𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

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 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍 

Ceterum Lemmi necessitates reactiones

  • 5 Posts
  • 441 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2022

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  • Yeah. SimpleX has a similar problem, because it’s basically creating a bunch of 1:1 connections between everyone to preserve anonymity - IIRC (I freely admit I could be misremembering this). As I understood, it’s a decent limit, though - more than the 7-12 friend/family group you’d reasonably trust in a chat group.

    I did not consider this a blocker - who’s using encrypted chat for large groups? Large group chats are fundamentally insecure; is the use case about anonymity, not encryption?



  • Amazon has a non-existent customer support, so you may have limited options.

    If they had customer support, I’d suggest contacting them and tell them to either refund, or else you’d give them the ID immediately followed by a GDPR request to purge your data. That might have gotten some movement, because those GDPR requests have the force of law, and are also a fair PITA for Amazon. However, there’s no way to give them a shot across the bow. I think your options are:

    • process a charge-back, as someone else suggested, which might result in an Amazon ban
    • take the loss (that’s entirely your call, regardless of anyone else’s opinion)
    • give them the ID, get your refund
    • you can still initiate a GDPR purge request. I’m going to guess it’s going to result in a block, but maybe not. You might be able to recreate your account

    The happy news is that you are protected by GDPR. Many of us are not, and don’t even have the option to demand they purge the information.


  • Second this.

    • message delivery can be iffy
    • VoIP works well
    • you connect with people like a normal app that isn’t going to scare your family off, not trying to get them to put in GUIDS
    • it has all the creature comforts, attached/embedded photos, markup, attached files, attach pictures, share your location for 10 minutes (I’m on my way), history editing, deleting
    • it has concurrent multi device support, so you can get messages on your phone, tablet, and desktop at the same time
    • There’s a full desktop client (Electron, i think 🤮 but it works)
    • the dev team is small and they seem to like to work more on features than user issues. development is slow
    • multi-person groups work fine

    It’s still the best E2E messaging system I’ve found; the only one my mom, wife, and sisters-in-law reliably use.

    I just want them to focus on fixing the sketchy DHT that seems to cause every problem.



  • My recommendation is to put all of the variables in an environment file, and use systemd’s EnvironmentFile (in [Service] to point to it.

    One of my backup service files (I back up to disks and cloud) looks like this:

    [Unit]
    Description=Backup to MyUsbDrive
    Requires=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
    After=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
    
    [Service]
    EnvironmentFile=/etc/backup/environment
    Type=simple
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/restic backup --tag=prefailure-2 --files-from ${FILES} --exclude-file ${EXCLUDES} --one-file-system
    
    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.timer
    

    FILES is a file containing files and directories to be backed up, and is defined in the environment file; so is EXCLUDES, but you could simply point restic at the directory you want to back up instead.

    My environment file looks essentially like

    RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/MyUsbDrive/backup
    RESTIC_PASSWORD=blahblahblah
    KEEP_DAILY=7
    KEEP_MONTHLY=3
    KEEP_YEARLY=2
    EXCLUDES=/etc/backup/excludes
    FILES=/etc/backup/files
    

    If you’re having trouble, start by looking at how you’re passing in the password, and whether it’s quoted properly. It’s been a couple of years since I had this issue, but at one point I know I had spaces in a passphrase and had quoted the variable, and the quotes were getting passed in verbatim.

    My VPS backups are more complex and get their passwords from a keystore, but for my desktop I keep it simple.









  • E2E usually suffers from the same thing HTTP does: the MITM might not be able to read what you’re saying, but they know who you’re saying it to, and they may know in what context. This is a lot of information that can be used in profiling.

    So you end up with systems like SimpleX, where everyone has a different UID for every contact, but that has its own problems, as anyone who’s used systems like that are aware. We haven’t really solved making that a good user experience for messaging; I don’t see it translating to broader social media any time soon.

    Nostr has some really good specs and tooling that neatly addresses these topics, including great cryptography support, signing, ad-hoc IDs, and an entirely voluntary simple naming lookup; it doesn’t exactly solve zooko’s triangle, but it provides a toolset sufficient to mix and match characteristics for whatever your threat model is. Sadly, Nostr is utterly dominated by the crypto crowd (and is associated with some controversial personalities), and even if you’re not cryptocurrency-hostile, it’s a really dull echo chamber with little other content that has prevented people who might otherwise build interesting platforms in it from doing so.

    Mastodon was around for ages before (the in practice centralized) Bluesky; why did it take Bluesky to open a mass exodus from X?

    This is a hard problem to solve. Throwing E2E at it doesn’t make it easier; it’s just tossing a buzzword in.






  • solder one destroy a PCB yourself

    FTFY.

    In my hands, a soldering iron is not a finely tuned instrument, it’s a hand grenade. The US government classifies me with a soldering iron as a WMD. Physicists are trying to determine commercial applications for my ability to instantly coat a PCB in a layer of solder with a single drop. The ATF added a special rule requiring a background check for me to purchase a soldering iron.

    I can paint eyelashes on D&D miniatures, but I bear some ancient curse when it comes to solder. In all seriousness, I’ve literally destroyed hundreds of dollars of equipment attempting the most simple soldering task; it’s cheaper for me to find someone competent selling already soldered solutions than to ruin them myself. I no longer try.