Notices by calcifer@hackers.town

I get and 100% support instance-blocking anything Meta puts up. I don’t understand instance-blocking instances that don’t block Meta?

If someone who’s contemplating doing the latter is willing to explain/argue a little (in the “argue to understand” mode), I’d welcome it

To be clear here: absolutely consider technical means too. Just understand that they’ll find a way around them, and a violation of TOS at least opens up the door to legal recourse when they do so. Use every tool available, even if imperfect

Hey fedi admins? Don’t just defederate/block Facebook/Meta. Put some time right now into figuring out what terms of service to have in place that will deny them the right to harvest data. They may not be able to use ActivityPub if you don’t federate, but nothing stops them from trying other means to harvest your users’ data.

Well that's an interesting thing to learn. Apparently there are decent numbers of people that think being queer or trans is a political position. As in they genuinely believe that not only are these things people's choices, but that they're making those choices specifically to undermine specific political platforms. Specifically that they are effectively pretending to be queer or trans out of some political motivation

I… don't even know where to start

@silverwizard not really a privsep issue; the component in question is a tiny thing that runs as root for one function that requires it. It was exploitable as a normal user. It was already blocked from merging to prod, dev was just trying to figure out if it worked in a realistic environment and didn't think it through.

Vulns don't respect privsep ?

One of my devs didn't understand how his new code was subject to a code injection attack. So another one wrote a harmless PoC to demonstrate it. First dev misunderstood and thought it couldn't lead to anything dangerous. So second dev used dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda as an example, intending the first dev to try it out in a local Docker image, which he did

Then he wanted to see if it would work in staging… and now he's learning how to rebuild our staging env (the relevant part of which is still on bare metal…)

The existence of Hail Satan suggests the existence of Rain Satan and Snow Satan

Looks like we acquired a “modern SaaS” application to maintain. It’s deeply tied to AWS and uses all the bells and whistles, so I guess I’m going to be learning a bunch about AWS and EKS and stuff over the next few weeks so I can start figuring out a plan to make it gradually less dependent on AWS specifics.

My goth-ish daughter had phys ed today, and at the end of the workout she was supposed to measure her heart rate using a small device

It was faulty and read zero multiple times

How does the kid tell me this? “Hey papa, my school’s heart monitor says I’m dead”

My phone has decided that when I Type fix I probably want fox. This may be statistically valid, but working critical bug on the weekend and having to constantly correct phrases like “how close are we to a fox for this part of the issue?” has stopped being amusing.

When I first started teaching folks to use computers, it was job training. And people were panicked. They knew if they couldn’t learn this new skill, their jobs were at risk. But they projected this fear onto the computer itself

The most effective technique I found to address that was to have my classes gather round while I disassembled a computer and let them touch the various components. This is the motherboard. It has the CPU on it, that does most of the work. Here is the RAM, that stores what the computer is working on right now. Etc.

It made things like copying files seem much less mysterious, and even helped with using shared drives (instead of the wire from motherboard to disk to talk to a disk, you’re using the network cable to talk to a disk on someone else’s computer)

Why would you call it a race horse when “speed steed” is right there?

Fun thought experiment: if the first comics hadn’t been intended to be funny, we probably wouldn’t call the entire medium “comics”

What would we have called it instead?

@hypolite all chaps are assless. “Chaps” that aren’t assless are just pants.

Hey #twittermigrants — the purpose of the Fediverse is NOT to “be like Twitter but not centralized”. It’s it’s own place with its own goals and design choices

It has some similarities, sure. But complaining that Mastodon (or whatever other Fedi software you’re trying) “isn’t like Twitter” is a lot like moving to a small town and complaining it doesn’t work the same as New York

You moved here, take some time to get to know the place. It’s different for very intentional reasons. It’s not meant as a perfect replacement, but an alternative way to have social media on the web.

You CANNOT wipe most solid-state disks. That includes NVMe, SSD, USB flash drives, etc.

The controller system on the disk does not write all zeroes just because you told it to, nor are blocks/sectors a physical map like they are on magnetic media. The wear and write management features baked into the storage system stop your wipe from succeeding

If you need to store information to flash storage that you need to protect from physical access later, encrypt the disk before you store the data. Or have plans to physically destroy the chips.