I mean, if you want to play a game made by volunteers, that’s where Team Fortress came from.

There originally was the Quake-based Team Fortress mod.

There was Weapons Factory for Quake II, which was similar.

The TF team was hired by Valve to do the confusingly-named Team Fortress Classic for Valve’s Half-Life, itself based on Quake II.

And Valve did Team Fortress 2.

Only HR, IT, and management are believed to be unaffected by the cuts, which reportedly would see the developer’s title, 2016’s Disney Magic Kingdoms, transferred to Gameloft’s studio in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Kharkiv? Damn. I mean, Kharkiv is an active war zone. As in “I read regular news reports about fighting there”.

This was today:

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-attacks-kharkiv-with-fab-500-bomb-for-first-time-injuring-4/

Russia attacks Kharkiv with FAB-500 gliding bomb for first time, injuring 4

searches further

And it’s not just casually using the term to refer to Kharkiv Oblast, either. The studio is in the city, slightly on the Russia side.

10 Nezalezhnosti Ave, BC Kvartal, 61022 Kharkiv, Ukraine

EDIT: They aren’t in the district that was bombed above, but they’re one block away from said district.

I mean, the whole thing doesn’t need to be destroyed for a bunch of pieces to be broken off.

There is, but that isn’t why I split it – comment #2 was an afterthought, dealt with a peripheral issue.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this

There are only 52 organizations that Firefox trusts to act as CAs. An ISP isn’t normally going to be on there.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Included_Certificates

https://ccadb.my.salesforce-sites.com/mozilla/CACertificatesInFirefoxReport

If whatever cert is presented by a remote website doesn’t have a certificate signed by one of those 52 organizations, your browser is going to throw up a warning page instead of showing content. KT Corporation, the ISP in question, isn’t one of those organizations.

They can go create a CA if they want, but it doesn’t do them any good unless it’s trusted by Firefox (or whatever browser people use, but I’m using Firefox, and I expect that basically the same CAs will be trusted by any browser, so…)

Ukraine has a navy. The navy just – for the moment – doesn’t have any ships, just boats and anti-ship missiles and USVs and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Navy

Also, regarding Russia knowing what’s up there and being able to talk to it, apparently earlier in the week Ukraine attacked a Russian satellite communication facility, so I dunno what secondary implications that might have, whether it could relate to this satellite situation.

https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-attack-atacms-space-radar-fire-1916340

Crimea Videos Show Fires Blazing As Space Radar Targeted with ATACMS—Report

Ukraine has struck a Russian deep space network hub in annexed Crimea—allegedly used by Russian Aerospace Forces—using U.S.-supplied missiles, according to local reports.

Kyiv’s forces launched the ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) attack across Crimea on Sunday night, and “successfully struck” Russia’s Center for Long-Range Space Communications in the village of Vitino in the Saky region, open-source intelligence X (formerly Twitter) account OSINTtechnical said.

“Multiple areas of the facility are burning,” the account said.

The center is one of three complexes that make up Russia’s Yevpatoria Center for Deep Space Communications, which supports manned and robotic space missions. The facility was reportedly previously struck in December 2023 with British-supplied Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles.

If it’s a “radar” site, then it presumably deals with stuff nearby.

I don’t think that Russia needs deep space communications facilities to talk to stuff in LEO – hobbyists can do that with simple setups – but it was apparently a military facility, and I think that most military applications today are for LEO. Maybe GLONASS, which has military applications and is in a larger orbit.

And Ukraine presumably isn’t gonna be expending limited weapons on it unless it’s got military significance to Ukraine. So maybe it was also being used to talk to satellites in LEO, dunno.

Also, stuff like constructing transport infrastructure for military logistics or more fortifications or revetments in airfields or any number of things may have significant military effect, even if they aren’t fighting.

considers

If North Korea is going to directly be involved in Ukraine, that maybe changes the calculus for what kind of stuff we send in. North Korea isn’t China, but it is East Asia. A lot of the argument from people who don’t want us committing more heavily in Europe is that it’s a waste of resources relative to what we’d like to do, which is pivot to Asia. But if East Asia is going to be fighting in Europe, that might make this an “Asia conflict”.

Satellites don’t just spontanously burst into 100 pieces.

Well…

There are at least three possibilities that occur to me, and two of them probably aren’t done by Russia intentionally.

One is that they tested it as a target for some kind of anti-satellite weapon. It was decomissioned and probably expendable, so that’d be consistent with targets of past anti-satellite weapon tests. Russia has been talking about anti-satellite weapons and is not happy about us providing satellite reconaissance data to Ukraine. US intelligence also believes that Russia has been considering deployment of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pentagon-official-warns-russian-anti-satellite-nuclear-weapon-devastat-rcna150314

A senior Defense Department official told lawmakers Wednesday that Russia is developing an “indiscriminate” anti-satellite nuclear device that would pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the world.

"The concept that we are concerned about is Russia developing and — if we are unable to convince them otherwise — to ultimately fly a nuclear weapon in space which will be an indiscriminate weapon” that would not distinguish among military, civilian or commercial satellites, John Plumb, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said at a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing.

He said the threat was “not imminent” but that the Pentagon and the “entire” Biden administration were concerned about the program.

This isn’t that – that’s in earlier stages and we’d know immediately if something like that were used – but I suppose it’s probably a fair bet that anti-satellite stuff is being discussed in Moscow. That’d be on Moscow, if they did that.

The second is that it got hit by some kind of debris too small for us to detect. If we don’t know about it, the Russians probably don’t either, and probably couldn’t avoid it.

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/measurements/radar.html

NASA’s main source of data for debris in the size range of approximately 5 mm to 30 cm is the Haystack Ultrawideband Satellite Imaging Radar (HUSIR). The HUSIR radar, operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, has been collecting orbital debris data for the ODPO since 1990 under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. HUSIR statistically samples the debris population by “staring” at selected pointing angles and detecting debris that fly through its field-of-view.

The data are used to characterize the debris population by size, altitude, and inclination. From these measurements, scientists have concluded that there are approximately 500,000 debris fragments in orbit with sizes down to one centimeter. The NASA ODPO also collects data from the Haystack Auxiliary Radar (HAX) located next to the main HUSIR antenna. Although HAX is less sensitive than HUSIR, it operates at a different wavelength (1.8 cm for HAX versus 3 cm for HUSIR) and has a wider field-of-view.

Since 1990, the Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar has collected orbital debris data for debris as small as about 2 mm in LEO for the NASA ODPO. It is located in the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California and is operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Goldstone Orbital Debris Radar is an extremely sensitive sensor capable of detecting a 3-mm metallic sphere at 1000 km, which makes it an incredibly useful tool in the characterization of the sub-centimeter-sized debris population.

Even with all that, my guess is that there’s probably debris up there that can cause a lot of damage. The example above is small, but also a metallic sphere. I’d bet that there are some materials that are a lot more transparent to the radar that they’re using.

Low Earth Orbit objects are moving at a pretty good clip:

https://www.space.com/low-earth-orbit

In very simple terms, low Earth orbit (LEO) is exactly what it sounds like: An orbit around the Earth with an altitude that lies towards the lower end of the range of possible orbits. This is around 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) or less. The majority of satellites are to be found in LEO, as is the International Space Station (ISS).

In order to remain in this orbit, a satellite has to travel at around 17,500 miles per hour (7.8 kilometers per second), at which speed it takes around 90 minutes to complete an orbit of the planet.

The most common handgun round is 9mm Parabellum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9×19mm_Parabellum

7.45 g at 360 m/s for one type of ammo, about 4.6% as fast.

So something that weighs 0.34 grams will have the same energy as a 9mm round.

A paperclip weighs maybe 1 gram. So something in LEO a third the weight of a paperclip will hit as hard as a bullet from a Glock.

It could also be a micrometeor not in Earth orbit coming in from outer space. I don’t know if we can detect those. Those could be moving a lot faster (and hence could be even smaller to cause a given amount of damage).

A third possibility is that something on the satellite exploded. It’s got maneuvering fuel with oxidizer…I’d guess that there are probably ways for that to blow up. If there’s something that has a lot of kinetic energy, that could fail. Flywheel failures can be pretty exciting in terms of shrapnel going everywhere, and if they use gyros to do orientation, it might be possible for one of those to shatter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel

A reaction wheel (RW) is used primarily by spacecraft for three-axis attitude control, and does not require rockets or external applicators of torque. They provide a high pointing accuracy,[1]: 362  and are particularly useful when the spacecraft must be rotated by very small amounts, such as keeping a telescope pointed at a star.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

High performance flywheels can explode, killing bystanders with high-speed fragments.

IIRC Russia was talking about detaching their modules and using them to help bootstrap some new station. So I dunno if those will get brought down.

That being said, that was also when that rather pugnacious guy was running Roscosmos, and I dunno if doing a new space station is the top of Russia’s priority list for their limited budget.

kagis

Dmitry Rogozin.

kagis further

It looks like they canceled the idea of reusing the Russian ISS modules back in 2021. So I guess those are destined for SpaceX’s deorbit too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_Experiment_Complex

The Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (Russian: Орбитальный Пилотируемый Сборочно-Экспериментальный Комплекс, Orbital’nyj Pilotirujemyj Sborochno-Eksperimental’nyj Kompleks;[1][2] ОПСЭК, OPSEK) was a 2009–2017 proposed third-generation Russian modular space station for low Earth orbit. The concept was to use OPSEK to assemble components of crewed interplanetary spacecraft destined for the Moon, Mars, and possibly Saturn. The returning crew could also recover on the station before landing on Earth. Thus, OPSEK could form part of a future network of stations supporting crewed exploration of the Solar System.

In early plans, the station was to consist initially of several modules from the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) of the International Space Station (ISS). However, after studying the feasibility of this, the head of Roscosmos stated in September 2017 the intention to continue working together on the ISS.[3] In April 2021, Roscosmos officials announced plans to exit from the ISS programme after 2024, stating concerns about the condition of its aging modules. The OPSEK concept had by then evolved into plans for the Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS), which would be built without modules from the ISS, and was anticipated to be launched starting in the mid-2020s.[4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orbital_Service_Station

The Russian Orbital Service Station (Russian: Российская орбитальная служебная станция, Rossiyskaya orbital’naya sluzhebnaya stantsiya) (ROSS, Russian: РОСС)[3] is a proposed Russian orbital space station scheduled to begin construction in 2027. Initially an evolution of the Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex (OPSEK) concept, ROSS developed into plans for a new standalone Russian space station built from scratch without modules from the Russian Orbital Segment of the ISS.[4]

I still dunno if they’re gonna get the money for a new space station. Like, deciding to have a war in Ukraine may have kind of killed off the viability of doing a new space station.

If ISP routers are anything like the west that means they control the DNS servers and the ones on router cannot be changed, and likely it blocks 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 and so on, as Virgin Media does (along with blocking secure DNS) in the UK for example, which definitely opens up a massive attack vector for an ISP to spin up its own website with a verified cert and malware and have the DNS resolve to that when users try to access it to either download the software needed to access this Grid System or if it’s a web portal - the portal itself.

Browser page integrity – if you’re using https – doesn’t rely on DNS responses.

If I go to “foobar.com”, there has to be a valid cert for “foobar.com”. My ISP can’t get a valid cert for foobar.com unless it has a way to insert its own CA into my browser’s list of trusted CAs (which is what some business IT departments do so that they cans snoop on traffic, but an ISP probably won’t be able to do, since they don’t have access to your computer) or has access to a trusted CA’s key, as per above.

They can make your browser go to the wrong IP address, but they can’t make that IP address present information over https that your browser believes to belong to a valid site.

I feel like I’m reasonably tolerant towards GNU Hurd.

I’d also add, on an unrelated note, that if the concern is bandwidth usage, which is what the article says, I don’t see why the ISP doesn’t just throttle users, based entirely on bandwidth usage. Like, sure, there are BitTorrent users that use colossal amounts of bandwidth, will cause problems for pricing based on overselling bandwidth, which is the norm for consumer broadband.

But you don’t need to do some kind of expensive, risky, fragile, and probably liability-issue-inducing attack on BitTorrent if your concern is bandwidth usage. Just start throttling down bandwidth as usage rises, regardless of protocol. Nobody ever gets cut off, but if they’re using way above their share of bandwidth, they’re gonna have a slower connection. Hell, go offer to sell them a higher-bandwidth package. You don’t lose money, nobody is installing malware, you don’t have the problem come right back as soon as some new bandwidth-munching program shows up (YouTube?), etc.

I don’t really understand the attack vector the ISP is using, unless it’s exploiting some kind of flaw in higher-level software than BitTorrent itself.

A torrent should be identified uniquely by a hash in a magnet URL.

When a BitTorrent user obtains a hash, as long as it’s from an https webpage, the ISP shouldn’t be able to spoof the hash. You’d have to either get your own key added to a browser’s keystore or have access to one of the trusted CA’s keys for that.

Once you have the hash, you should be able to find and validate the Merkle hash tree from the DHT. Unless you’ve broken SHA and can generate collisions – which an ISP isn’t going to – you shouldn’t be able to feed a user a bogus hash tree from the DHT.

Once you have the hash tree, you shouldn’t be able to feed a user any complete chunks that are bogus unless you’ve broken the hash function in BitTorrent’s tree (which I think is also SHA). You can feed them up to one byte short of a chunk, try and sandbag a download, but once they get all the data, they should be able to reject a chunk that doesn’t hash to the expected value in the tree.

I don’t see how you can reasonably attack the BitTorrent protocol, ISP or no, to try and inject malware. Maybe some higher level protocol or software package.

looks doubtfully at thumbnail of Vladimir Putin

I dunno what nanoUFO is aiming for, but for your use case, can’t do that with dual touchpads alone, then. You’re after a touchpad+gyro. Hmm.

searches a bit

It does look like there is at least one touchpad+gyro input device out there other than the Steam Controller.

https://www.amazon.com/DarkWalker-Controller-PC-Mac-Linux-Unix/dp/B0CM5YXYZM/

That might take some remapping to glue the inputs to a given game, as I bet that it’s presenting itself to the system as a USB hub with an attached keyboard, gamepad, and touchpad.

Huh.

I don’t think that it’s Austin Powers that’s triggering it, though, yeah, he does have mutton chops and a lot of hair, there’s some similarity there.

The only thing I’ve come up with before was Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, but while that’s also similar in some ways, I still don’t think that what I’m dredging out of memory either.

Some British movie.

Hmm. What’s your use case?

I mean, technically, the Steam Controller is neat and all. And it’s pretty customizable, so I get people who want to use it for some specific application.

I mean, as I understand it, the Steam Controller was aimed at supporting the Steam Machine. The basic problem was that Valve sold a large library of PC-oriented titles. A lot of these used a mouse. Gamepads were a poor substitute for the mouse. Valve wanted to get Steam into the living room, so put out their own video game console entrant.

But the Steam Machine didn’t sell well, so Valve’s reason for making the Steam Controller kind of went away. Most people gaming on a PC can just, well, use a mouse. I’m not saying that there’s no market for the thing – I’m sure that there are people who use a non-Steam-Machine PC to play games in the living room. But the intended use case for the thing kind of got clobbered.

It looks like there are still people selling Steam Controllers on eBay, though I assume that they aren’t going to be getting a whole lot of maintenance from Valve, given that they sold in relatively small numbers, and they haven’t been sold for about five years now. You could probably get one there.

I mean, there’s no clear solution in Sudan.

Both sides have interfered with food shipments. I haven’t been reading up on this particular one, but in conflicts I’ve read about in the past in Africa, I know that seizing food has been a strategy in conflict – everyone needs food, so control of food in a region short of it is power and wealth. Black Hawk Down’s opening scene shows exactly that happening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wYeNRzZtAA

kagis

Yeah:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/29/sudan-slips-into-famine-as-warring-sides-starve-civilians

A UN source, who asked that their name be withheld due to the subject’s sensitivity, said both warring sides are posing obstacles, trying to prevent food from getting to areas controlled by their rival.

So you’ve got limited options.

One possibility is that the factions are gonna decide that this isn’t a great strategy, like, preserving the value of the civilian populace is important enough not to dick with food. But I assume that they aren’t unaware, and they’ve decided to go ahead with this. Sounds like the conflict’s got an ethnic aspect too, and if factions would rather kill off the other ethnic group rather than just making them submit, you’re probably gonna have a hard time convincing them not to do this.

This isn’t gonna be a peacekeeping mission. Those don’t deal with situations where one is in active opposition to one of the factions, but where both sides want there to not be conflict and just need a neutral party to act as enforcer of a peace agreement or something.

I don’t think that you’re going to have countries willing to enter into the civil war, force both sides to stop disrupting food.

I guess some people could flee the country, but it looks like only a small portion have so far – I’d guess that neighboring counties aren’t too happy about taking them. Looks like Egypt has the most, and it’s less than 1% of the country’s population, with Chad also being close. Sudan is super-poor; WP has them at 185 out of 194 GDP per capita, poorer than North Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_of_Sudan

Egypt

Starting in the 1990s, the increase in refugees from Sudan has forced UNHCR RO Cairo to shift its focus from education and training to the care and maintenance of refugees.[12] In Cairo, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is involved in helping process refugees for resettlement, moving refugees, and assisting with their medical examinations. IOM also conducts cultural orientation for the refugees to prepare them for resettlement in third countries.[12] The UNHCR regional office in Cairo (RO Cairo) is overextended, and after Somalis, the Sudanese (mainly southern Sudanese) represent the largest caseload.[13] A large number of Sudanese refugees in Egypt reflects the fact that many Sudanese travels to Cairo to obtain official recognition of their refugee status from the UNHCR. The Sudanese refugees in Egypt fall under two categories: those who are waiting for their status-determination interview and those who have been rejected or who are self-settled.[14] Between 60 and 70 percent of Sudanese asylum seekers have their applications for refugee status rejected.[14] Rejection and closure of a file have serious psychological and emotional implications for refugees. Many of those rejected, especially men, turn to alcoholism as a way of overcoming their problems. Others become mentally disturbed and there have been reports of suicide or attempted suicide upon receiving news of the rejection.[14] The unity of the family has been challenged by Sudanese refugees’ quest for UNHCR recognition. Women and children wait in Cairo for their UNHCR applications to go through while husbands wait in Sudan.[14] The difficulties of life in Cairo and the inability of some husbands to join their families in Egypt have forced some women refugees to abandon their husbands, remarry, and leave for resettlement.[14] In cases of rejection of a family application at the UNHCR, many men leave their wives and children and look for another single woman with UNHCR status to avoid responsibility.[14] Additionally, UNHCR RO Cairo does not recognize polygamous unions, and as such will not refer polygamists for resettlement to countries where polygamy is not permitted.[14] All of these factors have contributed to the break-up of families, divorce, and the abandonment of children. Finally, the UNHCR identity cards issued to refugees are not always recognized by the Egyptian authority. There have been situations in which people have been taken and detained for three to four days and then released, despite their UNHCR status.[14] A resident permit stamp on a valid Sudanese passport seems to offer more protection for refugees.[14]

Or one side could win and the war end, but as far as I know, that’s not expected to be imminent, and you can’t just wait years for food.

kagis

https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2024-02/sudan-collapsing-heres-how-stop-it

The Sudanese civil war is brutal, devastating and shows no sign of coming to an end.

That article was from a couple months ago.