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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • How do you connect? Is there a domain? Is that domain used for email or any other way that it might circulate?

    Also, depends on if the IP address was used for something in the past that was useful to target or not. And finally do you use that IP address outbound a lot, like do you connect to a lot of other services, websites, etc. And finally, does your ISP have geolocation blocks or other filters in place?

    It’s rare for a process to just scan through all possible IP addresses to find a vulnerable service, there are billions and that would take a very long time. Usually, they use lists of known targets or scan through the addresses owned by certain ISPs. So if you don’t have a domain, or that domain is not used for anything else, and you IP address has never gotten on a list in the past, then it’s less likely you’ll get targeted. But that’s no reason to lower your guard. Security through obscurity is only a contributory strategy. Once that obscurity is broken, you’re a prime target if anything is vulnerable. New targets get the most attention as they often fix their vulnerabilities once discovered so it has to be used fast, but tend to be the easiest to get lots of goodies out of. Like the person who lives on a side street during trick-or-treat that gives out handfuls of candy to get rid of it fast enough. Once the kids find out, they swarm. Lol


  • Google is a Reddit partner now, so they probably don’t want discussion of anything that removes them from the loop, thus privacy is very limited to “privacy from everyone but Google” or whatever corporate blob is currently funding Reddit. This is why Reddit is dead to me, basically it is now all about profit and communities can only exist if they contribute to that goal.




  • Even if Copilot was suspended, the idea was put into the heads of managers and executives. My work laptop current has three applications constantly locking files as they track everything I do and every file that gets touched and upload it all to the servers. Git now takes a ridiculous amount of time to check in and push files since it creates tons of small changes to the cached files that a the tracking applications block further changes or uploads until they can record the information. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute to check in a single small file. Something that used to take a second or two at most. Worst part is if I’m in a WebEx meeting, the fighting over caches in it and git and any other processes,often causes deadlocks that crash the machine. I’m constantly apologizing for being late for meetings because the laptop crashed and had to reboot. It’s gotten to the point that they finally gave me a much faster laptop rather than just excluding cache and git folders and such from the tracking because the people who want literally everything tracked don’t know what cache or git is, much less how much useless data they’re gathering or how the AI that analyzes it all is going yo get distracted by the garbage and not find any useful data anyway. Microsoft needs to get in the game to push the others back out.




  • Note that often it’s more efficient to move infrequently accessed memory for background tasks to swap rather than having to move that out to swap when something requires the memory causing a delay in loading the application trying to get the RAM, especially on a system with lower total RAM. This is the typical behavior.

    However, if you need background tasks to have more priority than foreground tasks, or it truly is a specific application that shouldn’t be using swap and should be quickly accessible at all times, or if you need the disk space, then you might benefit from reducing the swap usage. Otherwise, let it swap out and keep memory available.




  • I mean LLC is just a nice option if you want it to be easy to transfer it to someone else next time so they don’t have to go through any hassle. Adding someone to an LLC to have control over the assets is just easier than if an individual owns those assets.

    But this all comes down to ownership. Someone owns the rights to the domain. Sonatype obeys that ownership. So it really comes down to how the owner wants to handle it. And in the US anyway, lawyers aren’t really required for an LLC, depending on the state you live in. Many it’s just a couple of simple documents and a small fee. That’s why LLCs are used by rich people to hide their money, it’s cheap and easy. I’ve done it many times in multiple states for various projects and never had any legal background. The nonprofit part is a little more work, but as long as you aren’t bringing in any money, its not necessary. Still easy in practice, but more research to figure out. Also, it comes with a lot of benefits like free access to a lot of stuff, including some from Sonatype. But again, not required, just thinking ahead and how I would do it.

    First step would be just to contact the domain owner. If they are no longer interested in owning that asset, then they may just give it to you. If they are unresponsive and the domain is not in use for anything else, you could also contact the registrar and report it and if they can’t contact the domain owner there’s a possibility that they may allow you to purchase it depending on their policies.

    Again, don’t get discouraged, and I’m totally willing to give pointers if you decide to go the nonprofit LLC route, but first, just contact the owner and maybe they’ll just give you the login for the domain registrar or if they don’t want to give up the ownership of the domain, maybe just authorize you with Sonatype to publish the artifacts. Essentially, because it’s an ownership issue, the owner needs to be involved.




  • I get the idea of wanting that lifeline in case of an emergency, but I agree, constant tracking is toxic. I’d never give a corporation my kids’ information just for some small convenience like that. Basically selling their future for almost nothing. By the time they grow up, potential employers and governments will know every place they ever visited as a kid, even places that might have been technically trespassing or politically divisive in the future. Kids need to learn and explore and be guided on what’s right and wrong, not be punished for minor stuff they did as children their entire lives.


  • I mean, in most cases this isn’t criminal law (in the US at least), so it means you have to attract enough attention of a corporation since they’re usually the only ones who can afford the legal costs to file the DMCA requests and responses for copyright violation. And with many other civil issues, often corporations with the money for it, don’t have standing to sue, and if they did, would be required to sue each individual in the appropriate jurisdiction.

    With the removal of Section 230, these costs will go down significantly as a single user’s violation could be enough to bankrupt or shut down an entire site of violating content or, if serious criminal violations like child porn, put the person who hosts the site in prison who, will be much easier to identify and sue in a single jurisdiction or arrest than a random internet user.


  • Yeah, other countries have similar or even more strict requirements, so yeah it all depends on the jurisdiction. You have to also understand that just hosting something externally, doesn’t mean you don’t fall under laws of another country. It’s the internet. And if you live in a country, you may be held responsible for obeying their laws. I’m not a lawyer, so it’s something to be careful of even if externally hosted.


  • This is especially necessary to consider if you live in the US right now. One of the things the current administration is pushing for even harder than past administrations is removal of Section 230 of the communications act that was enacted in the 90s. This provides a defense against liability for the content you host as long as you make a reasonable effort to remove content that is illegal. Problem is that this makes it really difficult to censor (maliciously or otherwise) content because it’s hard to go after the poster of the content and easier to go after the host or for the host to be under threat to stop it from being posted in the first place. But it’s a totally unreasonable thing, so it basically would mean every website would have to screen every piece of content manually with a legal team and thus would mean user generates content would go away because it would be extremely expensive to implement (to the chagrin of the broadcast content industries).

    The DMCA created way for censors to file a complaint and have content taken down immediately before review, but that means the censors have to do a lot of work to implement it, so they’ve continued to push for total elimination of Section 230. Since it’s a problematic thing for fascism, the current administration has also been working hard to build a case so the current biased supreme court can remove it since legislation is unlikely to get through since those people have to get reelected whereas supreme court justices don’t care about their reputation.

    So, check your local laws and if in the US, keep an eye on Section 230 news as well as making sure you have a proper way to handle DMCA takedown notices.



  • Not offering a solution here exactly, but as a software engineer and architect, this is not a Linux only problem. This problem exists across all software. There are very few applications that are fully self contained these days because it’s too complex to build everything from scratch every time. And a lot of software depends on the way that some poorly documented feature worked at the time that was actually a bug and was eventually fixed and then breaks the applications that depended on it, etc. Also, any time improvements are made in a library application it has potential to break your application, and most developers don’t get time to test the every newer version.

    The real solution would be better CI/CD build systems that automatically test the applications with newer versions of libraries and report dependencies better. But so many applications are short on automated unit and integration tests because it’s tedious and so many companies and younger developers consider it a waste of time/money. So it would only work in well maintained and managed open source types of applications really. But who has time for all that?

    Anyway, it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot at my current job as an architect for a major corporation. I’ve had to do a lot of side work to get things even part of the way there. And I don’t have to deal with multiple OSes and architectures. But I think it’s an underserved area of software development and distribution that is just not “fun” enough to get much attention. I’d love to see it at all levels of software.