asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2023-09-22#1115196 << aside from comment where iirc said 'theoretically one could link 2 trb nodez over pest, but why' , dun recall any such thing
dulapbot: Logged on 2023-09-22 22:19:47 Vex: I recall that alf had considered including coinage to pest. Imagine if my pest wot would reach all the way to the honda factory
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2023-09-22#1115197 << aside from above, ~0
dulapbot: Logged on 2023-09-22 22:30:58 Vex: adding pest to coinage would obviously be fun too. I wonder how much of the design came from alf's wrok on trb
asciilifeform: let's try that again
dulapbot: (pest) 2023-07-16 asciilifeform: not burns with desire to reopen the hood on trb (barring discovery of catastrophic bugola), as errytime he does so quickly comes to conclusion that what it really needs is a jerry can of gas, a bic, and a sane rewrite
asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2023-09-22#1115199 << last known sighting of subj fwiw
dulapbot: Logged on 2023-09-22 22:34:22 Vex: i didn't notice in the logs where phf definitively parted.
dulapbot: (pest) 2023-07-03 phf: we could further discuss if that's actually the case and the why's and the who's, but that's not to be, because i basically had a day of quite mulling over the things you said about me, and i have no interest or desire to be communicate with you any further
asciilifeform: mats: wassat ?
asciilifeform: aint obv from the linked page
mats: pricing of claims from ftx, blockfi, celsius, voyager
asciilifeform: a la goxcoin? a ok
mats: yes
asciilifeform: mats: wb btw. what've you been up to ? ( other than shopping for goxcoin... )
mats: wait, was goxcoin an actual cryptocurrency?
mats: just skimmed a wired article where it mentions goxcoin and mastercoin
mats: this thing is just people trading claims
asciilifeform: iirc goxcoin wasn't at any point an actual alt, but at one time there was at least 2 exchanges b/w which it could be moved
mats: hm
mats: not been up to much, just listing in the wind
asciilifeform: mats: got fantastically rich yet ?
mats: never
asciilifeform also not
mats: i've been thinking about the next thing
asciilifeform: ... there's a next thing ?
mats: ah, for me personally, as far as where to spend my free time
mats: some young people tell me that there's serious money in mobile game cheating
asciilifeform: mats: weren'tcha trying out to become a mercenary? (or was that sumbody else)
mats: gacha games
asciilifeform recalls when folx thought there was money in www poker cheating, after which there wasn't
mats: must be someone else, i'm too out of shape to consider that
asciilifeform: aok
mats: if you visit asia, you might notice that the sides of city buses and other billboard ad spaces are festooned with mobile gaming ads
asciilifeform: in usa too
mats: poorly disguised gambling apps in most cases
asciilifeform: i.e. game gold is convertible to saecular dough ?
mats: in one direction, yeah
mats: makes me wonder which games have a semi-functioning (or better) secondary market or otherwise 'escape hatch', like being able to trade items to other players
asciilifeform not deeply familiar with subj, if not counting mp's version
asciilifeform: iirc this is how 'wow' gold worked -- folx would advertise for sale on e.g. ebay, then meet buyer in game and 'give'
mats: exactly
mats: steve bannon famously made a fortune exploiting chinese gold farmers
asciilifeform also recalls legend where chinese prisoners condemned to 'mine' wowgold 'for the good of the motherland'
mats: i was somewhat hip to this while it was in progress, but the people i knew doing it were skilled amateurs
asciilifeform: seems plausible that sumbody, somewhere, 'made bank', but less plausible that it was anyffin but random chance precisely who
mats: a closet with ten desktop computers instead of emulation
mats: autoit scripts and god knows what other monstrosities
asciilifeform many yrs ago, was broke, 'cheated' amz's 'mechanical turk' via simple cl proggy + 'headless browser'
mats: i heard the same legend, but it was koreans
asciilifeform: likely 'no smoke w/out fire', and in fact took place somewhere
mats: somewhat similarly, the western press has seen a small deluge of reports about se asian migrants being enslaved to run online scams
mats: in the last two months or so
mats: https://apnews.com/article/cambodia-myanmar-migrants-online-scams-ebab962f236df69b1f9b7e136958e244
asciilifeform recalls similar rumours re prisoners in ru
asciilifeform: typically with 'call center' flavour tho
mats: would you prefer call center or some other job in prison
asciilifeform: all such stories that asciilifeform encountered to date feature rooms fulla 'too cheap to meter'(tm)(r)(c) meat, rather than elaborate cheat proggies, tho
mats: i knew some folks involved in leaguesharp a decade ago
mats: a subscription cheat for league of legends
mats: 'wow glider' is the other famous example, i think, also famous on account of lawsuits
asciilifeform: most such biz , at least as seen from asciilifeform's perch, seems to involve sums that dun amount to much in 'first world', so never looked into subj in depth
asciilifeform: if yer in charge of a sharashka fulla 1000 north kr prisoners, may be good use for'em
asciilifeform: seems like the human equiv. of cpu mining
mats: i think the leaguesharp guys earned about 10mn from their cheat
asciilifeform: nm if tru
asciilifeform: *nb
asciilifeform: supposing the lawsuit not ate 100+% of it
asciilifeform not surprised that the game vendors see these as 'their' moneys and try to 'reclaim'
mats: i remember jodus mentioned the panamanian bank account they were directing payments into
mats: told his dumb ass to buy bitcoins and get minions to collect fiat payments from customers and pay him in bitcoin for licenses wholesale
mats: didn't listen
mats: thought panama was a real country
asciilifeform: lol
mats: hes german too so he gets it
asciilifeform: country-sized financial honeypot
asciilifeform: (instituted after swiss became too obv. such, possibly)
asciilifeform: 'tax havens' rugpull in afaik same manner as 'mpexes'
asciilifeform: i.e. eventually scale tips and subj becomes inevitable
mats: so anyway i was thinking android cheats
mats: the ecosystem of devices and android flavs is huge
asciilifeform: mats: how pertinent is this from pov of 'cheatron' ? would expect you only need to reverse $proggy to the extent needed to get at the protocol & whatever embedded keys
mats: i'm concerned about anticheat
asciilifeform: mats: what does 'anticheat' consist of ?
mats: i've read there's a few different anticheat products like vmproduct, easy anticheat, themida, for pc games
mats: they obfuscate the code with virtualisation, use various antidebugging and vm detection techniques
asciilifeform: seem to be focused on blowing up patched copies of orig. proggy, rather than against ab initio reimpl. of protocol
mats: you have a point
mats: gacha games seem so similar that i envision a cheat framework for them
mats: ideally i wouldn't have to reimplement the protocol at all
asciilifeform: there's also the q of what, in particular case, 'cheat' has to consist of . ( i.e. are you merely emulating a north korean prisoner who plays reasonably well, and running over9000 instances of same? or does protocol letcha 'see other fella's cards' or equiv. ? )
mats: in terms of first steps i thought of the ecosystem because there might be plentiful buggy vendorware
mats: i'm thinking of the former at this time
asciilifeform: to asciilifeform seems as if, if this kinda thing is +ev for $game , this is arguably a bug and vendor can/will fix
asciilifeform: typical player oughn't get moar dough/convertible 'gold'/etc from playing than he pays to subscribe
asciilifeform: if the notion is that he can, and this is fine because he is tempted to buy 'upgrades' along the way -- the latter will simply go away eventually, would think
asciilifeform: ( as players are replaced by bots , which are not tempted to buy anyffin )
mats: it is a bug
mats: but in other respects bots are arguably a feature
mats: they make your numbers look good to vcs and mgmt
asciilifeform: would imagine that the latter are moar interested in cashflow #s rather than '# of players, some unknown % of which are bots'
mats: botters create liquidity for in game asset owners
asciilifeform historically uninterested in subj, seeing as the ratio of 'bank made to date' to 'folx trying to make bank' is ~infinitesimal, rather resembling e.g. spam
mats: you're definitely successfully discouraging me
asciilifeform: lol
asciilifeform: hey if mats has magick pill against whatever is today's 'wow', then by no means oughta feel discouraged
mats: i think there's a lot more people with mobiles than gaming computers
asciilifeform: but in asciilifeform's lights, playing 'i'ma do the same thing as 100,000 other folx and i'ma be the one who makes bank Because Reasons' game is a waste of time
asciilifeform must bbl
mats: it happens