@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

drwho

@drwho@beehaw.org

Living 20 minutes into the future. Eccentric weirdo. Virtual Adept. Time traveler. Thelemite. Technomage. Hacker on main. APT 3319. Not human. 30% software and implants. H+ - 0.4 on the Berram-7 scale. Furry adjacent. Pan/poly. Burnout.

I try to post as sincerely as possible.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

drwho ,
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Ask Amazon why they picked a name that was the same as a small publishing company that had been around for years and sued them into a smoking crater in the ground.

drwho ,
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Isn't this just a personal website with a links page?

What is the most appropriate way of tracking web traffic?

I have my personal blog, made with Hugo and hosted on GitHub pages. Initially I did not turn on any kind of web tracking / web analytics, because I do not like tracking at all. But I want to make my blog better and to achieve it, I need a feedback loop about traffic. For example, what are the most popular publications, or how...

drwho ,
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The folks who're recommending analysis of your site's access logs are correct. However, Github Pages doesn't have any such notion. You might have to go with the recommendations of moving stuff over to a VPS.

drwho ,
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It still strikes me as odd that anybody ever trusted a mega.

drwho ,
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Anybody have a VPN link into HK? It'd be easy to find out.

drwho ,
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The number of people who actually change their default settings is quite small. Those of us who have these discussions are a distinct minority in the sum userbase.

drwho ,
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And I agree with you.

drwho ,
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They've never been shy about saying this.

drwho ,
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They do this periodically. We saw it during Occupy, the Arab Spring, BLM, now Palestine (again). As a general rule, when folks go into the streets, the tighty righties start up the FUD.

There is a reason why spooks learn tradecraft - threat modeling, procedures, awareness, and techniques - more than they learn technology. It would behoove folks to to learn a little about that before hitting up the appstore.

drwho ,
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The fairest thing you can say about CrossFit is that it's a nicely unique string to filter out. :)

drwho ,
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XMPP is nice, but OMEMO is brittle.

drwho ,
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https://kolektiva.social/@Voline/112437280384669007

drwho ,
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One account, multiple devices logging into it (in my use case, personal laptop, work laptop, two phones).

drwho ,
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Unable to decrypt message

Unable to decrypt message

Unable to decrypt message

Unable to decrypt message

Unable to decrypt message

Unable to decrypt message

...

drwho ,
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It's a Google hosted service, which is arguably worse because they may as well be a nation-state unto themselves.

drwho ,
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I do not think so, no. However, Amazon is certainly big enough to be un-humorously compared to nation-states as well.

drwho ,
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Doable, but a huge pain in the ass because of conflicts in the protocol. I spent about a year trying to suss them out and come up with a fix but never figured it out.

drwho ,
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"nice" * 0.1

drwho ,
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He's trying to turn Linux into Windows NT. And Microsoft hired him as a reward for doing so.

drwho ,
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Nobody is using all of sudo's features because those features are for different use cases. Case in point, LDAP support. At home, pretty much nobody uses it. But on the job, where there are tens to hundreds of machines that someone might need, and they're all hooked into LDAP for centralized authentication management, it makes sense to have that built into sudo. Same with Kerberos support - at home, forget it, but in a campus environment where Kerberos (and possibly AFS) are part of the network, it makes sense.

drwho ,
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Points 0 and 1: None of this is new. This goes back to 2011 or 2012.

Point 2: If someone gets hold of your phone and unlocks it (meaning, they can interact with it), they have access to your Signal messages on-board. This is why additional security measures (not using biometrics, encrypting your phone natively) are recommended. If your phone is off and someone dumps the data from it, they get encrypted data.

drwho ,
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Yeah, nah.

drwho ,
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They start with Mac clients because those devs use Macs.

drwho ,
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Thing is, Protonmail has been telling people this from the very beginning. It's like it gets rediscovered every year or so when somebody else gets busted.

drwho ,
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Out of my toolkit:

  • Audio and video? yt-dlp, hands down.
  • Files? The plugin DownThemAll for Firefox.
drwho ,
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If you're going self-hosted with your stuff, have you consider a bookmarking webapp like Shaarli? You can even export your bookmarks from your browser and import them.

drwho ,
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They laid off 2/3 of their QA team. No wonder.

drwho ,
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In a journalistic context, a ZKP can't prove veracity of the information.

Let's say you have a hoax that you want to pull on a journo. You cook up something that looks legit, like the blueprints for a super secret stealth fighter or something. You find a way to apply a ZKP to that file (let's say an elaborate cryptographic hash). You leak the file to the journo. They ask for you to iterate on the ZKP a few hundred thousand times (which is on the low side for a ZKP) - easy to do, because you came up with it.

But that doesn't mean the file's legit. That's a separate problem, and not one that is technological in nature.

drwho ,
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Some of the bigger publishers were okay with it for a month or so. It smelled like a setup then, still smells like a setup.

drwho ,
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Looking at balancing might be right place to start. ref, https://archive.kernel.org/oldwiki/btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ.html#Help.21_I_ran_out_of_disk_space.21

You might want to start by rebalancing by percentages and not all at once. If nothing else it'll tell you much sooner if you're on the right track or not. Something like sudo btrfs balance start -dusage=20 -musage=20 /mnt/disk3 to work on only blocks that are 20% full or less. That should coaleace them into single data blocks and free up some others.

drwho ,
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Have you tried a rebalance? What's up over there?

drwho ,
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Sounds like they want to crack down on seedboxes.

drwho ,
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For non-profits (like 501(c)(3)'s) that's not unusual. Non-profits are more like specialized tools for the board of directors than like companies.

Source: First ten years of my career were at non-profits.

drwho ,
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Them's who has the gold, makes the rules.

drwho ,
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Naomi Wu was right.

drwho ,
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https://gizmodo.com/23andme-is-selling-your-data-but-not-how-you-think-1794340474

https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/23andme-sells-anonymous-dna-data-to-drug-company-for-20-million/article_ea59fe96-79df-11ee-8473-47193d62656b.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-30/23andme-will-give-gsk-access-to-consumer-dna-data

https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/377206-23andme-accused-of-having-fire-sale-of-customer-dna-data

The usual warnings about "anonymized data" and "data aggregation" apply.

drwho ,
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People don’t use turn signals, speed through residential neighborhoods, change lanes in the middle of intersections, it’s insane.

It's been like that since I was a kid in the 80's.

drwho ,
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Hot on the heels of piracy spiking when streaming media libraries were being pared down. This reads like a shot against seedboxes.

drwho ,
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Is it not kept in a git repository?

NotTheOnlyGamer , to Fediverse
@NotTheOnlyGamer@kbin.social avatar

Is it just Kbin, or does every fediverse service have the issue of being totally swarmed with bots advertising illegal pharmaceuticals? Is this just the result of limited moderation?

drwho ,
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I haven't seen it on any of the instances I hang out on.

drwho ,
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Have you tried a smaller card? 32GB was pretty well unheard of, even in the DOS 6.22 days.

It's been a very long time since I've thought about stuff like this. It reminds me of when I was trying to get a 1GB drive working on a 486 when I was in college. The drive wasn't seen (just like you're seeing). What I had to do was install the manufacturer's backwards compatibility software (it was for systems that were too old to have BIOSes that recognized drives that big) so that the BIOS, when it probed the hard drive would somehow load a TSR that added support for large hard drives.

Looking up the card in question, it loads the XTIDE BIOS, and the card has "Select XT-CF(PIO) Mode/Base IO 300h" silkscreened on the back. Zooming in on the front of the card, it doesn't look like you can set that on the DIP switch block for some reason. I don't see any documentation for download from the site. Did any docs come with the card?

drwho ,
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There has to be a way of getting FreeDOS onto the SD card. Way back when, there used to be ways of getting a floppy disk (and hard drive, I did it a few times) bootable with the SYS command to write the boot files to the right places. That was MS-DOS, though.

Hmm.

This article seems like it could be helpful.. It's for creating a disk image, not a drive, but the commands should work if you substitute in the SD card you want to use.

Please note that I haven't actually tried any of this. I'm at work and trying to pull together what scraps of knowledge I still have from my DOS days into something that seems coherent. This might not work, so please treat it as kicking some ideas around over coffee right now!

ms-sys basically does the same thing that format /s and sys a: used to do back in the days of DOS. That makes a drive bootable. So, you'd partition and format your SD card as VFAT or FAT32 from your box (I don't know if you have a Linux box or a Windows machine, or what). I'm guessing it'd be something like this:

sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

# New DOS disk label
o

# New partition.
n
p
1


t
c
a
1
w

Format the partition on the SD card:

sudo mkfs.vfat -c -v -F32 /dev/mmcblk0p1

Then use ms-sys to write the MBR to the SD card.

sudo ms-sys --mbrdos /dev/mmcblk0p1

Mount the SD card. Download FreeDOS and uncompress it. I think that would be FD13-FullUSB.zip. There doesn't seem to be a downloadable archive of "Here's all the stuff that's in the disk image," just the disk image. Some gymnastics do seem to be required to mount it:

sudo losetup /dev/loop0 FD13FULL.img
sudo fdisk -l /dev/loop0

Disk /dev/loop0: 512 MiB, 536870912 bytes, 1048576 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device       Boot Start     End Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/loop0p1 *       63 1048319 1048257 511.8M  e W95 FAT16 (LBA)

The gymnastics in question have to do with mounting a partition of the disk image, because you can't just set up the disk image and manipulate it like a disk device. In this case, it's calculating where to mount the FreeDOS partition: sector size * first sector == 512 * 63 == 32256

sudo losetup -d /dev/loop0
sudo losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 FD13FULL.img
sudo mount /dev/loop0 /mnt

From there, it looks like you'll have to look at /mnt/setup.bat to figure out how to do a manual setup of FreeDOS on the SD card. There is also a /mnt/FDOS-x86/SETUP.BAT file that I think will have to be read through to get the process figured out.

Again, this is all theoretical. I've no idea if it'll work without tinkering with it on real hardware. It's as close to figuring out how to do a manual installation as I have time for right now.

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

Thanking? No. That would be impolitic.

Quietly using? They'd be foolish not to.

What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

I'm working on a some materials for a class wherein I'll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we're including a section we're calling "foot guns". Basically it's ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers....

drwho ,
@drwho@beehaw.org avatar

I was working on my final project in a class in undergrad on the campus VAX. VMS had a versioned filesystem, which is to say that every time you saved a file (like your source code in LSE), it would create a new file (e.g., FINAL.COB;23). I was getting confused by all of the versions of my project so I decided to clean some of the older ones out:

DELETE FINAL.COB;1*

DELETE FINAL.COB;2*

I had to run to the data center the VAX was in halfway across campus to beg the sysadmins to restore $STUDENTS:[DRWHO.CS1337]FINAL.COB;* from the hourly tape backup (at least there was that) and re-debug the last two functions so I could hand it in before midnight. Lesson learned: Don't worry about cleaning up your workspace until after you're done.

drwho ,
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That's more than a reasonable period of time to wait.

Can you run a SMART check on the drive from a liveCD? memtest86?

Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract ( www.nbcnews.com )

"Google issued a stern warning to its employees, with the company’s vice president of global security, Chris Rackow, saying, “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies, think again,” according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC."

drwho ,
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I think yinz missed the sarcasm in the comment you're replying to.

drwho ,
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It'll be fun filtering all the color codes out of build logs, that's for sure. :/

drwho ,
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Madness!

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