Melody Fwygon

  • 4 Posts
  • 117 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • This actually doesn’t surprise me. Valve is getting greedy.

    But; to be clear; by using these tools, to unlock the DLC without paying for it, you are cheating in the game. That’s a mere fact; and not a moral judgement of anyone choosing to do so.

    Personally, I don’t judge anyone for doing so; and would use these tools myself if I thought a DLC were too predatory, expensive or otherwise unfair to not have it available.

    That’s not saying it’s fair or right for Valve to do so; nor is it saying the VAC bans or account suspensions are deserved. If you get hit by this; you absolutely should pirate every title you already own/purchased via Steam right away, and pirate anything else you want in the future.

    The only way to make them regret doing things like this is voting with your wallet; and asking others to do the same. Stop spending money on Valve. Once their earnings fall they’ll be forced to hear people’s concerns.








  • I have a /48 that I can basically roll through.

    A /64 is more than enough though to prevent most casual attempts at entry; and does force more work / enumeration to be done to break into a network and do damage with. I’m not saying the privacy extensions are the greatest; but they do work to slightly increase the difficulty of tracking and exploitation.

    With a /48 or even a /56; I can subdivide things and hand out several /64s to each device too; which would shake up things if tracking expects a /64 explicitly.

    I actually use /55s to cordon off blocks inside the /48 that aren’t used too. So dialing a random prefix won’t help. You’d be surprised how often I get intrusive portsweeps trying to enumerate my /64s this way…and it doesn’t work because I’m not subnetting on any standard behavior.



  • I run both because of this; and because SLAAC enables features in Desktop OSes that offer some level of additional privacy.

    For example; Windows can do “Temporary IPv6 Addressing” that it will hand out to various applications and browsers. That IPv6 address rotates on a periodic basis; once every 24 hours by default; and can be configured to behave differently depending on your needs via registry keys.

    This could for example, allow you to quickly spin up a small application server for something; like a gaming session; and let you use/bind that IPv6 address for it. Once the application stops using it and the time period has elapsed; Windows drops the IP address and statelessly configures itself a new one.


  • What happens is what’s intended.

    Everyone is going to do it; and it will cause companies, artists and creatives to step back and rethink a bit on how they monetize their creations responsibly. The ones that refuse to rethink and adapt will fail and flounder under the tiny handful of straw that Piracy adds to the load.

    That’s a GOOD thing.

    What’s unfortunate is that companies and people still think it’s productive to worry and handwring over piracy as if it’s killing someone; instead of being the thing you “don’t fly too close to, lest your wax wings get melted off and you plummet to the ground.”




  • You can automate this; but you have to make sure that the automation you create is going to respect the ratelimits. I’d recommend something simple like using a command alias or short script written for your specific IRC client.

    It’s what I used to do with that sort of thing; and there are plenty of well known Open Source scripts in the wild as well

    As an example; I would use mIRC with it’s scripting system and write my own event trigger scripts to automatically request, wait for and then accept the DCC chat requests and route them appropriately in the interface. There were also scripts that helped with getting the lists; unpacking them, and displaying those lists in my client…so I didn’t have to extract the text from the zip myself, and could select what I needed from the bot.

    All of this was lightweight automation that was intended not to flood the bot with commands and fed into command queueing modules that let the bots have time to process.

    Sometimes in those days you could get actually (+b)anned, Auto/KILL’ed or /(G/K):LINE’ed for causing a bot to crash…so you had to be careful and respectful with regard to scripts.

    TL;DR; know your bot, source channel & network rules, and write your own scripts for safety or read any scripts you import in carefully and understand what they’re doing.