𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
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𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖘𝖙𝖔𝖓𝖊𝖍𝖆𝖚𝖌𝖍
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Yeah, this is the perpetual challenge. I wouldn’t mind hosting an open server and dedicating resources to it, but I can’t afford for it in (and have no interest in it) becoming a full time admin job, which is what’s needed to prevent the problems you mention.
Freenet’s design was near perfect; the blobs you hosted were (are?) encrypted file segments that are assembled by a client into a file that can be decrypted. As a host, you have plausible deniability; you literally have no idea what the blobs you’re serving can be assembled into (unless you put them there). It’s great for political dissidents and libre journalism; it’s great for hosts who are willing to donate server resources but don’t want the burden of content administration. OTOH, it’s equally good for warez, CP, fascist and (other) terrorist coordination, and general naughtiness. It’s also slow as fuck (or was, years ago).
I keep waiting for a modern, performant version of Freenet, but any such system would suffer from abuse, and there’s a moral question about knowing that you are, in some way, enabling some amount of content you may strongly feel opposed to.
Oh, I didn’t intend to skip the Tox comments. I haven’t used that in a whole, and was unaware of the CVEs. Those, and the fact there’s no iOS app, are good reasons to not use it. I found its use of DHT limited its performance and often had device battery life impacts; it still had a better protocol than Signal. The CVEs and other issues are technical implementation problems that can be fixed, unlike Signal’s design flaws.
Confide was just an example of a new class of fully anonymous, ephemeral chat clients, and maybe not the best choice. There are a half-dozen of these, all using similar mechanisms, some of which are OSS. I need to do a deeper survey of these, because they’re an interesting new approach to full-security chat.
Anyway, just saying I hit "sendx prematurely.
Man, this is great. I’ll admit that after leaving Reddit I was starting to miss the petty arguing about semantics. It’s great to see Lemmy picking up the slack!
First, ease of use is absolutely relevant when it comes to security.
Eh, I disagree. A little convenient security is not as good as full inconvenient security. Governments and corporations everywhere are glad that there are many people who share your opinion, though - and a very many people do agree with you, as you point out in your comment about PGP.
Just to be clear, I didn’t mean to accuse you of ignorance about leaking metadata. I was expressing greater value of it than you do; metadata is a tool of oppression and exploitation, and companies like Signal minimize its impact in order to support their business model. Private messaging, to me, means privacy; not partial privacy. Not privacy of some things. It’s why it’s important to secure DNS queries. Google absolutely exploits DNS metadata from 8.8.8.8 queries - a perfect analog to Signal’s collection of phone numbers and routing. Who you talk to is extremely valuable metadata, metadata which is not private under Signal. So, again, I disagree with you that simplicity trumps metadata privacy in declaring a “gold standard” privacy protocol.
For SimpleX, the key is the statement “individuals with known identities.” If you publish your identity publically on your web page, and your friend does too, yeah. Attackers can tell you two are communicating. The difference from Signal is that, with SimpleX you can not publish your identity. You can also easily create new (unpublished) identities, and use a different one for each friend. With Signal, you have no option other than buying burner phones and having your friends all reconnect every time you get a new phone. And knowing what I do of the telecom industry, burner phones - while improving privacy - are not immune to a committed attacker such as a government.
You’re right that Jami has flaws; I won’t begin to try to defend them, although it still has better metadata protection than Signal.
It’s a false equivalency to claim that because a protocol is not perfect, that it’s no better than an even less perfect protocol. I might as well claim that because Signal isn’t perfect, it’s no better than SMS.
Maybe I should be asking: why do you believe that a system that requires users to expose their identities and route centrally unencryptable metadata through a central server is sufficient? Does it not concern you that, because Signal (the company) effectively shut down the use of third h party servers, giving them full access to all of this metadata? Why do they deserve the label “gold standard” - purely as a result of their popularity?
SimpleX is my current favorite, but I won’t suggest that it’s easy to use. It needs one missing feature (multi-device channel sharing) and some usability enhancements. It could also benefit from easier ID rotation to enhance its already quite good anonymity protection. But the core protocol is the most solid of the existing options, and it works well. And for people who are at risk, and truly need security - e.g. political dissidents - including privacy of metadata, I would recommend putting up with little inconveniences, and not cut corners on privacy.
I have no knowledge of the family, but when people get hungry enough, they’ll eat anything. Especially large birds. Poverty makes people desperate.
However, as I said: I have no idea whether these were desperate poor people (of which there are many in the US) or just unconscionable asshole fucks (of which there are almost as many).
Edit: typos. I was not drunk, despite the many errors.
And all those bicycles! So much rubber polution!
On that note, this is some exciting technology that’s coming that’ll help reduce rubber pollution from all sources:
Yes.
However, I’m perfectly happy with KeePassXC. It’s audited, secure, has a great UI, and if you want to accept less security can serve as a secret-service and ssh-agent replacement. There are a bunch of OSS tools and clients that support the kbx.v4 file format, and if you want to audit the code of the tools, they’re in almost every language. There are some really nice (pretty, user friendly) native mobile apps.
There’s risk in grabbing any old client, of course, but having such a diverse ecosystem is nice, especially if you don’t mind reading some code.
“Popular,” and even “ease of use,” are not relevant for the label of Gold Standard when we’re talking about security. Functionality for purpose is relevant, but if we’re allowing for weaker security in trade for ease of use then I’d say just use SMS; sure, it’s not as secure as Signal, but it’s a lot easier.
Reductio ad absurdum aside, there are by my count about a half-dozen systems which are more secure than Signal. Systems which don’t require you to give up your phone number, or publish it, or leak other personal metadata. You mentioned one, Briar, and there’s SimpleX Chat, Tox, and Jami (the latter two have been around for a few years, and IIRC Jami’s been audited). There are any number of apps (web and mobile) that claim encryption and anonymity such as Confide, Onion Chat, ChatS, Speek!, Peekno, and Threema. Ocelot and retroshare.io are peer-to-peer with no central servers, and are probably (metadata) secure.
I wouldn’t call any of these individually the gold standard, but several are obviously more secure than Signal.
I can’t get over how any system that required such a tracable and abusable piece of PII as a cell phone number could be considered the gold standard for privacy.
I just don’t like having to depend on a third party, or like the idea that they have access to my keys - even encrypted. It’s too many eggs in one basket, for my taste.
But lots of people like it, and I’ve never heard of any criticisms of it from the security community, so it’s probably an acceptable choice.
I don’t know which software, that can ever handle passwords, is immune to a hostile user capable of doing memory dumps on the target’s memory space. Are you aware of one?
This threat model would require inter-process memory security at the OS level; you’d need to be running BSD, or some microkernel. You’re not getting those protections on mainstream OSes, even with SE Linux, and every application that ever handles credentials in plain is at risk.
The point about Qt (and, TBH, probably about .Net) is how long the password remains in memory, and ao how big the attack vector window is, not whether or not it’s completely immune to memory dump-level threats. 'Cause Windows and Linux are both susceptable to that.
Right?
TFA claims Signal is the gold standard, which raises my eyebrows, especially as th] author - in the same breath - admits Signal leaks metadata.
There are chat clients, less popular, less well funded, that don’t leak metadata. Signal may be a good choice for the average non-techie, but it’s hardly the gold standard for private chat.
I have really come to depend on rolling-release systems. I have a few alliances that run Ubuntu, because of a dependency on vendor packages and insufficient interest in fighting with software+hardware issues, and I hate when I have to deal with them. The paupacy of software, the frequent breakage on release upgrades; I don’t know how people who prefer these systems justify how bad they are in comparison to Arch (or Nix, or any other rolling release-based distro).
I haven’t yet done it, but Arch is so reliable I’m tempted to create a daily -Syu cron job (or, more precisely, a systemd timer job, because I’m only yet running Artix on a couple of systems). The only thing that gives me pause are the kernel updates, which are frequency and necessitate system reboots.
Those kernel updates really make me wish Linus had focused on a microkernel architecture.
For KDE Connect, there’s a headless program called mconnect with no Qt (or KDE) dependencies. I use it with the KDE Connect Android app, and it works well. All of the commands on the Linux end are CLI, and many of the functions are supported.
Edit: link to source
I agree, I’d rather have it in .local/share/ or something like that. Not all *nix OSes use XDG (eg BSD variants), and even many linux distributions don’t use it by default. I suspect they did it for consistency as much as from a philosophy of “don’t hide things from users, they’re adults, not children.”
If you read Pike’s argument, it’s an argument for simply putting things in $HOME, out in the open.
I personally believe XDG has the right idea, but is a bad implementation. They should have put local, cache, and config without the dots.
IMO, the absolute worst offenders of FS use is Electron apps, which put all app files on .config. db files, cache files, temp files… they all go in .config/APPNAME, which makes version controlling .config a lot of work. That’s far mor offensive than an app creating a single, self-contained directory for itself in $HOME.
2¢
This is a client problem, a flaw in how clients exchange, manage, and maintain keys. How would server volume affect clients being unable to decrypt messages from people they were previously able to? Neither my wife nor I added new devices, or rotated keys.
My theory is that it was the result of a client version upgrade, because that does happen pretty regularly. And this hasn’t been the first time it happened; the previous time there was a week or so when messages were not decryptable, and then it mysteriously fixed itself.
Element and Matrix (the protocol) is just flakey.
Thanks to your post, I installed Steam and tried the demo. I’m going to have to figure out a think with my keyboard, b/c it isn’t playing nicely with the game, but I’m pretty excited.
I haven’t been interested in, or played, a resource management game in years; Factorio looks like it could be dangerously adictive.
Thanks for the videos!
Yup. A couple of months ago my wife’s Element and my Fluffychat suddenly started having problems decrypting each other’s messages. That was the last straw; having to go through Matrix’s annoying and tedious key sync dance every couple of months isn’t worth it. I switched us to SimpleX, which kinda sucks right now, but it at least works and doesn’t have a flakey, broken, unusable key management mechanism.
She’s completely off Matrix now. I still use it as a more complex, fussy IRC, because that’s where my rooms are… but I’ll probably go back to IRC eventually. The family is on Wire, which is also stable amd works well.
if you’re syncing passwords through a browser, a password manager, iCloud Keychain, or one of the Microsoft or Google equivalents, be aware that you are already trusting a cloud service
And this is a bullshit statement anyway.
I keep my passwords in KeepassXC and sync them with SyncThing; KeepasXC is absolutely a “password manager.” There’s no “trusting a cloud service” in there, anywhere.
Edit: 100% agree with you. I want proof that Google et al have no ownership of my identify before I use them.
It’s one of the easiest bread recipes I’ve seen, and frankly just as good as and fussy recipe thay requires more steps. This one is just “put everything in a bowl and mix it.”
Now, some breads do need more work that you really can’t simplify and still get the same result, like baguette. But I think people see bread recipes and think they’re a lot of work, get turned off, and never make their own bread. It’s a shame, because it doesn’t have to be hard, and it’s way cheaper - and IMO tastier - when it’s home made.
Rob Pike is the author of the most commonly quoted records about dotfiles, and how they were a mistake; this has indirectly led to the creation of the program under which we’re discussing.
Pike is also one of the original creators of Go, and it would have been extremely odd if he’d have perpetuated what he’s gone on record as being one of the great mistakes of Unix. One of the original creator of Unix was another of the creators of Go, which would lend strength to the belief that those involved believe dotfiles were a regrettable, unexpected, and undesireable consequence of shortcuts.
In short, many people believe that programs “hiding” files and directories is an antipattern, and they should put their directories out in the open, or where the user chooses them to live… jusy like Go does.
Mac and cheese is such a great base for meals! We do the same, and sometimes with burger. We often add peas to the tuna version, and onion to the burger version.
This is a really great suggestion! Once you have the mac & cheese, you can create a bunch of different dishes!
Also, my wife can’t have dairy, and we found a fantastic vegan mac & cheese by a company called Daiya. In our opinion, they’ve got the best-tasting dairy substitutes. They have a vegan cheddar cheese sauce and an alfredo sauce that’s really good, and also make standard mac & cheese boxes for quick-and-easy.
Americans tend to think if mac & cheese as unhealthy comfort food, but it’s a great basis for a variety of dishes.
+1 on your suggestion!
The one recipe I make, more than any other, is bread. It’s fast, simple, and aside from being a nearly every-morning staple, it forms the basis for many if our lunches. I make this once a week, throughout the year, and I doubt we make any other single, non-trivial recipe more frequently.
Unless “martini” is a recipe.
How is that the worst? Offlineimap adds three different dotfiles in $HOME. OhMyZsh turns one .zshrc into two (~/.zshrc and ~/.zshrc.local). Countless programs put multiple dotfiles at the top level – go is the worse just because it doesn’t start with a dot?
The directory is easily moved; the environment variable GOPATH declares where the tooling looks for it. Set GOPATH=~/.go in your profile or shell rc, and mv go .go. Or, if you’re cleaning up $HOME, move it to ~/.local (mv go .local/go) and set your GOPATH to that (export GOPATH=~/.local/go). Don’t forget to add $GOPATH/bin to your path, if you have executables you use.
It wouldn’t be SA picking sides in that war, though; it’d be about their legal obligation to act on the outstanding warrant for his arrest issued by the ICC.
They may still be unwilling to try to arrest him, but they’re probably concerned about the long term. The ICC will be around long after Putin is gone.
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So. Much. Pasta.
Here are two more:
3 ingredients (excluding salt, olive oil, and water) and it takes about 15 minutes.
My second current favorite is cous-cous. You just use whatever you have handy. You just add in butter, raisins, almond slivers (or almost any combination of fats, sugars, and protein you have in the cupboard) and cooks in 5 minutes, with no fussing or stirring. The deliciousness-to-effort ratio is insanely high.