fvold

For the past 50 years, commercial fusion power has been only a decade away. Now it's only a decade away for sure!

So what you're saying is that the problem people are trying to solve with NFTs has nothing to do with NFTs, and relies heavily on the good will of the corporation in control to work?

Yeah, nah, I'll stay on the fence until there is at least a strong proof of concept for this.

That's such a minor part, though.

Yes, your NFT will always be linked to object 238947872, but absolutely nothing about NFTs makes object 238947872 "a game sword" or even "a valid object in Game A", much less "Equivalent objects in form an function in both Game A and Game B".

Even if you somehow encode the visual representation and the stats into the NFT, using the most awesome method you could ever think of, that does not stop the power creep in a game.

Your Sword of Awesomeness does 3600 damage per second to the undead. You paid 36 ETH for this insta-kill weapon, and no undead could even be in the same instance with you without instantly becoming re-dead. Then the game gets a new zone where undead enemies have 40000 hitpoints and generate 7200 hitpoints per second. Your expensive sword is now a very impractical toothpick.

Even if you could make the stats permanent, you can't make it's usefulness permanent, nor can you guarantee it will be valid in any game for ever, much less several games at the same time.

Am I wrong? I want to know. Please elaborate on how you solve the "Object 238947872 is now a bag of chicken feed" problem and the "Object 238947872 is now obsolete because of power creep" problem.

Not even being sarcastic here. If I've misunderstood this whole thing, I want to know.

My main problem with this "you can own a video game asset!" argument is that you just don't.

You own a token on the blockchain that currently points to something. Tomorrow, it could point to something else. Let's take the "only sword that can kill a certain monster" thing, and have a look at the parts involved.

The parts are:

- The token on the blockchain - The art assets of the sword - The stats on the sword (including what it can and can't kill) - The list of games where this sword is a valid item

Of those, the NFT will only let you own or in any way control the first point. Let's say I get The Sword Of Dragon Murder in game A, and it is currently also accepted in game B. Woohoo, metaverse! The company in control of game B will control what it looks and sounds like in game B, and they will also control what it does there. Maybe it only kills dragons there, but the game has no dragons? It doesn't even need to be called the same. For a joke, they could have it display as "The Toothpick of King Arthur" and using it will have your character do a "pick your teeth" animation. Zero dragon murders to be had, no matter what you paid for the NFT.

Even worse is that you can't even control what the item does in the game you got it from. At any time, they can change the art assets so it looks like any ordinary sword, and remove the dragon murdering stats.

We even see kind of that in games now: Power creep.

When the next expansion comes out, your current gear is likely to be outdated, and you have to grind for the new stuff (or "microtransact" yourself up to date), and it doesn't matter if it's an NFT or a regular entry in a regular database, because your old stuff is still crap in the new area.

In your favorite MMO, take a five year old "best item" and try to sell it on the auction house. You won't get "best item" sort of prices. Why would that magically change with NFTs? Why are they exempt from this?

It seems obvious to me that the people talking about NFTs and secondary markets in games have not played any MMO for any length of time, or they'd know about nerfing and expansions.

1984.

Yes, I know you've probably read it already, but it's probably time to read it again.

Yep, that's what I usually call "four weeks worth of code done in three weeks", and it's the cause of every rewrite I've been a part of so far.

I hear that.

Machine Learning also has a long way to go before it can take a long, rambling mess of a meeting and somehow generate a halfway usable spec from it. I mean, the customer says they want X, but X is silly in this context, so we'll give them Y and tell them it's "X-like, but faster". For example, SQL is "Blockchain-like, but faster" for a lot of buzzword use-cases of blockchain.

Wow, this is nice!

Is there a hotkey to toggle the eraser?

No.

Chemically speaking, it's a rock. None of the original organic matter is left, it has all been permineralized.

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/paleo/fossilsarchive/permin.html

This "perfectly preserved dinosaur embryo" is a rock.

It's in the perfectly preserved shape of a dinosaur embryo, but chemically, it's a rock. Generally speaking, that's what fossils are.

I bet Young Earth Creationists will be quoting this article for decades now. Thanks, Guardian, for the clickbait-y headline. Cheeses.

Is it weird that I pictured the logo of Sun Microsystems?

Every time someone mentions "The Security Department" I'm reminded of a security review I failed because of the iptable rule `-I INPUT 1 --in-interface lo --jump ACCEPT` was "too permissive" and a "security risk".

Some corporations have morons for security auditors.

Just as being banned from one social media platform for bad behavior pushes people to a different social media platform, this might very well push the exactly wrong sort of people from iOS to Android.

If Android then implements something similar, they have the option to simply run different software, as Android lets you run whatever you want so long as you sign the wavier.

"You're using Android?! What do you have to hide?" -- Apple ad in 2030, possibly

You don't have to be the recipient of bad behavior to sympathize. I, for example, have never worked for Blizzard, yet I find these allegations to be appalling, and would not want to work with Blizzard until I knew the allegations were false or that the problem was properly dealt with.

Influential people can dislike the culture, and leave so their reputation is not besmirched by the much Blizzard is currently being dragged through.

This was specifically seeded into the criminal world. It's not like they cracked Signal, or whatever.

It's not an infiltration of the app, it's an infiltration of the criminal organizations, using an app they made.

The big blow isn't the amount of drugs or cash taken, it's the grabbing of relatively high ranking people in the organization, and the absolute shattering of their communication.

I bet a bunch of them will go back to in-person communication only for a long while after this, slowing things down considerably.

The main difference is that by building their own honey pot, they did not have to rely on an external actor to maintain any secrecy.

If they dug their claws into wikr, they'd have to worry about leaks from every single person involved with wikr on top of all potential leaks from law enforcement personnel.

Also, I suspect it's easier to get the warrants needed to create a sting from the ground up than it is for several different law enforcement agencies around the world to each get separate warrants to access wikr/slack/discord/whatever's data.

Once the data legally exists in a law enforcement database, it is relatively simple bureaucracy to share it with allied organizations.

Lawyers, even in the United States, are bound by rules of conduct, and will stop being lawyers very quickly if the overstep the rules of ethical conduct.

The standards of ethics they are checked against are not yours or mine, they are the rules they agreed to. To pretend like ethics aren't a thing for lawyers is surprisingly uninformed for HN.

I wonder what would happen if compilers/interpreters/lexers of various programming/scripting languages had this attitude.

Why do web page authors get a pass? I mean, most web page authors today at least also do JavaScript, where a single out-of-place character can cause the whole thing to simply break.

Yeah yeah, legacy and all that, but that's why we have doctypes.

"How to murder an IRC network in 12 easy steps", huh?

"These are evil, vile people I am torturing to death. In fact, it's debatable if they're even people!" tends to be the justification, and it tends to be based on mental gymnastics surrounding some old book :-/

I see your point, and I agree. "In the end, it's better for the consumer this way, we're just giving the process the tiniest of nudges." has fueled a lot of anti-consumer hogwash over the years, I'm sure.

The "left clap" is the server's left, and the "right clap" is the server's right.

Easy to get those mixed up, as the comic doesn't specify.

True, but it's enough to make a rather spectacular show to frighten people, and in the end, that's what terrorism is about.

"In place of"? It's trivial to cause a lithium-ion battery battery to explode if you know how. Don't tell TSA, though, or you're going to have a very boring flight.

Those are different jobs, and both jobs are being done. The sheer complexity of hardening makes it naive to think it will ever be bulletproof, as I'm sure you'll agree, so there will always be a call for another layer behind it.

World-facing firewall defends from the outside, strict routing and internal firewall defends the network from it self, firewalls on each server/computer defends from having exploits/worms spread like wildfire once they manage to find a crack, and detection software does it's damnedest to discover when something unwanted is happening. Remove any of these, and the whole chain is less secure.

To make a computer completely secure, of course, you need a trash compactor and a boat to take it out to the Marianas trench, so it'll always be about balancing risks against accessibility and usability.

Frankly, I think the detection software part of the security stack just has better PR.

I've worked with such a mimic. He did a security audit, then scrapped the whole system because there was a completely unfiltered network interface, and no matter what other security was in place that would never ever be good enough on a GNU/Linux system. "All interfaces must have strict filtration, only allowing traffic on previously approved ports as per system and application specifications."

The interface in question was called "lo".

I don't work there any more.

Another implications of this is that if a security flaw is found in this re-used image, it's trvial to write a worm, as it can very easily seek out and find vulnerable hosts.

Ooops.