Come on, this is Google we’re talking about. The ads come before opening the app.

Video content never changes, but the order and content of ads do. Automated browser, record the video 2-3 times. Diff the frames and slice out the ones that don’t match between runs.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

This might be the only valid reason to ever name a kid “Jayrahmyie”

Fuck. Well, I also have mercenary cobra chickens! They aren’t loyal, but they’re vicious!

Just try and stop me with my army of waterfowl.

For better or worse, the landscape has shifted since then. I can’t imagine people love Steam for being Steam, but rather for being the most consumer-friendly platform on PC.

Refunds? No questions asked if it’s within 2 weeks and 2 hours of playtime.

User reviews and ratings? Yes, and even comments on those reviews.

Community content? Steam discussions, guides, art, etc. Even mods with the workshop.

Bribes development studios for exclusivity deals? Nope! Devs can release games wherever the fuck they want.

Platform support? PC. Not just Windows, but going out of their way to make Linux a first class citizen. They even support Crapple despite its miniscule market share among PC gamers.

It’s pretty straightforward to use, in my experience. There’s a web UI, so you won’t need to worry about the nitty gritty details unless you go beyond what’s supported through that.

Students would set them up incorrectly and cause a series of problems with colliding DHCP servers

That’s an IT problem, not a user problem. The downstream ports should have been isolated at both the link and packet layers. Configuring a router to share an unrestricted LAN between a dorm full of untrusted users is a disaster waiting to happen.

If somebody goes and causes an outage, I would expect nothing less than a tech walking around and trying to triangulate the offending router.

But in OP’s case, it’s an external ISP that provides internet services to the dorm. As long as nobody gives them a reason to start looking, I don’t expect a for-profit ISP to be sending out a contractor proactively beyond the first week of move-ins. That costs them money, and likely a lot more money than they would recover by catching the handful of people trying to dogde the per-device upcharge.

If they go looking. It’s unlikely they went out of their way to purchase and configure specialized devices in the building to catch it proactively.

That’s assuming they’re actively looking. Hiding your SSID is more to prevent someone from getting suspicious and calling out the ISP.

You shall not use or attempt to use a device or software (such as NAT, Address Masquerading, Proxying, or the connection of an additional wireless router) that would allow you to connect more than the number of devices set out in the Service Information to the Network.

One of the ways they detect this is by checking the TTL of the packets coming from the “one” device is less than expected. If your router is using OpenWrt, you can configure an iptables rule to reset the TTL of outgoing packets to the default.

Turn off SSID broadcasting entirely. Hidden networks require more technical expertise to discover than most people have.

The ISP techs will still be able to find it, but there’s little reason for them to go looking when nothing seems out of the ordinary.

There’s no suitable metaphor for ad blocking IRL

Sure there is.

Every week, your community puts on an old movie in the town park that everyone can watch for free. You, an avid movie enjoyer, watch this movie every week.

But, the movie equipment isn’t free. To make this event happen, the community accepts a donation from The Church of Microwaving Babies and Kicking Puppies. In exchange, the Church of Microwaving Babies and Kicking Puppies pauses the movie every 50 minutes and puts on a small two-minute presentation about why you should consider joining and what puppy-kicking can do to improve your life.

You don’t care. You do not agree with their views, and you definitely are never going to join. Instead of paying attention to their mandatory presentation, you stare at your phone and read Lemmy. Then, when the movie is back on, you once again pay attention.

That’s ad-blocking. Some group gains revenue from their publicly available service by having an advertiser peddle their crap through said service. You take an active role in ignoring said crap, while most people just sit there twiddling their thumbs and pretending to care. The only tangible difference between you ignoring the ad while it plays and you blocking it is 60 seconds of your time and the bandwidth required to serve the ad.

Advertisers don’t like it—but fuck the advertisers. The difference that you as an individual makes in how much money is made through advertising is less than a hundredth of a cent. If the impact of the collective using adblockers is enough to be an issue in sustainability, then advertising was not the correct business model to begin with.

You underestimate the absolute idiocy of Trump conspiratorialists. If the man had his head blown off on live television, they would either claim that it was a body double, and he’s hiding underground to avoid another assassination attempt by “the Hollywood elite”… or that he faked his own death so he could go undercover and bust Harris’ pedophilia ring.

I wish I were exaggerating. The Q-ultists are unfathomably brainwashed.

Metric is excellent until it gets into data units. There shouldn’t be a difference between 4T and 4TB, but it’s actually a (1024⁴-1000⁴) ≈ 92.6G (99.5GB) difference because of the fuckers who decided to make data units metric and rename the base-2 data units to “kibibyte”/“mibi*”/“gibi*” (KiB/MiB/GiB)

What exactly does Google do for Android, then? Hardcode the IPv6 address of their own DNS service, or fall back to pulling AAAA records over IPv4?

If I recall correctly, you can do stateless DHCPv6 to just hand down a DNS server without also managing the devices’ IP addresses.

IPv6 has two main types of non-broadcast addresses to think about: link-local (fe80::) and public.

A device can self-assign a link-local address, but it only provides direct access to other devices connected to the same physical network. This would be used for peer discovery, such as asking every device if they are capable of acting as a router.

Once it finds the router, there are two ways it can get an IP address that can reach the wider internet: SLAAC and DHCPv6. SLAAC involves the device picking its own unique address from the block of addresses the router advertises itself as owning, which is likely what you’re concerned about. One option for ensuring a device can’t just pick a different address and pretend to be a new device is by giving it a subset of the router’s full public address space to work with, so no matter what address it picks, it always picks something within a range exclusively assigned to it.

Edit: I butchered the explanation by tying to simplify it. Rewrote it to try again.