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It's really hard to be in free software spaces. So many are so libertarian and kinda fashy.

I had someone try to get me on side by saying "When I said group of kids, I meant gang"



Fucking CrowdStrike showed up very smugly at SecTor and I can't believe that we, as a community, allow shit like That Incident without consequences


My 5yo just asked me "Was Andre the Giant smarter than you"

What the fuck do you say to that?!

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard: well, Andre the Giant has an explicit posse, so that's a thing he's got that I don't, I guess. No word on "smarter" tho.
in reply to BB

@BB Yeah! Being Andre the Giant sounds terrible. But Andre the Giant *is* awesome. Not gonna conflict on that.
@BB


One day we'll make a restricted tool to safely view websites without the attack surface of the browser. We can make a companion DSL for simple styling that doesn't have the power of XSS
in reply to silverwizard

it's going to be markdown files transferred over anonymous SSH via rsync



Built an F-Droid repo for my kids inside our local network. Added games and basic apps, let the kid tablets work without unfettered internet.

F Droid wont let me use a self signed cert because, I guess, the CA system is good

in reply to silverwizard

Bravo! Curating one's own app store is a great example of how Open Technology enables people to take control of our tech life. I yearn to see this sort of thing included as basic, default, built-in functionality in modern libre personal computer systems like Linux, Yunohost, and mobile OS's.
in reply to Julian Foad

@Julian Foad It was a little thorny to setup, but it probably would be pretty simple! F-Droid is pretty friendly.

apt-get install fdroid server
fdroid init
fdroid update --create-keys
put apks in the repo folder
fdroid update -c
fdroid update

then point a webserver at the repo dir.

not saying that *anyone* can do that - but it's well within the ability to make an ansible playbook for!

But yeah - letting my 5yo install and remove apps gives him power without exposing him to the wider internet

in reply to silverwizard

My 3 year old is sick and would normally be watching TV and trying to sleep. But right now he's on a tablet, exploring freely. All the games, the shows, and the audiobooks are safe, some are old, some are new. But he's able to be safe and happy.


Unknown parent

@Neil Brown yeah (he hacking was cool and well done, but the Fight Club was bad and... the opposite of well done


My instance has been exploding, but I just deleted the hack4pancakes moving thread and it seems to have stabilized, which is a fun effect of networks


I asked my church music director if he had a HAM license today, and he replied he never got into radio. I then had to ask how we'd run a pirate radio station together.

One day I'll be a HAM



describing the coffee to Becky "this is the world's best coffee that has never been pooped"


USPOL
It's that time every few years when The Bad Thing happens and then Americans pretend they have a democracy
in reply to silverwizard

Yes Libtards pretend it's a communist state when in fact our constitution defines our nation as a Constitutional Republic.


As usual my forays into making me enjoy reading RSS feeds is failing


One day I'll find a reader I love



I think a lesson of the AI bubble is that people don't like trading privacy for convenience. I don't think they ever had. The goal is the tech company is the hide the privacy invasion and maximize the convenience to hit critical mass.


Just got reminded of that time that DigitalOcean informed me that just because I'd paid for a backup, there was no guarentee the backup wouldn't be corrupt
in reply to silverwizard

we stored a snapshot, and we attempted to load it, but their cloudinit changed and the snapshot wouldn't boot, and they went "well, load a different backup, not our problem" while we paid for the snapshot


If I leave YouTube opened for the weekend, my computer reports: load average: 92.03, 25.80, 8.97 once i managed to pkill -9 librewolf. I think Google might be doing some anticompetitive shit.

MxFraud reshared this.



Me gushing about my 5 year old to my parents:
He produced phonology and semantics from orthography independently!


Who called it pulling data off a Federation Library Computer for building graphs and not PADDing the stats?

in reply to silverwizard

I didn't see the first post, and this one sure reads weird without it. XD


A huge mistake the fediverse makes is large instances. It's resource intensive, expensive, and creates wildly large failures instead of little ones.

This is why I'm sad to lose the bots, but also glad botsin.space is going away. BIS was always weird, a place to place bots which cost a lot, but wasn't a community. Bots should live alongside their makers or users (or just have a way of posting without needing a full server).

Unknown parent

@Tek aEvl Yeah! Better tools are always better! (Mastodon is kinda the worst of the Fediverse servers, but it markets)



Sat down with a large client's IT since email was getting wild. So we talked. We both explained the other side's mail border to each other. Having established we were both real techs. We talked shop and solved the issue with mutual respect.

It was a notable dance I've not done in a while, and a fascinating one.

Jay Hannah reshared this.



The fact that AI people say "AI is here to stay" before any other point tells me a lot

we're AI Gonna Make It



if you see this hacker at SECTor, you may tell me I owe you a drink. Prefacing it, "I'm from the fediverse" will make me slightly less confused. But, telling me I owe you a drink will cause me to buy you a drink, be it a fancy coffee, a boring coffee, a beer, a cocktail, a juice, or whatever else.

#SECtor

silverwizard reshared this.

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard Thank you. I love that they have a kid version, as the 6100 works for two of my kids, but is too big for two. I'll probably try that too. The part I can't find for love or money this week is the exhaust filter, but it looks integrated in that mask, which frankly would be fine for our use.

Thank you again. :)



Question - is the rise of people listening to music aloud related to the headphone jack dying?
in reply to silverwizard

It's a common and likely hypothesis, yes.

Although I feel like these days I'm more likely to run into people taking video calls on speakerphone in public than blasting their music.

I want the parallel universe where phones kept the headphone jack and it was the cameras getting pushed out into dongles/BT.



One of the things that is destroying the web is WASM and JavaScript.

This isn't really even a joke - it's literal.

By having all these tools to make a web browser have unfettered access to the system, it becomes unsafe to allow users to generate arbitrary code. We can't have another MySpace or NeoPets User Lookup because we can't allow users to write their own HTML, because that's *dangerous*.



So my project planning document at work is a wiki page called "Looming Disasters". It's just stuff that might explode.

I just had to add a slack thread to one of these disasters as illustration. >.<



HomeAssistant is too much power for a dad to have. Every day before I go downstairs to work - I toggle all the kids lights off and grumble about them not turning off the lights.
in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard French has an expression for this: “It’s not Versailles here!” after the eponymous Renaissance castle counting 2,300 rooms.


Played the second mystery of the game Suspects, and the writing was so abyssmal I quit. It was so bad I looked at the author in order to scream, and it's literally the fucks who sued the internet archive. I'm livid.
in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan I didn't want to link originally since no advertising.

But yeah - I also just want to be clear - the game is one of the most awful I've ever played. It was hell.



The problem with being a sysadmin and a dad is I accidentally say to my 5yo "All minutes are 60 seconds except for the 61 second minutes"

reshared this



As much as I love writing on it, my reMarkable2 (which has already been annoying me with its response to being caught out in the rain a couple years ago, two laptops and another tablet in the same backpack shrugged it off with no trouble but the rM2 now gets days on a full battery charge instead of months) has a jammed power button and no other way to wake it from sleep, so it's time to retire it.

Samsung makes tablets with the same stylus technology so I picked up one of those, and it's... adequate. At least it's half the price and should be durable enough to handle living in a backpack and not just sitting on a desk and never going anywhere (and if this one dies, for the same price as a rM2 I can get a ruggedized one with a bigger screen)

The device I really want is the guts of the new color reMarkable in an enclosure that's actually as durable as a reasonable person would expect from a consumer electronics device at that price point, but capitalism says nobody will buy that, so I can't buy it.



In light of our praise of the Internet Archive - can we make sure to use Indigo as an example of another org that did the right thing after a databreach?

Took everything down, fixed it, and improved the process.

in reply to silverwizard

I'm not caping for Indigo. I just know people who still haven't forgiven them, and this is the attitude we need to be encouraging, and putting into people's minds as a good thing.

Staying up during a breach investigation should be seen like running with a broken leg.


in reply to David Schuetz

@David Schuetz hmmmm, how do you represent that, you could probably do it wth redirect rules or clever folder structure
in reply to silverwizard

I think it'd be like 255.255.255.3? So the nets are (say) 192.168.1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3, and the hosts are ... jesus, this is why nobody's tried this.

Bitwise, it'd be: xxx00, xxx01, xxx10, xxx11

0 net: .4, .8, .12, .16, .20…
1 net: .5, .9..yeah, that makes sense.
2 net: .6, .10…
3 net: .7, .11, .15, .19, .23…

and so on.

This was asked in a meeting with NeXT engineers while I was a contractor at a government agency in the early 90’s. I think their answer was... "We support it...maybe? Why would you want to?”

I've always wanted to try, just for the hell of it, but I suspect 99% of networking gear would break.

in reply to David Schuetz

@David Schuetz I have managed to be mostly self taught, and get into the game after CIDR notation, so I completely never learned actual subnet masks, so I don't fully understand the issue you're even seeing.
in reply to silverwizard

It used to be (I guess this was before CIDR became popular) that netmasks were expressed as literal bitmasks. So a /24 would actually be written as "192.168.1.0, netmask 255.255.255.0” where the "24" represents the leading 24 bits representing the network (192.168.1).

So a /28 would be..255.255.255.240 (11110000).

But it was always a consecutive string of “1” bits, and the hosts were the remaining block of lower-most "0" bits. Usually 8, for a /24, but often smaller (for, say, a small block of public IPs your ISP gives you). I remember the net my office desktop was on in school that was 255.255.254.0 (or /23). That network used 9 bits for 512 hosts. (ish - router and broadcast addresses are still needed out of that 512).

A non-contiguous netmask would mean that consecutive final octets would be on consecutively different networks.

255.255.255.3 would be all 1s, then 00000011, so the NET portion is .0, .1, .2, and .3. So hosts .4, .5, .6, .7, .8, .9, .10, .11, .12... would be on networks 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1, 2, 3, 0….

Like I said, I doubt much of anything would support it now. Even when we wrote netmasks as bitmasks, it's likely most gear would've just failed using this approach.

It really is a cursed idea. :)

This wiki page may help, too. Once you see it, it's ... logical? (I won't say "easy”). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnet

in reply to David Schuetz

@David Schuetz Oh, I see, a subnet mask bitmap with non-contiguous 1s - that makes sense.Gross.

So something like 192.168.90.256/192.255.148.45, not just a wall of 1s.

(I know enough to set subnet masks on weird ancient gear ;), but I almost always am setting 255.255.255.0 and 255.255.255.255 because /24s rule everything around me. But yeah - reasonable)

I just don't know if I have any gear that would parse subnet masks like that enough to confuse it.

in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@Jonathan Lamothe @David Schuetz Are you aware of the RFC 864 Compliant Dungeons and Dragons Character Generator I worked on?

@Dave worked on a bunch of it and I need to replace his work (not because I don't like it -but because I want to do the actual work not just crib his, the goal was to learn socket code).

in reply to silverwizard

@Richard "mtfnpy" Harman non-mobile firefox fails instantly.
Tragic. I was hoping I could get firefox to accept my bullshit, but it's correct it doesn't work


Why does the SecTor app contain several trackers?! I mean - I'm not installing it because of this, and that's a pain in the ass?

Shouldn't we, as security people, be able to notice this shit and be better than it?

in reply to silverwizard

points at the number of security folks who went to in-person cons without even the most rudimentary PPE during covid upswings


When creating a clock display - never forget the sleep in your code >.<


70% of the email I get is Zscaler outage and maintenance notifications

How do people handle this software?!


in reply to silverwizard

The kids helped, they definitely got distracted, but they helped!

They, most importantly, got to see inside a computer and were allowed to touch all the pieces.

My kids have been able to use their computers for lots of little things

in reply to silverwizard

And to be clear:
the 5yo is playing Mario and a few other small games, mostly micro-indie games
the 3yo is listening to audiobooks and lullabies using a device he's built.

This isn't full hacking - this is still kids.

I'm looking at sourcing some classic lego motors to see if I can use these as the brains of a lego robot.



I am looking for a computer, that can be thrown in a backpack, and has a battery. Ideally no screen or keyboard inbuilt.
in reply to silverwizard

depending on what you're doing, the other hackish suggestion I have is to hit up Build-a-Bear for those record-a-message modules they sell for their stuffies
in reply to Michael Brown

@Michael Brown lol - that's also a pretty good option.

My goal is to make an ebook reader that will start playing when a CF card is inserted. And then bulk buy 128MB cards and put books on them.




/usr.slice/user-1000.slice/session-38.scope is not a snap cgroup

Ya know what Ubuntu, I actually don't care.

Just... make my shit work. If you want to make linux a hellscape - at least... function.