Changing the “id” like the MAC address or the IMEI has no impact on any system.

On the system none, yeah. But if you pick an IMEI that’s also used by an other phone, that is what can cause trouble, as I know. It’s the same as when multiple devices have the same MAC or IP address on the same network.

For example, when a client device gets its IP from the dhcp server on a router, which allocates a random ip from a specific pool, it does not influence anything like ip packets routing…

That’s because it is not random. The DHCP server keeps track of the addresses it has assigned to someone, and will never tell the next new client to use an IP it has already assigned someone.
But if you set your IP statically and pick an IP that is used, or if you run multiple DHCP severs for the same network without coordination, then problems will come.

I don’t have experience with it, but as I know that is a GUI helper for Wine.

A steam emulator is different. It is often just a single file, a program library that holds program code.
On windows it is a DLL file, on Linux it does not have an extension but it’s the same concept. The game loads it because it actually searches for the official version of this file, but both Linux and Windows implement the search for it so that a library file (with the expected name) besides the executable is preferred instead of whatever is installed systemwide.

Lutris on the other hand is a GUI tool to manage your “wineprefixes”, which is maybe better called wine environments. If you are familiar with python, it’s more like python’s virtual environments.
And besides basic tasks, it has a lot of additional tools to make using Wine easier.
Afaik there are also other such utilities, I don’t yet have experience with any of them.

On one hand yes, but on the other hand, doesn’t it confuse the cell network? I think the IMEI is used for routing or some other similarly basic operation. Like the MAC address, but it’s for a larger area and more easily can cause trouble

I wanted to search for the postman tracker’s address, so went to check on notbob.i2p. website unreachable. Isn’t this a relatively fairly popular site here?

Edit: on a second try it now loaded in ~10 seconds.
This latency is probably not to much of a problem, but two things:

• the instability that it couldn’t even start loading the site, and it’s regularity
• if a text site with few graphics takes this much time to transfer, bittorrent and movies will be even worse because that’s often not compressible

1-2 days is slow but acceptable I think. It’s a compromise.

But for some reason for me it’s much slower, even though I run a router that participates in routing and usually has 50+ or even 3 digit share ratios, with ~80 GB traffic a day in both directions, so it must be integrated well.

Now I realized I have only tried a single I2P torrent yet, and it was just 2 MB, and my experience was coming from both i2p sites and outproxies often being very slow or unreachable with the common tunnel settings.

Ater purchasing and downloading a game from Steam, the Steam client is not actually needed for it to be playable. Of course it will try to start up Steam, and if isn’t installed then it will complain, but if use use a “steam emulator” that can be worked around.
This is useful if you don’t want Steam to track how much and when do you play, when is it that you are online, what achievements you got and such. This is afaik also the only way to say no to forced automatic game updates.

One such emulator is Mr Goldberg’s steam emu.
It has a bunch of configuration options, per-game settings, optionally portable settings, windows+linux support, and I think it’s even open source.

Using the Goldberg emu is not piracy, neither DRM circumvention. The Steam API is not a DRM, most Steam games just make the Steam client a hard dependency, not bothering with making it work without it.
When the game is protected by DRM (this should always be marked on its store page), the steam emu won’t be enough, but you would also need to patch it’s DRM protection. Sometimes that’s easier, sometimes harder.

Steam emus may or may not work with multiplayer games.
The Goldberg emu has a replacement Steam’s own multiplayer network communication system, which works through the local network or a selfhosted wireguard-like VPN, but with big centrally hosted multiplayer games you’ll run into licensing validation problems or such.

I apologize for the confusion

Meta is working to address these concerns

Sure, they are working to solve these concerns by teaching their LLM to lie and obfuscate, and by becoming so big nobody sues them anymore. I’m sick of this.

It’s pretty hard to not use their services when among else even fucking university courses only upload their content there.

Fixed a word, it was supposed to be unavoidable, not unavailable.

Depends on the penalty

I2P and it’s sub 100 kb/s speed? Series, games would never finish downloading, but then also only those torrents are accessible through I2P that are published to an I2P tracker, there is no DHT (yet?). Clearnet torrents and clearnet peers are not accessible through I2P.

Or is it something on my end that makes it that slow? ISP download bandwidth is stable and much higher.

You are allowed to modify a car however you like

I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Like, even if we are not taking about adding a badly welded 4 wheel attachment without the use of a trailer hook, the car will have to go through technical inspection every few years.
If the inspectirs deem that a non-functional such system is a problem, you’ll not be driving your car anywhere.

This is just the usual “nothing to hide” handwaving argument.

This data is not used by some theoretical policeman to laugh at how bad you drive, it is part of commercial datamining present in virtually all devices and services you use.

GPS and such? Great that I have a smartphone that I trust more, and have more control over, than this big blackbox with no access whatsoever.

I can’t morally justify blocking ads and viewing their content for free.

I can’t morally justify anything they are doing, and have been doing for many many years already. Yet I use their public services because they are unavoidable. But I would never give money to such a company.

Ads need to be tailored to the user when delivered

1. It does not. If you install a new browser and open YouTube the first time, they’ll be able to show ads to you
2. They could be tailored based on other factors too, like country, region, or even household by the IP

I think the backend could just generate the ad ridden video feed for the specific user. Most probably it would be very resource intensive, but I can only hope so… but then I also don’t know much about HLS and other fragmented streams so it might not be a performance problem at all.

like a linked list

I think the full list of chunks is (currently) known beforehand. That’s how yt-dlp can download on multiple threads, but also how it can show the number of total fragments relatively quickly on the progress bar

How?

By the way, yes, it is.

In the end their name, their achievements and their reputation has been transferred, and nothing else. I feel they (the studios’ teams) have been made use of to then deceive people who trust the names.

I’m sure you’re building the best business you can.

The player does not have to be elevated. With an unelevated player the file exploiting such a vuln would be able to execute code with the privileges and access of the player

The way I understood was that it’s not a problem if the system does something bad because the newcomer I directed there won’t know anyway.

Sorry if that is not what you meant, but the comment has read like that.

Did you read my comment in it’s entirety?

For programs, that is not a problem.
This is a problem for data.

Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program’s “content”, and when you do, you’ll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.

If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it’ll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it’s users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It’s not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
And then there’s another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can’t because of the former problem.

Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it’s also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
But for data, whether it’s a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it’s just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.