BuoyantCitrus

joined 2 years ago
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How much does it matter what type of harddisk i buy for my server? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

One thing that would be useful to understand is the distinction between CMR and SMR

What is the best model of used ThinkPad to purchase? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I got a nice deal on the x280 and am happy with it, was also looking at the various X1 carbon. Two criteria I had were I wanted USB-C charging (since I have those chargers around and they can handle these laptops) and a single battery (eg. the T470s I have from work is nice but it has two small capacity batteries that each cost the same to replace as the full size single ones in the carbon and x280). One thing to keep in mind is some of the earlier X1 carbon don't support NVME SSD (I think it started with 5th gen?)

Edit: another thing to consider is soldered RAM. Part of why my x280 was cheap was it's only 8gb and can't be upgraded. Since you're looking at lighter weight things and using FOSS (and perhaps open to tinkering with things like ZRAM) that might be a useful aspect to focus on because there is probably a glut of such machines given how memory inefficient things are lately with every trivial app running a whole browser engine. OTOH, depending how many tabs you tend to have open and how many electron apps you tend to keep floating around, 8gb might start to feel cramped. Especially if you think you might want some VMs around.

Why North America Can't Build Nice Apartments [Video, 12:09] in c/[email protected]
Laptop with long runtime in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Next time I look for a small laptop to have handy one thing I'm going to be sure to prioritise is: how much battery does it use while suspended? I'd really like to not need to have it switch to hibernate after 30m of sleep or w/e and ideally just plug it in overnight like a phone.

Should I renew my liberapay donations? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Thanks, cancelled for now. I'll keep an eye out for ways to contribute as we get more organised.

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Should I renew my liberapay donations? (lemmy.ca)
 

Apparently, while it's closed for new donations, liberapay is still going to renew existing ones.

Self-hosted habit tracker in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Big fan of that one, been using it for years.

Anyone know of a reverse command script or package to parse args for flags, expand them, and condense a man or help page(s) to just the relevant flags? in c/[email protected]
'Something's changed': Summer 2023 is screaming climate change, scientists say | CBC News in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

They published this in Popular Mechanics in 1912, we've been ignoring this for a long time:

The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year,” the article reads. “When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=Tt4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA341&dq=carbon+climate&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=carbon%20climate&f=false

Also, this Wikipedia article has a good summary on the overall arc of our understanding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science

Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The app, in the scenario where we're trusting the author/store, is only part of the surface to the extent it's exposed to a potentially malicious payload. eg. a trusted solitaire game using a vulnerable API doesn't exacerbate that vulnerability because it doesn't expose it to untrusted input whereas a PDF viewer would because the PDF could be coming from anywhere...

Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Really appreciate you taking the time to write that. I have a sense of most of that ("defense in depth" and "threat model" are good lenses to think about such things through for sure!) but what I was trying to get a better grasp on was how much risk from automated attack was a normal person without worries of an "advanced persistent threat" taking on by using a device past EOL. Like you say, "Quantifying how much of a difference it makes is not trivial" so I feel less conflicted to know that you're comfortable with your dad taking that risk.

I would think that the main thing at stake for a typical user isn't just browsing history or email though but rather identity theft since a successful attacker can use the device to get through 2FA.

Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It seems like the attack surface is limited to RF (bluetooth/wifi can be turned off if one is willing to make that compromise), app install (many just use a small selection of well-trusted apps), and messaging/browser which are regularly updated if the device is properly configured. Apps that aren't pulling in random untrusted content are far less of an attack vector (eg. one's bank app isn't connecting to everything, just to the bank, pinterest is hopefully escaping user content, etc.)

Based on helpful details at the other thread (eg. Project Mainline, baseband isolation) I’m beginning to form the opinion that it is not unreasonably foolhardy for someone to continue to use an unsupported device if they are willing to make the compromises necessary to limit their exposure. Which wouldn't necessarily mean "giving up bluetooth entirely", just not using it when you're in bluetooth range of an untrustworthy party eg. if you just use your headset to make zoom calls at home and are fine not having it on the subway.

Thanks for the reply. Definitely appreciate the point that lacklustre updates mean we need to pay attention even if we're vaguely covered by our vendor. I think you've convinced me to subscribe to CVEs for android too, I've only had alerts for my browser. Really too bad they don't make smaller Pixels.

Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don’t think they are things that can be fixed on the app level?

Indeed not. So I'm trying to better understand how vulnerabilities at the system level are exploited. It seems like the attack surface is limited to RF (bluetooth/wifi can be turned off if one is willing to make that compromise), app install (many just use a small selection of well-trusted apps), and messaging/browser which are regularly updated if the device is properly configured.

Based on this thread I'm beginning to form the opinion that it is not unreasonably foolhardy for someone to continue to use an unsupported device if they are willing to make the compromises necessary to limit their attack surface.

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Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates (lemmy.ca)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1926125

Too many perfectly usable phones are put into a questionable security situation by lack of vendor support for keeping key software up to date.

But what's the actual risk of using an Android phone on a stock ROM without updates? What's the attack surface?

It seems like most things that'd contact potentially malicious software are web and messaging software, but that's all done by apps which continue to receive updates (at least until the android version is entirely unsupported) eg. Webview, Firefox, Signal, etc.

So are the main avenues for attack then sketchy apps and wifi points? If one is careful to use a minimal set of widely scrutinised apps and avoid connecting to wifi/bluetooth/etc. devices of questionable provenance is it really taking that much of a risk to continue using a device past EOL?

Or do browsers rely on system libraries that have plausible attack vectors? Perhaps images, video, font etc. rendering could be compromised? At this point though, that stack must be quite hardened and mature, it'd be major news for libjpg/ffmpeg to have a code-execution vulnerability? Plus it seems unlikely that they wouldn't just include this in webview/Firefox as there must surely be millions of devices in this situation so why not take the easy step of distributing a bit more in the APK?

I'm not at all an Android developer though, perhaps this is very naive and I'm missing something major?

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Better understanding and mitigating the risks of using a phone that no longer receives system updates (lemmy.ca)
 

Too many perfectly usable phones are put into a questionable security situation by lack of vendor support for keeping key software up to date.

But what's the actual risk of using an Android phone on a stock ROM without updates? What's the attack surface?

It seems like most things that'd contact potentially malicious software are web and messaging software, but that's all done by apps which continue to receive updates (at least until the android version is entirely unsupported) eg. Webview, Firefox, Signal, etc.

So are the main avenues for attack then sketchy apps and wifi points? If one is careful to use a minimal set of widely scrutinised apps and avoid connecting to wifi/bluetooth/etc. devices of questionable provenance is it really taking that much of a risk to continue using a device past EOL?

Or do browsers rely on system libraries that have plausible attack vectors? Perhaps images, video, font etc. rendering could be compromised? At this point though, that stack must be quite hardened and mature, it'd be major news for libjpg/ffmpeg to have a code-execution vulnerability? Plus it seems unlikely that they wouldn't just include this in webview/Firefox as there must surely be millions of devices in this situation so why not take the easy step of distributing a bit more in the APK?

I'm not at all an Android developer though, perhaps this is very naive and I'm missing something major?

1
Equal weight S&P 500 for US exposure (lemmy.ca)
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/653849

I'm trying to follow conventional wisdom and have more and more of our portfolio as straight up VGRO but want some more US exposure (though I am aware there are arguments in favour of a home-country bias). I was also interested in picking a USD fund as not only do they tend to have a lower MER but also get an extra boost from witholding tax exemption if I hold them in an RRSP.

An S&P 500 fund seems the way to go, but it seems awfully slanted towards giant tech megacaps. Apple alone is over 7% of VOO. With a P/E over 31 it's hard for me to feel like there's not extra risk with the concentration here--is it really such a safe bet to think the largest company in the world has that much more growth ahead of it? And VGRO already has a solid chunk of cap-weighted exposure.

And so, after my inexpert research failed to dissuade me, I'm probably going to use an equal-weight ETF like RSP or EUSA for this portion---there are no penny stocks on the S&P 500 and it doesn't seem to perform much worse (and indeed better depending how far back you test). At this point I'm more comfortable with either of those than VOO and will probably do this just for the irrational psychology, but I do wish there was something that combines an equal weighting with a screen for quality (something like SPHQ) as a big drawback seems like for as much concentration risk as it avoids it also keeps rebalancing more and more into failing companies as they crash and burn.

Anyone else subscribe to a similar reasoning and incorporate an equal weight fund into the passive portion of your portfolio? Which one did you go with?

83
A key part of Canada's Internet was just sold to Japanese telco KDDI (money.tmx.com)
 

Allied Properties sale of their data centre portfolio to KDDI includes 151 Front Street W., the site of TorIX which is the main Internet Exchange Point for the country. While that's not necessarily an issue, I kinda figured it was at least a little bit notable but I've not seen it mentioned aside from an investment context.

Unfortunately, it seems like it's less consequential than it should be because Bell Canada apparently still refuses to peer at TorIX and only connects to other ISPs through the US which means that eg. if I'm on Rogers in Toronto and you're on Bell, any communications between our computers have to flow through American controlled systems even though we're in the same city because that's how Bell chooses to have things set up.

Whereas, for pretty much everything else in Toronto, it'd move between networks via TorIX. Which is now in a building owned by a Japanese company instead of a Canadian REIT.

2
Privacy / data retention policy (lemmy.ca)
 

It'd be nice to (eventually!) see a link laying out a privacy policy for the instance, something like: https://newsie.social/privacy-policy

I'd especially be interested to know how long you associate the IP addresses we visit from with our accounts, who can see that info (and our emails), what other PII you store, and how long deleted posts/accounts are stored for.

(Totally get and very much appreciate that smorks &co have a lot on their plates just getting this place off the ground, not trying to demand additional work, just a suggestion. Seems like it'd take some thinking to balance with eg. a good backup regimen.)

1
Conestoga mall sold for $270m (money.tmx.com)
 

...and it's apparently a "trophy"?

5
Lemmy clients: Credentials, security, and transparency (lemmy.ca)
 

Was curious about whether someone could extract my password from Jerboa on my phone but didn't get any response there. Maybe you guys have some idea? Does Lemmy even offer an auth mechanism that could prevent this, is one in the works?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/652328

I noticed that Jeroba didn't seem to switch to a different site the way Relay passed through to Reddit so I could log in and link it via OAuth. From that I take it that when I authenticate in Jeroba I'm entrusting it with the cleartext password for my lemmy account which it's storing on my phone?

I'm sorta okay with that especially for now (eg. alpha) so I proceeded with things but maybe it should be more clear up front that's what's happening? And really, any of the other apps could probably have faked that OAuth page anyhow so it's dubious if you were really trusting the app all that much less in that case.

However, one thing OAuth had going for it was that would make it a lot harder for someone who steals my phone to permanently take control of my Reddit account whereas they could extract my password from Jeroba and use it to take over my lemmy account?

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Who can see my IP on Lemmy? (lemmy.ca)
 

Looked through the docs a bit and it's not really clear to me: I'm posting this on lemmy.ca, does that mean only that instance knows my IP? Or does every instance it federates with get my ip alongside this post?

This seems maybe important, did I miss a privacy guide to Lemmy someplace? Cursory searching didn't come up with much official. Are there other aspects we should be thinking about here? I'd come across some mention of deleted posts being still available everywhere they were sent but that sorta makes sense -- hard to "unpublish" anything.

5
Canadian immigration and inflation: It’s complicated (economics.cibccm.com)
4
Canadian immigration and inflation: It’s complicated (lemmy.ca)
 

...trying to cross-post from [email protected] ...is cross posting even a thing on lemmy?

1
Canadian immigration and inflation: It’s complicated (economics.cibccm.com)
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