notabot

@notabot@lemm.ee

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notabot,

Thanks a lot, I just sprained my brain trying to make sense of that.

notabot,

It sounds like you’re actually more concerned about the data in the files not being able to ‘pop up’ elsewhere, rather than the files themselves. In thus case I’d suggest simply encrypting them, probably using gpg. That’ll let you set a password that is distinct from the one used for sudo or similar.

You should also be using full disk encryption to reduce the risk of a temporary file being exposed, or even overwritten sectors/pages being available to an attacker.

notabot,

Nothing can prevent a disk clone cloning the data, and there’s no way to make something happen when a disk is cloned as you’re not in control of the process.

If you wish to mask the existence of the files, use either full disk encryption, in which case cloning the disk doesn’t reveal the existence of the files without the decrypt password, or use a file based encrypted partition such as veracrypt in which case the cloner would just see a single encrypted blob rather than your file names.

Ultimately encrypting the files with gpg means they have already effectively ‘destroyed or corrupted’ themselves when cloned. If you don’t want to reveal the filenames, just call them something else.

If you could be a bit more specific about your threat model people may have better ideas to help.

notabot,

Ok, I’m still not clear on exactly what you’re trying to achieve as I can’t quite see the connection between somehow preventing certain files being duplicated when cloning the disk and preventing yourself from reinstalling the system.

Bear in mind that reinstalling the system would replace all of the OS, so there’s no way to leave counter-measures there, and the disk itself can’t do anything to your data, even if it could detect a clone operation.

If what you’re trying to protect against is someone who knows everything you do accessing your data, you could look to use TPM to store the encryption key for your FDE. That way you don’t know the password, it’s stored encrypted with a secret key that is, in turn, stored and protected by your CPU. That way a disk clone couldn’t be used on any hardware except your specific machine.

notabot,

This seems like a very complicated way to achieve your goal! It sounds like sitting yourself down and giving you a stern talking to might be a beter aporoach.

Having said that, if you have these very important files that you don’t want to lose, please make sure they’re backed up somewhere off of your machine. Storage fails, and it’s a horrible feeling losing something important. Unfortunately doing so would defeat the approach you’re thinking of.

This might be a case of needing to reframe the question to get to the cause of the issue, and then solve that. So, why do you want to make it hard to reinstall your machine? Is it the amount of time you spend on it, the chance of screwing it up, needing it working, has it become a compulsion or something else? Maybe if we can get to the root of the issue we can find a solution.

With regard to TPM, it’s basically just a key store, so you can use it fir anything really, althought it’s normally used by generating a TPM key and using it to encrypt the key that’s actually used to encrypt your data, storing the encrypted key with the OS. Just reinstalling won’t wipe the TPM, but unless you made an effort to save the encrypted key it’ll be gone. Given your problem statement above it just adds to the data you’d need to save, which isn’t helpful.

notabot,

I just wanted to say ‘well done’ for going over what you said, realizing how it could be interpreted adversely, and admitting it. Not enough people are willing to do that, so well done!

Biden says the next president may get to name two Supreme Court justices (www.npr.org)

LOS ANGELES – President Biden on Saturday night said he expects the winner of this year’s presidential election will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court – a decision he warned would be “one of the scariest parts” if his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is successful in...

notabot,

So you’re willingly admitting that you deliberately increased the chance of Trump winning by not voting tactically? I know it’s a rotten system, but you have to work with what’s in front of you. The approach you espouse makes it look like you’re actually a right wing saboteur rather than anything left wing.

notabot,

I was doing fine, seeing two cows, right up until I read your comment, and now I see it as some sort of weird giraffe like creature with short legs and a surprising ability to balance even with its neck stretched out that far.

notabot,

I was doing fine, seeing two cows, right up until I read your comment, and now I see it as some sort of weird giraffe like creature with short legs and a surprising ability to balance even with its neck stretched out that far.

notabot,

It’s obviously just a glitch in the matrix, and you may be the chosen one for noticing.

I got a 504 server error the first time I posted, but apparently it worked anyway.

notabot,

You two seem to be somewhat talking at cross purposes.

As far as I can see, what they’re saying is that the Dem candidate needs to apeal to Dem voters and those who could be persuaded to vote Dem, to ensure their vote. If Biden turns enough of them off and they don’t vote he risks losing. On the other hand dyed in the wool Republican voters probably can’t be turned, so there’s no point trying to apeal to them.

You seem to be saying that not voting for Biden, despite him being unpopular, risk letting Trump in. That is also true, and it is vital that Trump is stopped, they’re just pointing out that that is easier if Biden listens to his base, rather than population wide surveys.

notabot,

I think you’re significantly misunderstanding whst they’ve said, or at least I get something entirely different from it.

The two of you seem to actually agree on almost everything, including that the Dems don’t have an overwhelming majority (I can’t see where they’ve said otherwise anyway). You seem to be saying that people should vote Dem regardless of what they’re doing, which they, and I agree with. They’re trying to point out that a) the Dems probably can’t win over solid Rep voters, and that trying to by making policies that would appeal to them risks alienating the Dem base, and more importantly swing voters and b) making policies that appeal to the Dem base and potential swing votes, despite the fact they might further alienate Rep voters is likely to result in a larger voter turnout for them.

A lot of the things Biden is currently doing seem to be aimed at trying to get Republican voters on-side, but are quite unpopular with the Dem base. Precisely because they don’t have a large majority losing any voters could be catastrophic.

The two parties, and their presidential candidates, are fairly evenly balanced in votes at the moment, both with a solidly entrenched core, a periphery of less commited voters, and the swing voters inbetween the sides. The candidate that wins is likely to be the one who loses fewest of their periphery voters and alienates the fewest swing voters. Making policie to try to ‘poach’ voters from the other party’s core is a lost cause, but might cause some of your potential voters to stay home even if they don’t vote Rep.

notabot,

Oh I absolutely agree that making sure people actually vote is important, and it’s something a parties supporters can do. You can bet that Republican voters will be pushing each other, and Dems need to be just as dedicated. The thing is, that’s a whole lot easier when your candidate is saying and doing things you agree with, and not doing stuff you abhor. That’s the nit the party and candidate have control over and should be tuning. It wouldn’t be easy to make big changes, but even more moderate changes would be helpful. Biden seems to finally be changing his tune on Isreal a bit at the moment, the question is whether he’s irreconcilably alienated too many voters already, or if he can win them back.

Expecting people to vote for Biden despite disliking his policies because the alternative is worse is logical, but might, I fear, be excessivly idealistic. The more Biden and the Dems listen to their base the easier this will be.

notabot,

I was going to roll my eyes at another “is this loss?” comment and move on, but then I looked at the strip again, and yes ot is. How did it get everywhere like this?

We could save so much bandwidth by replacing all loss graphics with the string “122L” and a short explanation of the specific circumstances.

notabot,

You shall be my first disciple. Go forth and spread the good word of 122L! Soon all who read it shall know it’s true meaning.

:)

notabot,

I reckon it won’t be long before we can just replace these sorts of inages with a short prompt and just have an AI generate the image on demand. We can swap bandwidth usage for energy usage instead. I’m not sure that’s a good trade, but with the way the internet is going that just makes it more likely to happen.

notabot,

Look everyone! That Weird Guy over there is Crazy Hair Guy!

FOSS Media Playback Device

I want to create a minimal install for mpv playback through jellyfin-mpv-shim and macast. this is going to be a base for a FOSS media sink akin to a Chromecast. you attach it to your TV and it plays whatever you send it, like movies from your jellyfin server and youtube/vimeo/piped/etc videos. otherwise, there’s no interaction...

notabot,

You shouldn’t need a window manager, you should be able to pass a tell mpv to just run full screen.

Alternativly, if you’re up for a bit more work, it looks like you can get mpv to run in tge framebuffer and so not need ecen X11. It might take recompiling a few packages, I’m not sure whether the options are built by default now, but you could have a look at this thread fir example: bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=176072

notabot,

I believe so, but that’s definitely something you’d need to check yourself.

notabot,

So “privacy for me but not for thee”? Despite your feelings about the individuals involved (which are fair enough) you do see that’s exactly as bad as the “laws for thee but not for me” that we rail against? Balancing these rules is one of those thorny problems we have to address if we ever want things to get better for the majority, but just saying “you’re filthy rich so you don’t get privacy” isn’t the way. Neither is saying that they can hide completely.

notabot,

Nevermind the billionaires, they’re just being used as scapegoats to distract you. You don’t beat an unfair and unjust system by creating a new unfair and unjust system, so the rules need to apply to everyone, no matter how annoying that feels, otherwise, you may find yourself or someone you care about in the out group and suffering because of it.

If we want privacy, everyone gets the same right. If we want free speech, everyone gets free speech (that’s the one that I find hardest to reconcile. If we want people to be able to protest or raise issues freely does that alao mean we must grant the same to those who spew hate and seek to twist the minds of others? How do we balance that?).

I don’t know what the ‘perfect’ system looks like, or even if there is such a thing. What we have now isn’t it, but saying ‘that group over there should have less rights than me’ isn’t the way either.

notabot,

Would you be ok with people tracking you in your car, or on public transport? At what level does that change for you? Is it just planes that should be publicly trackable, or boats too? What about limousines or jyst big cars?

Don’t get me wrong, I think people using any of those methods should be held accountable for the harm they’re causing, but that should apply all the way down too if that’s what we’re doing. Car drivers already pay tax on fuel and to register their vehicle so you could argue they’re already accountable, but I’m not sure that’s quite enough when you consider the harm tailpipe emissions do.

notabot,

I hope I’m not whining. I am saying we should apply the same rules to, and ensure the same rights for, everybody though; not doing so is a large part of how we got here in the first place.

You or I can travel anonymously, or at least without our movements being tracked by the public. If we want to deny that to certain people, or to certain modes of transport, we should have a clear reason why and ensure that it’s effects are balanced with it’s benefits. As I mentioned in one of my comments above, if we want to hold people accountable when they use certain types of transport, that’s fine, and if removing their anonymity is the way we want to do it, that’s fine too, but we should apply it all the way down, from planes to cars.

notabot,

Large cars too? We’re starting to get into rather dystopian territory here. I don’t drive a large car, but I know I wouldn’t like to be tracked just because someone decided I was.

I’m not actually averse to saying the loss of anonymity is the penalty for using particularly polluting modes of transport, but we should frame the rules in those terms, rather than just making ownership records public.

notabot,

Home ownership is a good example of what I mean about making the rules apply to everyone, and it applies to all types of houses, from the smallest to rhe largest, the most efficient to the least. This is an equitable rule.

Applying the same logic to transportation would mean making all car and bike ownership records public too, which I don’t think it a great idea. As I mentioned before, if we want to make the loss of anonymity the penalty for owning a massively polluting vehicle we should apply it to all significantly polluting vehicles including planes, yachts, trucks and maybe even excessively large cars. The problem is where to draw the line.

As far as I can see, the current change just brings plane ownership in line with other vehicles, and so, even though I appreciate being able to track some of these people, without rules applying to other vehicle types, it seems fair to me.

notabot,

Sorry, when you said ‘and everything above’ I thought you were referring to the things I’d listed above.

Reading it the other way, fair enough, you’re drawing the line for anonymous travel at private boats or planes. Personally I don’t think that’s helpful as they just end up chartering them from shell companies they own so their details aren’t attached to the flight so they can dodge scrutiny that way. You can try to investigate the companies but they’re anonymous that often all you can tell is they’re a charter firm a particular person uses a lot. That might be enough, but personally I’d rather either have proper accountability, or accept this isn’t the way to do it.

notabot,

Yup, I think that particular can can stay on the shelf. I appreciate the conversation.

notabot,

I’ve seen reports that slowing down the rate that someone with dyslexia reads by adding some difficulty to recognising the words and likewise increasing how much they have to focus on seeing the words actually helps with compression. I suspect this works in a similar way. It took me a few goes to work out how out of order it wss, and I’m not dyslexic.

notabot,

That’s just the author getting fed up of their character and killing them off. From the character’s point of view the shot sort of comes from right-angles to reality.

notabot,

Its shorter, so it fits better in headlines that need to be short.

notabot,

That one is a newspaper headline though, its from The Independent.

notabot,

A fair point, I hadn’t realized they’d stopped printing physical copies. They still seem to think of themselves as a newspaper though, and I suppose old conventions die hard.

notabot,

Debian works fine without systemd too, there’s a page on the wiki on how to install without it, or remove it after the fact.

notabot,

They seem to. Debian explicitly supports multiple init systems, sysvinit being the primary alternative, so packages have to handle systemd-init not being there.

notabot,

Probably not much time, a lot of packages come with init scripts anyway, and they’re pretty trivial to write if not.

You can certainly argue it’s a philosophical choice, I’d say it’s more down to recognising the many poor architectural choices in systemd, rubbing agaist its many pain points and misfeatures and being alarmed at the size of the attack surface it exposes. I understand there is an effort underway to reduce the size and complexity of the main shared library to help address the last point, but just the fact that is necessary shows the scope of the problem.

notabot,

Let’s agree to disagree on that point. Redhat switched because they invented it, and so took all the RHEL derivative distros with them. Debian switched to prefer it after a rather contentious vote and so took all the Debian derivative distros, including Ubuntu, with them. That just leaves a lot of the smaller distros, most of which seem to have stuck with sysvinit or similar as far as I can see.

notabot,

I obviously find the arguments against systemd more persuasive than you do, and that’s fine, it’s all open source and we can all make our own choices about it. My experience with it over the years has been, and still is that it vastly over complicates things that used to be simple, often the less commonly used parts just don’t work right (the automounter is a particular bugbear of mine, and few distros seem to use the network management component). The arguments do matter in practical terms as they directly impact how it works.

Of the distros you mentioned, centos is a RHEL derivative and so wasn’t independent, arch packages multiple init systems, but yes, I’d forgotten opensuse, and they seem to be firmly in the systemd camp.

I may be an internet rando, but I’m not actually angry, more just disappointed. I’d agree with Mr Torvald’s opinion that some of the design details are insane, but I think they are more fundamental than just ‘details’ as many are to do with the fundamental concepts around what systemd is and how it works. Linus can be a real dragon around changes to the kernel, but he’s always tended to be more relaxed about the layers above it.

That the developers of systemd are ‘much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility’ is surely clear to anyone who follows the relevant mailing lists and bug trackers, and should alarm everyone.

notabot,

I’m not disputing that he doesn’t think the issues are major, as I said, he’s usually pretty ambivalent about what runs on the kernel, so they’re not issues he cares about. On the flip side, I do care what is running because I have to manage and support it.

I do wonder if we’re talking at cross purposes though. You seem to mostly be talking about the systemd init system, I’m mostly talking about all the other bits it, as a sort of umbrella project, tries to encompass. I don’t much like the init system, I prefer to be able to explicitly set the ordering of the steps, rather than having them inferred, and I prefer shell script that I can test to unit files, but it mostly works ok. So does every other init system though, so it’s not a selling point.

As I said, the big problem is around how they’ve tried to do everything, much of it less well than what they’re replacing. Yes, you can build a system that uses systemd-init and none of the other components, but that still drags in a load of other dependencies, so you might as well use a different init that’s smaller and cleaner.

We came close to the ‘systemd apocalypse’ recently, when distros hooked the systemd library into openssh without understanding just how bloated it is and how many poorly monitored dependencies it brought in. It was just luck that the right person spotted a slight change in timing and investigated.

Ultimately I suppose it comes down to the level you interact with your systems at. If you just want to install your OS, a few packages they directly support and let it get on with it, then you probably neither know nor care that you run systemd, and that’s great. On the other hand, in my experience, when you try to push the system past that and do anything more customized you start running into the sharp edges and misfeatures on the various systemd components.

notabot,

NaevaTheRat? You’re not really a rat are you? You’re a Drop Bear. This is exactly the sort of thing a Drop Bear would post to entice more victims people to come to Australia.

Seriously though it’s a country I’d love to visit one day.

notabot,

It’s not just about haveing a calculator, it’s also that it’s faster and more convenient if you can do simple sums like this in your head. It also means you can sanity check the numbers your calculator gives you to make sure you didn’t make a mistake entering the sum.

To your point below about products having their unit cost displayed, more than once I’ve seen that just be wrong, so I wouldn’t rely on it. Make sure you can check it in your head.

notabot,

Have you got any local community sale type places? Things like gumtree, nextdoor, craigs list or facebook might be worth checking. I can vouch for the idea of a slow cooker. I’m pretty sure you could chuck in an old shoe, some random herbs, some root veg and a few hours later have enough tasty food to serve a small army.

Notetaking app that looks too good to be true? - Siyuan

Recently stumbled upon this note-taking app called SiYuan, but it honestly looks a bit too good to be true(?). Has anyone here used it or got any experience with it? Trying to replace Obsidian is a difficult task, and I’ve been through almost all note-taking apps there are out there, however this one looks fairly similar....

notabot,

You can sync Obsidian yourself too, it’s just a bunch of files, so anything that’ll handle them works.

notabot,

I’m using syncthing, but I think I recall the sort of issue you mention. Android locks down cross-app access quite hard, but if you move the files to your SD card (or tge emulated one if you don’t have one) it acts as shared storage and your sync program and obsidian can both read and write to it. On my device, the path is /storage/emulated/0/Documents/<whatever>

notabot,

tips fedora

M’Debian.

(Had one too many problems with Fedora)

notabot,

If there’s a question about whether it’s a biscuit or a cake, leave it out for a few days, if it gets softer it’s a biscuit, if it gets harder it’s a cake, and if it gets covered in ‘gravy’ there’s an American in your house.

notabot,

Indeed they are, as adjudicated by the courts of the land. I like the reporting here, especially:

Customs and Excise had accepted since the start of VAT that Jaffa Cakes were zero-rated as cakes, but always had misgivings about whether this was correct.

notabot,

Hackers aren’t the only way to meddle in an election, just the easiest to categorize and deal with.

notabot,

The big stumbling block I see with this approach is that it’s not just the maintainers who do the work, as others also contribute code fixes, documentation and help in the community.

I can see the very real need to support the core maintainers on the projects we use, but I can also see that causing friction if the others who contribute to a project being successful and useful are overlooked. I know that some projects’ communities put bounties on bugs they want dealt with, which helps to a degree, but still leaved many contributors effectively donating their time whilst a core group get paid. For instance, I’ve submitted and had accepted several patches across several projects that I use. They’ve usually been tobadd functionality that I wanted and saw others wanted too. I don’t think I’d want paying for them, but I’d probably feel different if I knew the person accepting the pull request was being paid, either commercially or via a scheme like this. Maybe that will work out in practice, but I’d be worried about the change in dynamic.

I don’t have a good solution to this, but I thought i’d offer it as a different viewpoint.

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