xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

Since the federal court ruling that fluoridation “poses an unreasonable risk to human health,” 64 communities, serving water to approximately 28,454,829 people have ended, suspended, or prevented water fluoridation!

See which communities: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/solutions/communities-that-have-ended-fluoridation-since-our-federal-court-victory

#TheFreeThoughtProject

#TheFediFiles 11 is back with perhaps the most infamous guest in ALL of Fedi: @ube or as you may have known her, Maija!

Do I even need to sell a Maija episode? Kicked off of over 109 instances, denies the existence of Russia, and... a racoon story (not to mention the Faggot Tourney top seed). Maija's fediverse history is something of legend, and that legend will be codified on this very special episode of The Fedi Files!

Stream starts at 8 Eastern 7 Central this Sunday the 8th. Don't miss it!

@TheDialecticalCommunist
Oh yes... Use the magic term to make sure noone knows if you're talking about free trade, banks, stock market or literally any other from +200 definitions of that term.

Really sad Patreon fucked over someone again.

https://blog.catbox.moe/post/785233399498555392/important-catbox-needs-your-help

@PurpCat youre on hn lol

RE: https://social.lansky.name/users/hn100/statuses/114567001474342776

@nyanide u forget we had kiwifarms on here. kiwifarms and adjacent read people's lives like gossip magazines

Public Call for DarkMod Beta Testing, "The Last Night in Stonemarket"

After a long year of tinkering and slaving over a hot DarkRadiant, I'm finally ready to start public beta testing of my new Dark Mod Fan Mission, "The Last Night in Stonemarket":

https://share.anon-kenkai.com/threepenny2.html

It's is a much bigger and more ambitious map than my first outing, and I'm sure it's in desperate need of outside eyes to help find and quash bugs. I'm mainly coordinating beta testing over at https://forums.thedarkmod.com/ , but if anybody plays DarkMod and wants to do some testing "out of band" over here, please feel free. I'd be happy to respond to feedback here.

uhhhh extremely based retro computing youtuber discovered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pm7QpG9X7k

Years ago the WEF announced they would mess things up so badly that people would beg for AI to run things. People were alarmed, and said "We'll never allow this to happen! Klaus is evil!"

>And yet, now some of those same people are cheering on Trump/Musk, hailing technonationalism, and demanding AI government, walking right into the digital convergence of the 4th Industrial Revolution...
>It's pretty surreal — and it's a clear indicator that waiting for some strongman or tech magnate to save the day is not going to pan out. Ever. We each have to do our part of the work. This channel is returning to look at what that work is, and how we do it. Stick around if you want to save the world

- Ice Age Farmer (from Telegram)

SCALE GO DOWN!
I'm thrilled to report that I'm finally below 400lbs.
#WeightLoss #Obesity

When rot is worse than a shutdown: The sad state of PC Call of Duty

Recently, a post I made discussing how games like Counter Strike or UT99 still are either playable or have communities went viral. I had many interesting responses to it, and while there were some weird comments many did grasp the point: older games were more moddable and some studios actually care about devs. Maybe I should have put “Multiplayer” in the title because old single-player games literally can never die as long as a single copy exists and is playable/preserved in some way, and there’s a computer out there that can run it (or there’s interest in writing an emulator to do such even if the hardware no longer exists or is rare, as with the Konix Multisystem or 3do m2.) In fact; as translations of games for Japan-only platforms such as the NEC PC-9801 or Bandai Wonderswan have shown, sometimes emulation can unlock a new audience for said games.

What also was mentioned was stuff like Stop Killing Games, something I 100% agree with as many AAA games either choose to force part of the game logic online, or have modes locked behind internet connections. While this trend wasn’t new (TGM: Ace needs a XBL Gold account for many modes while PSO on the OG Xbox needed a gamertag to play offline!), it’s ramped up with the rise of “cloud” stuff for online gaming. The Crew is a notorious example, along with NFS 2015, but even Call of Duty Zombies needs online for major functions of maps to function such as locking easter eggs behind a connection and this interesting video I found recently demonstrates this.

But what could possibly be worse than an online shutdown? What could be worse than a game that requires online connections to play either due to arbitrary restrictions the developers coded in or “cloud” connections? It’s a game that is literally unsafe to play online and I don’t mean that in an exaggerated way either.

Call of Duty and a brief history of the technical flaws

Call of Duty is a very weird franchise in many ways. It’s what happens when a company who only cares about money hits it big, only for the cracks to show quickly despite its popularity. Call of Duty is a very popular franchise and while part of this has to do with FOMO, the Xbox 360 era (and maybe some of the early next-gen games) held up well in theory.

The difference between Call of Duty and other games I mentioned in the last post, is that Activision absolutely hates their fans on a level only surpassed by Nintendo (in the legal department), without the excuse of having a record of making solid games like Nintendo does. The other difference is that Call of Duty is released in a yearly model reserved for sports games; with every year having a new title released. In fact, the exes for newer Call of Duty titles will have names like “cod23” or “cod22” for their exes and folders; literally being the release year. On top of that, the schizophrenic “3 development studio” model (where every year another dev releases their title) and pursuit of money has led to some very bizarre decisions that are inconsistent from game to game. Due to this, the Call of Duty playerbase is fragmented among different games that people like in particular. Some people like the WWII titles, others like something from the “golden age” of 360 titles from CoD4 to BO2, others like some of the Xbox One/PS4 era titles such as AW, Ghosts, and BO3, and others like the newest CoDs made after MW2019 acted as a reboot of the franchise (sometimes nicknamed the SBMM era).

While many of the core gameplay elements are there, the gameplay elements have shifted so dramatically between titles (think like Sonic or Need for Speed) that each person has their own individual game they love. In an ideal world, this would not be a problem. In fact for older titles like CoD1, 2, 4, and World at War on the PC, there’s even a server list one can use. Players essentially control that game to some degree, as these titles were PC focused games.

In 2009 however, Call of Duty on the PC would suffer a blow it would never recover from. PC Modern Warfare 2 was a straight up console port, with no mods, dedicated servers, LAN play (which was still on consoles), or similar. It was a giant middle finger from Activision to the PC audience, showing they were no longer their audience but rather the Xbox audience was. CoD on the PC would now be a matchmaking-based shooter, relying solely on VAC and maybe reports to get cheaters banned as opposed to the model of servers that worked. There were boycott MW2 campaigns that worked to varying degrees of success, and while people bought it initially over time interest waned. There were projects to replace the Steam matchmaking system in later PC Call of Duty titles with a server list like AlterIWNet, FourDeltaOne, and later IW4x/Xlabs. Every single one of them was shut down except for IW4x, which was designed with redundancy in mind for if this were to happen. Years later, these projects would gain more importance but keep this in mind.

Anyhow, back to 2009. Call of Duty MW2 launched and the cracks began to show. See; Call of Duty has this thing where they would reuse code all the time. The engine of CoD (at least for this era) is based on a heavily modified id Tech 3 engine, which CoD1 ran on. Call of Duty 2 and later titles for a while would run on descendants of this engine (to the point of still using Radiant), and even BO6 has the id Software copyright notice.

Still; the biggest problem with Call of Duty especially early on is the fact that the engine was not very locked down. The sole layer of security with older Call of Duty titles was if the platforms were secure to begin with. The Xbox 360 would get blown wide open with the JTAG hack of 2009, and the PS3 would follow not long after in 2010. VAC on the other hand was a total joke on the PC and there were bypasses being made and allegedly even ways to get other people VAC banned. Call of Duty’s high profile, lack of security (many “mod menus” were fancy GSC (the CoD engine scripting language) scripts), and desire for anyone to “get good” with cheats led to a period in which every Call of Duty title on every platform was “hacked” to death. It’s not uncommon to join a MW2 lobby in the current year and end up with hackers and mod menus, and don’t get me started on the infamous BO2 theater mode exploit years after launch that would run GSC scripts on unmodified consoles.

Activision tried many things to stop the modders on different titles that were new, but left the old ones to be abandoned and overrun with skids. This is maybe because they wanted people to plunk down $60 on BO2 if you wanted your CoD fix but didn’t want to run into xXBluntSmoker420Xx’s Wicked Sick Mod Menu being in use. As these older titles aged, Activision just abandoned them as they continued the eternal war on cheaters on newer titles with better security models. At least in a new CoD title the worst you’ll deal with are aimbotters and similar, which sounds crazy if you didn’t play these titles.

So you might be thinking, what’s the worst that can happen from a cheater on 360-era CoD? On a console, the worst that’ll happen is you’ll get “deranked” and find yourself unable to play online unless you jump into someone’s mod lobby or something to fix your rank (sometimes people have reported having corrupted files that cause an instant crash on Steam). The second worst thing that’ll happen is that your console can get frozen up and you have to reset it, and the third is that some kid will DDoS your internet connection.

On the PC, it’s so much worse it’s unreal.

RCE Exploits in your games? It’s more likely than you think

When Activision switched over to a mix of Demonware and Steam for Call of Duty’s network backend on PC, they had no idea of the can of worms they were opening at this point. There were the usual console exploits like mod menus mixed with VAC disablers and whatnot, but the worst was yet to come. In the late 2010s, people began to report having malware installed on their PC from playing Call of Duty titles. This wasn’t just some stuff that a CoD player was saying because he was mad online, oh no this was very much real. There are multiple
different
CVE entries from this period relating to Call of Duty. One of these would be documented by Call of Duty mod developer momo5502 and others, and by the time he wrote about it this exploit was floating around the CoD modder community for a while. This exploit used crafted packets in particular, while another exploited Steam’s auth and another exploits party joining commands. There are more exploits that haven’t had CVEs or only had patches for them, like one for MW3 and the MemberJoin call.

Now I’m no programmer or professional pentester, so I’m not going to talk about the nitty gritty that’s already out there since at least the PoC for one now-patched exploit is on the open internet and it’s safe to assume that other exploits use variants of this. But the crazy part is, all the code reuse bit them as it wasn’t just an exploit for one game but literally years’ worth of titles. There are recent reports on Steam forums of people getting malware dropped while playing Call of Duty titles on the PC version. In fact, this was talked about all the way back in 2018 (after at least one of the exploits was released) with a viral Reddit post by one such person having a RAT planted on his PC thanks to packets targeted towards him. But if this sounds like a “fake” story; this has happened to top streamers playing the game to the point YouTube videos would come out about this scare.

It got to the point where in 2023 Activision had to make an emergency patch after PC players were getting exploited en masse on Modern Warfare 2 thanks to a worm targeting the game to the point Kotaku and others picked up the story. A Steam user even discovered strings relating to modded lobbies in the malware itself.

Essentially; Steam-era Call of Duty titles are vulnerable to some serious exploits that allow your PC to get hacked by someone who wants to take control of your PC and in one dramatic example, a self-spreading worm. Usually this targets streamers, big players, or anyone who makes a skid feel angry online. The exploits are real, and while it’s debatable on if the stream video is kayfabe for clicks or not, the point is Steam-era Call of Duty titles are not safe to play online on the PC in their unmodded form.

Mods to the rescue?

Call of Duty is a game that after its sell-by date passes, gets left to rot by Activision. The servers stay up, but playing the game becomes a gambling session. Playing the game online now might get you into a good match, or you’ll get into a match with some kid trying to render a 15-year-old game unplayable because he’s having a bad day or wants to cause chaos. I mean, the entire TF2 cathook fiasco that took forever for Valve to finally stomp out after dragging on for literal years with numerous “save this game” campaigns was a good example of this. Activision could care less, which has led to community members taking matters into their own hands.

Black Ops 3, probably the most popular title in the franchise on Steam for now, has a third-party fix for it. With t7patch, RCE bugs are patched and you can even put a password on your game or make it friends only to reduce the attack surface, and 2.04 even reduces it further by disabling Steam Workshop support (meaning that you have to subscribe to mods first, avoiding possibly malicious mods from being downloaded).

The situation is much more mixed for older titles. There are two major modding groups for older Call of Duty titles, AlterWare and Plutonium. Plutonium is the most successful of these, covering Black Ops 1, 2, MW3, and World at War (for when the servers go down for that like they did a while back). AlterWare (covering AW, MW2, and Ghosts) is much less popular due to some players moving back to the hacked dumpster fire of vanilla MW2 (thanks to the Xlabs shutdown) and the relative unpopularity of Ghosts and AW (it’s a shame because AW is really fun…and I’d love to not play on a P2P connection from Venezuela (and I’m not joking) on the PS3). Both of these are probably the best way to play older Call of Duty titles on the PC not only due to the RCE exploits, but also due to the fact that they run with a server list model. In fact, Plutonium has more people than the Steam versions do right now, and it’s the only way to play BO1 online once the server payments end for the few remaining servers on GameServers!

There are two major problems with this. The first is that due to how these mods work, the playerbase is rather split between people playing the Steam versions, and the mods with server lists. The second problem is that these mods have had a shaky legal history.

A few years back, Activision shutdown one of the modding groups, Xlabs, with legal action. There are different people who had different theories for why this happened but the big theories at the time were:

XLabs was literally linking to pirated game torrents.
The devs were Patreon-walling a BO3 PC client, which to add insult to injury wasn’t even GPL licensed but worse: a “proprietary” license. Modding BO3 on the PC is also a touchy topic given that BO3 on the PC is the only CoD title made after CoD WaW to allow for full player control of the game, and the servers are still up. The motivation for modding the other PC titles had to do mostly with wanting dedicated servers and mods.
XLabs was not verifying that anyone using their patch and servers legally owned the game.

This led to several major events. AlterWare would pick up the mantle from XLabs, but due to the panic over XLabs and its shutdown the player count for IW4x decreased even with the fallbacks that allowed it to survive the shutdown. Meanwhile AW and Ghosts were unpopular on the PC as it was so this acted as a killing blow to those two games on the PC. Unlike XLabs, AlterWare does not link to pirated games and instead instructs you how to install the mod side by side with your Steam install. The bigger thing is that Plutonium would force you to link a Steam account to play online that showed you owned those games. This seems to have worked because neither project has been shutdown yet (and to be fair nobody cares about AW or Ghosts on PC, unfortunately).

The fear seems to have subsided for now about Activision shutting down these modders as they seem to be focused more on suing cheat developers and trying to get people to play Black Ops 6. Furthermore, what led up to the bnetd lawsuit and controversy over that was the inability to verify that anyone using their software owned the games as the CD Key was the copy protection measure of the time. By making sure that anyone on Plutonium owns Black Ops 2, this solves this problem and this has likely led Plutonium to stay active. If these servers would go down, it would be a massive loss for anyone trying to play this game online today.

It’s also why it’s unlikely you will see similar mods for SBMM-era Call of Duty titles for a good period of time, because most of the legal action against private servers took place when these games were still at their peak. Trying to make a mod to play any SBMM-era Call of Duty title online with servers instead of SBMM is just as legally risky as making AlterIWNet was when MW2 was still popular. Maybe in a few long years you might see these, but by then will anyone care? I don’t think people will be as nostalgic for MWII as they were for MW2.

It’s why user control of online games is important

The patches for these titles are not because of Activision, but rather despite them. Activision has left these titles out on a vine to die and they could care less. In fact, the saddest long-running joke about how Activision simply couldn’t care less is that the digital prices for old Call of Duty titles are still $60. Black Ops 2 in particular is still $60, along with later titles like Ghosts, AW, Infinite Warfare, and more. They could care less about lowering the price on a 2012 game that is so old that we’re living in the year it takes place in (2025!)

This game has serious exploits that remain unpatched unless something so blatant and drastic like “malware that self-spreads” is written for it. Even the theater mode exploit remained unpatched for a while. Activision just doesn’t care, but if this were an older game you could imagine how there’d be a community patch already and a serverside patch too by now. Yet because the control of the player was removed, these exploits are only fixed with a third-party patcher or an entire infrastructure designed for the sole purpose of escaping the closed system.

The point is; user control of online games isn’t just important because of shutdowns or matchmaking chugging because of a low player count. It’s because there are things a lot worse than shutdowns, like having your computer exploited by malware.

General PSA: don’t apply for a job at Canonical. Do NOT apply for a job at Canonical. Treat the blatantly artificially enormous number of job openings they post as the mirages of trickster fae. They are unhinged. Mark Shuttleworth is unhinged. They will drag you through the mud, disrespect you and your time, and definitely not give you a job. This article I saw today is like the thirteenth of its kind that I personally have seen https://dustri.org/b/my-experience-with-canonicals-interview-process.html

Microsoft did too good of a job copying the Dreamcast and ended up becoming Sega.

@icedquinn @genmaicha @jae @mint This is accurate and is more or less the view expressed by the author of the post. You don't expect a dictator to ask "Hey...are you a really nice guy?" before ordering someone's execution, getting deposed doesn't make you a saint. Chiang Kai-shek was basically a banana republic fascist.

Geopolitics is amoral, it's a really bad impulse to try to figure out who the "good guys" are. I mean, look at "militant psychopath with good lobbyists versus opium-trafficking terrorists with good PR" over in the Levant. The best anyone can do is figure out who is there that might be willing to be friendly to your country's interests for as long as you can prop them up and then make sure they still need you propping them up: that's how it's worked for at least 2500 years, I don't see it changing.
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