• 3 Posts
  • 119 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 1st, 2023

help-circle


  • Doing good cryptography is hard, and a lot of work. Designing a good key escrow system or other back door is more cryptographic work, so more chances to get it wrong, and more chances for the corporate overlords to demand corners be cut for cost savings.

    Even if the software has meticulously perfect cryptography, the government definitely won’t. The feds will:

    • give away keys to other feds, or local cops, for bad faith reasons.
    • give away keys to other cops for good faith reasons, though the other cops are not authorized. This increases the attack surface.
    • misuse keys themselves for bad faith reasons, like spying on their ex-girlfriend.
    • have poor security from the start, and get their keys stolen by hackers, both foreign and domestic.





  • Unfortunately this won’t happen until October 31st 2600. Starting on March 1st in the year 2600, the Julian calendar (popular in centuries past, and still used in a few places) will differ by 18 days from the Gregorian calendar (the current worldwide standard calendar).

    It happens that October 31st in the year 2600 lands on a Friday, and so the Julian October 13th, which lands on that same day, is also a Friday.

    There may be a sooner Friday the 13th that lands on Halloween, if you know of other obscure calendars like the Hebrew, Islamic, or Chinese calendars. I don’t know enough about those to check.



  • The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

    To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

    If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

    Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.


  • Looks like this program is really old. It appears to be designed for a 32-bit system, the way it casts between unsigned int and pointers.

    unsigned int is probably 32-bit even on your 64-bit system, so you’re only printing half the pointer with the printf, and only scanning half the pointer with the scanf. The correct data type to be using for this is uintptr_t , which is the same as uint32_t on a 32-bit system, and the same as uint64_t on a 64-bit system.

    Try changing the type of addr to uintptr_t , and change lines 14-17 to this:

    	printf("Address of main function: %p\n", (void *) &main);
    	printf("Address of addr variable: %p\n", (void *) &addr);
    	printf("\nEnter a (hex) address: ");
    	scanf("%p", &addr);
    

    You may have to include <stdint.h> . These changes should make the code portable to any 32-bit or 64-bit architecture.



  • “According to DataDome”. A company who sells that as a service.

    More likely, they just don’t have any obvious protections that DataDome’s lazy engineers could identify. They probably just checked IP ranges to see if the services were proxied by DataDome, Cloudflare, or another such service.

    I don’t trust anything DataDome says, because they are a known shitty service. They will arbitrarily block users, intercepting their requests to show a captcha page. Then, after the user correctly solves the captcha, they are directed to a page which reads simply “You have been blocked.” There is a fake contact form at the bottom of the page, which submits appeals into a black hole.

    Here’s an example of the block page. This user is connecting from a proxy, so the block is expected, but DataDome is known to block residential IP addresses arbitrarily.


  • NTFS is considered pretty stable on Linux now. It should be safe to use indefinitely.

    If you’re worried about the lack of Unix-style permissions and attributes in NTFS, then getting BTRFS or ext4 on Windows may be a good choice. Note that BTRFS is much more complicated than ext4, so ext4 may have better compatibility and lower risk of corruption. I used ext3 on Windows in 2007 and it was very reliable; ext4 today is very similar to ext3 from those days.

    The absolute best compatibility would come from using a filesystem natively supported by both operating systems, developed without reverse engineering. That leaves only vfat (aka FAT32) and exfat. Both lack Unix-style permissions and attributes.






  • Can someone explain to me how this is economical? (The article is pretty light on facts, and the few facts that it has are suspect anyway due to the article’s technical mistakes, like measuring capacity in “megawatts”.)

    The maximum price of electricity (that I could find) in California is $0.66/kWh . That means, if you charge at night, or at some theoretical time when electricity is free, and then sell at that maximum price every day, your round-trip profit is $0.66 for each kWh of battery capacity. Lithium-ion batteries, if I’m being generous, last up to 2000 charge cycles. Let’s say they don’t lose any capacity during that time, either. That means your profit $1320 per kWh, for the whole life of the battery.

    The cheapest grid-tie batteries I can find are about $3000 per kWh, so about twice as much as the total lifetime profit.

    Is there something I’m missing?



  • Your post here contains a homophobic slur.

    “Shock troops” implies actual violence.

    “the final solution” implies violence, genocide, and antisemitism.

    Your first link goes to a post suggesting that people put pro-Monero messages inside new books at bookstores. Most people would perceive this as vandalism, and possibly as advertising that they don’t care for.

    If you want to promote Monero on Lemmy, to start, you will need to stop being homophobic and antisemitic, and stop promoting violent themes.

    Try making a message based on positivity. Compared to paying with a credit card, where I have the right to make a chargeback in many situations, what benefits are there to paying in Monero?