mckinley
Reply to #sj2bhjq
The end-to-end encryption means very little if you have your messages backed up in iCloud because the encryption keys are also stored with the messages in iCloud according to this FBI document. If that's the case, Apple can definitely read your messages as well as (obviously) any government agency who can make a legal request to Apple.
5 days ago
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mckinley
Reply to #smnew7a
@movq Group chat is still pretty rough around the edges, especially if you want encryption. I don't use it with my friends. If you need group chat, it's probably better to use something else.
1 week ago
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mckinley
Reply to #smnew7a
@movq I don't have much family and I talk to them on the phone but I've been there on two occasions with friends and Jabber.
> They attribute unrelated things to it, like “I can’t send messages to you, I don’t reach you! It doesn’t work!”
This scenario has played out the same way for me multiple times. It's uncanny.
I have some friends on Jabber now but it took time to make that happen. It helps that Conversations on Android is really good. I just hand them $5 cash and have them buy it on the Play Store so I don't have to answer questions about F-Droid and APK files.
On iOS, I recommend Siskin IM which works most of the time but I need to set it up for them because it doesn't handle captcha registration very well (fields are shown that shouldn't be and it's confusing) and it doesn't enable OMEMO by default (iirc).
I also used to refer to it as "XMPP", but I think that made it worse for me. "Jabber" is much less technical-sounding and some people remember hearing others talk about it.
1 week ago
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mckinley
Reply to #fza7hea
@slashdot Great, now your car can slam the brakes randomly in addition to jerking the steering wheel randomly, i.e. lane keep assist. All these "safety features" add a fun new challenge to driving. You need to constantly be aware of your car's computer misinterpreting something and respond to its reaction or you're going to end up in a ditch or in the front of a 10 car pileup.
2 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #eehqw6a
mitmproxy is not un-escaping for readability:
2 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #eehqw6a
I swear I copied a URL from an address bar one time and I noticed it was percent encoded on the clipboard when the text in the box wasn't. It was showing me something easy to read, but when I was going to use that URL for something else it was properly encoded so it wouldn't cause exactly this type of problem.
2 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #eehqw6a
Do browsers not percent-encode URLs automatically? They did in the past, right? For some reason I thought they still did, but they showed the original URL in the bar for readability.
I just used mitmproxy and pasted that URL and it didn't escape it at all.
2 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #cmpe4tq
One more point, not necessarily for @bender but for anyone else reading this. If you don't want to use the command line, Arch probably isn't for you. Linux Mint is much closer to a command-line-free distribution. Don't be afraid of the command line, though. The command line is good for you.
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #cmpe4tq
@bender Yes, that one. It's not a big deal unless you use Arch on a remote machine. You can expect some minor issues like this, but the Arch team does a good job of smoothing these things over with prompt updates and announcements like that if they can't.
EndeavourOS is alright, better than Manjaro in my opinion. If you're going to use an Arch based distribution, I would recommend just installing regular Arch. They have an install script now that makes the installation very easy if you want an average setup, but the manual installation isn't that hard if you want something more specialized.
The Arch manual installation also gives you valuable knowledge on how to fix the system if it breaks.
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #cmpe4tq
@eldersnake That would be really useful. I can't train myself to do `yay -Syuw` and I don't like having one package name on each line when confirming the upgrade.
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #cmpe4tq
@movq I actually had to hook a monitor and a keyboard up to my server. This is the instability they talk about on Arch, which I've been experiencing a little more lately.
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #h4oppba
@prologic Regardless, Sentz looks really sketchy to me and I wouldn't trust it at all. I think it would probably function properly; they probably aren't going to outright steal your money (for now), but I have reservations about the confidentiality of transactions and what might happen to the ecosystem in the long-term.
Any "cryptocurrency" created by a for-profit company cannot be trusted. Plus, I'm not seeing a link to any source code from the home page either.
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ch5vxqq
It reminds me of this episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHYX0HFJoG4
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ch5vxqq
@prologic Looks like any other payment service except it's intermingled with some sketchy cryptocurrency. I would just bypass all that and use Monero instead.
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #5phr3la
@prologic I use Redirector by Einar Egilsson. It works great. You can even import and export your rules with JSON files.
* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/
* https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/redirector/ocgpenflpmgnfapjedencafcfakcekcd
3 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ckkcwlq
@eldersnake A *huge* effort. Andreas Kling is the lead of the SerenityOS project and he makes great videos on his YouTube channel. It's mostly been monthly updates lately on SerenityOS and Ladybird but he also has a lot of programming videos where you get to see his process, fixing a bug or adding a feature from start to finish. I highly recommend his channel.
4 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ckkcwlq
@prologic There is JavaScript, but not everything is implemented (properly). They're writing everything including the JavaScript engine from scratch.
4 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ckkcwlq
It worked! I can't reply to a message (this was posted from the conversation view) and the hamburger menu when the screen is narrow doesn't work, but it's getting much closer.
4 weeks ago
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mckinley
If you're reading this, it is now possible to post on twtxt.net using Ladybird!
4 weeks ago
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mckinley
Reply to #whvkqaa
@jsreed5 I had a public network block my personal Wireguard connections on port 51820 but my VPN service using Wireguard on port 1637 wasn't blocked. I don't know what they think they're accomplishing. It was at a hotel, where people might feasibly need to connect to a VPN for work.
1 month ago
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mckinley
Reply to #r7scenq
To everyone reading this, please make sure the elderly people in your life know to be very skeptical of unsolicited messages from companies, banks, government institutions, and pop-ups that say their computer is infected.
I would recommend getting them the hell off of Windows as well if you can, installing uBlock Origin in their browser, and disabling all browser notifications. Linux Mint is a great distribution for non-technical people. Just tell them to only install software from the Software Manager application and to think of it like the app store on their phone.
1 month ago
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mckinley
Reply to #r7scenq
@bender These sorts of scams are a huge problem and gift cards are an easy way to move money around anonymously. There are a few different common types of scams, but they usually involve someone logging into the victim's computer using a remote desktop utility like TeamViewer and asking him for money under some false pretense. If the victim won't pay, the scammer will sometimes lock down the computer so they can't use it.
Usually, it's nothing a reinstall won't fix but if they can change the password/recovery of the Microsoft account and the disk is encrypted (which is the default if you sign in to a Microsoft account on Windows 11) it can be impossible to get their data back without the help of Microsoft support, who will treat you as if *you're* the one trying to steal the account. It is important to remember that the people running these types of scams don't have much deep technical knowledge (if they did, they could get a real job) so I've never heard of that happening but it is a serious risk.
1 month ago
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mckinley
Reply to #lhs4mcq
It's been known for some time that AI actually stands for "A lot of Indians".
1 month ago
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mckinley
Reply to #lw6up5q
@prologic No
1 month ago
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mckinley
Reply to #f3gunra
@muayboranacademy Huh, a twtxt feed hosted on Google Drive.
2 months ago
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mckinley
A careless `rm -rf` just got me, big time. I realized what had happened and stopped it in less than a second, but it had already deleted ~3000 (70 GiB) of files I didn't want to delete. Luckily I had backups in Restic.
Fun fact: This is the first time I've had to restore more than a file or two from any of my Restic repositories.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #dhmexsa
@bender I see you host your own relay. Which implementation are you using, and how did it go setting it up?
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #dhmexsa
@bender Maybe I'll get back into it at some point. I think it would be a little excessive to have a standard twtxt, a rich twtxt, *and* a Nostr feed, not to mention a regular blog and a separate "notes" section on my website.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #dhmexsa
@bender I don't have one. When I was looking into Nostr, I couldn't find a client I liked so I put it on the back burner. Which one are you using?
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #4uamtsq
@prologic No pain here. There's no important data on them, and the first portion of the drives work reliably enough that there weren't any issues before I had to shelf it. This is just for fun. I don't even think I'd consider it a war game.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #4uamtsq
@mckinley It booted. I was going to do more but I had actual work to do so I shelved it. Maybe I'll come back to it another time. These drives are in really bad shape, though. They hold up udev by 30-60 seconds on every boot, even when booting the Arch install ISO, covering the console with lots of SATA errors and timeouts I don't really understand.
Badblocks via `mkfs.ext4 -cc` was taking too long on the full 1+1 TB array so I made new 250 GB partitions and neither drive had bad blocks in that range so it was just a waste of time. Maybe if I come back to it I'll do the full array and have the EFI system partition in RAID 1 just for fun. I didn't know that worked with software RAID.
> The key part is to use --metadata 1.0 in order to keep the RAID metadata at the end of the partition, otherwise the firmware will not be able to access it.
I had the ESP on a USB stick for simplicity's sake.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #fcghsma
@prologic I can't really commit to that. Don't plan anything around me.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #fcghsma
@shreyan Same here. I work relatively late so I'm never up that early.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #cbzsoyq
@prologic Nice! Save some marshmallows for me.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #6wcpwma
@prologic Any of the above
2 months ago
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mckinley
#QOTD : If you could redesign a fundamental internet protocol from scratch, which one would you choose and how would you improve it?
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #xpz5p3a
@rrraksamam I'm looking forward to my all-SSD Btrfs RAID5 NAS. I think it'll be a while, though. I just paid $6.92/TB for a couple of used 12TB HDDs.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #66sdgyq
@prologic They're shutting down after 7 years. It was a great place to buy Monero with cash by mail. https://localmonero.co/nojs/blog/announcements/winding-down
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #fv4mpda
@aelaraji Nice. Compiling problematic software is my #1 use of containers on my PC. I use a handful of them on my server.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #sd3pb4q
@lyse Same here. Where does it not work, @movq?
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ghroc5q
@movq People just don't ask these questions. It's really a serious privacy issue, and I don't see it brought up very often. Not even in privacy-minded circles. If you're using a proprietary operating system on any Internet-connected device, you need to assume that the vendor can see everything you do on it and maybe even what you do on other devices as well..
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ghroc5q
Actually, it looks like notifications using Google's service *can* be encrypted end-to-end. I don't know if this is used much in practice or if you can tell if the notifications on *your* device are encrypted. There seems to be some conflicting information out there.
Even if the content is encrypted, though, you're still giving quite a bit of metadata to Google by using their notification service.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ghroc5q
It looks like ntfy.sh can work either through the OS's notification service or by maintaining its own connection to the server in the background. For privacy, you definitely want to use "Instant Delivery" and self-host the server.
https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#how-much-battery-does-the-android-app-use
https://docs.ntfy.sh/faq/#what-is-instant-delivery
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ghroc5q
@movq I haven't done any app development, but I know notifications on phones are indeed dependent on cloud services run by the OS vendor which talk to servers run by the app vendor on your behalf. This is supposedly better on battery life, but it conveniently lets your OS vendor read all your notifications.
Mobile XMPP clients usually implement notifications using XEP-0537 and it goes like this:
```
Your XMPP server -> Client vendor's notification server -> Client OS notification server -> User's device
```
It's not end-to-end encrypted so servers will usually just send a dummy message through (You received a message from juliet@capulet.lit!) so you have to open the app to see the (hopefully) encrypted message.
It's a similar flow on both iOS and Android and I assume Matrix clients work the same way.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #xd77bfq
@prologic I know, right? It's a very elegant solution to the problem using standard command line utilities. It was too hard to find. I went through 3 or 4 Stack Exchange threads from my Web search before I found somebody linking to this answer. People were misunderstanding the question and suggesting all kinds of crazy methods including weird, proprietary, GUI Windows software.
2 months ago
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mckinley
How To Efficiently Copy Files To Multiple Destinations: https://mckinley.cc/notes/20240508-copy-multiple-destinations.xhtml
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ulztp5q
@prologic I can't recommend it enough.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ixpmzia
@movq
```
$ units -t '500 gigabytes per 9 hours' 'megabytes per second'
15.432099
```
That's a very unfortunate speed in the year 2024.
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #ixpmzia
@movq That's no fun at all. I don't like to throw away working hardware either, but I wouldn't wait 7 hours (CPU-bound!) for my manual backup to complete if it could be done faster on a 10 year old laptop with AES-NI. How much data did you add?
2 months ago
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mckinley
Reply to #57heunq
Speaking of which @prologic, have you heard from @ocdtrekkie lately? He's active on mastodon but I haven't seen him around here in a long time.
2 months ago
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