better noise cancellation on the mic (though I doubt anyone uses that)

Oh brother, do people ever use the controller mic. They especially love to do it when they play music from their phone speaker on their lap. And they never use headphones, so when you unmute yourself to say “Hey, can you turn your mic down a bit? I can’t hear the game,” you end up blowing out your own eardrums hearing yourself through their TV at full volume.

I loved Control so much, I’m glad to see that Remedy’s still expanding on that universe.

These scammers generally call from spoofed numbers. If you call them back, some very confused person is doing to answer and have no idea what you’re talking about.

Lol it’s like Nintendo just wants to back itself into a corner and waste away with its IP.

This is a Switch emulator, meaning these are games that are still available for sale. It’s not like taking down a SNES emulator or something Nintendo hasn’t made available for 30+ years, it’s involving games they’re selling today. Taking down an emulator is literally Nintendo protecting its IP.

I honestly have no desire to purchase anything from them anymore.

If you were using this emulator, you weren’t likely purchasing anything from them in the first place. And I’m no doctor, but… I’d have to imagine that’s likely the reason Nintendo took this down to begin with.

You’re trusting that a) they’re not malicious and b) they have their shit together and c) even though they do have their shit together someone doesn’t find a random exploit anyhow.

You could say this about literally any solution short of hand-delivering cash in person.

You do realize that if the bank authorizes a transfer, that you did not… it’s wire fraud and they’re obligated to refund that cash, regardless if they recoup the cash or not.

You do realize that not every transaction happens in countries where these protections exist, right? Not everybody can rely on something like the FDIC to protect their funds.

On the other hand, if you give your credentials to a 3rd party, that’s against the ToS none of us actually read, and if something happens to your account; they’re going to deem it as your fuck up.

You’re not providing your bank credentials directly to the third-party, either. They use OAuth-like systems to log you in, typically. I’m not familiar with Ozow, specifically, but from what I can tell about their company, they appear to be doing mostly the same things as Plaid.

It’s also risky to give. Banks will generally approve all transactions between two accounts if one of them is a business account, because the assumption is that those are business transactions and are legitimate 99.99% of the time, so there’s very little scrutiny involved for those transfers. Giving the merchant your routing/account number gives them access to make withdraws from your account at will and at any time and can’t be revoked, and giving that access to somebody you may not fully trust the reputation of is a dangerous move.

A trusted financial institution as a middleman can be useful for those situations, because they’ll tokenize your details to expose as little as possible to the merchant, directly. These services are typically insured, so even if something did happen to your account, you’re more likely to get your money back than if you gave a merchant direct ACH access to your bank account. It’s basically a modernized version of Western Union.

That’s unusual, but not unheard of. Some online merchants will allow you to make payments via ACH transfers. Can be useful for things like international purchases or if you don’t have a normal credit/debit card to use. Sometimes smaller merchants will prefer this, if they don’t have an existing business partnership with a payment processor already.

Usually these will go through a third-party system that tokenizes your login with your bank. This way the merchant can only access your routing/account numbers to do the transfer. As for why you’d need to provide your bank login instead of the routing/account numbers directly, it’s usually just a form of fraud prevention, as the login verifies that you’re actually the account owner and not trying to pay with a checkbook you found on the street.

It’s similar to Plaid, which is a near-identical service that some merchants in the US use. From what I can tell, Ozow appears to be legitimate, so realistically it’s probably safe to enter your login details as long as you’re not getting any certificate errors on the page.

E: Not sure why this is downvoted. I’m not saying it’s a good system, just saying that it’s not inherently a scam.

This article spent more time explaining the logistics on building pager-bombs than it did actually explaining why building pager-bombs is a bad idea.

Amazon will often just let you keep items, even if they refund it. It’s generally not worth the cost of shipping back, so they just eat the loss.

SO HERE I AM

Elon is a fucking terrorist. Deport his ass back to daddy’s emerald mines.

I long for a moneyless, classless game in this genre where the incentives are community thriving, trust, pleasure, and all the other aspects that make life worth worth living outside of capitalism.

I think Sim Ant technically meets these conditions.

It’s not a lie! It’s technically the first thing anybody was stupid enough to name “giga train”!

I very much doubt this is the result of AI, as much as somebody not checking the dictionary they imported into their game. Kinda like that Hello Kitty dictionary’s… concerning definition of “necklace”.

This has been a problem on Amazon for ages. Unless you can confirm the seller on the Amazon listing is authentic, you should never buy any storage devices on Amazon, ever.

I had a site-wide, week-long ban for saying that Nazis who got punched in the face deserved it. Fuck that place, lmao

The API-based deletion tools usually have to be tuned to delete posts slowly enough to not trigger Reddit’s abuse detection. Otherwise, they’ll automatically undo bulk changes like that.

There’s no way I can manually edit and delete all of my content with the snail’s-pace reddit UI

This is, unfortunately, the only way to guarantee that your posts stay deleted. My account was 15 years old. I still log in every few weeks or so to go manually delete more comments. It’ll be a while.

Gonna play Devil’s Advocate for a moment here.

I assume that this isn’t actually for nefarious purposes, and is actually just a low-effort way of curbing spambots on their platform. It’s likely that the bots are using emulated devices to post from the official app, and this permission might lock up a lot of those bots. Obviously this wouldn’t be the best way to combat spambots, but I’m gonna go with Hanlon’s Razor on this one.

I know the immediate first thought most people will have is that this is just so Meta can open up another avenue to spy on you. But let’s consider for a moment the logistics involved in that. Audio/video data is huge; capturing and parsing it it requires a non-insignificant amount of CPU/battery usage, and transmitting it will use a good bit of bandwidth, both of which would be noticeable by even novice users (since most modern devices these days will show an on-screen indicator whenever certain sensors are being activated, and will tell you what app is using it, so seeing Instagram trigger your mic/camera when you’re not using it would be immediately noticed by just about everybody). That would also make this one data stream exponentially more costly to gather and process for Meta than most of their other data streams combined.

Also consider the fact that Meta already has over a million data points on just about every single person on the planet, anyway; what could they stand to gain by monitoring your IRL presence that they haven’t already inferred from the other, less-invasive data they’ve gathered on you? Half of the recordings they’d get would be farts and “oh my god, stop barking, nobody’s even at the door”, and Meta probably already knows that you have a dog and lactose intolerance.

It’s more expensive to produce, it’s more likely to be detected, and there’s less of a guarantee that you even get any usable data from it at all since they already know just about everything about you already. I really don’t see spying as the end goal for this particular action, only because it doesn’t seem like a profitable venture.

None of this is to suggest that Meta isn’t spying on you. They are. They 100% are spying on each and every one of you. I just don’t think the mic/camera are how they’re doing it.

It’s 2024 and you need a subscription to make water hot.

Just end me.