• 1 Post
  • 43 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • BitTorrent breaks your data in blocks, each block is hashed, their sizes are known. Assuming you got your .torrent file from a legitimate source, it’s practically impossible to receive something else, as long as your client does all the checks properly.

    In theory, it is possible to write malware that will collide hashes with some other content, but considering you are restricted to the size of the actual content, it’s extremely unlikely that out of all the millions of .torrents we created so far we can find even one for which it is possible.

    And even if you win this absolutely bizzare lottery, you’ll be competing with legitimate peers for serving the blocks. If at least one block that you care about is not served by you, the recepient will just get corrupted content that won’t be dangerous in any way. In other words, you need to have so much bandwidth, that you serve everything before anyone else can serve even one significant block. At which point you will probably have to spend a lot more money on that than you’ll ever get from whatever malware you are trying to serve.







  • Have been almost a year since I switched to Linux completely. I’m using CachyOS (an Arch derivative), so, you may have to adjust some things for your distro.

    First of all, your driver setup varies heavily on what hardware you have, obviously. All AMD (both CPU and GPU) being the easiest for setup and laptops with Intel CPU + iGPU and Nvidia dGPU being notoriously hard to manage (it’s also my case, which sucks). Look up what you need for your specific hardware.

    Next comes your display server and audio server. The bleeding edge here being Wayland + Pipewire.

    Wayland can be a bit bitchy on Nvidia GPUs, but it got a lot better over the last years. To use Wayland your desktop environment has to support it. Check with your specific DE. I’m using KDE Plasma, been quite happy since the switch.

    Pipewire is pretty easy to setup, just uninstall your old audio server, replace it with Pipewire and an adapter package for what you had (like pipewire-pulse for PulseAudio) and you are good to go. It’s very cool with tools like qpwgraph for audio management, easily the most mind-blowing thing I installed. Your friend came over and you want to send game audio both to your and their headphones? Easy. Been selling parts of my soul to get these sorts of setups on Windows for a long time.

    Next, use native software where you can. You can replace Notepad++ with VSCodium or Helix (the learning curve for modal editors is steep, but it’s very worth it).

    For Minecraft, TLauncher is… controversial to say the least, even for usage on Windows. Try PrismLauncher. Works great, allows to download modpacks from popular distributors and is pretty easy to trick into playing in offline mode without a Microsoft account, just look it up.

    Next, the translation layer. I’m using Proton-GE for everything via Lutris. While, as per GE, it is not a supported use-case, it’s what I’ve got the best experience with so far.

    As for dependecies, there is a good guide from GE for that.

    Hopefully it helps in one way or the other. You can also experiment with distibution of your choice. There are some gaming-focused ones that come with driver installation tools to make it easier for you, don’t hesitate to dump everything and start from scratch with a fresh install while you are not that commited to one specific distro.














  • rand() generates a number from 0 to a constant defined in stdlib, which usually corresponds to the architechture of your compiler. So, for 32 bit systems (assuming all the software in the line is 32 bit, too) it will be 2^31-1 = 2 147 483 647, as 1 bit in integers is reserved for negative numbers and 1 number is 0.

    Though, by design it is guaranteed to be at least 32767, which is a value for 16 bit integers.