I believe the implication is that the spouse is not technically literate or is for some other reason expected to be mislead into downloading untrusted or dangerous software. By segmenting the network, the spouse’s actions can be contained.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34094364 My employer sent me to Germany, where he subsidizes 50% of my public transportation costs, the so called Deutschland-Job-Ticket. However, my employer only signed a deal wit the local transportation authority for digital tickets, the kind of ticket you’d store on a digital wallet like fosswallet. Except that the local transportation authority doesn’t offer pkpass files to download, the kind of file you need to work with fosswallet and similar apps, and the only way to use this digital card is to create a google account and download google wallet. I have no idea what an apple user would have to do, as they won’t offer pkpass files to no one. Google is a company I don’t trust, but so far every German I’ve talked to about this doesn’t seem to value privacy ¯(ツ)/¯ I’m looking for a workable, practical solution because as much as I’d like to show google the finger it seems that’s simply not an option here. Some suggested to get a second android device to use exclusively for this Deutschland-Job-Ticket, but that seems overkill. I also contacted my employer to ask if they’d allow me have a physical transportation card and still receive their subsidy. And yet another option would be to buy a pixel, install GrapheneOS, download googlewallet and sandbox it, but I’m not sure I want to spend 700 Euros to make google even richer. Has any of you ever done this? does it work? The other end of the equation is, how much information google grabs about me in the EU because if I go GrapheneOS, I still need to give google my data. I’ve never had a google account: Do I need to give them my real name? A telephone number? my real address? An Email address? my social security number? passport? Will they send me unwanted ads and spam me if I create an account with them? All this because my employer or the transportation authority won’t work with pkpass files… For more information, you may read my history.
I remember fifteen years ago I wanted to pirate new super Mario bros for Wii but Nintendo hired a lot of bad peers on eMule, it was impossible to download it. It would download it super fast thanks to the hundreds of fake peers that would upload garbage data, but then when completed it would check it and fall back to 0.2% completed. Super frustrating. In the end I just gave up because I hate and suck at platformers, why would I ever pirate something that I would never play, but at the time in the forums someone said that with IP address filters it was possible to complete the downloads, by blacklisting all the commercial ip address space and allowing only residential (or maybe they were just living in the right spot, at the time in select cities in my country there was an ISP that ran a fiber optic MAN - metropolitan area network, and it was awesome for piracy, as they didn’t block the smb V1 protocol between customers so there were peers that shared gold mines)
My employer sent me to Germany, where he subsidizes 50% of my public transportation costs, the so called Deutschland-Job-Ticket. However, my employer only signed a deal wit the local transportation authority for digital tickets, the kind of ticket you’d store on a digital wallet like fosswallet. Except that the local transportation authority doesn’t offer pkpass files to download, the kind of file you need to work with fosswallet and similar apps, and the only way to use this digital card is to create a google account and download google wallet. I have no idea what an apple user would have to do, as they won’t offer pkpass files to no one. Google is a company I don’t trust, but so far every German I’ve talked to about this doesn’t seem to value privacy ¯(ツ)/¯ I’m looking for a workable, practical solution because as much as I’d like to show google the finger it seems that’s simply not an option here. Some suggested to get a second android device to use exclusively for this Deutschland-Job-Ticket, but that seems overkill. I also contacted my employer to ask if they’d allow me have a physical transportation card and still receive their subsidy. And yet another option would be to buy a pixel, install GrapheneOS, download googlewallet and sandbox it, but I’m not sure I want to spend 700 Euros to make google even richer. Has any of you ever done this? does it work? The other end of the equation is, how much information google grabs about me in the EU because if I go GrapheneOS, I still need to give google my data. I’ve never had a google account: Do I need to give them my real name? A telephone number? my real address? An Email address? my social security number? passport? Will they send me unwanted ads and spam me if I create an account with them? All this because my employer or the transportation authority won’t work with pkpass files… For more information, you may read my history.
I came here to get away from Reddit, but for Usenet deals, I don’t know where else to track them. I haven’t been on Usenet long enough to go through BF deals yet, but I plan on tracking https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/providerdeals (for provider deals, obviously). I’ve also seen provider reps post in the main sub (https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/) with “terabyte Tuesday” & other similar type deals, but I can’t recall if I’ve ever seen indexer reps post deals in there (pretty sure they don’t, please anyone correct me if I’m wrong). My provider is Eweka, so I don’t plan on getting any other provider deals, but I’ll still take a look at what’s available. Another good sub to track indexers might be: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsenetInvites/. Example: when Ninja (indexer) opened up registrations (temporarily no invite needed, about a month ago, supposedly very rare), it got posted in both of these subs. Originally, my first provider wass a 2TB block from UsenetPrime (UsenetExpress backbone) and only completed 55% of the downloads I tried. I was extremely frustrated, and kept asking myself “this is what everyone else is saying is so great?” I did a lot of searching through various posts and then got the Eweka annual unlimited plan, and I haven’t had any real problems since. I later picked up a 500GB data block from BlockNews (doesn’t expire, & although they’re under the same Omicron company name, they’re on a different Highwinds backbone), just in case I ever ran into any future problems. Usenet.Farm (“Its Hosted” backbone) also had a deal that (if I recall correctly) you just signed up for an account and you get a 10GB block for free, and can get a 48% discount (code BDAY2023) when you’re 10GB is gone and you’re ready to sign up for a package (I’m assuming that code expires at some point though). With all these blocks I have, all of my DLs come solely from Eweka (according to SABnzbd stats). So I wouldn’t buy any blocks (depending on who you’re main provider is). I’ve also seen a lot of people mention a combination deal of Frugal Usenet (Highwinds backbone, unlimited annual access, but limited retention), but it also has a 300GB or 750GB block with Usenet.Farm (“Its Hosted” backbone, supposedly longer retention period, more similar to Eweka) from Blocknews, for a little cheaper. So that may be another option for people to consider. Either way, I’d recommend not wasting money on UsenetPrime / UsenetExpress, or other data blocks unless you’re having problems. Just in case anyone is unaware of how backbones work, you should research it, and understand why you don’t want to pay for accounts on overlapping backbones. Good tools for checking are: https://svgshare.com/i/iG8.svg -and- https://whatsmyuse.net/ My indexers are: DrunkenSlug (DS), NZBGeek (Geek), NZBFinder (Finder), NZBPlanet (Planet), NZB.Su (Su), and NinjaCentral (Ninja). So far, Planet and Ninja have been the most disappointing. Planet rarely comes up with something I’m searching for, probably well below 33% of the time. Ninja also rarely shows up with search results. However, the difference is, the rare times I’ve had a problem completing a file, I’ve then attempted to DL from the Ninja index link and I was then able to complete it, but that’s been maybe 3 times? Planet just rarely shows up, to the point I forget I even have access to it. The other 4 indexers have all worked well. If there is another someone suggests, please let me know. I guess I’ll add, I got an invite to DOGnzb (indexer), but I soon realized you have to “buy” a shirt from them when paying for the account, and then if you want the shirt you just paid for, you have to actually pay for it again. Maybe it’s a decent indexer, but it’s extremely expensive, and I haven’t had a problem with my other indexers, so I deleted the DOG account & never tried it.
This is the best summary I could come up with: But after briefly disappearing, Libgen popped back up and has been online ever since, operating in defiance of that order—as well as court orders “in several countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom,” publishers’ complaint filed yesterday said. Those countries even tried ordering “Internet service providers to block access to Libgen Sites as a result of infringement actions,” publishers said, all seemingly to no avail. This includes tons of students whom publishers claimed are “bombarded with messages to use Libgen sites” on social media rather than paying full price for textbooks. Instead of paying publishers to distribute books like a real library does, the complaint alleged, Libgen profits off pirated works by running advertisements alongside e-book downloads for things like online games and browser extensions. Libgen staff, the publishers alleged, hide behind usernames like “librarian” or “bookwarrior” and rely “on proxy services that specifically conceal website operators’ identifying information.” Thanks in part to these US companies, Libgen operators can “rely on the anonymity of the Internet and their overseas locations to hide their names and addresses and frustrate enforcement efforts against them,” publishers alleged. The original article contains 873 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This post kinda fits (and kinda does not) both [email protected] and [email protected]. please forgive if it feels out of place. I used to host a “drive” for my collegemates (and juniors), which consisted of all the courses and related material (lecture notes (official, or what i made), software, code, research articles, assignments, media, video lectures, books, test, etc…). Earlier I used sharepoint (onedrive) which our college had made a deal with ms to get (1 tb for everyone). But at some point sharepoint started “faultering” (while I am almost certain it was not realted to pirated books and stuff, but there was a small chance that it was), and I then switched to proton ( i got a yearly plan with student discount - coming to something around $2/month for mail and 15 GB storage). Earlier this year, I switched to posteo for mail provider (multiple reasons, but one of the primary ones was cost ($1 without discounts), a simple imap setup), but kept the stuff on proton drive. Now my subscription for proton has ran out, and do not plan to renew it. I am not the only one who does this kinda stuff, but I was first in our department. Other departments (older than us) already had some other long running drives, which essentially become useless when original maker graduates, so new stuff has to be made for each batch. Also, most other drives are hosted on google drive, or sharepoint. I could consider the college sharedrive again, but recently microsoft broke the deal, stating our college was using too much storage (something like 50-60 TiB), and then froze acceess for everyone. this was sorted, with weeks of down time, and our limit decreased to 15 GB (1.5% of previos limit). I do not want that to happen with my drive. I also take some prestige in my drive, because it is arguably the best organised, and has the most stuff (i find many books, if not available, get them from library, or purchase them, then scan and ocr, or assignments, which you are not meant to share with others, but i do mostly because for end sems they serve as practice). I want a “semi anonymous” (anyone can see/upload stuff without accounts) (semi because tonnes of stuff has my personal identity (name on assignments and tests), somewhat private and “piracy friendly” (so no mainstream stuff like google and onedrive works, especially because i currently do not have a account for either to upload), and non public (or at least, be something like a very long and random url, stuff which will likely not end up on search engine indices). I am willing to pay too, provided, once i get access to drive, others can upload/download stuff without accounts (people will likely not sign up for random stuff, yet another step of friction)(sharepoint was good in this aspect. you could make a public link to which anyone could upload. they did not have edit access (delete/modify existing files) without login, but those operations are relatively rare). *What I have considered, but can not be done - * a private git repo, with some hosted webui (something like forego) - the actual size of stuff is not that large (5gib if consider stuff only related to course work, 80gib if i include other stuff(like offline wiki/stack overflow/other wikis backups)), so i could just get something like a 128 or 256 gib ssd, connect to a sbc (which i would have to buy, but practically a 1 time cost). a private torrent a google/onedrive, but i compress and/or encrypt the stuff, so they will not practically check content our college’s existing infra (made by student welfare body), which already hosts tests for some of the courses, and another website, which hosts “some” (barely anything) other resources, likely useful websites, or lecture notes *Why not possible? * intended audience is essentially tech illiterate - many of them do not know much about what files/folders are. they usuallly do not dowwnload stuff (so they keep going back to drive, to view stuff in browser previews). they can not download stuff and then extract. they most definitely can not do that for the compression i usually use (it is a zstd in squashfs (as to why specifically this - it effectivelly uncompresses only the stuff it needs, like a pdf from a folder containing pdfs, so storage space saving at cost of slight cpu increase (zstd helps to lower that usage)), for windows - you need 7zip, which most do not have). they can not decrypt stuff. they can not torrent (like 95+% have no idea how torrenting even works. to them, that is just a way to acquire “linux isos”). out of 5%, maybe 4.5% will not be able to work with priavte torrents (something they have no experience with) our college’s infra forbids most of copyrighted material. they forbid tests which were not allowed to leave exam premises. (In those cases, I used ot memorise the questions, and recreate the tests, or when we went to check our answersheets, I would try to take pictures of question paper/answer sheets)(this was not the case for majority of courses, but a significant minority for sure)(this was done mostly by professors who teach a course multiple times, and do not want to design questions every year, and they just rehash old stuff). They forbid any executable stuff. (they have allowed file types of common multimedia formats. but from my minimal testing, they just do a stupid extension check, and not file metadata or headers, so i can fool this shit, by making zips and then appending a .txt or .pdf at end). is there some other drive provider I can consider? which has good usability, and mostly anon? there is mega drive/pcloud, icecloud, and many others, who provide somewhat private/anonymous viewing. some of them have quite generous free plans too, so I can use some of them as backups. but most do not have a “qol” features (for example, afaik, mega drive does not do previews, they download in a wierd way in browser memory, and then to your filesystem, others have little information available). I could consider maybe something like archive.org, if I do a very tedious task of making most of stuff not have my names, and making a archive.org account is easy , but that is still a deterrent. edits - PS: For anyone wondering about legality or ethics of this drive - it is a mixed bag. I definitely have copyrighted works which I did not acquire properly. I share stuff which I am not supposed to. hence i decided to post on piracy subreddit. on to ethics - many of our professors know about this. most are fine with it. some complain that I am ruining future students, by providing most stuff in a easy single spot, and that leads them to not go to classes or stuff. But i disagree with them. kids not going to classes is only weakly dependent on availability of notes, but stongly dependent on the nature of course, for example teachers interactivity or teaching style. Some professors even like the drive, and also use it (as a reference for what was taught earlier, or questions they have already used.) IMO, their tests become better (less rote learning type stuff, and more applications based stuff, for which you can come up with questions for). A funny side story - My drive was used in a “mass cheating” case. In one of our programming related courses (we are not studying computer science, and this course was a effectively - how to use python to do some scientific computation). Our prof was very chill, and allowed people to use internet freely, and even allowed using chatgpt (at that time, it was like a few months old) to write the programs (essentially, we were expected to know the “science”, and formulate a good set of equations, and then use python (or any other language for that matter). so allowing use of internet/gpt was just to allow people not good at programming, but good at the actual science to perform well too.). He also knew about my drive, and encouraged people to check it. (I got most of the packages setup for most people, also had a good relationship with the prof prior to course). During midsem, a “eureka” like moment hit. My drive would largely automatically sync stuff once a day. what if, during exam, my drive would sync, lets just say, every 10 minutes, then my solutions (as i write them) would be avaialable on the drive in during the exam, and somewhat frequently updated. But it would feel odd for everyone to check a single drive, the same file, at the same time. So I also wrote small curl scripts for windows and mac folks, which would pull the required file every 10 or so minutes from the drive. Now it would feel as if everyone was checking some other code (probably old code from class)(ot was a open book/notes/internet exam). Was what i did technincally rule breaking ? - no, people were allowed to use my drive, i just made much of that process automated. Was it ethical ? - definitely not. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I was doing it one part for the giggles. Also, I was not the one who actually came up with the idea (someone gave a rough proto-idea, upon which i further developed upon). What was the result? No one caught the cheating. Teaching instructors (tas) find it normal for people to check otheer files, or a terminal process running. Not everyone used it. I was not checking from others, but roughly 80+% of class was using it. But someone snitched (i got to know did that fairly soon. he also cheated). Luckily, no disciplinary action was taken against me (I could have been suspended, or even rusticated, since it was a mass cheating), but the prof was very chill. He did scold me a lot. did not talk with me in his usual jovial manner for few weeks, but it eventually got ok. NOBODY (including me) got any punishment or point deduction. edits 2 PS2: while reading the last part again, I realised what i had done was something close to implementing a adblock. you are allowed to close the ads manually (like checking drive manually). It is only frowned upon, if a program (like ublock) closes all the ads (in this case, by blocking ads from being even fetched, in the background) (like using a curl script to fetch the file in background).
If the company is that incompetent, I’d only wanted to work there if I’m really desperate. I’d hope it never comes to this. Might be different where you live or in your sector, but no competent company in Germany would go with AI summaries. The chance that the AI misses a statement that the applicant might be disabled and could sue for discrimination is too high. Also, we have to open CVs in the browser within the hiring application, download is not allowed for data security reasons. The renderer for Word files is definitely not good enough to guarantee that the files render correctly. Personally, we’re looking for highly skilled people in a specialized field, I’d never trust an AI summary, but we’re also not being swarmed by applicants. If the company looks for a barista, your approach might be better. But proofing computer literacy is not really necessary then anyway.
Download amogus, trust me.
There’s $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable to poor people, and to ensure that Elon Musk gets billions in new broadband subsidies for his expensive and increasingly congested satellite broadband company, Starlink. The rewrites delayed the underlying grant program, forcing many states to revamp their plans for the already earmarked funds. That includes a new bidding process. Unsurprisingly, in states like Tennessee and Colorado, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper and Elon Musk’s Starlink are now poised to dominate the bidding process, resulting in a lot of taxpayer funds likely going toward satellite services… instead of fiber: “SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper flooded the Tennessee office with applications, submitting more than twice as many broadband grant applications as fiber builders, while requesting on average about 10 times less in funding – at least according the application areas.” Republicans revamped the program to make billionaires happy. Though they claim they revamped the program because they were looking to cut costs. But we’ve noted repeatedly how these Low-Earth orbit satellite broadband efforts have massive problems that make them ill-suited to tackling America’s digital divide at any serious scale. Starlink has been criticized for harming astronomical research and the ozone layer. Starlink customer service is largely nonexistent. It’s too expensive for the folks most in need of reliable broadband access. The nature of satellite physics and capacity means slowdowns and annoying restrictions are inevitable, and making it scale to permanently meet real-world demand is expensive and not guaranteed. One recent study found that Starlink struggles to deliver the FCC’s already flimsy definition of broadband – 100 megabits per second (Mbps) down, 20 Mbps up – in any areas where Starlink subscribership exceeds 6 households per square mile. In many areas, these capacity constraints are causing Starlink to issue “congestion” charges as high as $750. So yes, it’s technically cheaper for taxpayers to fund expensive, congested satellite broadband service, but it results in slower, more expensive service that can’t actually deliver on the promises it’s going to be making. Republicans don’t really care about that, and later on, after the subsidies have been doled out and public is frustrated by the substandard result, they’ll just ignore the problem they caused. The other problem is money directed to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is money directed away from a lot of locally owned municipal and cooperative broadband providers that have been recently using taxpayer money to deploy “future proof”, symmetrical gigabit fiber for prices as low as $60 a month. Many states had only just started funding these promising emerging competitors, but the Trump revamp of this BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment) program means that if the Trump administration doesn’t like your proposal (it doesn’t reward Musk, it tries to help the poor, or it funds community broadband access) your state could lose millions or billions in funds, permanently. Another problem: the Trump administration’s lower standards means that companies like Comcast that had originally been encouraged to deploy fiber, are now deploying slower (but still as expensive for consumers) cable broadband service. From Tennessee: “In the initial round of funding, Comcast applied for funding for 27 project areas. In the Benefit of the Bargain round, Comcast applied to serve 39 project areas. The key difference is that, in the initial round, Comcast proposed to serve these areas with fiber broadband and is now proposing to serve them with cable broadband at a lower cost.” Fiber providers may have higher up front construction costs, but they’re fixing the problem permanently and properly. As opposed to throwing the lion’s share of taxpayer money at a technology that literally and technically can’t accomplish what’s being asked of it. And, in at least one case, into the lap of a company owned and run by an overt white supremacist with a head full of conspiracy theories. Ideally, you want taxpayer money going primarily to fiber. After that, to stuff like fixed wireless and 5G wireless. After that, you fill in the gaps with LEO satellite service. LEO satellite service shouldn’t be the primary choice. But because the U.S. is too corrupt to function, that logic’s flying right out the window, and most of the funding is now poised to get dumped into the laps of Trump’s favorite billionaires.\
When you want to share a image you found on PieFed, don’t download and share the image, just share the PieFed link. This way the people or person you’re sharing it with might discover PieFed without you pushing it. It also works great like this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTheWorld/comments/1md2npo/what_is_the_best_power_outlet_and_why (does not work with old.reddit ) This will also improve SEO, and PieFed etc. might start popping up on search engine results more, and people will start to see and trust the Fediverse more.
When you want to share a image you found on PieFed, don’t download and share the image, just share the PieFed link. This way the people or person you’re sharing it with might discover PieFed without you pushing it. It also works great like this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTheWorld/comments/1md2npo/what_is_the_best_power_outlet_and_why (does not work with old.reddit ) This will also improve SEO, and PieFed etc. might start popping up on search engine results more, and people will start to see and trust the Fediverse more.
Edit: I realise I posed this in the wrong community, so I’m making this a crosspost and promotion for [email protected] a place to help grow the Fediverse. Check it out. When you want to share a image you found on PieFed, don’t download and share the image, just share the PieFed link. This way the people or person you’re sharing it with might discover PieFed without you pushing it. It also works great like this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskTheWorld/comments/1md2npo/what_is_the_best_power_outlet_and_why (does not work with old.reddit ) This will also improve SEO, and PieFed etc. might start popping up on search engine results more, and people will start to see and trust the Fediverse more.
I’m sure you’ll know by now that some time ago I did a full interview-ish effort with the dev team behind RomM. RomM - three our of five of the team gave me answers on their history of the project, emulation as a whole, self-hosting, ROMs and building what they did. That RomM Project is an open-source, self-hosted application that’s designed to organize and give you a nice, clean and pretty way to view and play your retro video game collections. Its got a clean, responsive web interface that allows users to scan their ROM libraries, then grabs the metadata from sources like IGDB, MobyGames, and Screenscraper, and playing games directly in your browser via built-in EmulatorJS support. It supports over 400 gaming platforms (seriously), accommodates various naming conventions, multi-disk games, and custom tags. It even integrates with tools like Playnite and muOS, and upcoming features include device syncing for games, saves, and emulator settings. I reached out to the team again about their new release for RomM - RomM 4.0.0, which also included at the same time a full Android app made by a community member. They agreed to share their thoughts and experiences putting it together with me, and while 24 or so hours ago I shared a full ‘article’ I wrote on this, based on these answers they gave me, I’m sharing their full answers here on Lemmy with you. I write these little interviews, Q&As and articles with devs from all kinds of gaming, Linux and Steam Deck projects and programs. Its fun for me, and I love to help people get a peek behind the curtain, and get to know who is behind these bits of software they might know and love. I’ve previous shared interviews on Lemmy with: The RomM Project (like I mentioned!) in general The solo dev behind Minigalaxy A PC game repacker (piracy!) The dev who runs a Switch piracy FreeShop Independent Linux & Gaming journalist, Gardiner Bryant The creator and dev of Lutris The team who make Heroic Games Launcher With RetroDECK Do be warned, this is a little rough, since I intended to cherry-pick the quotes for an article, there might be some general statements from one dev, then some direct answers to direct questions from another. Regardless, I do hope you enjoy this! With danblu3: About the Android App: Our main goal is to have RomM reachable from any platform, we want to be the centre piece of your retro library and an android app has always been an idea in the devs head. That said, the Android app is not something we claim (fully) an amazing user by the discord name of “MattSays” actually made the application and just dropped it into our discord one day without warning, we did have a very basic and functional version from a user called “samnwella” which did do the job, but it was clunky and I know they won’t mind me saying this. MattSays dropped it and the UI was there, the functions was there, everything. It was gorgeous even from a 1.0 release. Community reaction has been positive, bugs have been raised and already squashed, and in relation to the RomM team both Zurdi and Arcane have reached out to MattSays for further discussion, it’s currently being branded as the official Android connector app for RomM and as for team status for MattSays, that is up in the air. The future? It’s definitely bright for the Android app, the dev is very keen and even wants to get save syncing up and running. Imagine this flow: Going into ES-DE and with the recent Android app launch update you open the RomM android app, using your controller you scroll to a game you fancy playing, press A and that’s it, downloaded, you exit the app, back to es-de, scrape the game and play. No removed SD cards, no plugging into your PC, no dealing with SMB users or NFS perms, just, done. Dusted. The future is very bright for this app. About the new 4.0.0 release: Right. So. 4.0 4.0 from many different point of views is huge, from preservation enthusiasts, from retro nerds, from the people who just want a retro fix and the completionists, 4.0 is HUGE. Before I go on to say what 4.0 is let me explain about hash matching, I’ll make this very simple and it’s possible I might get something a little bit wrong here or there but the theory is correct. A hash is like a signature, and each ROM (file) has a unique signature, some people way back when began groups to dump these games in the name of preservation and put all this together into a library called .dats, these .dats files store a unique signature and this unique signature will match to a game name, it’s development date, if it was ever released to retail etc etc. Two of the biggest names of these groups is NoIntro and Redump, they both specialise in different media formats but with them combined they built a “digital bible” of what game is what signature, with 4.0 we finally introduce hash matching with the help of two incredibly skilled developers. Why is hash matching better, why am I so excited? It’s faster, much much faster. Right now when a ROM is scanned into RomM it breaks apart the file name, removes the (tags) and then sends an API call to the metadata agent of your choice with the name, even though we began to get a high success rate it relied HEAVILY on your files being named correctly. With hash matching, ROM reads the unique signature of the file and is told near instantly what the game is and what data is needed to be scraped, without wasting time doing a fuzzy match. It’s more accurate The fact we can now match on hash means that you could have a game named “TLOZ: AltP.zip” which is a snes game from way back when and you named it like for ease of use, you load it into RomM and are confused why it doesn’t match, you know it’s the legend of zelda! But RomM does not, because of the weird name you chose, like come on? It’s one of the best games, give it the full name! Anyway, with hash matching it’ll look inside and see the game file, extract and work out the signature and instantly match it against the matching signature online, pulling all metadata and information it needs, without you needing to rename your whole collection. It’s prettier - Now we have confidence in what your matching, we’ve made SteamgridDB a metadata agent, it was before but we left it to user decision. Now that we are confident in the matching we can pull gorgeous artwork for the matched games directly from SteamgridDB, and we still give user the choice if they want to change it. Now that is out the way, I want to give a huge shout out to Yukine for making Playmatch and FlibbleHexEyes for making Hasheous both these technologies have been implemented in RomM and honestly they are flawless. Yukine has been a regular around discord and I’m pretty sure he began working on hash matching pretty damn quickly just for his own benefit, he then released a small tool which caught the eye of the RomM team, a few conversations later and here we are with it as a service. It’s essentially a 2 in 1 service where it does the hash matching through a lighting quick database and then proxies that over to IGDB to pull the relevant metadata from their servers, all in record time compared to our API to IGDB route. Then onto FlibbleHexEyes, people who are around the self hosting scene might recognise the names, and yes he is the lead dev and creator of Gaseous, I would say a competitor but not really only because of how well we get on with him, the self hosted space is large and there is enough room for all of us, no point sniffling creativity! It’s another hash matching service (we go from 0 to 2!) and it’s similar in the vein of playmatch, just on its own location and maintained directly by Flibble. Without these two amazing devs 4.0 would not be as huge as it is now. We have more news as well! In 4.0 we introduced launchbox support, this is essentially an offline database that is downloaded every day and used for matching. It does not do hash matching but it does fair better with ROM hacks on testing, it’s also very good for people who want to control exactly what is coming in and out of their server as it does not need an API key and the queries are ran locally (until we go to LB to collect the art) Something that might have been missed is that we also support retro achievements! This is purely display purposes but if you have a matching hash, 9.9/10 you have a matching retro achievement and it will update your status on how your doing when it resyncs, it’s a nice little QoL feature and we even show the difference between hardcore and soft core achievements. Want to help contribute? Well now it’s now easier then ever with an official devcontainers RomM container, which will be explained further in the release notes but the environment is contained in the container, just pull it and start developing, no setting up extra libraries and so forth. 4.0 is huge for RomM. It’s deserving of the major number and this has lit a fire under the dev team, I’m sure there will be a small hiatus between updates to let them recover but as we always keep saying. We’re just getting started. With Yukine (community member and contributor: What changes are you making? The main changes for RomM 4.0 besides adding new Metadata sources (like LaunchBox) is the integration of Playmatch and Hasheous I’ve created the Pull Request to add Playmatch Support into RomM and arcane added Hasheous support a little bit later Playmatch (and Hasheous too) is a Microservice which does Hash based matching for Roms, it incoperates DAT files from Groups such as No-Intro and Redump and keeps a database of those Roms with a mapping to external Gaming Databases such as IGDB, right now only IGDB is support but i plan to add other Gaming Databases such as Screenscraper, MobyGames, Launchbox, SteamGridDB and more How was your experience, making these changes with RomM? The Pull Request to RomM wasn’t really all that hard, even me who doesn’t usually do or write python was able to integrate it quite easily into RomM that said there was work the RomM Team did before my change was merged to ensure that the logic runs in the correct order What i mean by that is that in RomM 3.10.x it used to be so that the resolution step of Metadata was running before the calcuation of hashes When you integrate services which require you to send the hashes of files for the metadata provider resolution you usually want these hashes calculated which before wasn’t possible because Matching of Metadata Provider was running before the hash calculation step After arcaneasada changed that and did some other side work the Playmatch PR was quite fast ready to be merged, i think it took less than 2 weeks to get it merged into RomM How long has this release been ‘in the works’ for? As i said above the PR itself was only ~2 weeks of work but Playmatch itself was quite a lot more work I’ve started Playmatch back in June 2024 (over a year ago already ) as a side Project of mine, at the time RomM was quite a bit more immature especially the Metadata Matching part, i personally have quite a big Rom collection and when only ~40% of all games got a match on IGDB i was quite annoyed because i didn’t want to go through my whole collection and manually match all the unidentified games to get the nice looking metadata for them Out of annoyance i thought how i would fix that, thinking about other Projects who also use Metadata Providers i checked out how they solved it and then i also found Hasheous at the time which basically was @FlibblesHexEyes Solution to the issue. After checking it out i decided that while i know C# and i think he did a good Job i wasn’t quite sure if i would’ve solved it this way and the database structure of it wasn’t quite speaking to me (when i thought about performance and how many req/s it would likely get) so i decided that i could probably write a small microservice myself and i oriented myself at Hasheous but also at Skyhook which is a Metadata API Sonarr uses and how they solved a lot of issues with that What can the users, both existing and new, expect from this 4.0.0 release? Generally speaking 4.0 with Playmatch and Hasheous enabled should improve Automatic Metadata matchinig a lot. When users enable them they will be queried for each rom and if either has a metadata match in there database it will be used This makes RomM a lot less reliant on Rom Names and exact naming matches and basically kills the naming requirement completely assuming the Rom Hash is in either Playmatch and Hasheous (usually if your ROM matches the No-Intro or Redump DAT thats the case) and has a Provider match in either. Playmatch does by default automatically try to match ROMs it gets from the dat files to IGDB but sometimes that also fails when for example the ROM name is localized and on IGDB there is no Alias for that name. Playmatch also allows users to “suggest” manual mappings for No-Intro/Redump roms, if a rom was not automatically mapped due to naming issues i described before users can now use a Discord Bot to suggest a mapping to be added to Playmatch, after an Admin (currently thats me) reviews it and approves it it’ll be added to playmatch and RomM can make use of it This Discord Bot is also added to the RomM Server so that users can do the suggestion there if they like to, this also helps out the whole community (so when the next person then checks playmatch for the same hash it already has a mapping!) which is generally the ideal state that the community can “maintain” a mapping database themself Any significant difficulties? Anything you’re particularly proud of with this release? There were a lot of difficulties to be fair but thats normal Playmatch is written in Rust which is a Memory Safe Language and a very fast and performant language too. When i initially thought about how i would create Playmatch i had a few key aspects in Mind. It needs to be fast and handle a lot of http req/s when a lot of RomM users run library scans It should keep a low memory usage so i can run on a small VPSIt should have a good Database ORM because i dislike writing raw SQL queries in code generally My choices were between Rust, Golang and C# but i decided for Rust because the HTTP Server Actix im using has decently fast benchmarks, the language can run a http api on only a few MB ram and also the Database Driver im using (SeaORM) is great and very fast for database queries Playmatch does a lot of things automatically by now, it can automatically download & import dats and after import also automatically try to match unmatched games to IGDB for example the matching logic is also decently smart, the datting group No-Intro for example has a cloneof id relationship set in there dat file, basically if a game like Pokemon Emerald has multiple versions (different regions, Demos, Betas etc) they write it down in the dat file with an id and a clone of id field, Playmatch can make usage of that and use it for matching, if any game gets matched playmatch automatically matches the games parents and of the parent other child games as well so that if i manually match lets say No-Intros German Pokemon Platin ROM playmatch will check the database and see that other roms (Like the Italy Pokemon Platin Rom) is a clone of the same parent (The Europe or USA Pokemon Platin Rom usually) and then apply the same mapping to it as well For automatically matches this is a great benefit, like if one of the different region name is either the Direct Name or an Alias of the Game on IGDB then we can match all versions of a game This fixes the issue for localized rom naming a lot as well, if you use any Rom Manager or tool which renames your ROMs to match names from No-Intro/Redump dats this will now not make the Identify step of RomM fail because the name is localized and not like that on IGDB and also if one region gets matched now all region gets matched! this makes it less annoying to manually match as well when instead of 20 matches for all different versions (Regions, Beta, different Revisions) of Pokemon Platin you just match any of it and Playmatch does the other one fully automatically Another big issue generally is compression, RomM does not enforce any format when accepting ROM files for Platforms, users usually want to compress there roms if possible to save space zipping Roms is one way but usually the compression rate is not that good especially for newer consoles with for example encryption (which decreases compression rate by a ton) so most Homebrew Communities have developed own formats to compress ROMs a few examples are Wii / Gamecube raw format is .iso and the a common compression format is .rvz which is supported by Dolpin Emulator Wii U Raw format is .ISO but the common compression format is .wux A lot of Disc based system Emulators support .chd files which is a format the MAME team developed with a very good compression rate DAT groups such as No-Intro and Redump usually only create dat files for “RAW” or original formats so if you want to compress your roms it will not be matching to Playmatch anymore as Playmatch only holds rom data which is from a DAT group Luckly the Community already has made DAT files for a few of those formats but depending on the format and compression used these formats might have some randomness depending on what compression level and settings are used Playmatch currently has community dats for .rvz, .wux and decrypted PS3 Games With FlibblesHexEyes - community member and contributor: Hey! So, just to clarify I’m not part of the Romm team, though I do work closely with them. I work on Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), which provides hash based ROM matching to metadata providers as well as metadata proxying. Hasheous came about from my other project called Gaseous Server (which is similar to Romm - started about the same time) where I noticed a major point of friction for users was matching their ROM files to metadata providers such as IGDB. This led me to begin the Hasheous project where a user adding a ROM to their ROM Manager of choice (Hasheous was always designed to be client agnostic and not favour one client over another). The idea here is that when adding a ROM, instead of the user having to manually say that file is “Choplifter”, the client (Romm or Gaseous), would reach out to Hasheous and say “do you know what this file with this SHA1 hash is?” and Hasheous would respond with information about the ROM and where the client could find metadata such as summaries, and cover art. Which led to solving a further point of friction for users which is that many metadata providers require an API key - and an often convoluted method to generate them - which led to Hasheous having the ability to proxy some metadata providers. This allows users of Romm (and others) to have a completely friction free experience when adding ROMs to their libraries. It’s this part that I’m particularly proud of. It’s taken me about a year to get Hasheous to where it is today. By far the biggest issue is that of data integrity. Hasheous relies on DAT providers (such as TOSEC and NoIntro) who all name games slightly differently. The same is also true of the metadata providers. Examples include that a DAT might name a game with a dash, which the metadata provider might use a colon. Individually these are reasonably easy to match, but at scale it gets a lot harder. So building out a community contribution method (to fix bad matches) that is abuse resistant was also a challenge. With MattSays - community member and developer responsible for the Android app: Yeah sure! You may want to know why I decided to make this app. I recently got into retrogaming handhelds and in particular Android retro handhelds, and I also discovered the existence of RomM. However, to my surprise there wasn’t an app that could easily handle all of my rom collection without having to go to my browser and manually do all the steps required to just play my desired games. So I developed a client that could improve the usability of RomM on Android without too much hassle and shared all of this with the charming community that instantly tested it and gave me precious feedback. And that’s that! Well, like I said, perhaps a little rougher than my regular efforts at these, but the contents in the answers really did deserve to be read through, but anyone interested. I love how passionate about gaming, self-hosting and emulation the team (and contributors) are in RomM. It makes me smile to see! You can find more on The RomM Project with these links: Their official website Their GitHub Their Discord And don’t forget, if you like this kind of gaming nonsense I share, you can find me on Mastodon, where I tend to post every day:
I’m sure you’ll know by now that some time ago I did a full interview-ish effort with the dev team behind RomM. RomM - three our of five of the team gave me answers on their history of the project, emulation as a whole, self-hosting, ROMs and building what they did. That RomM Project is an open-source, self-hosted application that’s designed to organize and give you a nice, clean and pretty way to view and play your retro video game collections. Its got a clean, responsive web interface that allows users to scan their ROM libraries, then grabs the metadata from sources like IGDB, MobyGames, and Screenscraper, and playing games directly in your browser via built-in EmulatorJS support. It supports over 400 gaming platforms (seriously), accommodates various naming conventions, multi-disk games, and custom tags. It even integrates with tools like Playnite and muOS, and upcoming features include device syncing for games, saves, and emulator settings. I reached out to the team again about their new release for RomM - RomM 4.0.0, which also included at the same time a full Android app made by a community member. They agreed to share their thoughts and experiences putting it together with me, and while 24 or so hours ago I shared a full ‘article’ I wrote on this, based on these answers they gave me, I’m sharing their full answers here on Lemmy with you. I write these little interviews, Q&As and articles with devs from all kinds of gaming, Linux and Steam Deck projects and programs. Its fun for me, and I love to help people get a peek behind the curtain, and get to know who is behind these bits of software they might know and love. I’ve previous shared interviews on Lemmy with: The RomM Project (like I mentioned!) in general The solo dev behind Minigalaxy A PC game repacker (piracy!) The dev who runs a Switch piracy FreeShop Independent Linux & Gaming journalist, Gardiner Bryant The creator and dev of Lutris The team who make Heroic Games Launcher With RetroDECK Do be warned, this is a little rough, since I intended to cherry-pick the quotes for an article, there are some general statements from one dev, then some direct answers to direct questions from another. Regardless, I do hope you enjoy this! With danblu3: About the Android App: Our main goal is to have RomM reachable from any platform, we want to be the centre piece of your retro library and an android app has always been an idea in the devs head. That said, the Android app is not something we claim (fully) an amazing user by the discord name of “MattSays” actually made the application and just dropped it into our discord one day without warning, we did have a very basic and functional version from a user called “samnwella” which did do the job, but it was clunky and I know they won’t mind me saying this. MattSays dropped it and the UI was there, the functions was there, everything. It was gorgeous even from a 1.0 release. Community reaction has been positive, bugs have been raised and already squashed, and in relation to the RomM team both Zurdi and Arcane have reached out to MattSays for further discussion, it’s currently being branded as the official Android connector app for RomM and as for team status for MattSays, that is up in the air. The future? It’s definitely bright for the Android app, the dev is very keen and even wants to get save syncing up and running. Imagine this flow: Going into ES-DE and with the recent Android app launch update you open the RomM android app, using your controller you scroll to a game you fancy playing, press A and that’s it, downloaded, you exit the app, back to es-de, scrape the game and play. No removed SD cards, no plugging into your PC, no dealing with SMB users or NFS perms, just, done. Dusted. The future is very bright for this app. About the new 4.0.0 release: Right. So. 4.0 4.0 from many different point of views is huge, from preservation enthusiasts, from retro nerds, from the people who just want a retro fix and the completionists, 4.0 is HUGE. Before I go on to say what 4.0 is let me explain about hash matching, I’ll make this very simple and it’s possible I might get something a little bit wrong here or there but the theory is correct. A hash is like a signature, and each ROM (file) has a unique signature, some people way back when began groups to dump these games in the name of preservation and put all this together into a library called .dats, these .dats files store a unique signature and this unique signature will match to a game name, it’s development date, if it was ever released to retail etc etc. Two of the biggest names of these groups is NoIntro and Redump, they both specialise in different media formats but with them combined they built a “digital bible” of what game is what signature, with 4.0 we finally introduce hash matching with the help of two incredibly skilled developers. Why is hash matching better, why am I so excited? It’s faster, much much faster. Right now when a ROM is scanned into RomM it breaks apart the file name, removes the (tags) and then sends an API call to the metadata agent of your choice with the name, even though we began to get a high success rate it relied HEAVILY on your files being named correctly. With hash matching, ROM reads the unique signature of the file and is told near instantly what the game is and what data is needed to be scraped, without wasting time doing a fuzzy match. It’s more accurate The fact we can now match on hash means that you could have a game named “TLOZ: AltP.zip” which is a snes game from way back when and you named it like for ease of use, you load it into RomM and are confused why it doesn’t match, you know it’s the legend of zelda! But RomM does not, because of the weird name you chose, like come on? It’s one of the best games, give it the full name! Anyway, with hash matching it’ll look inside and see the game file, extract and work out the signature and instantly match it against the matching signature online, pulling all metadata and information it needs, without you needing to rename your whole collection. It’s prettier - Now we have confidence in what your matching, we’ve made SteamgridDB a metadata agent, it was before but we left it to user decision. Now that we are confident in the matching we can pull gorgeous artwork for the matched games directly from SteamgridDB, and we still give user the choice if they want to change it. Now that is out the way, I want to give a huge shout out to Yukine for making Playmatch and FlibbleHexEyes for making Hasheous both these technologies have been implemented in RomM and honestly they are flawless. Yukine has been a regular around discord and I’m pretty sure he began working on hash matching pretty damn quickly just for his own benefit, he then released a small tool which caught the eye of the RomM team, a few conversations later and here we are with it as a service. It’s essentially a 2 in 1 service where it does the hash matching through a lighting quick database and then proxies that over to IGDB to pull the relevant metadata from their servers, all in record time compared to our API to IGDB route. Then onto FlibbleHexEyes, people who are around the self hosting scene might recognise the names, and yes he is the lead dev and creator of Gaseous, I would say a competitor but not really only because of how well we get on with him, the self hosted space is large and there is enough room for all of us, no point sniffling creativity! It’s another hash matching service (we go from 0 to 2!) and it’s similar in the vein of playmatch, just on its own location and maintained directly by Flibble. Without these two amazing devs 4.0 would not be as huge as it is now. We have more news as well! In 4.0 we introduced launchbox support, this is essentially an offline database that is downloaded every day and used for matching. It does not do hash matching but it does fair better with ROM hacks on testing, it’s also very good for people who want to control exactly what is coming in and out of their server as it does not need an API key and the queries are ran locally (until we go to LB to collect the art) Something that might have been missed is that we also support retro achievements! This is purely display purposes but if you have a matching hash, 9.9/10 you have a matching retro achievement and it will update your status on how your doing when it resyncs, it’s a nice little QoL feature and we even show the difference between hardcore and soft core achievements. Want to help contribute? Well now it’s now easier then ever with an official devcontainers RomM container, which will be explained further in the release notes but the environment is contained in the container, just pull it and start developing, no setting up extra libraries and so forth. 4.0 is huge for RomM. It’s deserving of the major number and this has lit a fire under the dev team, I’m sure there will be a small hiatus between updates to let them recover but as we always keep saying. We’re just getting started. With Yukine (community member and contributor: What changes are you making? The main changes for RomM 4.0 besides adding new Metadata sources (like LaunchBox) is the integration of Playmatch and Hasheous I’ve created the Pull Request to add Playmatch Support into RomM and arcane added Hasheous support a little bit later Playmatch (and Hasheous too) is a Microservice which does Hash based matching for Roms, it incoperates DAT files from Groups such as No-Intro and Redump and keeps a database of those Roms with a mapping to external Gaming Databases such as IGDB, right now only IGDB is support but i plan to add other Gaming Databases such as Screenscraper, MobyGames, Launchbox, SteamGridDB and more How was your experience, making these changes with RomM? The Pull Request to RomM wasn’t really all that hard, even me who doesn’t usually do or write python was able to integrate it quite easily into RomM that said there was work the RomM Team did before my change was merged to ensure that the logic runs in the correct order What i mean by that is that in RomM 3.10.x it used to be so that the resolution step of Metadata was running before the calcuation of hashes When you integrate services which require you to send the hashes of files for the metadata provider resolution you usually want these hashes calculated which before wasn’t possible because Matching of Metadata Provider was running before the hash calculation step After arcaneasada changed that and did some other side work the Playmatch PR was quite fast ready to be merged, i think it took less than 2 weeks to get it merged into RomM How long has this release been ‘in the works’ for? As i said above the PR itself was only ~2 weeks of work but Playmatch itself was quite a lot more work I’ve started Playmatch back in June 2024 (over a year ago already ) as a side Project of mine, at the time RomM was quite a bit more immature especially the Metadata Matching part, i personally have quite a big Rom collection and when only ~40% of all games got a match on IGDB i was quite annoyed because i didn’t want to go through my whole collection and manually match all the unidentified games to get the nice looking metadata for them Out of annoyance i thought how i would fix that, thinking about other Projects who also use Metadata Providers i checked out how they solved it and then i also found Hasheous at the time which basically was @FlibblesHexEyes Solution to the issue. After checking it out i decided that while i know C# and i think he did a good Job i wasn’t quite sure if i would’ve solved it this way and the database structure of it wasn’t quite speaking to me (when i thought about performance and how many req/s it would likely get) so i decided that i could probably write a small microservice myself and i oriented myself at Hasheous but also at Skyhook which is a Metadata API Sonarr uses and how they solved a lot of issues with that What can the users, both existing and new, expect from this 4.0.0 release? Generally speaking 4.0 with Playmatch and Hasheous enabled should improve Automatic Metadata matchinig a lot. When users enable them they will be queried for each rom and if either has a metadata match in there database it will be used This makes RomM a lot less reliant on Rom Names and exact naming matches and basically kills the naming requirement completely assuming the Rom Hash is in either Playmatch and Hasheous (usually if your ROM matches the No-Intro or Redump DAT thats the case) and has a Provider match in either. Playmatch does by default automatically try to match ROMs it gets from the dat files to IGDB but sometimes that also fails when for example the ROM name is localized and on IGDB there is no Alias for that name. Playmatch also allows users to “suggest” manual mappings for No-Intro/Redump roms, if a rom was not automatically mapped due to naming issues i described before users can now use a Discord Bot to suggest a mapping to be added to Playmatch, after an Admin (currently thats me) reviews it and approves it it’ll be added to playmatch and RomM can make use of it This Discord Bot is also added to the RomM Server so that users can do the suggestion there if they like to, this also helps out the whole community (so when the next person then checks playmatch for the same hash it already has a mapping!) which is generally the ideal state that the community can “maintain” a mapping database themself Any significant difficulties? Anything you’re particularly proud of with this release? There were a lot of difficulties to be fair but thats normal Playmatch is written in Rust which is a Memory Safe Language and a very fast and performant language too. When i initially thought about how i would create Playmatch i had a few key aspects in Mind. It needs to be fast and handle a lot of http req/s when a lot of RomM users run library scans It should keep a low memory usage so i can run on a small VPSIt should have a good Database ORM because i dislike writing raw SQL queries in code generally My choices were between Rust, Golang and C# but i decided for Rust because the HTTP Server Actix im using has decently fast benchmarks, the language can run a http api on only a few MB ram and also the Database Driver im using (SeaORM) is great and very fast for database queries Playmatch does a lot of things automatically by now, it can automatically download & import dats and after import also automatically try to match unmatched games to IGDB for example the matching logic is also decently smart, the datting group No-Intro for example has a cloneof id relationship set in there dat file, basically if a game like Pokemon Emerald has multiple versions (different regions, Demos, Betas etc) they write it down in the dat file with an id and a clone of id field, Playmatch can make usage of that and use it for matching, if any game gets matched playmatch automatically matches the games parents and of the parent other child games as well so that if i manually match lets say No-Intros German Pokemon Platin ROM playmatch will check the database and see that other roms (Like the Italy Pokemon Platin Rom) is a clone of the same parent (The Europe or USA Pokemon Platin Rom usually) and then apply the same mapping to it as well For automatically matches this is a great benefit, like if one of the different region name is either the Direct Name or an Alias of the Game on IGDB then we can match all versions of a game This fixes the issue for localized rom naming a lot as well, if you use any Rom Manager or tool which renames your ROMs to match names from No-Intro/Redump dats this will now not make the Identify step of RomM fail because the name is localized and not like that on IGDB and also if one region gets matched now all region gets matched! this makes it less annoying to manually match as well when instead of 20 matches for all different versions (Regions, Beta, different Revisions) of Pokemon Platin you just match any of it and Playmatch does the other one fully automatically Another big issue generally is compression, RomM does not enforce any format when accepting ROM files for Platforms, users usually want to compress there roms if possible to save space zipping Roms is one way but usually the compression rate is not that good especially for newer consoles with for example encryption (which decreases compression rate by a ton) so most Homebrew Communities have developed own formats to compress ROMs a few examples are Wii / Gamecube raw format is .iso and the a common compression format is .rvz which is supported by Dolpin Emulator Wii U Raw format is .ISO but the common compression format is .wux A lot of Disc based system Emulators support .chd files which is a format the MAME team developed with a very good compression rate DAT groups such as No-Intro and Redump usually only create dat files for “RAW” or original formats so if you want to compress your roms it will not be matching to Playmatch anymore as Playmatch only holds rom data which is from a DAT group Luckly the Community already has made DAT files for a few of those formats but depending on the format and compression used these formats might have some randomness depending on what compression level and settings are used Playmatch currently has community dats for .rvz, .wux and decrypted PS3 Games With FlibblesHexEyes - community member and contributor: Hey! So, just to clarify I’m not part of the Romm team, though I do work closely with them. I work on Hasheous (https://hasheous.org/), which provides hash based ROM matching to metadata providers as well as metadata proxying. Hasheous came about from my other project called Gaseous Server (which is similar to Romm - started about the same time) where I noticed a major point of friction for users was matching their ROM files to metadata providers such as IGDB. This led me to begin the Hasheous project where a user adding a ROM to their ROM Manager of choice (Hasheous was always designed to be client agnostic and not favour one client over another). The idea here is that when adding a ROM, instead of the user having to manually say that file is “Choplifter”, the client (Romm or Gaseous), would reach out to Hasheous and say “do you know what this file with this SHA1 hash is?” and Hasheous would respond with information about the ROM and where the client could find metadata such as summaries, and cover art. Which led to solving a further point of friction for users which is that many metadata providers require an API key - and an often convoluted method to generate them - which led to Hasheous having the ability to proxy some metadata providers. This allows users of Romm (and others) to have a completely friction free experience when adding ROMs to their libraries. It’s this part that I’m particularly proud of. It’s taken me about a year to get Hasheous to where it is today. By far the biggest issue is that of data integrity. Hasheous relies on DAT providers (such as TOSEC and NoIntro) who all name games slightly differently. The same is also true of the metadata providers. Examples include that a DAT might name a game with a dash, which the metadata provider might use a colon. Individually these are reasonably easy to match, but at scale it gets a lot harder. So building out a community contribution method (to fix bad matches) that is abuse resistant was also a challenge. With MattSays - community member and developer responsible for the Android app: Yeah sure! You may want to know why I decided to make this app. I recently got into retrogaming handhelds and in particular Android retro handhelds, and I also discovered the existence of RomM. However, to my surprise there wasn’t an app that could easily handle all of my rom collection without having to go to my browser and manually do all the steps required to just play my desired games. So I developed a client that could improve the usability of RomM on Android without too much hassle and shared all of this with the charming community that instantly tested it and gave me precious feedback. And that’s that! Well, like I said, perhaps a little rougher than my regular efforts at these, but the contents in the answers really did deserve to be read through, but anyone interested. I love how passionate about gaming, self-hosting and emulation the team (and contributors) are in RomM. It makes me smile to see! You can find more on The RomM Project with these links: Their official website Their GitHub Their Discord And don’t forget, if you like this kind of gaming nonsense I share, you can find me on Mastodon, where I tend to post every day:
download this image here. Hi, all, and happy Thursday! Hope you’re enjoying your week, as far as it’s possible. At the very least, I trust you’re basking in Trump’s ever-growing discomfiture as he gets hit with wave after wave of bad Epstein-related news. While the backstory on Trump’s long relationship with that loathsome pedophile is sordid, heartbreaking, and tragic, the satisfaction I, for one, am feeling at seeing him finally face blowback for his despicable behavior is huge. Meanwhile, the tariffs continue to bite, prices are skyrocketing everywhere, Pete Hegseth has another Signal scandal on his hands, and more and more people are deciding that Trump is a failure as a President—across the board. Good! We are nowhere near winning this battle, folks, but we’re moving in the right direction, and that’s because of your hard work. Thank you for everything you do. When the history of this epoch is written, you’ll be the heroes at the center of it, and I’ll be proud to say I knew you. Let’s get to work. Call Your Senators (find yours here and/or use this list to find staffer contact info) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is ______. First, I understand that a final vote on Emil Bove could be coming as soon as Monday. I expect the Senator to do everything in his/her power to ensure that this unfit, corrupt man doesn’t get anywhere near a lifetime appointment on our federal courts. Vote no. Also, I’m angry that Texas is holding a special legislative session to try to redraw the legislative maps in their favor. Instead of focusing on responding to devastating floods in central Texas, Governor Greg Abbott is trying to rig Texas’ maps to push Democrats out of office and preserve Republicans’ majority. It’s repugnant and anti-democratic. I want the Senator to make a statement denouncing it. Thanks. [If Democrat add:] And I support Democrats in “going nuclear” to counteract this threat in any way they can. Take the gloves off. Thanks. Call Your House Rep (find yours here and/or use this list to find staffer contact info) 📲 Hi, I’m a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______. I’m furious that Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans have shut down the work of Congress to protect Trump from accountability over the Epstein files. They are abandoning their constitutional responsibilities in order to serve Trump’s personal interests. Americans demand the truth. We will settle for no less. [If GOP add:] And we will never forget the Republicans who blocked the release of these files. Also, I’m angry that Texas is holding a special legislative session to try to redraw the legislative map in their favor. Instead of focusing on responding to devastating floods in central Texas, Governor Greg Abbott is trying to rig Texas’ maps to push Democrats out of office and preserve Republicans’ majority. It’s repugnant and anti-democratic. I want the Congressmember to make a statement denouncing it. Thanks. [If Democrat add:] And I support Democrats in “going nuclear” to counteract this threat in any way they can. Take the gloves off. Thanks. Extra Credit ✅ I try not to publish Middle East-related material in this newsletter—I typically keep it in the global edition—but the famine in Gaza has grown too horrifying to ignore. If you want to push our lawmakers to help get food aid into Gaza I’ve written a Resistbot letter you can read here, then send it, if you like, by texting SIGN PFONLN to 50409. Thanks to Marisa Kabas of the Handbasket, whose great article I used to craft the Resistbot. Get Smart! 📚 On July 30 Indivisible is hosting their next One Million Rising call. OMR is a national effort to train one million people in the strategic logic and practice of non-cooperation, as well as the basics of community organizing and campaign design. This is the second session, where you’ll learn not just Indivisible’s strategy, but how you can lead a discussion with others and get them on board with taking action in your community. You’ll host your first community resistance gathering after this session, before the next session. You can sign up here. Did you miss Session 1? Watch the recording here! Messaging! Messaging! Messaging! 📣 This Framelab piece explaining what’s happening with Trump’s base right now around the Epstein coverup, how it could be dangerous for democracy, and how we can counteract Trump’s next attempts to make it so, is really worth a read. Get in the Streets! 🪧 This weekend, Families First (a collaboration of AFSCME, AFT, Caring Across Generations, Community Change, Fair Share America, Families Over Billionaires, Family Values Work, Moms Rising, MoveOn, National Domestic Workers Alliance, NEA, People’s Action Institute, Planned Parenthood, SEIU, and Working Families Power) is hosting events across the country to say: our families come first, and we will protect each other. You can find an event near you here. And learn more here. [H/T Small Deeds Done] Chop Wood, Save the Planet 🔥 Join the Southern Environmental Law Center Thursday, July 31, at 12:30 P.M. ET for a webinar focused on key efforts to advance protections for clean air and water across the South — even as critical federal safeguards are under attack. From federal litigation to local advocacy, SELC experts will share how they are stepping up alongside communities, partner organizations, and state leaders to protect what matters most. Check out the speaker list and/or register here. Resistbot Letter (new to Resistbot? Go here! And then here.) 💻 [To: all 3 reps] [H/T] [Text SIGN PFSJOQ to 50409, or to @Resistbot on Apple Messages, Messenger, Instagram, or Telegram] (Note that for the most effective RESISTBOT it’s best to personalize this text. More about how to do this here. But if you’re short on time just send it as is using the above code.) I’m writing to demand that Congress act to repeal Trump’s tariffs. No matter how Trump tries to package his trade war, everyone from chief financial officers to everyday Americans is feeling the effects of his economic chaos. Trump’s erratic trade policies are raising operating costs for businesses — who are passing them along to consumers. A new study from the Yale Budget Lab reveals the average household will pay $2,800 more per year because of Trump. A new report from Goldman Sachs estimates that 70% of tariff costs will be paid for by consumers. This is unsustainable! We are already paying the price at the grocery store and soon could pay even more. Beef prices are hitting record highs, and orange juice prices are set to rise by as much as 25%. Trump’s tariffs are devastating us! Congress has the power to stop this any time, and they must. Reclaim your constitutional power and stop Trump’s import taxes now! OK, you did it again! You’re helping to save democracy! You’re amazing. Talk soon. Jess Chop Wood, Carry Water is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Share Leave a comment From Chop Wood, Carry Water via this RSS feed
I forgot but do browsers download binaries as executable? One of the big issues with windows is the fact that it uses file extensions for determining file type, so EXEs can just be instantly run after downloading, which led to MSFT making the “Mark Of Th Web” attribute, which moved hackers into finding every type of bypass for MOTW. I think straight bin downloads require you to chmod +x first, but you could also probably bypass it with any archive format like .tar.gz or opting for a .deb or .rpm. The upside is that you really shouldn’t be downloading raw bins outside of the package manager, but there are a bunch of tools that only ship as appimages, so you’re kinda screwed if you download and execute from an untrusted source.
Mozilla says they use a third-party OHTTP intermediary. In the blog post linked above, they name Fastly as their partner. So it’s not as bad as Mozilla + Mozilla-wearing-funny-glasses. Personally, I still think this is the wrong approach to privacy, even though I’ve used Fakespot on my own many times over the years. Largely because I don’t think any of this needs to be built into a web browser. I would prefer my web browser to minimize information leakage by default, to the greatest degree that it can while still remaining useful as a web browser. Mozilla keeps adding bloat to Firefox, and bloat always comes at a cost. I’d much prefer these to be browser extensions that people can download if they want them, rather than built in by default. The baseline Firefox should be lean. Less “stuff” = smaller attack surface. Simplicity is best. I mean, the Fakespot browser extension has existed for a long time, and I’ve never seriously considered installing it. I’d much rather just take an extra three seconds to load their web site and paste in a URL than have it constantly monitoring my activity and doing god-knows-what with it. That way I have better knowledge and control of what is happening with my data. Even if I trust their intentions, I don’t implicitly trust their competence (all software has bugs) and I don’t trust that they will never go rogue in the future. And also, I just don’t find this claim all that compelling in principle: By processing the data jointly across two independent parties, they ensure neither party holds the information required to reveal sensitive information about someone. I mean…sure. That’s fair. Buuuuuut handing half the data to your “partner” doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence. Especially since literally nobody reads all of the privacy policies they are subject to. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/reading-the-privacy-policies-you-encounter-in-a-year-would-take-76-work-days/253851/ https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/04/19/150905465/to-read-all-those-web-privacy-policies-just-take-a-month-off-work https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/you-need-a-whole-workweek-every-month-to-read-privacy-policiesand-thats-bad-news Minimizing privacy policies should be a high-priority goal for any organization that claims to value privacy. Furthermore, how many additional parties have access (legally or otherwise) to both Mozilla and Fastly? 🤷
If by emulation you mean your ability to emulate, absolutely not. Its a portable program, you can find countless mirrors of the downloads or ask someone you know and trust for a copy. If you mean active development in 3DS emulation… Yeah probably dead.
Air VPN as it supports port forwarding. PF isn’t as important if you only download popular new content, as there are usually enough connectable seeders on popular torrents. But PF is absolutely crucial if you want to be able to obtain old or rare content or if you use private trackers. I’m honestly baffled that so many are still recommending Mullvad after they made such a stunning reversal of their friendly policy towards p2p by removing port forwarding. I wouldn’t trust them as far as I can throw them.