Thanks, I thought I knew all the major mesh VPN options (tinc, nebula, tailscale, zero tier, hamachi) and yet I never heard of yggdrasil.
This is the kind of comment I love HN for!
10,335 karma · joined June 10, 2018
This is the kind of comment I love HN for!
This is just prohibitively complex. Formats like JSON and YAML thrive because they don't have the complexity of trying to fit every possible scenario ever. The KISS principle still works.
And yeah they should know better. On the other hand, modern programming languages also pull libraries from all over the place without any serious vetting. This is becoming more and more of a problem as several people have demonstrated here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30679098
I bet sooner or later this will result in a major wannacry/log4j style international incident and then we'll start doing something about it.
Lockpicking is more interesting as a sport, or for legitimate purposes. For illegitimate ones it just takes too long, and its positives like being silent aren't of any benefit to robbers. And spies have better tools.
Modern door locks are full of mitigations like mushroom pins anyway. Data centre racks, office drawers, filing cabinets, those are the ones you can open in seconds because they tend to have cheap locks with really poor manufacturing tolerances. This is what makes lockpicking so interesting to pentesters.
Source: lockpicking class at security conferences (most of the defcon-style ones do them). It was really enlightening to see how hard it is to pick a good lock. And how easy to pick a crap one.
But 5 seconds is particularly bad indeed. Usually the cylinders are made of metals with different hardnesses inside to deflect a drill sideways. Brute force will still get them but 5 seconds is quick.
After all, even a physical lock is just a combination lock. The combination is just 'encoded' in a metal strip. Or in the above case, with magnets. And it's still possible to copy the key by reading it.
Better to use a digital key with asymmetric encryption. Using that you can prove you have a private key without actually giving up the information needed to fabricate a copy.
Here in Spain (which is a first-world country :) a good dev would make about 50k or so..
I think the Silicon Valley area has really skewed expectations of salary (and of course living expenses!). Familiarity with codebase is a problem indeed, but they could start setting up a hub somewhere in Europe.
I think part of the problem is that when they incorporated Mozilla they started thinking as a corporation. Multi-million-dollar-paid CEOs, top-heavy with marketing etc. They should have stayed nonprofit IMO.
All the ones I've seen emulate Whatsapp and signal. Big avatars, lots of spacing everywhere. This doesn't work well if you bridge lots of other networks with many channels. Discord, slacks etc.
For now I still bridge that kind of network to IRC, and I use matrix just for my personal chats. Because there's just no good client that doesn't become a huge mess with that many channels open.
It used to peg my cpu to 100% though back in the day when I used it. Hope they fixed that.
But I'd love something more modern.
I agree the focus isn't there. I was managing everything "not Windows" as an endpoint architect and it was very difficult to get other teams to consider them. Makes sense because "not Windows" was less than 1% of our userbase. So I had to really push for them to select tools like VPN and antivirus that support Linux and Mac.
However we did manage. What I did see a lot was that R&D users didn't want to use the standard supported distro (which by the way I picked with their input). They complained about all the mandatory antivirus software (which was not my choice, but the security team's mandate). But really there was a very high amount of "I just want to manage everything myself" going on too. You can't have it both ways though. Either you get a managed endpoint and you have to roll with some of the decisions or you do it all yourself (and in some cases are locked out of some critical environments due to security policy)
This is fine (well fine by me, but not by our security team!) but then don't complain about how hard it is to get it set up.
I can see how WSL fits well into this for companies, though I prefer real Linux myself too. A lot of R&D users would be on Mac as it's a "Linuxy enough" OS with much less hurdles in a corporate environment (native MS Office available etc).
That can be changed of course. They can make it work just like on Android where the user has to give permission for things like filesystem access.
The point of the law is to bring more control away from Apple and to the user.
However it is indeed possible that Apple would weasel such a requirement through the loopholes, yes.
Also it could lead to a much better ecosystem of open-source apps like there is with F-Droid on Android. It'll take some time to develop but I really love many F-Droid apps over their commercial alternatives. Apps are so much more efficient if they just do what they need to do and don't bother with all the spying and ads.
It could also finally enable other browsers on iOS for real!
What made some stuff hard was that there were not many pixels available for icons due to the more resolutions in those days, which made icons hard to recognise.
I've been looking to put words to what's going wrong at Mozilla recently but you captured this perfectly.
LCD tech has really come a long way since then (not even to mention OLED :) )
I still hope this can be settled. If Ukraine gives up the areas that were basically constant civil war anyway... Continued escalation is to nobody's benefit. I don't think the Russian population wants this war either.
PS for what it's worth I also was really opposed to my own country helping the US to invade the middle East (eg Iraq, Afghanistan). But two wrongs don't make a right.
The sysadmins hated it when we made our terminals look like what they viewed as an inferior system (which to be honest it was, at the time with its DOS underpinnings)
It'll be a possible sanction because it will hurt the Russian population and businesses. But it won't avoid any cyberattack.
I hope you will find more fulfillment in the future!
By the way I never planned anything. I don't think more than a week ahead. Somehow I have fallen into the right places anyhow.
I tend to get really bored once I've totally mastered a job so I change a lot. I need a challenge. Because I do this within the same company (lucky to get the opportunity!) it didn't really make me look like a jobhopper, that helped alleviate worries about having a CV that's all over the place.. Also, some things I've done (like desktop office telephony) are totally extinct now so it is pretty easy to explain. I'm definitely in the "Senior IC" category in the article.
But I can recommend to look around if you're not happy. You never know...
IOS hides it a lot more. There wasn't even a file manager until they introduced one with iPadOS.
I guess they just wanted to use the metaphor that made sense visually too. Since it was always represented by a folder icon. I don't remember what Windows 1-3 called them but they weren't visually represented by a folder but by a window with little icons. Which didn't make a ton of sense.
I know people often didn't use directories on floppies but the complexity was replaced by another one: which floppy contained the file you were looking for. Most people had big boxes full of hundreds of them.
And Android still has a visible file system.
As a result, those earlier terminals are even harder to emulate as there wasn't really much 'firmware' and definitely no standard CPU architecture. However those were pretty barebones anyway in terms of control codes.
I loved the VT05's design though. It looks really star trek. It won't fit on a modern desk because of the depth (all those custom boards take up a ton of space) but it looks so cool.
However for those who are so inclined I can see the value.
I'm not going to buy bug burgers nor rent my stuff.
What we should do is more population control. As a first step stop incentives for having children (Inn the Netherlands you get more child benefit per child the more you have!). It's tough for the people that want big families but we can't continue growing humanity like this.
For example: A lot of patches contributed by Microsoft are to make things run better on Azure and are irrelevant to most consumers. They view desktop Linux mainly as something that should exist under Windows (in my work there was a lot of pressure to move our development laptops to WSL2). They use their market position to push their views (think of the way they hassle third party browsers on Windows).
Canonical is trying to make the snap store something they and only they control (it is not possible to run your own even now). RedHat with IBM took over CentOS just to remove it from the market as a free way to run RHEL.
It's my belief that in the end they will always want something back, some kind of strings attached. The GPL is not sufficient to prevent that because it's purely about code, not about the business model behind it. Be it intellectual property, use of their services, data collection, whatever. And they will do whatever they can to gain a foothold over the competition, which is also involved in Linux.
Even if a current operator is benign, they can always be taken over by a less scrupulous party, as happened many times in IT history. I don't want my OS be used as a pawn in that game. This is what I like about FreeBSD, the MIT license while being more open gives corporate interests less guarantees their contributed work won't be used by competitors and because of that they tend to ignore it. With the exception of Netflix which hasn't really done harm to the ecosystem because FreeBSD itself doesn't really factor into their products other than as a server platform. Even so, FreeBSD is not free from corporate influence nor are many of the apps I use. But it is more so than Linux.
But yes it is more a personal principle than an explicit objection to some of the contributions made. I used to be a supporter of "big tech" influence a decade ago but too many things have happened. That was still in the days we believed Google really wouldn't be evil :) Now they rely on tracking and push clearly user-hostile tech like FLoC through standards bodies. As a result I've admittedly become more anti-corporate than the current situation warrants. But action = reaction. They have a lot to make up for.
Apple was the best in this regard IMO because their business model was all about hardware, so they could afford to give software away for free. But they too are becoming more closed, with increased reliance on app store and iCloud revenue. They gave us stuff like OpenCL but lately everything they've come out with is closed (think Metal).