shit lately — that they’ve wasted the window they had for onboarding me.

Dead internet theory, huh? Online ad fraud as part of “content by machines, for machines, sometimes mistaken for organic human-generated content”?

I suspect the same thing is happening in my desktop too, but I have hilariously overbuilt that thing’s cooling system due to the local climate; as a result, I suspect that the reason I’ve been so infuriated with the MacBook recently is that the PC workstation has enough thermal headroom for a 50% overclock

All Google’s doing, and not Apple’s. Thanks, folks, for showing me who’s actually blame for this kerfuckle.

It was quickly discovered that disabling whichever ad blocker is being used immediately revitalizes the site

As it turns out, this is so bad on my MacBookPro from 2019 that simply having a YouTube tab loaded -- at all -- will frequently result in a runaway process in Safari and overheat the laptop, while precipitously draining the battery. And it gets hot. Not like a little toasty, we're talking full-on "Penis Panini" mode over here!

So. Guess YouTube is serving malware now. Time to up my blocking game or ditch them entirely.