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This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints

That’s because cops don’t need a warrant if you use a face or fingerprints, but they do if you use a PIN. What you’re talking about is for protection against casual, warrantless searches.

What I’m talking about is a subpoena where you’re required to present evidence. The fact that it’s encrypted is irrelevant. If the data is subject to a subpoena it doesn’t matter if you store it encrypted or unencrypted, you’re still required to present it to the court.

If you keep you stuff updated

Keeping stuff updated is a chore, and it can take hours out of your week, often when you don’t expect it or don’t have time. When that’s someone’s full time job and they’re updating it for hundreds, thousands or millions or people, there’s a better chance they do it right, and a much better chance that they do it in a timely fashion.

I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.

I hope you’re not anybody’s lawyer, with your lack of knowledge of the law. Did you graduate from Dunning-Kruger law school?

Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

Uh, those can all be shut down. You may control the server but you don’t control the datacenter the email server lives in, unless you’re hosting out of your house, which is a bad idea. You also don’t control the pipes to and from these servers. There have been many plans over the years requiring that ISPs ban users who are accused of copyright infringement. And, even if you don’t infringe copyrights, we all know about how the DMCA can be weaponized against people who have done nothing wrong.

File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

Sorry, your own file storage can be subpoenaed, you just don’t have a lawyer on call to help you through the process. If you think “haha, I’ll just delete the data”, you can be in much worse trouble. AFAIK in some cases the judge / jury are allowed to assume that evidence that you deleted was incriminating.

I self-host things and think it’s a good idea. But, don’t go overboard with how good it is. It’s still vulnerable to government and corporate actions. in many cases you’re more vulnerable because you’re on your own, you probably don’t have a lawyer on retainer, etc.

They’re not going to patch the game with an update that removes the TOS, privacy policy and code of conduct now that the multiplayer elements are no longer relevant.

It makes it easier for your lawyer to organize the briefing document she prepares for you when she’s suggesting whether or not you agree to the terms of the contracts.

What, not everybody has their lawyer look over contracts they’re about to agree to? What, so they just act as their own lawyer and carefully review these legal documents without the benefit of a law degree? That sounds risky!

OP says it’s a single-player game, but it looks like that’s not the case. If it is multiplayer, a code of conduct is 100% necessary. The rest seems pretty standard for something online: privacy policy, EULA and TOS.

I wish EULAs would go away, or at least be heavily restricted in what they can force you to agree with, but they’re standard.

TOS is useful to define what you can expect out of their online service.

I also wish there were privacy laws, so the Privacy Policy didn’t force you to agree to absurd terms, but here we are.

In theory a smart fridge could be useful.

If it automatically scanned everything you put inside, it could tell you what ingredients you had if you were planning a recipe. If you were at the store you could know what to buy. It could warn you before something reached its expiry date, or remind you what leftovers were still uneaten. Depending on how much you trusted it, it could learn what you always buy, and add them to your shopping list when you were running low, or even actually order them.

In theory this could reduce food spoilage and wastage, and could save you money in the long term. It requires trust though. Samsung is obviously mistreating users by showing them ads. But, it could be much worse. The fridge could order food that the user didn’t need, or if it ordered food Samsung could strike a deal with one company and always prefer their brands even when there were cheaper options. And, of course, Samsung could sell your buying habits to Google and Meta who would use it to more effectively target you with ads. Or, Samsung could cut a deal with insurance companies to tell them which users had unhealthy eating habits so the insurance company could deny coverage or hike rates.

The big issue here is section 1201 of the DMCA. If that didn’t exist, someone could open up a business installing a new, custom, privacy-centric OS on people’s fridges. But, with section 1201 in place, that’s illegal and you could be thrown in jail for performing that service. Even outside the US laws like that exist because the US insisted on them on condition that otherwise the US would force those countries to pay high tariffs. Of course, now the US is jacking up tariffs regardless. I have no idea why no country has yet repealed their equivalent of section 1201. Whichever country does it first will have a huge advantage.

I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

Thanks. In theory if I do change my mind and run Steam on my HTPC, it should work even if I don’t use Bazzite. But, for now, I’m going to aim for keyboard control and Kodi.

It seems better now than it was a few months ago. Back then it actually locked up my machine if I triggered the bug. Now it just temporarily slows things down.

But, I haven’t gambled on running a few apps that would regularly trigger it just in case. What’s funny is that modern Steam games are no problem, but it’s running emulated games using Emulation Station that causes problems. Games from 2024, no problem. Games from 1984? Hey, that’s pushing it.

On the HTPC you’re running Bazzite? Do you play games on that machine?

I’m planning on setting up a HTPC, but I won’t use it for gaming. I was thinking of setting it up to run Sway because I think I’ll mostly be using Kodi which has good keyboard support, so why not try to do everything in a keyboard-friendly way.

Yeah, you should be using flatpak wherever possible. I currently have only gnome-tweaks and zsh as layered packages. Everything else is a flatpak, brew or lives in a distrobox.

Same here also on a 1080, but with the closed-source drivers. There’s some issue they’ve had for at least the 6ish months I’ve been using it where with my dual screen setup sometimes hangs. Apparently it’s a known bug and they haven’t fixed it. It hits me about once every couple of weeks these days. Other than that it has run every game I’ve tried as well as Windows.

Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.

Yes, some form of “giving pledge” where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.

You expect those 250k lines to be comprehensible? In my experience they’ll be an utter clusterfuck.

Even worse is if they’re completely plausible, but there’s a very subtle logic bug in there that is super hard to spot because of just how plausible everything is.

Even if the original developers weren’t rock stars, the codebase was feature-complete in the 80s or earlier and they’ve spent the decades since then eliminating nearly every single bug.

The real issue is that it’s expensive to add new features compared to a modern codebase , and it’s very difficult to find COBOL programmers in 2025.

Eventually a bank is going to take the gamble and rewrite everything in a modern language, and designed with modern tech in mind. But, it’s going to be a huge gamble. And, I can guarantee you, they’re not going to be vibe-coding it.

“Doogie Howser here hasn’t even had a day of med school, but thanks to AI he’s writing 5000 drug prescriptions per day!”

“We literally found this homeless man on the street ranting about lizard people, and now thanks to AI he’s the the biggest stud at the hedge fund, making hundreds of multi-billion dollar trades every day!”

“Betty here failed out of high school and can’t even pronounce ‘nuclear’ properly, but thanks to AI she wrote the entire atomic power plant safety manual in a day.”

“Would you believe that Fred is still in a coma? Yeah, doctors say he’s ‘in a persistent vegetative state’ and ‘never going to recover after that i-beam crushed his head’, and ‘what you people are doing is both cruel and insane’. But, we hooked DeepSeek up to his respirator and heart monitor and connected some black and red wires together and he’s back to working as an air traffic controller!”