Spyke

Replies

android

Comment on

Google rolling out auto-restart security feature to Android

Reply in thread

The before first unlocked state is considered more secure, file/disk encryption keys are in a hardware security module and services aren't running so there is less surface for an attack . When a phone is taken for evidence, it gets plugged into power and goes in a faraday bag. This keeps the phone in an after first unlock state where the encryption keys are in memory and more services that can be attacked are running to gain access.

Comment on

Paid SSL vs Letsencrypt

The main benefits to paying for certs are

  • as many said, getting more than 90 days validity for certs that are harder to rotate, or the automation hasn't been done.
  • higher rate limits for issuing and renewing certs, you can ask letsencrypt to up limits, but you can still hit them.
  • you can get certs for things other than web sites, ie code signing.

The only thing that matters to most people is that they don't get cert errors going to/using a web site, or installing software. Any CA that is in the browsers, OS and various language trust stores is the same to that effect.

The rules for inclusion in the browsers trust stores are strict (many of the Linux distros and language trust stores just use the Mozilla cert set), which is where the trust comes from.

Which CA provider you choose doesn't change your potential attack surface. The question on attack surface seems like it might come from lacking understanding of how certs and signing work.

A cert has 2 parts public cert and private key, CAs sign your sites public cert with their private key, they never have or need your private key. Public certs can be used to verify something was signed by the private key. Public certs can be used to encrypt data such that only the private key can decrypt it.

Comment on

Oh no! 🤦‍♂️

Reply in thread

A method not yet mentioned is by inode, (I've accidentally created filenames I didn't know how to escape at the time like -- or other command line flags/special characters)

ls -li

Once you get the inode

find . -type f -inum $inode -delete

news

Comment on

Disney says DeSantis-appointed district is dragging feet in providing documents for lawsuit

Reply in thread

I've been dealing with lawyers and court recently, they may be above average in terms of intelligence and drive but most wouldn't be extremely above that average. I've had to explain fairly basic math, with easy numbers (fractions like 1/2 and 1/3 regarding pay structure), several times already. Ie

  • base = 100
  • bonus = 1/2 * base
  • total = base + bonus.

Still had to explain that bonus is 1/3 total not 1/2 total.

linux

Comment on

Enabling secure boot later on

Reply in thread

You can, and for Linux generally have to, manage your own secure boot keys and signing your own kernal, united, modules, etc. Conacal and Red Hat have signing keys iirc, but distributions can and do get the shim boot loader signed so secure boot works. The arch wiki has a page on how to setup secure boot . Many distros installers do end up signed as well so you can go through the full install process with secure boot enabled.

Comment on

UK air traffic control meltdown

Reply in thread

If I understand the article:

  • a flight plan is a series of waypoints.

  • Waypoints are represented using identifiers that are known to not be globally unique.

  • an algorithm attempts to extract the portion of the flight in the UK airspace failed due to one of the non-unique waypoints in a flight plan

  • the failure caused the primary system to halt

  • the backup system takes over, processes the same flight plan and fails the same way, halting as well

  • UK air traffic control can no longer accept/process flight plans, preventing flights from happening

  • it took a while to resolve the system error, and longer to resolve the impacted people

memes

Comment on

I'm right, right?

Reply in thread

Being in a divorce currently, I have noticed a few things that aren't talked about that I think lead to these memes being so popular.

Divorce laws vary a lot from location to location, in the US they are all state level laws. Not all state level divorce laws are fair to both parties, it seems to get worse if children are involved (some states have recently been adding laws that state 50/50 custody must be the assumed starting point because it hasn't been).

Even if the divorce laws are written to be fair to both parties in theory, at least in my state, the judge has the flexibility to rule in ways that may seem or even be unfair (what is equatable is complicated).

Even if the judge would or does rule fairly on all issues presented to them, the lawyers (if the parties can even afford lawyers) may be perpetuating gender biases in divorces as well. So the issues may never even reach the judge and just be settled by an "agreement" between the parties pushed by the lawyers.

Most divorces settle, maybe even on terms that heavily favor one party, because going to trial is a lot of money. Lawyers know this and have "games" they can play. like 60%-70% of assets to one party is still cheaper in theory than going to trial for the other party, so they hold that line in negotiations and your own lawyer will push for you to agree to terms like that as a cost/benefit analysis exercise.

Even if none of that happened and it was fair the whole way through, it is a very complex emotional time, and men often don't have the same level of social support to vent to.

Telling people to stop unless they are in some level of extreme situation is really toxic. People need to vent and be able to talk about what they are going through.

Comment on

The plan for nationwide fiber internet might be upended for Starlink

Reply in thread

The speed of light through a medium is what varies, since I have to deal with this at work, and the speed of light through air is technically faster than the speed of light through fiber. But now there is hollow core fiber that makes this difference less.

Between Chicago and New York the latency of the specialized wireless links commercially available is around about 1/2 of standard fiber taking the most direct route. But bandwidth is also only in gigabits/s vs terabits/s you can put over typical fiber backbone.

But both are faster than humans can perceive anyway.

linux

Comment on

Plug-and-play development environment

Reply in thread

I do agree mostly with your point here, but I think you can limit the scope a bit more. Mainly provide a working build environment via one of the mentioned tools, since you will need it anyway for a ci/cd pipeline. You can additionally have a full development environment that you use available for people to use if they choose. It is important that it be one regularly used to keep the instructions up to date for anyone that might want to try to contribute.

From my observations as a sys admin, people tend to prefer the tools they are familiar with, especially as you cross disciplines. A known working example is usually easy to adapt to anyone's preferred tooling.

proxmox

Comment on

Who's using Proxmox?

Reply in thread

We are a vdi shop too, so we have to be sure performance is at least as good. With a few other complicated setups, it is non-trivial to test alternatives.

Migration is usually shutting down the VM, exporting it from VMware, and importing on the other side. We have some really generous maintenance windows usually(ie basically 36-48 hours every weekend) and I would still expect it to take a year to migrate everything if we went all in.

We would be over 50 hypervisor hosts too, san connectivity, shared disks, and GPU accelerated vdi. It's a lot to eval for each option and test it all works and figure out the caveats.

linux

Comment on

I need to vent about Windows. I want workplaces to use Linux.

Reply in thread

In Linux everything is a file. So modifying files is all you really need. The hardest part is how to handle mobile endpoints like laptops, that don't have always on connections. Ansible pull mode is what we were looking at in a POC, with triggers on VPN connection. Note we have a large Linux server footprint already managed by ansible, so it isn't a large lift for us.

proxmox

Comment on

Who's using Proxmox?

Reply in thread

Many places are still looking at options, and costs of switching. Where I work still is, even though we have a large Linux server fleet already. I expect this is on a 3-5 year plan to ramp up switching to something else for most companies that are going to switch.