https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/genetics-firm-23andme-says-user-data-stolen-in-credential-stuffing-attack/

The information that has been exposed from this incident includes full names, usernames, profile photos, sex, date of birth, genetic ancestry results, and geographical location.

The threat actor accessed a small number of 23andMe accounts and then scraped the data of their DNA Relative matches, which shows how opting into a feature can have unexpected privacy consequences.

• Usernames Profile Photos DoB

They can be linked to other online accounts. This allows for phishing, potentially scamming or getting additonal information on them which can lead to more sophisticated/personalised scams. Older, less tech savvy users are better targets for scammers.

• Username Sex DoB Genetic Ancestry Location data

Data aggregators can sell this info to Health Insurance Companies or any other system who can then discriminate based on genes sex age or location

• All of this information

Can contribute to people committing fraud with their information if they collect enough information from different sources.

• DNA relatives

Having enough information about a user to use it to target their now known relatives in personalised scams.

The people that did this probably didn’t know what information they were going to get, maybe they were hoping for payment info, and settled for trying to just sell what they got.

Any information, no matter how useless it might seem, is better than no information and enough useless information in the wrong hands can be very valuable.

Theres countless data breaches every year and people will collect it all and link different accounts from different breaches until they have enough information. Most people use the same email address for every website and a lot of people reuse the same passwords, which is how this data leak occurred. Knowing that these users reuse the same email/password combination here means theres a very good chance they’ve reused it elsewhere.

You can check out what data breeches have occured and if your email or password has been posted in any of these dumps here https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Once the information is out there, its out there for good and what might seem trivial now to you could be valuable tomorrow to someone else

Finally a good take. Or maybe I’m just a pessimist lol

Microsoft are masters at dancing around anti competitive regulation. Xbox is struggling, they’ve said so themselves. I think they’re going to focus more on Gamepass and the Windows Store so making it as difficult as possible for the likes of the Steamdeck to succeeded is in their best interest. If they can push companies to adopt their new framework and at the same time make that framework almost impossible to implement into wine then its a win win. They can hurt wine while painting it as better security so they’re isn’t another CrowdStrike incident.

Anticompetitive practices disguised as user security.

I know linux isn’t very popular for the general public but Apple has their own implementation of wine in development and Google has flooded schools with Chromebooks. If I was Michaelsoft, I’d want to crush the competition quickly and discreetly now before I implement my Windows subscription so people don’t have any good alternatives left

Yeah, sometimes there just isn’t another option. I have a 60GiB Win11 VM for things I use every few months for a couple of minutes at a time

I’d recommend https://www.qemu.org/ for virtualisation

https://virt-manager.org/ for a gui to manage VMs, you can easily add or remove cores, memory, internet, directories etc really easily.

https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp lets you add a directory from your host to the VM to easily share files

https://github.com/virtio-win/virtio-win-guest-tools-installer makes the cursor seamlessly move between the VM and host instead of pressing ctrl alt g to escape.

Win11 23H2 still allows for offline set up. Just press shift f10 when you’re at the internet set up and type

oobe/bypassnro

The VM will reboot and give you the option to select I don’t have internet so you can just use a local account

https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat/ for getting rid of the unwanted bloatware

Theres also an easy way to activate windows for free, I don’t think I can link it here but its on github and MAS-sive amount of people have starred it.

I started The Witcher 3 for the second time. I tried it a year ago and I kept getting absolutely wrecked by the ghost thing in thr very first crypt so I gave up but this time I killed it straight away so who knows what I was doing wrong last time! Also, probably a bit controversial but I refuse to learn how to play Gwent, I don’t have the time or patients to learn a card game inside an already massive game

I also started and finished American Arcadia this weekend and I absolutely loved it. I’m trying to play shorter games that I wouldn’t usually play in between The Witcher 3 since its long. AA is probably one of the best games I’ve played. The story is fantastic and the gameplay is pretty basic, which suits me. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and has some fun twists at the end.

I’ve also been playing Supraland, its a pretty fun, chill game. The areas aren’t very difficult and the upgrade system is fun. I love the funny dialogues from the NPCs and again its a fun game that doesn’t take itself seriously and I find myself smiling while playing it

Over and over and over and over the gaming community has been screwed over by Publishers so I’ll stop grave dancing when Corpos stop being so horrible

• Requiring a third party account to play a game months after it was released and after selling it to customers who can’t legitimately make an account because you don’t feel like their country can make you enough profit. Helldivers 2

• Attempting to take away peoples digital “purchases” of media because you can’t be bothered to pay licencing. Sony

• Changing the definition of “purchase” an established word in English and not defining your new definition until page 22 of a EULA that you know nobody is going to read. Sony, and everyone else

• Shutting down a server and rendering a game with a whole single player aspect completely useless and not telling consumers this at the time of purchase. The Crew (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)

• Selling a terribly incomplete game filled with glitches for the price of a full game. Cyberpunk 2077 and so many others.

• Selling Pre-Purchases to let people play the game early but really its just another way to get people to pay to be Guinea pigs in your buggy game. That new Star Wars game and so many others.

• Adding so many stupid “micro transactions” to games to milk players as much as possible for useless skins and camos etc. Diablo 4 and so many more.

• Adding a “Season Pass”??? I don’t even understand what this is??? Buy a full priced game and then buy a subscription to that game??? But still not have access to all of the content and then be shown a magic glove that costs €500, why is this not part of the subscription or is it??? I hope it is. New COD and probably others

• “Making” a game and selling it to people but really its just a scam where they got “volunteers” to work on the game for free. Then shutting the game down instantly. That zombie game with Will Smith.

• Something, something Overwatch 2 is a totally brand new game.

• Shutting down third party mods for an unsupported and dangerous game just after the sale for that game is over. Fine, they didn’t own all of the assets used but they did fix the issue where people could infect your system with malware. COD

• Increasing the prices of all of your subscriptions and making those subscriptions worse by offering less while your parent company is posting ~$20 Billion profits in the most recent quarter, yes quarter, thats like 3 months…

Btw all of these examples have happened within the last 4 years. Its pretty sad that I can list these off the top of my head. I only play single player games and I only got back into gaming a couple of years ago after ~10 years of not really playing anything

Even if your coutry reaches 100% and you haven’t signed, please still do incase some signatures are invalid

TIP – It is better to collect more signatures than required. Sometimes the national authorities might not be able to validate all the statements of support you provide.

https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/how-it-works_en

I’ve run into issues where a game will work with a specific version of wine but then not work with a newer version but then other games that don’t work with the older version, work with the new one.

Theres also potentially issues of dependencies for one game breaking another game. Separate prefixes just make it easier to troubleshoot a game not working since you can just install/uninstall whatever dependencies that it might need without worrying about messing up other games.

Its also just easier to delete the entire prefix when you realise you’ve installed too many useless dlls and you’ve finally found the one thing you do need to make the game work lol

I also like to archive games I like since companies can just decide to remove their games from existence whenever they want. So I just add the separate prefix that has any extra dlls or tweaks to the archive so that the game should still work in 3 years without having to try and download dependencies that may not be as easy to find in the future

But if you don’t have issues I don’t think its a big deal and if you do have issues with a game, you can just make a separate one for that anyway.

Guide is maybe not the right word lol, it just exactly what I click to set up the majority of my games

I’m not 100% sure, but from my understanding yes the regisrty in the “prefix” folder would be changed. You can manually edit the wine prefix registry with regedit https://www.winehq.org/docs/wineusr-guid<br />e/using-regedit and Lutris supports this, just click the arrow that brings up the winetricks option and its under Wine Registry

I use Lutris and set up my directories a “GameName” and then 2 subdirectories “game” “prefix” and point Lutris to these.

All of the game files go in “game” and the prefix is created in “prefix” when I press play in Lutris. Any extras dlls that are needed can be installed with winetricks within Lutris to that specific prefix

This way you can just compress and decompress “GameName” folder and point Lutris to these locations on whichever machine.

You can choose which prefix version you want in Lutris and it will download that version for you. I’m pretty sure it saves the version to somewhere in ~.local/share/lutris I’m not at my PC now so not 100% sure of the path.

It saves it to ~.local/share/lutris/runners/wine and you can put a custom wine build here and Lutris should recognise it when configuring the runner options

So you could copy this over to the corresponding location on the deck and Lutris will automatically detect this version as installed and won’t have to download it again but its not necessary unless you don’t have internet on the deck, or you’re like me and want to keep an archive of the working prefix for the future in case the prefix version is no longer available for whatever reason and other version just won’t work.

If you’re new to Lutris, I wrote a step by step guide on how I use Lutris on a different community

https://sopuli.xyz/comment/9858101

I see the Extend part of Embrace Extend Extinguish is about to start…

I’ve never used miui devices but I think you need to make an account and use this https://en.miui.com/unlock/download_en.html so you will probably need to have wine installed to run it, unless it has a native linux version in the zip file. Then you should have an unlocked bootloader

Oh nice, I haven’t heard of Vanguard! I love how creative some fan games are, especially compared to the main games that have gotten a bit stale. I’m definitely adding it to my list now, thanks!

I’m the type of player that needs the bright yellow markings, that people seem to hate, to be able to get around! So I constantly have to read the signs in Control and even then I still second guess myself.

I did the part where you have to answer the phone at the end of the hallway thingy. The amount of times I just walked off the edge because I didn’t understand I had to pull the chord is embarrassing. And then trying to get back from the motel thing I genuinely thought my game was bugged, I was so comfused lol

Ah damn, I know how you feel! Alan Wake remaster kept going black screen every few seconds for me and the only way to fix it was to pause it for a few seconds every time so I had to give up.

Maybe updated drivers or something could have fixed the bugs since then, I definitely recommend checking it out again for a fun linear single player game that doesn’t take weeks to finish

Yes! I feel like there really aren’t enough games like it! Just a fun little linear shooter with some cool time travel/ superpower elements.

I heard there were references to each other, that’s why I wanted to start with Alan Wake before playing Quantum Break but tbh I’m so bad with names and stuff I probably wouldn’t even notice them anyway lol

I didn’t know Remedy didn’t own the rights to it, that’s unfortunate because its such a good concept but at least we got Control after it, hopefully they continue with more games like them

I finished Quantum Break, I loved it! I’ve never really played a game with superpowers, especially like these. I also love games that give unlimited ammo in the starting pistol since I have the worst aim ever, I constantly find myself having no choice but to melee enemies in other games. And the slow motion after doing the dash was so nice!

The final fight was so bad, I could not understand why I was dying even when I was doing exactly what someone on YouTube was doing but other than that it was so fun! And I actually liked the story, usually I’m not a big story person, I just like running around causing chaos, it also probably helped that I finished the game in 3 days, so I didn’t forget what was happening.

I had to give up on Alan Wake Remaster, the visual bugs were just too much so I moved onto Control. I was expecting a more linear style, similar to Quantum Break so I ended up running around in circles being so confused, especially the elevator at the start, I spent way too long looking for that lol but having the force like a Jedi is super fun

I also started GoW Chains of Olympus and I kinda regret playing the series in chronological order instead of release order because going from Ascension to this is not so great, since it was Originally designed for the PSP but hopefully the original series will look better when I get there

Quantum Break got me to put down BG3 for now since I’m looking for shorter games that I don’t accidentally spend 10 hours on a Saturday playing

Its also convinced me to get back into RE4 remaster. I started it in November and got to the part where I’m in the little boat on the lake but I got a bit bored of it. I think my expectations were too high, I loved 0,1,2 and 3 especially 2 and 3. And since everyone always says 4 is the best, I just expected more. I still want to finish it and continue the series because they are fun games tbf

Ha, we’ve been doing the same thing for the past few months! I just made a generic Immich account that we all log into and upload to that. I auto backup the library to other places as we go, just in case. Once we’re done, we’ll all get copies of the directory to do with as we please.

I have Immich set up to keep the name of the files instead of giving them a random name. As we scan we name the files with the peoples names and generic tags like Tom.Mary.Birthday.1992 and putting Mary before birthday indicates that it was Mary’s birthday. So that if I decide to try and add meta data to the files it will be easier.

I haven’t figured out a plan for adding meta info to the files so they at least have the year/month they were taken and I don’t know if I even want to since we’re 1000’s of photos in now

Don’t forget about this

I caved into my urges and started playing Baldurs Gate 3 again, this time as a dark urge

I finished it for the first time a few weeks ago and have wanted to do nothing but play it again but I never replay games like ever. I held out for as long as I could but no other game was calling to me like BG3

I never understood how people could keep replaying games, I always thought the new game+ concept was pointless but now I get it, now I understand why people have put thousands of hours into Skyrim

I nearly never even bothered to try BG3 because I’ve never played anything with turn based mechanics and I know nothing about D&D but now its all I want to play, I’m worried I’ll never want to play anything else again lol

Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for but I found this a few weeks ago https://github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx and I haven’t really seen anyone talk about it

I’ve been using the tts on android for navigation and its way better than rhvoice and espeak.

I did try stt on android and it worked great but I’ve never used stt before so I don’t know how good it is compared to other stt