As Cloudflare is inbetween everything it might result in unexplainable behaviour. Maybe something is whitelisted in the Cloudflare webpanel config, no idea. Its doing a HTTP 301 redirect, so its Cloudflare initiated (or webserver related but we can't "see" that due to Cloudflare).

What is the status of Fern Bay? Does it get beached?

Yah, Grok4 just got released (to every1), giving just one answer;

Step-by-Step Reasoning:Identify the full character set before exclusions:Lowercase letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z (26 characters).
Uppercase letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z (26 characters).
Numeric digits (base-10 system, interpreted as 0-9): 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (10 characters).

Total without exclusions: 26 + 26 + 10 = 62 characters.
Apply the exclusions:Exclude small-L: Remove 'l' from lowercase → lowercase now has 25 characters.
Exclude capital-i: Remove 'I' from uppercase → uppercase temporarily has 25 characters.
Exclude letter O: Remove 'O' from uppercase (as "letter O" refers to the uppercase form, consistent with the phrasing where cases are specified separately for others) → uppercase now has 24 characters.
Exclude digit 0: Remove '0' from digits → digits now have 9 characters (1-9).

Total allowed characters: 25 (lowercase) + 24 (uppercase) + 9 (digits) = 58 characters.
Calculate the number of combinations:The query asks for the number of 20-character combinations using this set.
Assuming repetition is allowed (standard for such character-based combinations, like passwords or strings, unless specified otherwise) and order matters.
For each of the 20 positions, there are 58 possible choices.
Therefore, the total number is 582058^{20}58^{20}
.

Compute the value:58[sup]20[/sup]=18559226468222606056912232424511897658^{20} = 18559226468222606056912232424511897658^{20} = 185592264682226060569122324245118976
.

Final Solution:185592264682226060569122324245118976

some people need the whole reasoning for whatever stupid argument, so there you go.

My point still stands, why make it overly complicated for the whole planet while its not needed. Even my bank handshakes with eight digits. No alphabet nonsense.

Last edited by cargame.nl, Mon 11 Aug 2025, 02:30.

Quote from Bokujishin :

Yeah, first of all, why 59? 2*26 letters + 10 digits is 62, remove O, 0, I and l...

The original answer was longer and gave both 58 and 59 as its a matter of interpretation. 20 characters, 15, 10, even 5 is ridiculously long for the purpose which is a temporarily handshake, not even a password. But keep focusing on the things which do not matter at all in a discussion, this "community" will get "somewhere" 🫠

Quote :

Grok how many combinations with the alphabet lower upper case and the numeric 1-10 system with twenty characters? small-L and capital-i / letter O and digit 0 are being left out.

The exact value is: 59^20 = 7,573,809,984,801,565,563,723,794,128,486,401

Is LFS a bank nowadays? 20 characters is a bit insane if you'd ask me.

Quote from https://gdprhub.eu/Article_4_GDPR :

A person is "identified" when they can be directly distinguished or "singled out" from a larger group of persons, based on the information. This can be achieved through several 'identifiers' listed by Article 4(1) GDPR, such as the name, identification number, locations, online identifiers, physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of a particular person. Other examples are provided by the Working Party 29 like telephone number, car registration, social security numbers and passport numbers as well as a person’s height, hair colour, clothing or professional qualities. Note that the name of a person is therefore not necessarily required to identify an individual as there are often more unique identifiers.

A person is "'identifiable' when they have not been identified yet but where identification is possible through a combination of available pieces of information. It can be unclear what is still 'identifiable' and what is not anymore. Different people may have different abilities to identify a person, and different contexts or situations may lead to different answers as to the person being identifiable. Recital 26 clarifies that "to determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means reasonably likely to be used... either by the controller or by another person to identify the natural person".

Starting point is therefore an absolute (objective) approach that generally considers both information of the controller as well as information from any other entities to identify a person. However, the 'reasonable likeliness' of such information being used by the controller or a third party, narrows the approach. In this regard, Recital 26 adds that in order "to ascertain whether means are reasonably likely to be used to identify the natural person, account should be taken of all objective factors, such as the costs of and the amount of time required for identification... the available technology at the time of the processing and technological developments".

In other words, while not all of the information required to identify the person needs to be in the hands of the controller the mere hypothetical possibility to identify the person with the information from other entities is not sufficient. Thus, the assessment requires a case-to-case decision on the reasonable likeliness to identify an individual, taking into account the use of state-of-the art tools, available sources, costs, time, and effort requried to identify the individual. The assessment is factual and is not limited to lawful means to identify a person, when it is reasonably likely that an actor could also use unlawful ways to identify a person.

In C-582/14 Breyer the CJEU had to consider if IP addresses enable the identification of a natural person. The IP address is the number under which a computer or smartphone can be reached over the internet. Almost every controller exchanging information with a data subject over the internet will have to use the IP addresses. IP addresses can be dynamic (meaning the number is lost every 24 hours or every time a customer restarts their internet modem) or fixed (which means the number is always associated with the same customer). It may be that such a number is associated with a user account, in which case it becomes personal data. Even if the number itself may not be linkable by a controller, governments but also private entities may have legal powers to access subscriber details in relation to the IP-address. The CJEU found that even in such cases, the IP address can constitute personal data.


CJEU - C-582/14 - Breyer, margin number 49.

This example from case law shows that many data types may constitute personal data in one situation and not in another situation. Usually controllers and processors cannot, for example, determine if an IP address in their log files is dynamic or fixed. In practice this may mean that controllers or processors choose to treat all IP addresses as if they are personal data, to ensure compliance with the GDPR.

Furthermore, taking the increasing accessibility of information through means such as big data technologies and device fingerprinting into consideration, measures to successfully identify individuals are becoming increasingly effective. Additionally, because more information is continuously added to individual data sets and stored over a longer period of time, persons are significantly more likely to be identified.

TLDR; you know in what direction this is going

And what is stated is right,

Quote :

but also private entities may have legal powers to access subscriber details in relation to the IP-address

I know people which got doxxed because there where people working for telecom companies which on request looked up private subscriber data with the help of an IP address. It quickly escalates in hate crimes, no joke. In my country it even went that far that grave desecration took place. Completely nuts. It are not paranoia thoughts, this is really taking place nowadays.

Last edited by cargame.nl, Fri 23 May 2025, 00:35.

I fail to understand myself why the IP address is so important in relation to abusers. In my day to day experience most abusers use a VPN/proxy. Or believe it or not, Starlink.

However not all VPN users are potentially malicious. Earlier the discussion was, if and how, it was possible to detect VPN usage. This is being done by researching the actual owner/company of the IP address.

Masking the IP address is counterproductive in the search for detecting malicious activity but when a hardware identifier is being added which cannot easily be altered then it would be a pretty big security increase. Far better then working only with an unmasked IP address as most gamers do not have ten computers with LFS installed or going to be bothered with swapping hardware to change the checksum.

geoIP country info was and is nice to know for the sake of communication. Lots of websites change their language based on that info. I expect(ed) the same for moderators and InSims, although I'm not busy with LFS myself anymore. The online atmosphere is too tense nowadays to put it mildly.

Last edited by cargame.nl, Tue 20 May 2025, 16:43.

Quote from Scawen :

though I haven't looked up how to do that yet. I know such functions are available on the web server but our master server is not written in php.

It is also not tied specifically to PHP

https://www.ccoderun.ca/GeoLite2++/api/
https://github.com/maxmind/libmaxminddb ( https://github.com/orgs/maxmind/repositories?type=all )

Many more examples can be found of GeoIP implementations. Iptables (Linux firewall), webservers itself can have a GeoIP module, someone created a REST API based on JSON but this all goes beyond the potential use scope here I guess.

I fail to understand in what program LFS is being written though nowadays. Back in the days it was VS2015? Let me research for a sec. [..] Yeah, I dunno, those postings are too old but I'm sure there is some C solution to this. Grok (or others) can also assist with that.

---

crc32 has 4.2 billion combinations, just as much as IPv4 addresses (4.3 billion but not all are publicly used). The collision rate -ending up with the exact same crc32 from two different devices on the planet- should be low.

Last edited by cargame.nl, Mon 19 May 2025, 23:33.

Agreed. The internet landscape has changed a lot the last ten years. Fingerprinting -as this is being called on the web- has become a major thing. A salted hash of the GPU model and some other hardware static data would not be bad to provide. I still recommend to share GeoIP ISO code separately although it can be spoofed easily with VPN nowadays.

(by the way; the IP address can also be salt hashed.)

Last edited by cargame.nl, Sat 17 May 2025, 16:36.

Quote from Scawen :

I guess there is possibility of DDoS of a person's home? And maybe there is a hacking possibility depending if someone has left open ports?

Start living in fear is not really the way to go; (<= there is a hidden pixel here)

if I was the hoster of wikimedia and monitor your forumposting time behavior matching webserver logs then I would know your IP address. There are always ways.

As for the question of this topic, you have to research where this RFC was actually coming from

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/86589

A game? If it gets levelled down a sloppy physics engine would be sufficient.

(on the upside, I do not need to change any domain name)

Quote from super_gt :

I wonder if LFS was no hardware limit, would it be with the new physics already...

No, it has nothing to do with hardware limits. More to do with human brain limits.

We arrived in interesting times. Although I'm quite skeptical in the capabilities of complex tasks, "AI" already helped me a lot. AI between quotes because its not really AI, more like machine learning and pattern recognition but its helping nevertheless. And its only in its beginning stages

The bar of whats being called a trash computer will be different at the time of release. Half the gaming world freaked out about the system requirements of Far Cry 2 in 2008. You can now play it on mobile phone. I recommend to focus on real problems not artificial ones.

Quote from uf1 :

It's been almost a year since I opened this topic.

I see you are new, things go in decades around here

Quote from Androphp :

I have no knowledge on the subject and I will only offer a suggestion based on...

Servers are on a controlled location
LFS uses registered usernames for demo and licensed environment
as soon as a client goes online it needs to announce its IP address to this registration system
this should unlock the hardware or software firewall for this specific IP address on the online sim environment(s)
this IP address cannot be refreshed/updated on this registration system within interval X

Quote from CozmicDragon :

But the LFS master server won't last forever, either. And once it's gone, so are all the mods that were uploaded, too, since all of that is dependant on the master server. While you can technically still make offline mods with the editor since the testing function does let you store mods offline, you can't even unlock the game without the master server. What happens then?

I fully agree. Therefore I see more future into initiatives like CARLA. Which has nothing to do with racing at the moment but LFS best days concerning this sport are really long stuck into history so it doesnt really matter.

Sonicrealms racing team leader jasonmatthews vision also coming true

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oalMRccCbiY

Rudy van Buren – Official simulator test & development driver (Red Bull F1 / Max Verstappen Dutch news article)

type eventvwr in the Windows run textfield area (Windows menu)

https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/96121-Please-do-report-crashes

Quote from BorislavB :

when nobody will make championship or endurance race with them

chicken and egg situation. You cannot make a competition out of something which is undriveable

people like the progress, there is overall feeling of fun, life is about having fun

probably just a kid, take it easy

Quote from GT4_PL :

NO FEAR! it's worth just 150 pln. YOU COULD WATCH THIS LINK! Will you know.
https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/2059204#post2059204

Just 150 pln S3 license.

holy cow thats just browser rape

loading that many YT players in one page has serious consequences (probably just simply complete crashing on lower end systems).

---
Not that I expect that something will be done about it but I like just to report that this is a very big efficiency problem. (Which I solved on a different forum many moons ago by preloading the thumbnails and only initiating a player screen when the actual video is requested to be played).

Not really. In Trackmania all other vehicles are ghosts. In LFS it are all moving obstacles.

Quote from bayanofmansorofisky :

Yep there's issue with japan servers i guess, mods will not download (i always get redirecting to jp).. Now mods downloading after disabling redirect.

This whole redirecting thing should not happen at the client side to begin with. Its old fashioned. The (sub)domain should keep the same format and a geoDNS service should decide which server is the best to serve the request.

Then this whole redirect functionality can be removed, obsolete.

Quote from rane_nbg :

Our Airio can also show you the time for each sector and

Its relying on the same node information which LFS stores in .pth files. EQ Worry combined certain corners for custom layout tracks to complete some missing data. It would be much better to create a whole set of nodes which do not rely on a (modified) .pth file.

Actually this is the missing piece of the puzzle to get racing interesting again. At the time I had the idea to recreate nodes based on some external polygon track overlay being triggered by MCI data but this is a lot of work and I guess it introduces some lag.

twelve year old topic covering the same problem; https://www.lfs.net/forum/thread/74329-How-to-create-PTH-files

Last edited by cargame.nl, Fri 25 Aug 2023, 22:14.

Quote from Scawen :

you can switch off "Allow regional downloads" in Misc Options.

ideally this should be done automatically. Upon failure try another (fallback) option.