Parental controls usually only require a password to unlock or bypass, so if you’re worried you’ll just unlock it yourself you may want to ask a trusted friend/ family/ partner to set the password for you.

Not really, it’s a way to sell you 25 year old games for $50. They saw Nintendo’s Virtual Console and wanted in on that same grift.

How so?

Yes, they’re exactly that; plush doll random chance boxes. It’s funny because gachapons have actually been in the US and Europe for 50+ years, but no one ever really thought of them like this because the toys inside never had real value.

Remember these outside of supermarkets?

I mean gambling in general, not just loot boxes or TCGs. Gambling is not a bad thing. Gambling addiction is, but it’s bad because it’s addiction.

me to know which people to block

Frankly, I don’t mind. I don’t love being accused of posting in bad faith and berated just because you forgot what you originally posted. Cheers.

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Yep. There are too many people who don’t understand addiction, and think that gambling is the root cause problem, rather than one of many systems that preys on addiction disorders.

The reality of addiction is that it will always find something to fulfill it without treatment, and banning or regulating every trend of collectibles that pops up is not an actual solution. Banning or regulating specific structures that intentionally prey on addiction is important.

Too many people mistake their feeling-based objection to gambling that was inherited from the protestant moral objections, with actually being about solving predation on addiction.

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MVV app is super convenient, but I could still use the kiosks without too much added delay. MVVswipe is like 30 seconds to “check out” a ticket, MVV kiosk machine is like 90 seconds. The biggest inconvenience is having to find a kiosk outside of a train station.

Holy hell it’s been a while since I heard that name… I remember putting Cyanogen on my PSP back in the day.

*laughing as Atlassian dies*

“I guess I was the…”

*puts on sunglasses*

“jeer-a all along.”

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Somehow a multibillion dollar company can’t compete with an ancient quad core server shoved in a coat closet when it comes to page load times.

To be fair, it’s nearly impossible for remote sites to beat on-prem page load times, given the added per-component transit times over the internet.

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That’s not what this commenter was doing, though.

So what do you think there were doing, exactly?

Let’s break their comment down, and then you can point out the part that is “extremist”.

14,000 sounds like a big number, until you realise that there’s many millions of routers.

This is 100% accurate, especially in the age of Mirai-like IoT botnets. 14k is pretty small nowadays. Variants of Mirai (e.g. Midori and Aisuru) had 300,000+ devices.

Asus is not known for backbone routing

Correct, this is a pretty low-danger botnet due to being low-power consumer devices, even if it’s difficult to clean.

so while this might be happening, you have to ask yourself, is this the biggest threat across the internet,

Less fair, because it is still news, and Ars is a tech news site.

or is this article intended to serve another interest?

The part I assume you take issue with, but it’s also a completely fair question (and is in fact precisely “telling people to question the purpose and bias of news”). The article made the deliberate choice to name-drop BitTorrent and IPFS, despite them not being related other than them also using DHTs. I understand the writer may not have been intending to draw a “malware <-> bittorrent” association in the readers’ minds… or they may have. It’s sort of like saying, “the killer drove an Audi, much like Nico Hulkenberg”. That’s why you have to critically question news.

what’s the point of this? To me it seems like an argument over the semantics of a word which I honestly couldn’t care less about

The point is that you immediately jumped to calling them an “extremist” for what seems a pretty innocuous (if not particularly useful) comment. We generally assume good-faith around here, and calling people “extremist” for questioning an Ars article doesn’t seem like that to me.

But in the society we live in, that position is pretty extreme.

By what metric? And “Extreme” and “Extremist” are two different words, with different meanings and connotations.

Extreme simply means the far end of a spectrum. Extremist means

having or involving beliefs that most people think are unreasonable and unacceptable

(and that’s even avoiding the legal definitions that exist in e.g. the UK that specifically tie “extremist” to violence)

At no point did I ever say that it’s a bad thing to hold that position

Without offering any metric by which to assert that, you most certainly did convey the commonly understood negative connotation by calling it extremist.

So to be clear, asking whether an article has ulterior motives qualifies as an “extremist” question, in your eyes?

Because that seems a pretty extreme limitation on acceptable critical and contextual interrogation of news, to me. You should always be asking that question, in a world where 90% of news orgs are owned by people with heavy political connections and influence.

That’s a misreading of what it means. The botnet averages 14,000 routers + IoT devices a day, not new devices per day. Every day, devices cycle in and out of these botnets, so their count is always in flux.