I once put my homelab rack outside of my apartment, in the hall. Then used it to catch a bastard who kept stealing my bike light, and later tried to snatch the whole bike.
I love these weird micro-cult stories, thank you for posting this!
What made it extra weird for me was the fact that I grew up among people obsessed with tolkien and larping, ocasionally being labeled as a cult by the general public, except they actually pulled off the fantasy/scifi convention part. And they are still going strong for more than a decade. It was a humbling experience for me as a young adult to see my peers exhibit such dedication, discipline and organization skills just for the sake of building something together.
Seeing how the same drive can backfire under different conditions was quite a ride!
edit: To whoever it may concern, this story had almost frighteningly simmilar vibes as the story about the Zizians:
No way, I thought the thrill of browsing sketchy appstores to find the other half of the ACR phone was part of the fun.
For those out of the loop - ACR phone is a dialer app that does call recording. It's distributed through the play store, but without the call recording part, because that would be against the ToS. Once installed, it instructs you to go find the other app that serves as an accessibility module with access to the microphone. And by that I mean ONLY your microphone. The other side of the call is recorded only as an echo of the speaker caught by your own mic.
No wonder. That was bound to happen after the humanity as a collective decided to replace the clear labels written in an actual alphabet for some undecipherable monochrome pictograms. Majoring in egytology shouldn't be a requirement for recycling.
Piping scripts directly to bash is a security risk
Nobody has ever explained why.
What is the difference between executing a script directly from curl, and adding a repository which downloads a package which contains a script.
I record all my phone calls. It allows me to pretend not to forget all the names, dates, places and other important details we just talked about with the other person as soon as the call ends.
Wait. Bitpay is still around? That was the company Valve has used before. It was the de-facto standard for every eshop accepting bitcoin. Until they decided to implement identity checks, and only support payment from wallets implementing certain protobuf-based payment protocol. Which made them slide into obscurity pretty fast.
It was the support cost as far as I remember. Way too many people were too confused about how Bitcoin works.
Volatility was not the concern, at least for Valve. They've utilized a payment gateway that just swapped the BTC to USD right away. Which was still a single point of failure, but in case of bitcoin, the company switching a payment gateway does not affect the UX for the customer as much.
If they are training on historical dubs, just be thankful you're not Polish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YSEI7ugaKo