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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • I guess I am not getting it.

    If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

    Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

    But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.


  • Really depends on your current tool so RTFM on that.

    But when you are activating it in your account? There is a QR code you are supposed to scan. And there is almost always a button like “Having trouble?” or “Show TOTP Key” or whatever. Click that and you get a long alphanumeric string instead. Paste that into the TOTP field for Bitwarden (or Keepass or whatever) and it will generate codes for you.

    Once or twice I have had to actually use my phone camera to decode the QR code so that I can manually type in the TOTP code/seed, but I think the last time I did that was in like 2020?


  • There is.

    2FA. No, not the fucking “we’ll send you an SMS” bullshit that is increasingly used to just highlight an active phone number for spam purposes. Proper TOTP with the code backed up to a proper service (bare minimum, Bitwarden)

    Someone can steal your password and even your email account (unless you TOTP that too…). They still can’t get into your account unless you are an idiot who gets tricked into providing the 2FA key.

    In a perfect world? Have your TOTP credentials in one encrypted database/Bitwarden account and your passwords in another. In reality? Just use a trusted service. I used to be a big fan of Keepass but protecting that with a yubikey (or similar) is a huge mess.


    The recent push for passkeys (?) is a nice-ish middle ground. People don’t need to understand how to paste a TOTP code into Bitwarden but they still need to approve a login. That said, I hate it since so much of it is dependent on a single device that can generally be opened by just applying REDACTED to the screen and doing REDACTED to narrow down the lock code significantly.








  • Gotta love that Rossman has pivoted from “failed business owner” to “basically James Stephanie Sterling but with less nazi imagery”

    Shit like this REALLY annoys me. I am all for a discussion of the ethics of piracy… if people actually understand what ethics are (and, as has been demonstrated countless times, people don’t). But shit like this is about deciding when it is “fair” to pirate content and when not. And, considering it is Rossman, I assume he is goign to talk about how you should support companies that care about your rights or are small businesses and fuck larger businesses and the New York City government.

    But the reality: Whether you think piracy is or is not stealing is irrelavent. It is piracy whether you are pirating a game from a toddler with leukemia or Amazon after they rebranded to having the website be a giant picture of Bezos’s dong. It just becomes a matter of if you think that matters or if it is okay to hurt/“hurt” one of those companies.

    Which almost inevitably becomes about defining The Tragedy of the Commons.

    At the end of the day: it is piracy. We are pirates. Fucking own up to it.







  • Yeah. I have a LOT of issues with Tor’s design. And the philosophy and its tendency to be used for heinous shit like CSAM makes me just not want to deal with it. Why should I help mask the scum of the earth’s behavior?

    And while it has historically been used to protect some journalists and activists, Signal, twitter, and proper opsec/dedicated hardware have very much taken over for that. In large part because people have realized that masking your route to a destination doesn’t help if you are connecting from home and have been identified at the destination.

    But people get REALLY pissy about Tor. Likely because it makes them feel smart to be “one step farther”.


  • Not what you want to hear but:

    Putting ALL of your traffic through a VPN accomplishes little to nothing… and may actually compromise you. Understand that we all have a digital fingerprint, as it were. A mess of tracking cookies but also lining up “personas” and the like.

    An example I like is that Jim in Botswana is known to login to the same account as Jim from Sweden and Jim from Alabama. Also, Jim from Alabama has used some of the same VERY distinct language as Sophie Smith’s little brother. And Sophie Smith went to Polk High in 1997. And if this sounds crazy: THIS is why there is so much research into how to aggregate and analyze large swathes of data and stuff like LLMs largely came out of this as a bonus.

    If you put all of your traffic through a VPN you are more or less making it easy. Jim from Sweden blah blah blah AND that same IP downloads a lot of copyrighted tentacle porn. Which has now greatly increased your risk vector in the event an example needs to be made.

    Put traffic that needs to be VPN’d through a VPN. Put traffic that needs to be Tor’d through Tor (although, also do some research on the various attempts to compromise that…) and so forth. But the key is to not mix your “good” traffic with your “bad” traffic.


  • So… because this is 100% legal, people should… hide their name and run shell companies?

    Because patreon tends to give a shit who they are mailing the check to.They won’t just leave it taped to a wall outside the local Denny’s and not ask questions about who picks it up. Shell companies can help with obfuscating that.

    Relying on crypto DRASTICALLY reduces the likelihood people will make any donations to you. And is still incredibly easy to track, even through tumblers (there is a reason graph algorithms are such a hot topic and it isn’t just twitter).

    Because, you are right: Emulation is legal (if you thread the needle). Which is why people who spend thousands of hours writing cool software put their name on it. Rather than jump through all these hoops and make themselves look like criminals.