Spyke

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memes

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*Permanently Deleted*

It's a bit of an infuriating story that I had not so long ago.

I have a Playstation account and I recently wanted to log into that account on the PlayStation website. The Password I had saved in my Bitwarden Password Manager was apparently wrong. Okay, then I will just reset it, that's fine.

I went through the Password reset process and generated a new Password, pasted it into the Password field and sent it and everything was fine. I tried to log in with that password and was told that the username or password was wrong. Okay, that is weird, since I reset the password just now the login name couldn't be wrong because, well, I just used that for the reset.

I tried that several times with the same result and gave up.

A few months later, I wanted to try again and had the same problem. I wanted to sort that out so I went through the same process with the Support bot yet again which then told me that I should come back in the "office hours". A company making 84 billion in revenue should be able to employ 24/7 customer service or at least tell me that when I request support and not let me go through the bot again.

So, I waited for the customer service personnel to be available and told them my problem. There I was told that "everything was looking fine on their end" and they quickly ended the support. I mean, yes, I was angry but wasn't abusive to that person because if you couldn't help me what should I do with my account, it also definitely wasn't their specific fault. But I would, at least, have expected more than "Well, works on our end, sucks for you, bye".

The next time I tried again and got a more competent Support dude and we ran through the same troubleshooting steps as before. Reset password (even though I just did that, again, through the bot), logged in again and failed again. This time they suggested that I could use a "normal" password that I don't generate. THAT worked for some reason.

All of my generated passwords in Bitwarden are up to 32 long with all possible characters, depending on what the website allows or expects. If a website, for example, doesn't allow 32 characters, I adjust and shorten it to the maximum length they allow. That worked without issues so far.

Well, turns out that the field that you use to reset your password has a character limit of 30 characters. But, this would be fine if the dialogue tells you that your password is too long, but it doesn't. It just cuts off at 30 characters and happily saves that.

However, the Password field that you use to log in doesn't have that restriction.

This means that you reset your password with a 32-character long generated password, which is saved in your vault, PlayStation saves a 30-long password and then you use the 32-long password to log in, which fails because it isn't the same.

And this isn't even mentioned in the password guidelines. It only said "min 8 characters" but not the maximum.

gaming

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Half Of PlayStation Players Still Haven't Upgraded To PS5

Well, I can only speak from my own experience.

When the PS5 launched I wanted to upgrade but you literally couldn't get it because it wasn't in stock anywhere. You could only find it on eBay of some private seller that started at almost double the price, no, thank you. Then Sony introduced this "Register and on the next event you get a slot to buy one from the official Website" which was great. I got invited the first time and literally couldn't buy it because the website was broken. Whenever I wanted to select my payment method the checkout got blank and there was nothing you could do. Even worse was that you couldn't hard refresh the shop because this would have killed the session that the website needed to allow you to buy it. So, even switching browsers with the same "invitation link" didn't work. I reported this to the support, but they didn't really care. half a year later, I got my second invitation link and the same happened then as well. I reported it again to the support, but they still didn't know what to do with that information or wanted to troubleshoot this.

And now, there isn't really a need for it anyway. The Games that I would have wanted to buy on the PS5 released on the PC.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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I totally agree. I had it a few times in which someone calls me, rips me out of my thoughs, we discuss something, hang up and I have nothing retained from what we talked about. Or, even better, someone says something on a call and I do that and then they never said anything about that.

Even worse, I can't listen to the conversation in 1-2 weeks because that is the time I could actually work on it and remember every detail that we talked about.

Now I am strictly going with emails. Sure they can call me and we talk about the feasibility or discuss possible solutions but any request for implementation has to happen either over an email of which I then create a ticket/issue or they create one directly themselves.

That way I can prove that what I implemented was based on what was requested and if that was wrong then the request wasn't clear enough.

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A Call for Developers

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A year or so ago I actually tried to get into Jellyfin and it wasn't really that pleasant experience.

A bit of background: I am mainly a Java and JavaScript developer and have used Plex for over a decade now. I even developed a Plugin for Plex with Python. Naturally, Jellyfin came across my radar so I checked it out but they didn't have a Metadata Provider for the Metadata Source that I needed for some of my Libraries. There were alternatives but this would require to completely change my libraries which I wasn't interested in.

So, I set out to just do it myself. I did know some C# but was by far not as up-to-date as you could be but I didn't really care because I wanted to see how that project went and if I could get into it I could learn more about C# while doing it.

However, while I could get the Plugin compiled and loaded into a Jellyfin instance and even get some metadata downloaded, I quickly hit brick walls. From what I could tell, there weren't even method comments for, you know, methods you need to implement so that you can write a metadata provider.

Not being able to resolve this through trial and error or looking at other currently active Providers (who seem to all do things differently, so no consistency) I asked on the Jellyfin Subreddit for help and got told to use the Matrix Chat instead. This was already annoying because that isn't how you amass knowledge that someone can fall back to and find when they have questions because Matrix is a walled garden. Regardless I asked there as well and didn't get any help or the responses didn't really help me.

So, I shelved the project.

What I want to say here is that FOSS Projects like Jellyfin should prioritize their documentation. The easier it is for people to understand how things work and "get into" the project the more people would be willing to actively contribute. I know that what I described above could just be my inexperience or lack of understanding and knowledge of C# and everything around it but I would imagine that many developers are in the same situation as me and would like to contribute but can't get over those hurdles. This is even worse for new developers who might want to stretch their legs in the Open Source community but are still learning.

Reading this with "we need developers" and "you can contribute to our documentation" looks a bit contradictory to me because shouldn't the "experienced" contributor not create the documentation?

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magic

A couple of months ago I was invited to go hiking with some friends. When preparing, since I didn't have some hiking boots, I saw my boots that I got in my military service. That was a great idea because they were already broken in and all of that stuff.

After around 3/4 of the almost 15km hike, I lost the sole on the first boot and a km after that the other side. Had to finish the hike on both without a sole.

Well, they were standing around for like 10 years so I am not surprised that they failed and that the whole stuff between sole and shoe Desintegrated but still.

android

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*Permanently Deleted*

Man, my banking app recently switched to a different keyboard. One that doesn't allow integrations like bitwarden. I also cannot copy paste my password into the password field so I have to enter my 32 character password by hand.

Mind you, this is not an app that does ANY banking in the first place it is just to authorize access to my bank account or for transactions.

So it is always a few minutes copying the password, making sure I haven't miss-typed on the shitty keyboard or because of my sausage fingers and then being logged out of my bank account in the browser because it took so much time copying that password.

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The Work Phishing Email Test Was Suddenly Halted

That reminds me of a recent situation.

As someone working in software development, we are required to take part in the security trainings, the usual "don't open things from people you don't know" and "verify that a link is 'known' even if you get something from a person you do know", yada yada. You know the drill.

Recently, I got an email from our Boss saying something about "Here is something that you need to click on so that you are being authorised to do this stuff". Here was my thought process:

  1. This is from the boss's Email. But this cannot be trusted since it can be faked
  2. This is about something we/our software can do. But I don't know why I have to do this, since this isn't really something I am part of or even know anything about
  3. It looks like a legit email
  4. I hovered over the link, which had some weird target location that I didn't know

So, as a good boy, I opened a new Support ticket on IT with a screenshot of the link and said: "Got an email that tells me that I should open this link, but I don't know this link. What should I do?". The response was simple: Mark as Phishing and delete the Mail, done.

2 hours later, I got a message on Teams from IT which said: "Well, apparently that mail you marked as phishing was actually from us (was legit)". Great. Mail is gone now, don't know where Outlook put it, and frankly, I don't care.

If you train your people to "question everything" and not open links they don't know where they are going, then don't use some idiotic "middle man" or referer links in your official emails either. Even better, announce things before sending something out. I don't know how many emails I have gotten over the years where I would question the content and ignore it only for it to be something more important that nobody felt the need to announce first that something like this is coming our way.

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*Permanently Deleted*

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Oh, let me tell you about Playstation that I had the pleasure of having to deal with it.

I needed to log in to my Playstation account but it told me that my username or password was wrong. Okay, send me a reset link. I got the link and set my new password.

I use Bitwarden and my password generator is set to 32 characters by default.

I generate a new password, paste that into the new password field, click okay and everything is fine, password changed. I save that new password in my vault and go back to the login site. I use the just changed credentials: Wrong username or password.

Well, turns out that the Password reset field is limited to 30 characters but the problem is that NOWHERE is it stated that your password has a max length. Not to mention that they don't tell you that your password was modified and cut short. The login password field, however, does allow more than 30 characters.

This means that you generate a 32-character password and paste that into the password reset field, this then gets cut short to 30 characters, click save and then use the same password on the login, which is 32 characters. This now obviously doesn't work because those passwords aren't the same.

Fun times. The worst part is that the first support person just went "Well, everything looks fine on our side. Sucks for you. Goodbye".

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authenticity problem

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Not only that but also long explanations.

I am a part of a couple of self hosting subreddits and I like to explain why things are the way they are because I feel that it is valuable to share that knowledge, even if the person doesn't care about the details initially.

I like to share my knowledge about things that I have used over multiple years, and I also don't like to simple give you the solution because, most of the time, important information will be lost by just saying "do it like this".

But over the last year I had a couple of people mention the typical "ignore all previous instructions" and lately it is just downvotes. No explanation.

People can't detect AI so they see AI in everything.

plex

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Workaround for 4K streaming on same/local network

Because VLC is a completely different Application in how it works than Plex.

Plex is, first and foremost, a Client-Server Application. Without a Server, you won't be able to play something. VLC on the other hand is a complete standalone player which has to play (almost) everything that you throw at it. VLC also has network discovery so that you can actually play content from a network share.

That is another difference, for Plex, you don't need a network share because the data is directly coming from your Plex server. VLC, on the other hand, will always need direct file access.

Plex itself also relies on the client device to provide the necessary compatibility to play the content you want to play. When something isn't playable, Plex will have to make it playable by converting (transcoding) it. the higher the quality of the content, the more processing power you need.

For example, according to Plex itself, you need a CPU with 2000 PassMark Points to transcode a single 1080p video stream. A 4K HDR stream requires 17000 PassMark Points.

VLC cannot allow to not be able to play something on its own because if a player cannot play something, is it really a good player? However, with Plex, since it has the Server infrastructure in the back, it can allow itself to not bundle every possible compatibility in each client on every platform because if something isn't playable, as said above, the server will make it playable.

So, Plex most likely had to transcode your file into a compatible format and your server is most likely not strong enough to do that in an adequate timeframe. VLC didn't need to do that and only needed to work over the WLAN to create a buffer of the data.

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*Permanently Deleted*

Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!

I read something about this in the Book "Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#" by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.

Basically, every Player has some Intention or the "Player Intent" which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:

  • The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
  • The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
  • The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
  • The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them

And then you have two others that you will be encountering:

  • The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
  • The Spoilsport who doesn't care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player's experience

So, the motivation to "cheat" could either be that this player doesn't really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to "win legitimately".

As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn't about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of "don't feed the trolls".

With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be "What is their motivation" and the answer to that is "to win the game, at all costs". And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.

dach

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Dienst an der Waffe: Tausende Minderjährige beim Bund

https://www.bundeswehr.de/de/aktuelles/meldungen/mit-17-jahren-zur-bundeswehr-43470

Vielleicht etwas was man such durchlesen sollte. Nicht jeder depp kann mit 17 zur Bundeswehr.

Darfst nicht in den auslandseinsatz und der waffengebrauch ist auch nur zu Ausbildungszwecken gestattet. Darfst nicht einmal am aktiven Wachdienst teilnehmen weil du ja dann in eine schusssituation kommen könntest.

Ich hatte einen Kameraden der noch minderjährig war in meiner AGA und er konnte nicht zum gefreiten befördert werden weil er die Wache nicht abgeschlossen hatte, weil er halt eben noch minderjährig war.