Paul Erdos is known for work in hobby mathematics which has little or no use "in real world".
1,121 karma · joined May 16, 2015
What about that audit?
If you keep all your important data off internet, that's good for you, and Qubes helps.
> To prevent remote root exploits, the Amazon Linux AMI does not allow remote root login via SSH[...] By default, the only account that can log in remotely via SSH is ec2-user. The ec2-user has sudo privileges.
Can someone please explain how this makes any sense for better security. It seems to be just a security theater.
> Never lead to escapes
Escape is the highest form of security failure. I'm talking about data access and exfiltration.
Do you store all your important data on a VM with no internet access? Even Qubes users don't, it's hard to work with. Then it's Firefox/ kernel bug away from being accessed remotely.
XSAs are publicly known vulnerabilities discovered by someone who wanted to make it public and later were published by the Xen developers. There very probably are publicly unknown vulnerabilities, both in HW and Xen, discovered/created by people who want to profit from exploiting them. There are whole teams focused on this kind of work, payed by states and criminal-enablers like NSO.
> What is restrictive about Qubes?
No GPU acceleration for video in a VM, legacy OS on dom0. Xen development in support of modern CPUs has fallen behind, didn't even boot on modern Zen X570 platform last time I tried, dysfunctional nested virtualization, using KVM from Linux does not work, can't run Android Studio with phone emulator.
Sudoing into root from lowuser account is in some scenarios potentially more dangerous than just using both accounts separately, as the user who uses root regularly/very often gets accustomed to the fact his commands are powerful and can screw his system, so mistakes almost never happen. While sudoing all the time creates a false sense of security and the user is more likely to run harmful command with sudo.
The idea your data on a PC connected to Internet can be really secured from the most powerful actors is very naive.
Why have multiple different unix users if all have the same power of the root user? They aren't isolated from each other, they aren't less powerful than root. So why not just use the already existing single root account?
Probably because those "everyone" (in fact, a big portion of population) wants to have that party that the other side wants to ban, and there is chance it could happen. So they try to defend it preemptively by suggesting any banning in general would not be democratic (which is probably not true).
Another reason is that in recent history, most if not all German governments banning parties either were undemocratic, or turned out to dismantle democracy.
I'm assuming the hypothetical weird situation where public advocacy outside the lawmaking process is illegal, but the lawmakers in the lawmaking process can discuss and repeal that law. This isn't implausible in democracy, as it is common in democracies that lawmakers have immunity from prosecution based on objectionable speech in a parliament.
Or illegally via advocating (just because an action is illegal, it does not mean it can't happen) or motivating the lawmakers in various ways, eventually a revolution (which still can be democratic in a sense).
If lawmakers can't repeal that kind of law legally, the system is not a sovereign democracy, but, at best, restricted/controlled democracy, by someone else than demos, who is maintaining that superlaw.
It depends on the law (constitution). If the law says it's forbidden, then it is anti-that-kind-of-democracy. If there is no such law, then it's consistent with democracy.
Real presidential democracy should allow for change of law and constitution, so the democratic process here would be to first change the law/constitution to allow for advocating, then advocate for switching to Parliamentary system, then get this change passed through the lawmaking process. Lots of steps, very hard to do, but in principle there should be a legal and democratic way. If there isn't legal democratic way, the system is highly suspicious, and probably isn't even formally a democracy.
> If we didn't, should the NZ government be able to ban a party advocating for one?
If the government (in extreme, the president) is democratically elected, and if the ban is done constitutionally and lawfully, then that would be still democratic.
> Germany supports lots of antidemocratic measures. They oppose binding referenda of the population before the adoption of international treaties
Interesting, is this an official government position with some rationale? Or the government just does whatever they can legally and ignores the calls for referendum?
One rationale I've came across is that international treaties (in parliamentary systems) have to go through the parliament, which is representative, so referendum is not needed, and if someone wants to invoke one, they have to do the necessary work required by the law.
Party leadership making apologies for Nazi Germany or support for Nazi/equivalent policies, or tolerance of party members behaving in such a way.
> There's a protocol
OK, so they were not found overstepping the red lines yet, only problematic and dancing on it. OK, this may change in the future. When the relevant institutions make the judgement, then it should credible.
> say you want to create
Sorry, I can't play this game. But you have a point, yes smart Nazis would try to do that.
Democracy in contemporary context also does not mean direct democracy, it means representative democracy. That's why banning a party that has overwhelming popular support can still be democratic, if it is done lawfully by democratically controlled institutions (via regular and free elections). Dissent of the people for a specific decision or policy does not have legal power in standard democracies unless a special mechanism is invoked, such as referendum with the power of law (whose invocation the president or representatives have to agree on, details depend on country).
Re downvotes, I'm pointing out that decisive German institutions so far did not pronounce the party as Nazi, and there were probably good reasons for that.
I don't know if there is such evidence, so no judgement on AfD.
However, it seems very often media in west write "protecting democracy" when they actually mean "protecting political power of centrists/liberal democratic parties". Some people even genuinely think that it's democracy only when that part of political spectrum rules.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linu...
About the only class of scenarios to use BTRFS instead of ZFS is if you want the features, do not need RAID5/6, require support by Linux distributor/kernel developers or for some other (hard to think of) reason you can't use ZFS.
I do use BTRFS on a single disk where I don't touch it with cli tools, and there it's fine.
When people tried to do a full-featured filesystem, with a remarkable exception (ZFS) it's either a disappointing unfinished mess (btrfs) or a promising, but a long-term project taking years (bcachefs).
Making a filesystem with strong support of important features is an extremely demanding project.
In your The Register article. It's good that here on HN you have clarified that this is Red Hat's position and your position. But that's the mistake - you should have stated this clearly in the article. Making an honest mistake is fine, pretending you don't see it at all is the reason for length of this conversation.
> That a corporation which over 20Y has gone from being worth very little to being worth tens of billions of dollars solely from selling contracts should not consider contract law or license terms before making such an important decision?
> To conclude that and maintain it seriously is laughable.
> Amusingly, RH itself has contacted me officially, as well as several members of staff unofficially, and ex members of staff privately, to thank me for a cogent analysis and being fair.
Nice deflection and PR work there. From outside, you seem to fit better in Red Hat's PR department than in a journal that prouds itself in "biting the hand that feeds IT".
Analysis should involve also sources and argumentation. You stated a contentious belief as an obvious fact without source and argumentation. That's more like a commentary.
> The position that "they can't do this, it's GPL!" is risible. It's stupid: it means those saying it have not thought about what a corporation worth tens of $billions has to do before such a move.
That's your analysis?
No it's not risible.
Commentators do not usually claim this is their official legal position. It's an understandable emotional reaction to IBM/RedHat turning their back on decades of established mutual understanding with the community, which was that clones are fine.
What's risible (or sad) is that some people, on both sides, including you, think their position is obviously correct and the other one is obviously wrong. None of the legal questions here are obvious.
From a legal standpoint, the contract vs GPL issue is contentious, and if you do not see why, then you probably did not came across enough of various sources on the matter. There is a documented case in the past where Red Hat violated GPL as they threatened to revoke support to a customer using the GPL code if they won't pay royalties; the customer said go pound sand, and Red Hat ultimately backed down. The spook of GPL, or "no further restrictions" in particular, is strong, and Red Hat/IBM are not likely to want to test it in court.
> I see a lot of entitled angry people who haven't put real thought into what's going on and are angry because something they felt they were entitled to has been taken away... but they were never really entitled to it at all.
That is pretty funny, because it works both ways, depending on your attitude to Red Hat :)
In addition to reading what people/organizations wrote since the announcement, it's eye-opening to read also past sources on the Red Hat attitude, especially how Red Hat tolerated CentOS, then embraced it and supported it [Jim Whitehurst quotes], then killed it, and now that they themselves have caused original centos rebirth (alternatives like Rocky and Alma), they've decided to make problems and even call the people doing useful work for the user community "freeloaders".
Jim Whitehurst quotes [1]:
"CentOS is a derivative of RHEL that works for people that want a stable release without support,"
"If they don't see the value of our model then at least I'd rather have them on something similar to RHEL."
"We don't view CentOS as a competitor. It's almost a complement,"
"Red Hat is great for production, but there are so many new innovations with OpenStack... There was nothing in the Red Hat family to support that. CentOS is moving faster and fills a gap in our portfolio of offerings."
The old management got the culture and did not attack the community. The present management is the opposite, and I think it's dumb.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-ceo-whitehurst-on-vmwa...
> [...] as far as we can see, the Hat is acting perfectly in accordance with the terms of the GPL [...] The key point being is that to obtain those binaries, customers – as well as developers on free accounts – must agree to a license agreement and are under the terms of a contract, which overrides the GPL license of the code itself.
And later here:
> I covered my take on the situation at length [...] if you have further points or questions I will be happy to try to address them.
So, if you were just reporting, and you're happy to address questions, my question is - who did you report there? Who thinks contract overrides the license? Is it you yourself, is it the Register team, or somebody else?
I think that if using that claim at all, you should have reported that this claim is pretty controversial, there are many discussions on the internet that show this.
> customers [...] are under the terms of a contract, which overrides the GPL license of the code itself
Do you have a source for this claim? Why would the contract be legally stronger than the license?
GPL prohibits further restrictions on rights of the code recipient. Contractual terms are sometimes found unlawful/invalid by courts. I guess this question can really be resolved only by a court.