Great Moments in Computer Programming

[RealNC]

I could see that working in a lot of places! Though I wonder if some networks restrict it or if it will be in the future. In a total asshole hotel/ship/etc wifi network, I envision that they would scan all connections periodically to catch things. Such as.. "Oh. I see 2 or more active MAC addresses on the same IP.

NAT is layer 3. MAC is layer 2 and is thus invisible through NAT. So they can't detect if you're doing this or not

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I'm currently on a cruise ship. We paid for the internet access so that we can stay connected and post pictures during our vacation. The internet package allows one person to connect on device at a time. I can have my laptop and my cellphone connected to the internet, but not at the same time.

Several sites, including YouTube and Patreon, are throwing up security validation checks because I am logging in from a new IP address. Each one insists on sending me a 2FA verification code. When I try to log in on my laptop, it sends a code to my phone. The codes expire in one minute and there isn't enough time to disconnect the laptop, connect the phone, get the code, disconnect the phone, connect the laptop, and enter the code.

I appreciate what they are trying to do with 2FA and it's doing a good job of keeping the bad guys out. Right now it's also keeping the good guy out.

2FA is a scourge. More on this later.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Several sites, including YouTube and Patreon, are throwing up security validation checks because I am logging in from a new IP address. Each one insists on sending me a 2FA verification code. When I try to log in on my laptop, it sends a code to my phone. The codes expire in one minute and there isn't enough time to disconnect the laptop, connect the phone, get the code, disconnect the phone, connect the laptop, and enter the code.

I really do love that you shared this experience.

The people that are working in 2FA are among the very worst in our industry. Not being a jerk, but it just is and it's obvious. Them FREAKING OUT because an ip address is different? If you can see that it's different then check to see if it's an IP address registered to a goddamn cruise, you lazy sacks of shit.

But they won't. That YouTube and Patreon are doing this is insane because for the most part we can't throw hundreds of dollars to YouTube and Patreon in a non-recoverable way like we could with Amazon or whatnot.

It's just so aggravating. As I have said elsewhere, American Express wants me to do multiple CAPTCHAs just to logon. I use Brave, that is the only non-standard thing. I rarely clean out my history and who knows about my IP address because I use Starlink. It wouldn't surprise me if Musk screwed that up, but still. Them doing this doesn't make me feel more secure. Logging in every day to check my account made me feel "secure". What it does is make me not want to use their card, but since there are only really four options for cards and one of them is Discover, there is nothing a consumer can do for this nonsense.

[Jizaboz]

I could see that working in a lot of places! Though I wonder if some networks restrict it or if it will be in the future. In a total asshole hotel/ship/etc wifi network, I envision that they would scan all connections periodically to catch things. Such as.. "Oh. I see 2 or more active MAC addresses on the same IP.

NAT is layer 3. MAC is layer 2 and is thus invisible through NAT. So they can't detect if you're doing this or not

Right. I couldn't come up with a realistic scenario when I was thinking about it. But it's not hard to assume companies will always get more money out of you if they ever figure out how!

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I tried out Microsoft's AI image creator, to try to make an image for Baldur's Gate II based on a description.

Midjourney can do it for $10 a month in seconds.

I gave Microsoft's stuff a half hour. No image. I don't know why I thought anything of theirs would work.

[Jizaboz]

My Apple Pay from my phone shit works again!

The fix? Remove your card. Re-add it. I'd say this is fucking stupid but app release services such as iOS store and Steam are WORSE. SOOO much worse. Just to get to agree to something you didn't fucking read because it probably didn't apply to you.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I am pretty sure Substack just decided on their own to sign me up for a writers of theirs and charge me $7 for it. I got a refund, but this is terrible of them, and they were already a terrible platform.

No way to remove the credit card they have on file, of course.

[Tdarcos]

No way to remove the credit card they have on file, of course.

Inform your card issuer (bank, credit union, brokerage, etc.) to refuse further charges from them, and declare any charge from them fraudulent, which it is. If the issuer can't or won't refuse charges, as a last resort, if all else fails, declare the card lost, cancel it, then get a new one with a new number. A pain in the ass, but if they won't remove it, make it unusable.

Come to think about it, this is where virtual credit card numbers can help.

You log on to your existing issuer's website, select whether you want the new card number to expire before, or on, the month and year of the primary card, and a daily spend limit, or no limit. They'll ask you to authenticate, then they will issue you a unique card number with the expiration date you chose and its own CVV. Write the information down, because this is the only time you'll see it. If you don't write it down, you'll have to ask for another virtual card number. Charges on that number will appear on your primary card's bill. Give that informationo to one party only, and if you no longer want their services, you go back to your issuer's website and cancel that number. Your primary card remains unaffected.

Find out if your issuer offers this service. It's one of the few things Citibank does right. I have found the feature very useful.

[Da King]

Find out if your issuer offers this service. It's one of the few things Citibank does right. I have found the feature very useful.

Unfortunately, Citibank only offers this for certain cards. I dont understand why it isn't a blanket benefit for all of their cards.

My Costco Citibank card does not have this feature, and it drives me crazy, as thats the card I use for all travel needs.

[objectinspace]

Games are so goddamn stupid now.

Mortal Kombat 1 got updated to add crossplay.

I feel like that sentence alone proves the truth of my statement, but we're blowing right past the small stuff. Like how the 12th game in the franchise is called 1 because... because, that they thought they could get away with releasing a fighting game in the 2020's without crossplay for 5 months, how that is apparently correct because idiots like me keep playing it. And so on. These are trifles.

The game used to be 100GB's, now it is 140GB's. Quite a far cry from the first Mortal Kombat called Mortal Kombat 1! So the update is huge and takes forever. This is fine, I have gigabit internet like a good tech bro. Nevertheless it is taking hours to install this patch, which Steam has intelligently decided that I won't want to play until tomorrow, which is why it didn't just do this in the afternoon while I was working. The reason it takes so long is the allocation of space, and the patching. Again, no idea why since I have an SSD--but whatever.

So while I am waiting these hours to play the video game I paid $100 for, I set up the aforementioned crossplay, because that's fun. In a development which surprises no one, the only way the engineering geniuses at WB have discovered to make this work is to make everyone create an account with them, with the entirely coincidental side benefit that they get to see everything you're doing. Kind of like how, when you ask the Military how to solve a problem, all the options boil down to exploding people:when you are a hammer, every problem must look like a nail.

But--again, whatever. This is just the state of things in 2024. I make the account, and connect my other gamer accounts. Since they only enabled crossplay today, I have 0 friends on WB, so the easiest, most logical way for me to quickly generate a list of people I can play with would be for WB to export my friends lists from other services, and show me how many of those people have also created WB accounts once they have linked their other gamer accounts. This is a thing that makes sense.

Yes?

Haha nope!

This functionality does not exist. I linked my accounts for nothing.

[objectinspace]

Also, while I'm here (as MK1 is *still* patching)

https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/13971691

As we continue to make Google Assistant more helpful, we're prioritizing the experiences you love and investing in the underlying technology to make them even better — which means that some underutilized features will no longer be supported.

What follows is a list of things Google has decided are no longer worth having, like a stopwatch. I'd like to add a few things to that list.

I downloaded the new LLM-based Gemini assistant app. To try it out, I typed a query.

And sat there.

This was due to two bugs that Google apparently thought was perfectly fine to release with. The first was that voice queries would not automatically send. The second was that the send button was not focusable by TalkBack.

YOU COULD NOT SEND ANYTHING!

So, I uninstalled it.

A week later, Gemini became my assistant experience in the Google app! They never told me this would happen, I just woke up one morning to discover that the app I had been using every day for the past 6 or so years is now completely different. They have, however, fixed the aforementioned bugs, so I can at least tell it to do things. So I tell it to play my podcast, which is what I went in the app for.

I do not get a podcast. What I get is a page or so of very polite text informing me that it is not able to play podcasts, followed by a list of podcast recommendations.

Which it cannot play.

So I ask it to, instead, open my podcast app. I get a page of very polite text informing me that device actions are not supported, followed by a list of app recommendations.

Which it cannot open.

Google laid off 12,000 people for this garbage?

[AArdvark]

The Only Game In Town syndrome, thats Google's real problem. Remember when computing was fun but not essential?

[Da King]

Also, while I'm here (as MK1 is *still* patching)

https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/13971691

As we continue to make Google Assistant more helpful, we're prioritizing the experiences you love and investing in the underlying technology to make them even better — which means that some underutilized features will no longer be supported.

This is all a major reason that I am mostly de-Googling. You cannot count on any of their products to perform the way you want them for any length of time.

I still use gmail. I figure they can't mess that up.
And I still use Google Maps, because it is far superior to anything else.

I swear, if Google hadn't nailed SEARCH and GMAIL so perfectly, I'm not even sure they'd exist as a company today.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I own an Atari VCS console. Because they picked a stupid name for it, it means I have to - when mentioning it - say it's the newish one, not one from the 1970s.

They had a driver update for a joystick. The joystick had been working flawlessly for years. Its process to update the firmware on a beautifully working joystick failed and it reset itself. The thing does not respond to factory reset and is not recognized by the VCS any longer. I have a support ticket in, and the guy I guess gave up. What is the point of having support if they give you one useless reply and then stop replying? There is a guy I contacted over Discord about it. Someone on AtariAge was flabbergasted that this happened, he had NEVER SEEN it before. I don't know what to tell you, pal.

I am letting go of the fact that they gave out a coupon to everyone to let you get a free game from their store and there is one report of it not working on February 29th. I am letting go of the fact that all I really want is a replacement joystick because this was 100% on them. What I am posting about is that they have not missed a day sending out spam to me since I opened the ticket.

I realize that spam subscription lists are run by people wholly incapable of even taking people off the list in fewer than 4-90 business days, but maybe see if someone has an open support ticket with an email and if they do, lay off the fucking ads until it is closed? But hey, that wouldn't make the line go up, so of course nobody at any company would ever dare think it, you'd be escorted out of the building like you were radioactive, like what they did to Jerry Maguire.

[AArdvark]

They don't care about you. You can get more satisfaction by buying a whole new joystick, which was probably their intention in the first place

[objectinspace]

I still use gmail. I figure they can't mess that up.

GMail is good. Funny story though!

I used to have an email that was hosted on a different domain through a free version of the enterprise version of gmail. Just so I could have an address that was my name @ trendy science fiction reference dot com. That is, until Google decided to restrict the free tier to a maximum of 50 accounts per domain. Since the domain already had more than 50 accounts on it, any account that was marked as not having logged in for more than three months would be deleted automatically by Google. In another great moment in computer programming, Google took my lack of logging in on the web (I was using Thunderbird) as proof that my account was inactive, so poof went the address I'd been using professionally for 15 years.

And I still use Google Maps, because it is far superior to anything else.

I also cannot use Google maps. They have not made it accessible. They have known this for years and done nothing.

I'd better stop here though--if I start including accessibility gripes then I will never leave this thread, and Robb will eventually have to close it as a mercy for the BBS.

[Da King]

I'd also used a GFYD account (or whatever they renamed it to THAT week). Once they started pulling back the benefits, adding stuff behind a paywall, etc, I gave it up because I figured that too was in the process of getting wrecked. Hence my interest in ever using FREE, basic gmail. Google cannot be counted on to do anything else correctly in the long term.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

6 captchas to simply reset my password for Instacart.

I am only using them to send my mother groceries. I will never, ever use them on my own. Unreal to me that these shit companies will spend money doing work for Google to train their systems, rather than let their own customers use their products.

[Da King]

6 captchas to simply reset my password for Instacart.

JUST LEARN HOW TO SELECT THE PICTURE WITH THE BIKE IN IT CORRECTLY THE FIRST TIME!!!

[RealNC]

6 captchas to simply reset my password for Instacart.

I am only using them to send my mother groceries. I will never, ever use them on my own. Unreal to me that these shit companies will spend money doing work for Google to train their systems, rather than let their own customers use their products.

At least I think this has reduced the amount of captchas I have to do significantly:

https://privacypass.github.io/

Most of the time, the capchas I'm presented with are already solved and I just click "OK." I still need to solve one once in a while to refill the stored tokens. After that, the next 8 or so captchas do not require solving.