Wow, I didn't expect to see Clonk on HN today! Almost 20 years ago, as a 13 year old in the US I managed to make friends with an older player from Germany, and then we collaborated on making Clonk Rage mods together in c4script. It was an amazing experience and did help me get more into programming, so I'm so sorry to hear about your experience! I do recall members of the development team at the time being accessible and active in the community, specifically Sven2, but I'm not sure about MatthesB.
Awesome, Clonk fans on HN! To this day, I don't think there's any game series I spent more total hours in than Clonk. Also starting in 1998 with Clonk 4, especially with one particular friend from school, we played these sometimes every day for hours, all through Planet, GWE, Endeavour, and Rage (did I miss one?). As far as splitscreen multiplayer is concerned, it's still one of the best and most versatile computer games ever written, in my opinion. Bastard of a learning curve, though, which is why I never managed to get anyone beyond that one friend hooked, and I stopped playing it when our life paths started diverging... :(
I also remember Matthes Bender as more of a distant, benevolent ruler keeping the project running but staying very much in the background. IIRC by the time Clonk 4 came out he already had his consultancy going, so he was probably glad to offload the community stuff to other people.
By the way, Clonk is still going: there's OpenClonk, as well as an open-source continuation of the original Rage branch. Even the CCAN is still online!
Nice, a dedicated Clonk player. My obsession didn't last as long. Many years later, King Arthur's Gold scratched a very similar itch: https://kag2d.com/en/
The community is very small now. Peak was 10 years ago, but still an excellent multiplayer game.
I think it must’ve around '98 when I played Clonk 4. I even downloaded some custom assets via an Internet cafe to floppy disks to play with them back home. The mail was actually a physical letter. Maybe the devs became more active later when internet communities started to grow.
- That commit's date matches the date in the 404media article (July 13th)
- The commit message is totally unrelated to the code (highly suspicious)
- The code itself downloads additional code at runtime (highly highly suspicious)
I have not yet been unable to uncover the code it downloads though. It downloaded code that was hosted in the same repo, https://github.com/aws/aws-toolkit-vscode/, just on the "stability" branch. (downloads a file called "scripts/extensionNode.bk") The "stability" branch presumably was a branch created by the attacker, and has presumably since been deleted by Amazon.
I'm not a git expert, but how was the attacker able to push the stability branch directly to the Amazon owned repo? The PR would have been to merge the modified branch to main right?
Joseph's 404 article quotes the hacker as saying they "got admin privileges on a silver platter," so I think this is it: first part of the breach was gaining the GitHub permission to create a branch. Possibly just by asking.
I was impressed at this. By sharing side-load instructions and by the the overall restrained language of the post, they're emphasizing that this is not a personal attack on Deepin or an attempt to hurt Deepin and also emphasizing that OpenSUSE leadership understands the value of their community and have no power fantasy aspirations about trying to exert undue control over the users of the distribution. Really, OpenSUSE had more than enough ammunition to make a scathing takedown on the behavior of the Deepin maintainer and all of Deepin upstream, and many other OSS leaders would have done so ("Fuck Nvidia" anyone?), but they did not. They chose restraint and statements encouraging reconciliation. Cheers to the author for keeping it together in this obviously quite disappointing situation.
opensuse continuously impresses me on a community level but for some reason it's one of the only major distros i've never actually tried running. not sure why!
For #1 I can highly recommend this interactive article by Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/sound/. It might lack the depth you want in intermediate or advanced topics, but in my opinion it is the most efficient and effective beginner education material out there.
Thanks for the nostalgia though. Amazing game.
reply