jamieweb

I can see where you're coming from on the privacy bit, but from a security point of view, Chrome/Chromium is generally a well-secured browser.

Yes it's not written in a memory-safe language, but drive-by exploits and attacks that escape the sandbox are exceedingly rare in Chrome, even if you're running an older version.

Of course if you add extensions and Flash to the mix, the security is degraded, but with a normal Chrome install it's fairly hard to do something bad in one tab that will negatively impact another.

It's a challenge to weigh up the risk of not using an adblocker versus the risk of the extension getting compromised.

I guess that solutions like DNS-level blocking or custom hosts files are a fair balance, but I still like the DOM-based per-element control found within adblock extensions.

And then I see people with like 20 extensions installed...

There are 4 species of damselfly named after each of the band members of Queen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteragrion_freddiemercuryi

Often the reason for having the user and password fields on separate 'screens' is to facilitate federated logon.

I.e. if someone has an account where they 'Logged in with Google' or it is connected to an IDAM solution like Okta or Duo, they don't have a password for the site so shouldn't be prompted for it.

As for the delay and any other nonsense, I'm not sure. Perhaps design winning over usability?

Yeah, there are 500 and 503 errors in the dev console.

Twitter is usually first to report this stuff: https://twitter.com/search?q=youtube%20down&src=typed_query&...

Perhaps something like IPFS or Dat? If the site gets more than a few visitors per day it should remain cached.

I definitely agree with you in regards to the "everything is a text file" thing, but the average computer user doesn't know how to properly utilise text files and manage them effectively.

This is similar to the fact that basic knowledge of file systems and file formats is lacking in many modern teenagers, because this is all abstracted away by smartphone apps and cloud storage.

As a tech guy, I'd love to run the crematorium using YAML files in GitHub, but the reality is that the target audience for the system is Funeral Directors and Cremation Assistants, so it needs to be a non-technical user interface.

I was surprised to see that the web server for www.microsoft.com reports via the 'Server:' header that it runs on IIS 10.

To me that just seems weird... even though it's their product.

Slack and Trello.

I'd love to be able to have a '#trello' channel where I can see my full board without having to leave the Slack interface.

I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for.

I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server (e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi licensing, nursing home management, etc).

Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in the open-source world, because there is such little demand for it by individuals.

The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System). If anyone wants to create an open-source one with me, please get in touch...!

My own solution is AWStats combined with a custom log file anonymizer that I wrote.

https://gitlab.com/jamieweb/web-server-log-anonymizer-bloom-...

This will provide stats on unique visitors, most viewed pages, referring sites, etc, whilst protecting the privacy of visitors.

Does anyone know of an equivalent product/solution for the cryptographically-linked social media identities feature of Keybase?

Technically the cryptographic links can still be verified even if Keybase doesn't exist anymore, but they did provide a user-friendly interface to set them up, etc.

I'm delighted to see that they have a vulnerability disclosure program for the app too [1].

That's fairly rare for the public sector - the UK Gov and NCSC are really leading on this sort of stuff.

[1] https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-iOS-BETA/blob/master/SE...

Free for personal and small team use to gain brand and product awareness, then charge for support, additional features, higher usage limits, etc.

Basically the same as Slack, Trello, etc.

Be careful with per-user billing though, as this puts a lot of big enterprises off.

I've had a good experience with Zare.com. Support is very fast and the pricing is fair.

AMI BIOS?

My own solution to this is to store the server key fingerprints in a public Git repository, which can then be pulled from on all devices that need to be able to connect.

This works nicely for my own personal setup with a few servers. It may be possible to scale this to a larger environment with multiple users too.

Then main benefit is that whenever a server is rebuilt (which can be quite regularly when using infra-as-code/infra automation), I don't have to go and manually update every single client that needs to be able to connect.

https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/managing-your-ssh-known_hosts-...

I'm not seeing much mention in this thread of the cryptographically-linked identities feature of Keybase, i.e. where you can link your Website, Twitter, Reddit, HN, etc.

As far as I know, that was Keybase's initial offering, which they then built on top of to create a full suite of applications.

Although to play the Devil's advocate - while the feature is cool and implemented nicely, I doubt that many people actually use it beyond the novelty factor.

As someone who has been through this process, I strongly agree with the advice of Lammy and nikivi posted in this thread.

Unless you have a high-traffic blog with lots of user engagement, I think it's best to keep your blog clean and handle comments/feedback elsewhere.

Just a pointer, but something like Plainsight[1] may give you some ideas.

You could agree on a source text with your friends in an out-of-band way, then everyone just has to go and download whatever book/song/etc that you agree on in order to decode your articles.

Anybody who isn't 'in-the-know' will just see gibberish.

[1] https://github.com/rw/plainsight

Be aware that the [trusted=yes] config disables GPG signature verification for the repository, which does slightly break the security model of Apt (where repositories can be untrusted/HTTP-only as long as all packages are signed by trusted keys).

Unless I'm mistaken, a malicious package with the same name as a critical system package could be added to that untrusted repository by an attacker who had compromised it, and if the version number is higher than that of the 'official' package and your Apt priority config prioritises it, your system would download and install it without any verification.

This is a fairly niche attack vector that may not be considered a significant risk in some environments, but it's one to consider when establishing your threat model and risk appetite.

As a side note, it's worth noting that GPG signing packages is not a silver bullet either, especially if the signing keys and administrative access to the repository fall within the same security boundary (e.g. developer doing both from their PC without any segregation/sandboxing). However, it has proven to be a robust method so far, and definitely beats explicit [trusted=yes].

For blogs that really don't have RSS, I use Versionista[1] in order to monitor the page for changes.

[1] https://versionista.com/

For those wondering, the domain tpc.int was registered before `.int` domain registrations required an established international treaty.

It was grandfathered in when this requirement was added.

For my own reference and for anybody who just Googled it, the SHA256 hash of pop-os_20.04_amd64_intel_5.iso is 5478241142930dbd95143773d53be079087024d3112614a901edc2829040f996, verified using GPG key 63C46DF0140D738961429F4E204DD8AEC33A7AFF.

Do your own verification as well!

How the Internet actually works from the ground-up.

There are lots of videos that stop once they get to the IP/network layer.

There is very little content that goes further down the stack than this and talks about the backbone, transit, routing, BGP, autonomous systems, etc.

I mean a policy against contacting them outside of their duties of work. This is fairly standard practise for anybody with access to personal data as part of their job.

I'm sure there's all sorts of problems, ranging from simple nosiness to people snooping on previous partners or crushes, etc.

I wonder whether there were any negative repercussions for the postman? I'd be surprised if there isn't a policy against personally contacting mail recipients.

Surely it'd be some sort of data protection violation for him to have used the data printed on the envelope to find the guy on Facebook and send him a personal message?

Or is ad-hoc sleuthing allowed to a reasonable extent to ensure delivery of mail?

This is cool though, maybe I'm just boring. :)

I'm not talking about gaining persistence via a legitimately-installed system service. Instead I'm talking from a malware point of view.

If a malicious Snap has read/write access to non-hidden files within someone's home directory, you can almost certainly gain a level of persistence, e.g.:

* Edit a desktop shortcut file so that it points to your malware

* Edit a script or program so that when the user runs it, it runs your malware

* Edit a non-hidden configuration file in a malicious way

I am talking very theoretically here, and I agree that this is taking security concerns to the extreme, but these are important considerations that aren't really present with Apt (when using default repositories).

At the end of the day, despite my security concerns, I do like Snap and the technology it uses.

However, at the moment at least, I will always prefer Apt with default repositories as it provides that extra level of safety/guarantee of authenticity.

Finally, I use a script to install the Chromium Snap to remove the risk of typosquatting, which sufficiently mitigates this risk for me.

> Why are you downloading random crap from teh snap store to begin with?

I'm not, but the fact that there's the potential for junk to exist on the store in the first place is the problem, especially when there isn't adequate protection against typosquatting like I mentioned originally.

As long as I only use the default repositories, I can `apt install` a package I've never even heard of and it's pretty much guaranteed to not be malicious/actively dangerous. With Snap, this guarantee doesn't exist to the same level.

Sure, there is moderation and review in place, but this puts the Snap Store in the same realm as other stores and 'community maintained' package managers, almost all of which have issues with junk/dangerous packages.

> Snaps can't magically persist that is a load of FUD.

Yes, in many cases this is right, but some of the most common Snap interfaces (multiple of which can auto-connect) would provide enough leverage on a system to gain persistence or actively interact with things outside of the sandbox.

For example, the `home` interface is enough to compromise an average personal computer and probably gain persistence, as everything of value is usually within the home directory. (I do like the fact that `home` disallows access to hidden files though.)

The `x11` interface can even be auto-connected, and this potentially allows the Snap to read the graphical output of other applications.

I agree that these scenarios are quite theoretical, but as foresto says in this thread, 'sandbox' implies 'safe', and sandboxed Snaps are quite leaky compared to other sandboxes such as Firejail or a full-blown VM.

Perhaps this is just a terminology problem? I would say that Snap sandboxing is far more comparable to permission management on an Android phone.

Another point is that when installing Snap packages from the command-line, the verification tick only appears after the install has finished, by which point it is already too late.

You can view package info prior to installing, but if we're talking about a typosquatting issue here, that doesn't really help.