Skip Navigation

Posts
23
Comments
195
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I don't know if this applies directly, but in my early days of hosting a server for fun, I installed a telnet server because my phone didn't have SSH at the time. I forgot to close it when i was done and someone got in and installed a password sniffer. This was a Slackware box, IIRC. My only indication that there was a problem was that the "." & ".." directories didn't appear from an "ls -Alf". I pulled the network cable and booted to a boot image and discovered that many key system utilities were replaced with imposters that would mask that there was an intruder. The '"ps", "ls" and other utils were symlinked to the "..." dir in /usr/local/lib.

    I didn't trust anything on that server and nuked it. Now, anything that's internet facing is built from ansible and the config is stored in a repo and the repo is backed up on a drive that's physically disconnected except when backing up. I've messed up the initrd from time to time and it's usuall easier for me to reimage than try to fix it.

  • Thank you for a thoughtful post with citations and quotes. After reading the whole page by Mozilla, it seems like they're taking steps to show advertisers how they can get what they want while preserving people's privacy. I can live with that. They're trying to build a win-win scenario.

    I'll still block ads. I'll still reject cookies, but I feel like it's a reasonable feature THAT I CAN SHUT OFF. I'm still in control of my browser! Great!

  • Look at the strangler pattern in microswrvice architecture. Applying this to your scenario, set up a front end to YouTube, cache the results locally (probably host in a place that allows it). Also host videos from other platforms like peertube. Once you have a lot of users, slowly prioritize "free" videos over YT content.

    It's not likely to happen, but it's the pattern that FB uses to present news. First they showed a link to the story and you'd click through, then they required more of the story, then when all were hooked, they demanded the whole story to be displayed, effectively stealing all the users and the ability to advertise.

  • Only managers get a phone. You can expense $5 of your bill each month if you spend over a certain number of hours performing after hours support. My app is stable, so I don't exceed the minimum, but I need to carry my laptop around now so I can at least log in to see the ticket and route it to the correct group.

    Also, I've been interviewing. 🤞

  • I feel like everyone's missing the point. Even 20 minutes a week is almost a day a year of your life sitting at a charger. I fill up my gas tank once a week and it takes maybe 5 minutes which is 4 hours a year that I spend feeding my car, staring at the stupid advertisements for a bacon-egg-and-cheese cinnamon roll covered in maple syrup or whatever other impulse items lie within the gas station. 5 minutes isn't enough to do anything whereas if I plan for 20 minutes, I'm going to go get a tea or something.

    On the other hand, something we can all agree is a waste of time is, "how many hours of your life have been/will be spent sitting at a traffic light?"

  • I know of a guy who had good intentions. He just wanted to make Germany great again. I can't remember his name right now, but IIRC, it didn't end up being good for a whole lot of people.

  • I had one from Sony a long time ago. It even had a cable you could attach between two of 'em (600 CDs!) so that it could seamlessly start playing another track while loading the next song. I dropped it during a move and the next time I opened the door, it spit gears at me. I had intended to fix it some day, but started watching Hoarders and decided it wasn't worth it.

  • Hi! I'm not having any problems with linux. I just thought you'd like to know.

    There. Now there's a message in the support forums about a person not having problems!

  • Can you elaborate on the scenario this is solving for? Isn't software RAID a performance hit?

  • You're 100% correct on the tactile difference in the buttons. I didn't think of that. A similar complaint is every feature is a "button" on the infotainment screen. I saw this on a Dodge. My current car has no touchscreen and I have driven it long enough to just know where all the buttons are without looking. In my opinion, distracted driving should include these types of things that take your attention off of the road.

  • Push button transmission? It's been done before.

    Of course back then distracted driving was digging through the box of 8 track cassettes.

  • Upvote for.disabling firmware. It's a sad state when the average printer consumer needs to know how to disable firmware updates and even needs sysadmin skills to know how to block a host from the internet.

  • Well, that's unfortunate. I've seen this happen way too many times.

  • I don't know what your criteria is other than privacy. This guy's post looks interesting.

  • I have a similar story as your first point. It boils down to tucking away money with each financial gain. I put in enough to my 401k to get the full match, then with each raise, increase the amount invested by the raise. I'd already learned to spend within my limits and had no credit card debt, so each raise was "new money". Years later, after adjusting our financials to pay for daycare, when the daycare expenses dropped (infants are most expensive, costs drop down as they age), we started putting into a college savings and some for school expenses. We had saved up enough to pay for private school, which was less than daycare. Now that private school is done, college is paid for, we're paying down the mortgages. We locked in at 3% years ago. The house will be paid off when the kid graduates HS and we turn 55 and are eligible for the employer's retirement program, including health care. We plan to travel in those years where we're young enough to be healthy and old enough to have some money tucked away.

    Oh, we also did the same for cars. When the car was paid off, we'd put the same money into a separate bank account and when it was tome to look for a new car, we had almost enough to pay for it outright.

    Of course all of this can only happen when you have the skill to spend with your means.

  • I have the Debian netinst disk, but it doesn't include the dm-cache modules, so I downloaded the live DVD last night. I only get about an hour a day to work on stuff.

  • 🤦‍♀️ I've never considered this, but it's the simplest solution and makes perfect sense. I'm always so diligent to keep my system clean to save a few megs.

    This particular server is an old PowerEdge server I'm using to learn server stuff on and a practice home lab. Unfortunately, it won't boot from SD card, so I have a few DVD RW's in a drawer. I've read that there's a SD slot inside that you can emulate a floppy, but haven't explored it.

  • I'm just speculating here, but I've seen where app developers pull in a framework for a feature and it comes with all sorts of hidden gems since the framework was developed by a large corporation. The small development team now needs to consider writing their own framework (an established anti-pattern), find another (that may have the same problems or be less mature, etc) or include the privacy invading code and plan to replace it in a future release (which never happens because users want new features and the privacy concerned users have left).

  • Any device that requires an app to function is an immediate deal breaker for me. Same for most things that require "the cloud" to work. Garage door openers, doorbell or other cameras, cooking appliances, door locks, cars, even a basic pedometer to name a few. All of these things will only work temporarily until the company decides it's end of life for any reason.

  • I would love to give this a try. Did you follow any guides? Which Pi?