frustbox

joined 1 year ago
[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just SSH. Every public facing piece of software (I.e. a web interface) adds more complexity for misconfiguration or security vulnerabilities.

You can mount you remote filesystem locally and use your local file manager and text editors to manage most tasks. If you use ansible you can make changes to a local configuration and deploy the state to the server without needing to run anything special on the server side. It is especially effective if you also run docker.

And for monitoring I usually just have a tmux with btop running. Which is fine if you don't need long term time series data, then you might want to look at influxdb/grafana - but even those I would run locally behind a firewall, with the server reporting the data to the database.

[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

When I saw that there was a pihole update to a new major version I got so excited hoping it would finally support DoH or DoT - nope. So disappointed.

Sticking with Adguard then.

[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

One scar away from losing access to your ability to pay …

Biometrics can not really be changed. Except maybe through time or trauma (i.e. age or injury). They can be used to uniquely(?) identify a person - except maybe twins - at the expense of anonymity, which has it's own set of problems.

But because they can not easily be changed they're a terrible security feature. Once they leak, they're unusable and you're hosed. You can't issue a new palm print for your bank account like you could a new chip card and password.

Also, just because you waved your hand over a scanner does not mean that you approve and consent of the transaction. With tap to pay there were ideas of mobile point of sales devices just tapping on peoples backpacks in a crowded area. You don't even keep your biometrics markers in your pocket, they're just out in the open for anyone with a camera. This may be bordering on paranoia, but a few years back (2014) German hackers from Chaos Computer Club took iris scans from Angela Merkel (then Chancellor of Germany) and finger prints of Ursula von der Leyen (then Minister of defense) using nothing but press fotos. Cameras have only gotten better.

TL;DR: Biometrics can be used for identification but should never be used for authorisation.

[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

Why you should care?

Because the debate is not about whether or not you have something to hide.

It's about your right to consent. You should have the right to say no. And you should have the right to change your mind for any reason. You should have the right to regain control of who can store, access or process your data.

Depending on where you live you may have such rights, or you may not. And the political debate is about granting, strengthening, weakening or revoking these rights. And you should care about having these rights, whether you use them or not.

[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Exactly, and when something crashes in the ocean it might be full off sea weed errr, I mean non-human biologics. And if equipment from foreign nations were recovered of course they'd get reverse engineered.

Knowing how secretive militaries tend to be about their missions … of course the whistleblower gets stonewalled when trying to inquire about it.

I haven't seen a single claim that couldn't be explained with something mundane.

[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 49 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My interpretation is that it's mostly half-truths.

Do I think governments and militaries around the world have plans for such scenarios? Like retrieving UFOs? Yes, this seems reasonable. Do I think they have run exercises and tested those scenarios for real? Probably, yes. Most likely successfully so. Do I believe that someone with a lot of hearsay could interpret those things as "holy shit, they actually found something"? Yes, yes I do.

Is any of this proof? Nope. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You should absolutely have web environment integrity. Your browser should not allow the website to do things that you don't approve of, so the integrity of your computer can be ensured.

Wait, that's not what they mean, is it? Oh no … 🙄

Yea, I feel like Google has this a bit backwards. As always, I like to turn the metaphor on it's head. You're not visiting a website, you're inviting a website. You're allowing the website to use your system resources, bandwidth, CPU cycles, etc. And what you do with your own system is none of the websites business. They can protect their business model on the server side, if they need to. But maybe they just need better business models.

[–] frustbox@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We have made mistakes.

We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.

And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!

They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.

Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.

And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.

And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"

I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.

There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.