cypherpunks

cypherpunks , 5 days ago

and later it will turn out that the AI solution was actually two clickworkers in a trenchcoat

cypherpunks Mod , 12 days ago

A daily ISO of Debian testing or Ubuntu 24.04 (noble) beta from prior to the first week of April would be easiest, but those aren't archived anywhere that I know of. It didn't make it in to any stable releases of any Debian-based distros.

But even when you have a vulnerable system running sshd in a vulnerable configuration, you can't fully demo the backdoor because it requires the attacker to authenticate with their private key (which has not been revealed).

But, if you just want to run it and observe the sshd slowness that caused the backdoor to be discovered, here are instructions for installing the vulnerable liblzma deb from snapshot.debian.org.

cypherpunks Mod , 12 days ago

xzbot from Anthony Weems enables to patch the corrupted liblzma to change the private key used to compare it to the signed ssh certificate, so adding this to your instructions might enable me to demonstrate sshing into the VM :)

Fun :)

Btw, instead of installing individual vulnerable debs as those kali instructions I linked to earlier suggest, you could also point debootstrap at the snapshot service so that you get a complete system with everything as it would've been in late March and then run that in a VM... or in a container. You can find various instructions for creating containers and VMs using debootstrap (eg, this one which tells you how to run a container with systemd-nspawn; but you could also do it with podman or docker or lxc). When the instructions tell you to run debootstrap, you just want to specify a snapshot URL like https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20240325T212344Z/ in place of the usual Debian repository url (typically https://deb.debian.org/debian/).

cypherpunks OP , 13 days ago

VPNs have several purposes but the big two are hiding your traffic from attackers on the local area network and concealing your location from sites that you visit.

If you're using a VPN on wifi at a cafe and anyone else at the cafe can run a rogue DHCP server (eg, with an app on their phone) and route all of your traffic through them instead of through the VPN, I think most VPN users would say the purpose of the VPN has been defeated.

cypherpunks OP , 13 days ago

The vast majority of LANs do not do anything to prevent rogue DHCP servers.

Just to be clear, a "DHCP server" is a piece of software which can run anywhere (including a phone). Eg, if your friend's phone has some malware and you let them use the wifi at your house, someone could be automatically doing this attack against your laptop while they're there.

cypherpunks OP , 13 days ago

Sounds like it requires that your DHCP server is hostile, which is actually a very small (though nonzero, yes) number of the attack scenarios that VPNs are designed for

In most situations, any host on the LAN can become a DHCP server.

“there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user’s VPN runs on Linux or Android” is a very funny way of saying “in practice applies only to Windows and iOS”.

No. There are certainly ways of mitigating it, but afaict no Linux distros have done so yet.

cypherpunks , 20 days ago

See https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling for a list of many similar things. A few of them automatically setup letsencrypt certs for unique subdomains so you can have end-to-end HTTPS.

cypherpunks , 18 days ago

I have a device without public IP, AFAIK behind NAT, and a server. If I use bore to open a port through my server and host a game, and my friends connect to me via IP, will we have big ping (as in, do packets travel to the server first, then to me) or low ping (as in, do packets travel straight to me)?

No, you will have "big ping". bore (and everything on that page i linked) is strictly for tunneling which means all packets are going through the tunnel server.

Instead of tunneling, you can try various forms of hole punching for NAT traversal which, depending on the NAT implementation, will work sometimes to have a direct connection between users. You can use something like tailscale (and if you want to run your own server, headscale) which will try its best to punch a hole for a p2p connection and will only fall back to relaying through a server if absolutely necessary.

cypherpunks , 18 days ago (edited 18 days ago)

I do have wireguard on my server as well, I guess it’s similar to what tailscale does?

Tailscale uses wireguard but adds a coordination server to manage peers and facilitate NAT traversal (directly when possible, and via a intermediary server when it isn't).

If your NAT gateway isn't rewriting source port numbers it is sometimes possible to make wireguard punch through NAT on its own if both peers configure endpoints for eachother and turn on keepalives.

Do you know if Yggdrasil does something similar and if we exchange data directly when playing over Yggdrasil virtual IPv6 network?

From this FAQ it sounds like yggdrasil does not attempt to do any kind of NAT traversal so two hosts can only be peers if at least one of them has an open port. I don't know much about yggdrasil but from this FAQ answer it sounds like it runs over TCP (so using TCP applications means two layers of TCP) which is not going to be conducive to a good gaming experience.

Samy Kamkar's amazing pwnat tool might be of interest to you.

cypherpunks , 17 days ago

You can use Wireshark to see the packets and their IP addresses.

https://www.wireshark.org/download.html

https://www.wireshark.org/docs/

A word of warning though: finding out about all the network traffic that modern software sends can be deleterious to mental health 😬

cypherpunks , 25 days ago

Mattermost isn't e2ee, but if the server is run by someone competent and they're allowed to see everything anyway (eg it's all group chat, and they're in all the groups) then e2ee isn't as important as it would be otherwise as it is only protecting against the server being compromised (a scenario which, if you're using web-based solutions which do have e2ee, also leads to circumvention of it).

If you're OK with not having e2ee, I would recommend Zulip over Mattermost. Mattermost is nice too though.

edit: oops, i see you also want DMs... Mattermost and Zulip both have them, but without e2ee. 😢

I could write a book about problems with Matrix, but if you want something relatively easy and full featured with (optional, and non-forward-secret) e2ee then it is probably your best bet today.

cypherpunks OP , 27 days ago (edited 27 days ago)

What’s the old saying, Ben Franklin said it if I remember right?

Those who would give up freedom in exchange for security deserve neither and will lose both.

The original phrasing was "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." but Franklin didn't mean what most people quoting it today assume that he meant. (The author of that article is contemptible imo, being the sort of person who often writes things similar to the NYT Opinion piece which this thread is about, but I think his analysis of this particular quote is probably correct. You can read Franklin's original use of the phrase in context here.)

cypherpunks OP , 1 month ago

"First-term state Rep. Roger Wilder, R-Denham Springs, who sponsored the child labor measure and owns Smoothie King franchises across the Deep South, said he filed the bill in part because children want to work without having to take lunch breaks."

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-children-yearn-for-the-mines

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

Tuta is most likely a honeypot, and in any case it is pseudo-open source so it's offtopic in this community.

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

Title card from Star Trek: Voyager S02E01, with the crew of Voyager standing around a 1936 Ford truck in their cargo bay. The episode title "The 37's" is at the top left of the image.

cypherpunks Mod , 1 month ago

Ok, I just stickied this post here, but I am not going to manage making a new one each week :)

I am an admin at lemmy.ml and was actually only added as a mod to this community so that my deletions would federate (because there was a bug where non-mod admin deletions weren't federating a while ago). The other mods here are mostly inactive and most of the mod activity is by me and other admins.

Skimming your history here, you seem alright; would you like to be a mod of /c/linux@lemmy.ml ?

cypherpunks Mod , 1 month ago

Ok, you and @d3Xt3r are both mods of /c/linux@lemmy.ml now. Thanks!

cypherpunks Mod , 1 month ago

As of today, NixOS (like most distros) has reverted to a version slightly prior to the release with the Debian-or-Redhat-specific sshd backdoor which was inserted into xz just two months ago. However, the saboteur had hundreds of commits prior to the insertion of that backdoor, and it is very likely that some of those contain subtle intentional vulnerabilities (aka "bugdoors") which have not yet been discovered.

As (retired) Debian developer Joey Hess explains here, the safest course is probably to switch to something based on the last version (5.3.1) released prior to Jia Tan getting push access.

Unfortunately, as explained in this debian issue, that is not entirely trivial because dependents of many recent pre-backdoor potentially-sabotaged versions require symbol(s) which are not present in older versions and also because those older versions contain at least two known vulnerabilities which were fixed during the multi-year period where the saboteur was contributing.

After reading Xz format inadequate for long-term archiving (first published eight years ago...) I'm convinced that migrating the many projects which use XZ today (including DPKG, RPM, and Linux itself) to an entirely different compression format is probably the best long-term plan. (Though we'll always still need tools to read XZ archives for historical purposes...)

cypherpunks , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Thanks. They are no longer a mod of this community. (I wrote this comment to them and they did not reply.)

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

Opensource just means that the source code is available, FOSS however implies that you’re free to modify and redistribute the program

Incorrect. "Open Source" also means that you are free to modify and redistribute the software.

If the source code is merely available but not free to modify and/or redistribute, then it is called source-available software.

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

Not necessarily true - that right to modify/redistribute depends on the exact license being applied.

If you don't have the right to modify and redistribute it (and to do so commercially) then it does not meet the definitions of free software or open source.

For example, the Open Watcom Public License claims to be an “open source” license, but it actually doesn’t allow making modifications.

The Sybase Open Watcom Public License does allow making modifications, and distributing modified versions. The reason why the FSF has not approved it is that it requires you to publish source code even if you only wanted to run your modified version yourself and didn't actually want to distribute anything to anyone. (The Watcom license is one of the few licenses which is approved by OSI but not FSF. You can see the other licenses which are approved by one but not the other by sorting this table.)

The FSF's own AGPL license is somewhat similar, but it only imposes the requirement if you run the software for someone else over a network. (Neither of these requirements are likely to be enforceable by copyright law, as I explained in my comment about the AGPL in the thread which this thread is about...)

This is also why we specifically have the terms “free software” or “FOSS” which imply they you are indeed allowed to modify and redistribute.

I would recommend reading this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

I would recommend that you re-read that, because it actually explains that the two terms refer to essentially the same category of software licenses (while it advocates for using the term free software to emphasize the philosophical aspects of those licenses).

cypherpunks , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Hi @haui_lemmy,

fyi icymi due to this thread someone posted this other thread asking "Is it appropriate for someone to be a mod here when they don't understand open source, and insult users in the community?".

I don't have time to read all ~200 comments in these two threads, but I do think that being a moderator of /c/opensource@lemmy.ml requires knowing what FOSS is to be able to remove posts promoting things which are not.

Hopefully the replies here (again, I have not read even half of this thread...) have made you better informed?

In case you haven't yet, I would highly recommend that you read these two documents (you can start with their wikipedia articles and follow links from there to the actual documents):

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

In short, the answer to your question ("Is there a License that requires the user to donate if they make revenue?") is yes, there are many such licenses, but they are definitively not FOSS licenses (despite what some people who haven't read the above definitions might try to tell you).

I won't enumerate any of the non-FOSS licenses which attempt such a thing, because I recommend against the use of such licenses or software licensed under them.

BTW, I saw you wrote in another comment:

By now I get that FOSS mostly implies free work for corporations. I‘ll just go with agpl to ensure they get nothing from my work.

While corporations benefiting from FOSS while failing to financially support it at all is extremely commonplace, I vehemently disagree that that is what FOSS "mostly implies". In fact, the opposite is more common: the vast majority of free software users are not paying anything to the companies who have paid for an enormous amount of the development of it. A few hundred companies pay tens of thousands of individual developers to develop and maintain the Linux kernel, for instance.

Regarding the second sentence of yours that I quoted above, in case you haven't understood this yet: the AGPL does not prevent commercial use of your work. If you write a web app and license it AGPL, you are giving me permission to run it, modify it, redistribute my modified version, and to charge money for it without giving you anything.

What the AGPL does, and why many companies avoid it, is impose the requirement that I (the recipient of your software) offer the source code to your software (and any modifications I made to it) under that same license not only to anyone I distribute it to but also to anyone using the software over a network on my server.

If the software were licensed GPL instead of AGPL, I would only be required to offer GPL-licensed source code to people when I distribute the software to them. Eg, I could improve a GPL web app and it is legal to not share my improvements (to the server-side code) with anyone at all because the software is not being distributed - it is just running on my server.

By imposing requirements about how you run the software (eg, if you put an AGPL notice in the UI, I am not allowed to remove it) the AGPL is more than just a copyright license: violations of the GPL and most FOSS licenses are strictly copyright violations and can be enforced as such, but violating the part of the AGPL where it differs from the GPL would not constitute copyright infringement because no copying is taking place. Unlike almost every other FOSS license, the AGPL is both a copyright license and a end-user license agreement.

For this reason, many people have misgivings about the AGPL. However, if you want to scare companies away from using your software at all (and/or require them to purchase a different license from you to use it under non-AGPL terms, which is only possible if you require all contributors to assign copyright or otherwise give you permission to dual-license their work) while still using a license which the FOSS community generally accepts as FOSS... AGPL is probably your best bet.

HTH.

p.s. I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc etc :)

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

that was predictable

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

that nostr link doesn't load for me but this is the url that the post in the screenshot is ultimately linking to: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/eu-cash-cap-and-ban-on-anonymous-crypto-payments-results-in-financial-paternalism/

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

You act like it is Google’s fault that someone found questionable software on the phone they got from Rent-a-center or Alibaba.

Google made the app.

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.devicelock (via this comment 15 hours ago...)

cypherpunks , 1 month ago

So then send the URL to the play store page from the app posted in ops photo. Go ahead, waiting.

lol, what? i did, in another comment, shortly before you posted this. here it is again: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.devicelock

cypherpunks OP , 2 months ago

farmin techniques

"it aint much, but it's honest work" farmer meme

cypherpunks OP , 2 months ago

protects you from any

i think "mitigates the" would be more accurate here

cypherpunks , 2 months ago

It’s a mild pain and definitely not what we were promised

I think this is precisely what the ActivityPub model of federation promised, actually 😅

cypherpunks , 2 months ago

It sure is convenient for law enforcement and others to have the ability to immediately get the IP addresses of all visitors to a specific URL. (They just need to circumvent the OHTTP by asking fastly and google to collude...)

cypherpunks OP , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

post-quantum cryptography can be compared with a remedy against the illness that nobody has, without any guarantee that it will work. The closest analogy in the history of medicine is snake oil.

Good on them for saying that.

A "remedy against the illness that nobody has" is a good analogy, but it is important to note that it's an illness which there is a consensus we are likely to eventually have and a remedy that there is good reason to believe will be effective.

It isn't a certainty that there will ever be a cryptographically relevant post-quantum computer, and it also isn't a certainty that any of the post-quantum algorithms (as with most classical cryptography) which exist today won't turn out to be breakable even by yesterday's computers. The latter point is why it's best to deploy post-quantum cryptography in a hybrid construction such that the system remains secure even if one of the primitives turns out to be breakable.

That said, I think it is totally wrong to call PQC snake oil because that term in the context of cryptography specifically means that a system is making dishonest claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil_(cryptography)

cypherpunks OP , 2 months ago

they basically agree with you

yes, I realize :)

I should've made clear in my comment that, aside from a bit of imperfect English and incorrect use of the term snake oil, I think this is an excellent blog post.

cypherpunks Mod , 2 months ago

+1 to ctrl-alt-fsomething (start at f1 and go up to move through the different virtual terminals). once in a while there are graphics problems which this will fix.

If you're using GNOME Shell on X you can reload the shell (and all of its extensions) with alt-f2 and then in the "Run a command" dialog that appears type r and hit enter. Unfortunately this doesn't work in GNOME on Wayland.

cypherpunks OP Mod , 2 months ago

So it will be only Systemd

what? no. did you read the linked post? Some desktop environments will have more functionality and work better if you do use it, but (for now, at least) you can still run even GNOME under OpenRC if you want.

cypherpunks , 2 months ago

Nelson Muntz "ha, ha" meme

i wonder how waydroid is these days. i still haven't gotten around to trying it but I just looked again and I see its downloads are still hosted on Sourceforge 😖

apparently there was a proof-of-concept of it working on windows before Microsoft's thing that died today had even been released. if many people actually used Microsoft's thing I imagine some will turn their attention to waydroid now.

cypherpunks , 2 months ago

💯 points for the name.

They should make it use the sosumi sound for something so that maybe they can get sued by Apple Inc too 😂

Poor choice of git hosts though; won't gitlab.com take down anything that a big company asks them to?

cypherpunks , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

two weeks later: GitLab confirms it’s removed Suyu, a fork of Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu

sad to see their new git hosting is behind cloudflare 😢

cypherpunks Mod , 2 months ago

screencap of Dulmur and Lucsly from the Department of Temporal Investigations, in DS9 S05E06 "Trials and Tribble-ations"

cypherpunks , 2 months ago

thanks!

cc: @grunfink @firefly