This might be an unpopular opinion, but I feel Tears of the Kingdom is overrated. Yes, it has some welcome quality-of-life improvements, and yes, it has more content than its predecessor, but I find the characters less interesting, the environments less inspired, and the encounters more repetitive. Every time I pick it up again, I get bored within a couple hours and go back to another play-through of Breath of the Wild.

I would vote for Baldur’s Gate 3 over TotK without hesitation.

What do these professions have in common? Requirement for a government-issued license?

You might start with the documents posted to the EFF site over the past year. For example, the September opposition letters include specific court decisions and put them in context, including commentary from law professors.

https://www.eff.org/search/site/pera

Looks like things have changed:

Will my registration expire?

No, your registration will never expire. The FTC will only remove your number from the Registry if it’s disconnected and reassigned, or if you ask to remove it.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/national-do-not-call-registry-faqs

It’s re-posted from a news community, where it was since removed for not being from an acceptable news site. Unfortunately, the acceptable news sites covered this more than 30 days ago, which disqualifies their articles regardless of whether they were ever posted to the community. shrug

I couldn’t find a better article in the time I had to spare, so I re-posted this one. I think what’s important in this case is just that word gets out. I don’t see anything misleading about this one, and the EFF link (which is also not exactly a news site) is plainly visible.

Maybe one of these?

https://system76.com/desktops/

https://www.dell.com/en-us/search/linux

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/

Thorin has my respect for building his own machine.

I hope he saves the box for you.

Cloudflare is a provider that you can choose to have as a part of your own infrastructure.

Indeed.

man in the middle implies “attack”

That can be a convenient shorthand if the parties in a discussion agree to use it as such in context. For example, in a taxonomy of cryptographic attacks, it would make sense. It is not the general meaning, though, at least not a universally accepted one. Similarly, “counter” does not imply “counter attack”, unless we happen to be discussing attack strategy.

More to the point, nothing that I wrote misrepresents the situation as was claimed by that other person. If I had meant attack, I would have said attack. Rather, they made a leap of logic because I (like most of my colleagues) don’t happen to follow a convention that they like, and picked a fight over it. No thanks.

You’re conflating MitM,

Heh… It’s safe to assume I’m well versed in this topic.

You’re going to have to prove any of your claims, or else I am just going to assume you’re talking out of your ass.

I am not, however, inclined to indulge rudeness. Bye bye.

It bugs me when people say Cloudflare is a MitM, because that is a disingenuous representation the situation.

No, it is a clear description of what is happening: Instead of https keeping the traffic encrypted from user to service, it runs only from user to Cloudflare (and then in some cases from Cloudflare to service, although that’s irrelevant here). The result is that a third party (Cloudflare) is able to read and/or modify the traffic between the two endpoints. This is exactly what we in mean in cryptography discussions by man-in-the-middle.

You can decide that you don’t mind it because it’s not a secret, or because they haven’t been caught abusing it yet, but to say it’s not a man-in-the-middle is utter nonsense.

and you opt into it.

No, the service operator opts in to it, without consulting the user, and usually without informing them. The user has no choice in the matter, and typically no knowledge of it when they send and receive potentially sensitive information. They only way they find out that Cloudflare is involved is if Cloudflare happens to generate an error page, or if they are technically inclined enough to manually resolve the domain name of the service and look up the owner of the net block. The vast majority of users don’t even know how to do this, of course, and so are completely unaware.

All the while, the user’s browser shows “https” and a lock icon, assuring the user that their communication is protected.

And even if they were aware, most users would still have no idea what Cloudflare’s position as a middleman means with respect to their privacy, especially with how many widely used services operate with it.

To be clear, this lack of disclosure is not what makes it a man in the middle. It is an additional problem.

it cannot be a MitM because both sides of the connection are aware of this layer.

This is false. Being aware of a man in the middle and/or willingly accepting it does not mean it ceases to exist. It just means it’s not a man-in-the-middle attack.

My condolences. Unfortunately, people are sometimes designated the in-house expert on a thing just because they seem slightly less ignorant of it than anyone else in the organization. That leaves more than a few people making decisions that impact security and privacy without good understanding or sound judgment in those areas.

Maybe you should train up and become your state’s new security expert?

music group IFPI complained that while Cloudflare discloses the hosting locations of pirate sites in response to abuse reports, it doesn’t voluntarily share the identity of these pirate customers with rightsholders.

“Where IFPI needs to obtain the customer’s contact information, Cloudflare will only disclose these details following a subpoena or court order – i.e. these disclosures are mandated by law and are not an example of the service’s goodwill or a policy or measures intended to assist IP rights holders,” IFPI wrote.

So the corporations enjoying enormous profits from other people’s work are unhappy that Cloudflare doesn’t make it easy for them to circumvent due process. What a surprise.

(I’m generally not a fan of Cloudflare, because its man-in-the-middle position between users and services has grown to an unhealthy scale, making it ripe for dragnet surveillance and other abuses. But it would be even worse if it was actively helping these greedy, predatory corporations dodge the law.)

They’re not saying it was unavoidable random chance. That’s not what perilous means.

They’re saying the consequence of the choice is peril, and they seem to agree with you about the would-be dictator:

He showed us in his first term and in the years after he left office that he has no respect for the law, let alone the values, norms and traditions of democracy. As he takes charge of the world’s most powerful state, he is transparently motivated only by the pursuit of power and the preservation of the cult of personality he has built around himself.

This is one of the more important reasons to minimize dependencies and be very picky about the ones we adopt.

Yes.

Example from 2018 in North Carolina:
(Note that the article also mentions another example in that state from 1975.)

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/north-carolina-is-getting-a-do-over-election/

Example from 2023 in Connecticut:
(I don’t know if this one was considered a general election.)

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/election-redo-rare-connecticut-mayor-rcna129735

<3

Recounts do not include submitting new votes.

If you read my comment more carefully, you’ll find that I mentioned those two things separately, as example responses to a problem. I did not say or imply that one included the other.

You are gambling on the hope that the problem gets fixed later.

No. I am saying that election interference reports must go to the election authorities. Directing people to a political organization instead undermines the process, and is not sufficient. (Reporting to both is fine, though.)

And local election offices - often under partisan control - have no obligation to assist individuals in getting their ballot cast.

If that is a problem where you live, then I suggest also reporting to the federal authorities. There’s a whole list of contacts on the .gov page I provided.

And maybe making a special post aimed specifically at people in that situation. Not telling everyone, everywhere that a partisan political org is the place to report election interference, as was done in the problematic post.

(Again, reporting to the authorities and also reporting to a non-government org is fine; what’s bad is leading people away from reporting to the officials. The officials need to know when this stuff is happening. We need to get it on the record.)

The misinformation is directing people to report election interference using phone numbers belonging to a political organization, rather than the election authorities. A call to those numbers is not a call to the authorities. The post directs people away from the appropriate channels. It is therefore misleading.

[Edit: I acknowledge that it might have been well-intended. It is still misleading.]

the image clearly states who is behind it.

The presence of a domain name printed at the bottom of the list of phone numbers, which most people will not carefully consider (or in many cases even notice), doesn’t make it okay.

you came at it as “lies”

I said no such thing. Please don’t put words in my mouth.

Of course, if there is immediate danger, calling someone who can show up and help right away is always a good idea. (I wouldn’t think this needs stating, but yes, I agree on this point.)

None of the resources detailed in this post provide any form of immediate assistance to resolve an ongoing threat to your ability to cast your vote.

The local election offices are not substitutes for police departments, but I think they are likely to respond quickly. They have phone numbers.

If your ballot is never cast, it can’t be fixed later. The best the folks in the OP can do is punish the people who committed the crime. They can’t get your vote counted.

This is untrue. It is better to get your vote recorded the first time, of course, but fixing things later is also possible. If regional authorities are made aware of election interference, they can initiate a re-count, refuse to certify the results until a new vote is taken, etc. That’s part of their job.

I agree, but every avenue at our disposal are forms.

This is untrue. A phone number is prominently shown on the very first official link I tried: the Public Integrity Section of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. There are more phone numbers at the various state election offices.

You assuming that because they are a political org, they will play partisan politics,

No. I have assumed no such thing. I am pointing out that they are not the authorities, and since they are not, a report to them is not a report to the authorities. They might play partisan politics, or they might not. They might remember to pass your report on to the authorities at some point in the future, or they might forget. There’s no way to know, and it doesn’t matter.

Report directly to the authorities. It’s fine to also report to someone else, but they are no substitute. Definitely report to the authorities.