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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I’m actually doing two classes on alternating weeks, but they’re both

    “Here’s basic opsec principles and now we’ll talk about a bunch of tools that are useful specifically for activism in (against) the current political climate.”

    I’m doing a basic class where we’ll just try to help people organize in safer ways (Telegram is like the number one organizational platform right now). One of our goals there is to try to set specific projects / organizations up with dedicated Matrix servers and help them get non-technical people to use them.

    We’re also doing a more advanced class where we want to help people set up their own hardened laptops and (for those able to secure the hardware) GrapheneOS phones. That will probably be like Unit 2 of that class. We want to start with threat modeling and help people figure out the tools they specifically need to do their work.


  • UPDATE:

    I’ve had a chance to read through it.

    • It’s short, to the point, an easy read, covers a lot of bases. I think that makes it an excellent starting point for people at the beginning of their journey.
    • It doesn’t contain a lot of specific information, but I think it’s a good thing to have literature that’s just a general overview as a starting point.
    • Stylometry is far from an exact science (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11707938/). However, I bet this won’t stop the current administration from using it (and possibly falsely accusing people because of it), so it’s good to know about.
    • This will be extremely useful as I’m creating my lesson plan and I will probably pop it out to the class on day one as suggested reading.

    Overall: Great resource and very timely. Thank you.

    I would add, that if you’re planning to make a lot of use of tor, and run tor hidden services locally, syncing the Monero block chain over tor (possibly to multiple local machines) and solo mining on old slow computers is a great way to generate a bunch of random tor traffic.









  • I still think that planning for a villain to escape alive is risky unless the fight is totally rigged.

    You want the scene to play out like a classic horror movie bad guy, so you have to rig it like a movie script without making it seem rigged. I would run it that Alan has more than 18 hp, but as soon as he takes 18 pts of damage or more, one of his various escape mechanisms triggers. I would think of five or six before hand, and try to make them fun and creepy. A 3 use ring of Meld Into Stone, crude slide tunnels (where after Alan goes down, spear traps trigger, waiting to impale pursuers), he dumps a bag of live rattlesnakes at your feet and then runs away, he triggers a cave in between him and the party that spreads, so they have to retreat. Also, every time he comes back his AC is a little better and his attacks are a little stronger as he slowly collects all the murderer contingency equipment he has hidden all throughout his burrow.

    Although if I were running this, I might just have him attack again even if the players killed him.

    He’s basically this thing.










    • Theoretically Yes, if your Linux partition is not encrypted, any OS can read it. Password protecting it doesn’t do anything to conceal your data, just keeps people from logging into your system while Linux is booted. If this is a security / privacy related question, there is nothing to stop a program running under Windows from reading the data on your Linux partition except

    • Practically No, depending on the filesystem you chose (if you went with the default, it’s likely ext4 but could be something more exotic). Out of the box Windows lacks the software / drivers to read most Linux filesystems. If this is a “can I access my files” question, you probably need to install something like this to read your data from Windows. Note that the reverse is not true. Most distros other than light weight distros like Alpine are perfectly able to read the NTFS file system out of the box. Sometimes they can’t write to it unless you install additional tools (like OOTB Debian probably can’t, but I’m pretty sure OOTB Linux Mint can if you change a setting and IDK about OOTB Ubuntu / Fedora / Arch).

    The easiest way to share data between Windows and Linux is with a 3rd partition formatted to FAT32, as both Linux and Windows have no problem reading from / writing to it without additional software.

    EDIT: The other poster is absolutely correct. The modern way to do this is with exfat. What can I say? I’m a crusty old engineer.

    It’s very likely that adware / spyware / malware targeting Windows users will NOT be able to read Ext4 or other Linux filesystems, unless it’s specifically targeted to do so, so you do have that added “security through obscurity” protection.