- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
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Let’s protect the children by scanning everyone’s face and ID and uploading them to a server that’ll get hacked five years from now.
Five years? My, aren’t we optimistic.
Within 5 years, I’d say.
That sounds more like the Discord I know.
And said data will never be used for fake CSAM or a library for the powerful to handpick their next victims
Don’t worry, it will only require us adults to give ID’s.
They will only make porn of us, everything is fine then!
I hear you, but what about: it actually will be used for those things?
“Hacked” I’m convinced most of them are selling it, then claiming being hacked so they have plausible deniability when the alias/e-mail you ONLY used for discord starts getting spam+. Depending on if you linked your number, etc…
There’s a disturbing amount of people thinking of the children
Disclaimer: I don’t like Discord and stopped using it years ago. And this announcement is just another step on the road to enshittification. It’s a shit corporation going public and becoming more shit in the process. Simply don’t use their shit.
However, it seems a bit rage-baity to claim that Discord will require age verification for all users. That simply doesn’t seem to be true. Age verification will be required for users who don’t feel the basic features are enough. Were I still dumb enough to use Discord, I don’t think I’d feel the need to go for the age verified account.
I’m actually pretty happy that Discord is killing itself. Far too many people use it as an official platform for stuff like help forums.
Maybe lets go back to basic message boards that are actually searchable, etc.
Self-hosted options like Mumble also exist.
Self-hosted is a pain to get started with but as everything enshittifies if will only get more important.
As someone who doesn’t use the voice chat feature of Discord, I am always confused when people suggest things like Mumble as an alternative.
Self hosting also just isn’t possible for a fair number of people
I am of the opinion that any project that uses Discord for support, I just immediately ignore.
So mad at retro tink for this…
I’m still salty about The Cutting Room Floor requiring you to log into their Discord to create an account for their website.
Well there is that one nsfw forum that is VERY active. Said forum also provides a list of file hosters that have escaped enshittification.
Those guys pirate the shit out of Japanese games but official nsfw game developers sometimes go there to advertise.
For ID scans, Discord says that documents “are deleted quickly.”
Just a few months ago they had a data leak which proved that they were indeed /not/ deleting documents and ID’s like they had been claiming.
Granted in that case it was mostly countries that force keeping that data but, I’m sick of companies lying and saying “lol yea we defo delete the data after”
I won’t even give hard drives when recycling a computer, I pull and smash myself. Last set of old drives I cut in half with bolt cutters.
That’s overkill, a couple of passes with dd and it’s irrecoverable.
A couple of passed with dd takes way longer than bolt cutters and it’s much less satisfying
I think they meant you could wipe with dd and then they are
recyclablereusable.EDIT: s/recycleable/reusable
They’re recyclable snipped.
More like they become reusable. A lot of places that refurbish donated computers for people who need them are perpetually short on drives since so much of the hardware they get have the drives pulled.
SSDs are cheap enough, no sense in using a 10 year old mechanical drive to save $30.
Yeah lmao. Wipe one drive at a time with a USB connector. No thanks. I don’t have bulk drive operation equipment and then it ties up a computer doing the work.
Wait, you don’t just hang like 6 of them out of your desktop by their cables and wipe them while you sleep?
saw a setup like that at work, until it was determined to be a fire hazard. which it was.
had to short the start pins of the MoBa with a paperclip to start the damn thing.
we called it “the scorpion”, cause it would shock you if you touched it wrong, and it kinda looked like a scorpion with the cables hanging out all over the floor…
#tales-from-IT
Mine, sure. I replaced 15 desktops that day, no fucking way.
Snip
I think bolt cutters are faster though
And significantly more power efficient
But more wasteful
What’s dd?
A tool, primarily within Linux, that can overwrite disks. I’ve never seen it recommended for data deletion, but I guess it makes sense.
It stands for “disk to disk” and is usually used for things like writing ISOs.
However,
shredis the usual approach.I thought it stood for DiskDump
A wise coworker of mine once told me that, when it comes to what Unix commands stand for, you kind of make it up as you go.
Darn
They’re 500gb mechanical hard drives with financial data on them. Snip and done. No time wasted, not reusing them.
This is not truly foolproof. Data can still be recovered from the spinning metal platter since it can theoretically be removed and put into a recovery device, even in a broken state.
Im addition to that, hard drives/ssd’s sometimes have small flash memory chips, from which data can sometimes be recovered.
If you want it to actually be unrecoverable then you have to actually ensure all parts thay store data are truly deleted/wiped, which is more than just the core platter. Or just use encryption and throw away the key, since all data going through the tiny OS on these devices will be encrypted. Or just store them forever in a vault.
Bud, if you put that platter back together after I snipped it, you deserve every bit of data you get off it, 1000%
It’s not that hard though. There are companies that offer data recovery as a service. If the value of the data on those drives exceeds the cost of those services then it becomes worth it to fish one of the drives out of the dumpster and take it there.
This is a very specialized job, your avg joe is not going to do it. Also, in the many years I’ve been in IT, I’ve never even seen a video of a platter reconstructed and get data off it.
Microwave it idk
I think I’ve never disposed of one for this reason haha
We delete your data after we hand it off to our partners. Who definitely do not delete it.
My friend is an exec there. After reading this thread bugged him to buy my software that would protect this vulnerability. They confirmed data/file never leaves the user’s device. Sounds pretty safe.
You do know that it’s bullshit? Unless they’re incredibly incompetent they’re lying to you. If the data never leaves the client then all the checks are client-side, which means it’s relatively easy (compared to a server side check) to bypass those checks.
For a while (maybe even still, I haven’t kept up with it) you could unlock paid features with a modded client, so they absolutely have a history of using client-side verification.
Afaik the files exfiltrated were photos that the on device detection could not identify and were uploaded to verify server side. That would mean not all pictures are sent to the backend, and that corroborates why “only” 70k photos were stolen when discord has millions of users verified.
Of course you have to put your trust in a closed source system so best not to upload, but if true it’s still a far cry from openly lying about it. It’s probably explicitly stated in their ToS that they may upload the file if the verification fails client side.
Source: Trust me bro.
Yeah, I’ve known him and worked with him over 10 years and he knows I’m a user. I trust him. You don’t need to trust me.
If the pushback on social media doesn’t get Discord to drop these plans, then I’ll just have to delete the app.
Not caving to another app asking for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) only for this same data to be leaked months to years later.
Society will do everything to protect children aside from making better parents.
The parenting aspect is a red herring. Nothing about these policies is really to ‘protect the children’. The big tech groups have figured out that they can gate-keep … everything… and require your pii/data to get to it; and that many/most people will give up that data to keep access to their content.
That said, teaching your children about the importance of privacy is becoming as important as teaching them about other harmful online content. “Don’t trust a Nigerian prince, let me know if you’re being bullied, don’t watch porn* and don’t scan your face to get on discord”
* until you’re 18-ish, at which point go nuts, just know it’s all fake.
I am also leaving discord, I hated it and the people who use it a lot, but used it to connect to family members. I will find other ways.
This is the same exact cycle I went through with social media, which I also left entirely. I stopped browsing a lot of sites I used to, I took most of my personal info off the internet, and ended a lot of subscriptions.
The internet lately is feeling more and more like making end-of-life plans.
Because parenting is hard and they don’t need the working masses distracted by kids, they need them slaving away forever.
The obvious solution is architecting society such that parents have more time to parent while making enough to pay the bills, rather than exporting parenting because they can’t afford to miss work due to parenting.
You start having enough of these conversations, and it all eventually points back to capitalism and taxing the rich.
But… But… They pinky promise it’s all secure, and that they won’t hold any of your data! You can’t trust a pinky promise? You monster!
Well, looks like I’m leaving discord.
Maybe this bullshit will be the spark needed to move us all off Discord. It’s fine for voice-chat in games, don’t get me wrong, but I HATE how its replaced forums/wikis for so many games/mods/etc. Searching disparate Discord servers is like looking for a nonferrous straw-colored needle in a haystack.
Worse, it also makes it seem like developer support that is provided through Discord needs to be always on/always available since you can be pinged on Discord 24 hours a day. Why would you do that yourself, I don’t know. At least with forums you can choose to respond on your own time frame and people have less recourse to act like you should be around and available. It’s just asking for higher demand from the userbase since you’re chatting with them in real-time, they begin to expect real-time fast responses.
People are already looking to migrate to checks notes apps exactly like discord.
I mean, I share the complaint of Discord having tons of unindexable knowledge locked away in it, but forums are not good replacement for my friend group. So yeah we kinda want a Discord alternative specifically.
Wire exists.
Obviously the problem isn’t you and your friends, the problems is services that use discord like it’s a forum, dispatcharr for example “oh do you want support? Join our discord”. Fine, I’ll figure it out myself.
My group of friends, like yours, we have a discord server with 9 channels, more than half aren’t used, and one of the channels is to share links.
Matrix is great for this. Fluffy chat is a client that even uses jitsi for video chats
For others who are interested:
Does it work on Linux?
I found it on linux
What’s wrong with good old fashioned data base backed message forums? There are so many implementations available, I’m sure many are FOSS, and I’m sure there’s managed solutions as well. It’s a mature, tested, rock solid reliable technology that has existed pretty much since the inception of the internet, and can be easily incorporated into other tools and workflows - because there is 40+ years of development work with the concept.
Seriously, why?
Forums are great for being forums. Real-time instant messaging, voice chat, video chat, and screen sharing are all a very different use-case. They’re two entirely separate products, and comparing them is apples and oranges. People are looking to replace Discord with Discord-like services, because forums don’t fucking do what Discord does.
The big problem (and the reason everyone seems to compare the two) is that Discord started eating forums, as companies realized it was easier to create a Discord server instead of creating (and hosting, and maintaining) a support forum. And that’s a perfectly valid complaint. But that doesn’t mean forums are a valid replacement for Discord.
He is talking about forums because the main issue with discord is that it’s cut from the rest of the internet so nothing is indexed and a lot of platforms and services use discord like a forum (it isn’t).
No one wants our conversations indexed, and discord shouldn’t be a forum.
Exactly my point - And public help forums should be indexed, and should not be on Discord.
It is not comparing apples to oranges, there are many companies that use Discord as a direct replacement for help forums or product wikis.
Read the rest of my comment.
I’ve already read your whole comment. It’s not comparing apples to oranges.
Agreed. As if every company just having a subreddit wasn’t bad enough.
I have just been using signal. Works fine.
Sure.
But what are you replacing it with ?
I tried Mumble and Teamspeak in the past and it’s pretty far from the same level of comfort.
Don’t take that the wrong way though, I’m all for supporting open alternatives, I’m just saying you have to think about the features of the alternatives too.
I just saw something about Stoat.chat which seems like a good open source software for that application but a lot of people will have to bear the cost of self hosting these servers.
I know I will think carefully before slamming the door on discord.
Stoat looks promising, open source
They won’t even send a verification email to my gmail account so I can sign up.
Same :)
They were suffering with email issues due to the “hug of death” effect, try again now maybe it’ll work
Were you trying Teamspeak 6? The UI is different, but the functionality is on par I believe. Not open source, but at least you can self-host.
You can selfhost TS6 now? O:
Have they finally released screen sharing in ts6? I gotta say that the development of that project is pretty comical. Radio silence with the only communication being the community manager shitting on discord every other day while giving no updates on their own product.
Weird vibes.
No. Recently I played a bit using a friends mumble server. And it’s a friend that is already privacy conscious. But these friends are not the norm. They are the exception.
Interesting to see Teamspeak evolved but still you have to pay to host a server so that’s a huge difference.
I did start a projects aiming to be a more decentralized/federated discord more akin to how IRC was back in the day. Time to revisit it, it seems.
A federation based discord would be amazing !
But still that’s a big challenge as voice chat will be costly to host.
Also out of curiosity do you aim for something that would connect through the fediverse ?
Voice chat isn’t inherently costly to host, usually the server acts as a broker and then people connect P2P. Do you remember jitsi? It was used as an alternative to zoom during covid, it was a webpage like Google meet where you opened a room, and people joined with the link. Actually under the good the first one that joined the room acted as a host so all voice communications never reached jitsi’s servers.
Jitsi still exists btw, although I understand that a more integrated solution like matrix is preferable. Matrix IS the federated discord-like solution, although last time I read about it it had some issues with scalability and the typical foss Dev drama.
Yeah its kinda terrible
Correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t they got a massive leak for gov IDs last year? And they still pushing this bs?! Hello?
You are not wrong.
One of many massive security leaks!
This surely is different, right? I’m sure they learned from last time
I’m sure they’re very sowwy and have learned their lesson and your face and ID and personal, private browsing habits will be perfectly secure, and even the AI bot that will “monitor your habits to decide your implicit age” will be very quiet with all your sensitive personal details and not give it to anyone even if they ask very nicely for it.
Unless they offer discord $2
If they force me to verify, I’m done
Like I said, they don’t actually need to. You’re going to have your own silent buddy watching everything you do!
Hello!
Hey! Are you okay?
My discord account is about 10 years old. Do they assume I created it as a 6 year old? Account age alone should be enough to verify I’m an adult with reasonable certainty.
They will have some kind of nebulously described “thing” that will monitor your browsing and chatting habits on discord and use that to decide your “implicit age” and I wish any of that was a joke or rumor.
They won’t just ask for your face and ID, they are also admitting that AI or something is going to be literally watching you at all times to “determine your age.”
Tell me again how we’re protecting kids? Where them Epstein prosecutions at? We save any kids yet? How about now?
Legally, they can’t be sure you didn’t sell the account, even if the email address is the same.
Not defending the policy here, it’s bullshit. But I’m simply pointing out that they have excuses to beat any logic you throw at them. Logic has nothing to do with it, so it can’t be beaten by logic either.
Selling accounts is against the TOS, surely they can’t be liable if that’s the case.
Well no, what if you have a Benjamin Button situation going on and will be too young to use Discord in a year or two?They gotta cover all their bases.
Naw, they assume they can tie all your conversations to some nexus realid and sell all your groups, likes, and dislikes for cash.
I hope there is a mass exodus from discord!
Where should we go? So many game dev communities are only on discord :(
IRC & Matrix
Maybe things changed but last I checked Matrix kinda sucked. I’m not sure how it’s any more secure than Discord but it has worse quality for voice and video calls, so it just seems like Discord but worse, although no microtransactions is nice, although although there aren’t any account decoration in the slightest either so
Other people have been recommending other apps and websites like Stoat and Team Speak though I am sure that a new app will use this opportunity to go viral.
I mean, let me know when it does. I’ll hang out with the Teenager Lock enabled and keep my biometrics to myself.
But there’s no point changing social media ecosystems if nobody I know is in the new site.
What is teenager lock? How can I safely engage with this stuff idek
Discord has some information about it in their press release about this:
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-default-settings-globally
What is teenager lock?
Discord locks your account to the security level considered appropriate for a teenager.
They’ll offboard too, if they know what’s good for them.
already making plans with my battle group t move to team speak 6, which is only an option because they now have screen sharing
Have you considered self hosting Matrix?
yea, but with the video streaming team speak seems better equipped for gameing, at the cost of the federated capability of martix, but i am not sure what these benefits would be
Skill issue, kid.
what? if you have something to add please do. i do not see the benefit of federation in my voip
Good that there are alternatives but I bet that won’t last for long. More and more apps will copy this.
Or just get bought out. Discord was supposed to be the answer to Twitch getting gobbled up. Then Microsoft gobbled Discord.
Does anyone seriously believe there’s an indie third party social media site immune to a multi-million (possibly even billion) dollar buyout offer? One that won’t go the way of TikTok and be legislatively forced into sale?
i mean… i will pay the license for it, AND i have to self host it, so they have a monetary scheme that will delay the need for enshitification. but it’s 5$ or something, and reportedly has better audio quality, faster transfer rates, and lower overhead then discord. and because i am hosting it, i will have complete control over it and its white list
Does anyone seriously believe there’s an indie third party social media site immune to a multi-million (possibly even billion) dollar buyout offer? One that won’t go the way of TikTok and be legislatively forced into sale?
federated platforms
Federation is easy. BlueSky is federated, ffs. You think Jack Dorsey would be shy about selling his Twitter knock-off a second time?
Bluesky is poorly federated
Lemmy is excellently federated:
- Its users are split across many instances with no majority
- Lemmy, PieFed, and other instance software exists, preventing anyone from seizing control of the network software
Yeah, no. Companies don’t get to scan my face or ID. You know they are selling your data.
Yep, straight to Palantir.
In 10 years, when MAGA has everything locked down, and you complain about something online, they’ll put out a BOLO, and instantly, the entire network will start checking every camera for your face, and within a few minutes they will have a timeline on your movements for as far back as they want, including every time you enter or leave your house. If you aren’t in your house, they’ll find you out there somewhere, and immediately dispatch ICE Apes to find you, detain you, and send you to the nearest work camp, where you will be leased out as a slave to some corporation.
That’s Black Mirror Season X
I would barely be okay with a bank or government website asking for this information, I sure as shit would not give it to a fucking chat app.
Whatever you do - don’t use telegram.
Would you be willing to elaborate more on this topic?
Tied to your phone number. Cannot use without phone number - result is automatic 0 privacy.
Another issue - there is absolutely 0 recourse if they ban you, there is no support you can email, there Is absolutely nothing. So if you have a family group there and telegram banned you - you are out of options entirely other than switching phone number and device.
Don’t touch that garbage platform with a 60ft pole.It’s a Russian copy of facebook. Non-Russians hate it for that reason alone.
I though VK was Russian Facebook.
That’s another Russian facebook, yes.
Telegram I feel is a mix between Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t really push far enough in either direction to be a copy paste clone.
Or Signal
/s obvs
How come?
I was being sarcastic.
I use signal. It’s not bad
I’m not sure anyone could read that as sarcasm. You gotta add a /s
Discord was always an overhyped crap.
Not really. At the beginning it was amazing. It took 0 resources to run while gaming and the call quality was miles ahead, nevermind the flexibility around servers and what you could do with them.
Then, as all things, it turned to shit once ot gained market share.
This is one of the real root causes of enshittification, particularly around privacy.
Once a product is profitable, the profit needs to be protected. That’s not really a slight against it, just a reality of capitalism. Those developers expect their jobs to persist. Middle management probably wants to keep those developers on staff. C-suite needs number-go-up to keep their jobs (fuck them, but if number-go-down then other people lose their jobs too). Adhering to regulations limits the risk of the government suing the company to oblivion.
Discord has been big enough for a while that it needs to be aware of the legal and political landscape in order to survive. This is just them limiting their risk. It will cost them customers – sort of: I’m gone, and have been since September when they updated their TOS, but I’ve also never given them any money and I’ve never seen an ad other than theirs. I’ve been nothing but a cost, so maybe good riddance?
Discord is not the enemy here. The enemy is congress/parliament and the power grabs they keep enacting. Big Tech has captured our governments and wants our data. The ‘for the children’ angle is such a trope that everyone who isn’t a potato can see through it, and we need to tell our leaders that this isn’t acceptable.
I agree with everything you said, but Discord is also an asshole itself. It could not sell out, but it did. There are plenty of projects who kept their integrity against selling out even though they could’ve generated millions
One of the most predictable outcomes of anyone or anything downfall is all the idiots coming out of the woodwork to loudly proclaim that they never liked it to begin with and actually saw this coming the whole time because they are so very super smart
I mean yea… But whatever man, people can say whatever. It’s not like they’re attacking each other.
It was an embedded browser embedded website crap since i know it (since 6 years), like m$ crap
Well yes, it was, but it worked, and it was still better than everything else. I’ve been on discord for 9 years.
Embedded browsers aren’t necessarily bad design. They’re super fast to develop, and if done well, can work super efficiently. A browser can have a billion tabs open and work just fine. The same can go with an electron app given that the devs give 2 shits about optimization.
Though if the Discord team doesn’t care about optimizing the electron app, they wouldn’t give a shit about optimizing a desktop app either.
it was useful when it was new and there were no alternatives as easy to use.
Now it feels like commercialized app slop that wishes it was actual social media.
I had to run a server for work. It was right after they put in boosts. At the time, I had to buy my own fucking boosts one at a time.
The whole platform only exists because they made the api easy enough that people could build on it.
You run a Discord server for work? I thought my company using Google was crazy.
When your job has communities that spring up around it, you either get there first, where you can work with the users and help steer, or just sheepishly join in the community efforts.
There are lots and lots of companies that use discord the same way they use facebook, just a place to promote and gather “feedback” and such. They likely mean they ran the official company server, not that they use discord to chat between teams.
Although I’ve done that before too.
we fall back to IRC :)
Why not. If we’re stuck with sketchy, lawless apps for chatting we might as well go back to the OG sketchy, lawless chat app.
Using it for more than text gets to be a bit arduous. I was going to make us a matrix instance, but honestly, we kinda love it when slack explodes and we go back tot he dark ages
Already happened in Australia. I can’t access NSFW channels, unless I do a face scan (no thanks).
Oh no. Anyway.
But the rest of the server you can access?
So far yeah. Only really use it to look for coop groups in game, so still doing its job for me right now.
Okay thanks for your reply.
And the garbage takes itself out, marvelous.
Anyone remember xFire? It was better 15 years ago than Discord ever was or will be.
…damn I miss that shit. They were litigated out of existence by a frivolous lawsuit from Yahoo. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Dude xFire was my jam.
I remember leaving xFire handles in my forum signatures with a random anime picture. Those were the days…
Xfire was all we ever needed.
