Recenty finished:
Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline pretty great, maybe a bit too many pop culture references. Spielberg is making a movie about it, not a clue how he's going to pull that off.
The Three Body Problem (trilogy), by Liu Cixin really looking forward to book no. 3 in september. It's by a Chinese author and I thought I might not like it because of that, but these books are awesome.
Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson, basically a way more badass version of the Imitation Game. If you're just slightly into programming or cryptography, this is a great read.
Seveneves also by Neil Stephenson First 2/3 of the book are great, the last third is OK. Long read, but totally worth it if you like world ending apocalypse/sci-fi stories.

Currently reading a Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking

I like cheat feed (but I'm biased). CS:GO events are casted with no delay and despite some great observers they regularly miss flashy/important plays. It's such a shame to see multiple kill feed lines in the top right while in-eyes with someone doing nothing.

CS:GO has big live audiences watching the teams on a stage, so delays to enable cheat feed don't make sense.
We don't have that so I think we just gain things by using it properly without any downsides.

ikr, I apologize to the player of the ETF2L match tonight that mentioned this on twitch chat after the match and its premature STV death.
Just because the previous 9 times players were messing with rcon, I shouldn't have assumed it would be more of the same tonight xD

Removed the default sourcemod plugin "nextmap" from all servers in all regions, when combined with SOAP DM this would lead to unplanned map changes when the map timer ran out.

Casual mode is a pleasant surprise

Could have fooled me.

You have an idea and now you "just" need people to build it for free, genius!

Only the medic had mostly moved out of the way (medic's client side) when he shot. His game predicted the medic to be there (based on his typical ping and both their movements), but when the server looked at the actual positions and shots he mostly missed. Now that seems unfair, and it probably is, because he hit those shots on his screen.

But consider the medic's perspective, he sees most or maybe even all pellets miss him, it isn't fair either to have that register as a meatshot.

You can't have both perfectly fair hitreg (for the shooter) and perfectly fair 'dodge'-reg (for the one being shot at) in a game with lag compensation.

If you want to have perfect hitreg you need 0 latency or 0 prediction (including movement/mouse-look!). John Carmack wrote about QuakeWorld's netcode way back in the 90s. He settled on instant movement/mouse-look and delayed shots, requiring you to lead your targets in that game. http://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm
Half-life and later Valve games went with lag compensation. Giving you instant movement, mouse-look and shots

That's what Overwatch does. The downside is you might get hit by a shot you actually dodged.

It's not.

Client side prediction of server side events will lead to errors on the client side. In that youtube video of noMsheep, he hits 2 good meatshots on the medic, at least on his screen. Meanwhile the medic actually moved out of the way of most of those shots (on the medic's screen).
The gameserver reconstructs where noMsheep shot and where that medic really should have been on noMsheep's screen, causing something looking like a 100+ meatshot doing only 10 damage.

Things will look worse with lower server FPS / tick rate and higher pings.

Due to a lack of paying customers I will not be renewing three machines (2xFR, 1xDE) in the EU region. For now the EU site has no servers available for free, just for paying customers.

I'm sad there's only one person (afaik) in the comp TF2 community with this kind of relation with Valve. I'm glad it's b4nny.

An update on the changes to serveme.tf:

1. All new logfiles viewable on serveme.tf and in the downloadable zipfile automatically have 0.0.0.0 instead of real IP addresses.
   
2. All older logfiles already stored on serveme.tf have had the IPs in them replaced with 0.0.0.0. These are the logs you see when you click the "logs.tf" button for your reservation.
   
3. All older logfiles stored in the downloadable zipfiles (300GB of zips) are being removed from the zipfile, the demo will not be removed. This is taking a while because there are 30k zipfiles to go through.

If I am to believe the person that built this tool, and I'm leaning to believing him, it's to find and catch cheaters/alts on TF2Center.

Not really, I ran a VPN experiment when a whole bunch of matches got DDoSed last year. Now I was cheating a little bit by running the VPN service on the game server machine, so routing was identical for the players when comparing VPN and no-VPN. But the encryption didn't add any noticeable delay or ping, at the rates TF2 uses I wouldn't expect a modern processor to have any troubles handling that.

No, that person guessed/calculated the zip file URLs and downloaded files not intended for him. I agree with you it's much better to filter the IPs from the logs. That way only a person with RCON can get the player IPs.

Because "rcon status" already gives whoever made the server the power to get the IPs of all connected players, this is true for any server you play on.
Giving everyone playing in the reservation the logs just leveled the playing field.

The US servers have protection through NFOservers standard anti-DDoS protection.

All my French servers are hosted by OVH, which is one of the few EU hosters to offer cheap (free) anti-DDoS on all their servers. However, by default, on their budget and standard range servers, the DDoS protection is off until an attack is detected, this can take 2 minutes. BeretBrigade and FromageBrigade are in their budget/standard range.
BisouBrigade is one of their gameserver-optimized dedicated servers. It comes with a different kind of anti-DDoS that's always active and also allows you to configure an upstream firewall, so you can prevent most DDoS traffic from ever even reaching your server. It just gets filtered by OVH's upstream routers which they boast can handle up to tens or hundres of gigabits per second.

This same anti-DDoS type by OVH is also what's keeping TF2Center running atm. Cloudflare protects their website, but OVH's anti-DDoS protects their Mumble, websocket server and log listener ports from 300k packets/sec attacks.

Depends on your ISP. For mine, I can power off the modem, change my router's MAC address and power on the modem again to get a new IP.
For some just power cycling the modem can be enough, or leaving the modem off for 30 minutes before turning it on again might work.

A VPN can increase your ping yes, it can also lower your ping if your VPN has better routing to the gameserver interestingly. If you pick a VPN on the route to the gameserver, or very close by the gameserfver, it can be very competitive ping-wise.

The French servers on serveme.tf offer some DDoS protection. BeretBrigade and FromageBrigade have protection that can take a minute or two to kick in (during which you'd already be disconnected from the gameserver due to a timeout). BisouBrigade is the only one with DDoS protection that's always active and that actually seems to work.