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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 25th, 2024

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  • One thing I can think of is an overzealous corporate security solution blocking or holding back your email purely for having an attachment, or because it misunderstands/presumes the cipher-looking text file to be an attempt to bypass filtering.

    Other than that might be curious questions from curious receivers of the key/file they may not understand, and will not be expecting. (“What’s this for? Is this part of the contract documents? Oh well, I’ll forward it to the client anyway”)

    Other than that it’s a public key, go for it. Hard (for me anyway) to decide to post them to public keychains when the bot-nets read them for spam, so this might be the next best thing?






  • Since you mention setup instead of any manual install screwery, I’d say root(uid 0) is still very real, you just didn’t setup any login for it. Every time you sudo (substitute-user-do), you(probably uid 1000) are running that command as root instead of you. In fact, just sudo -i and you are now “logged in” as root.

    Edit: Missed the context. Should still be useful info but you probably are not accidentally remoting into an account you never setup the login for.


  • Raspbian is sometimes a compromise between security and usability, because it is designed to go into the hands of new users. It also used to ship with a default “pi/rasberry” login hardcoded and IIRC permitted root password login over ssh. Things experience users change or turn off, but needs to start friendly for the rest, you know?

    By doing this, they can take a step in the right direction by separating the root and login user, without becoming annoying asking for a password frequently as a newbie copies and pastes tutorial commands all week.

    And as I said it’s unlikely, even very unlikely, but just not impossible. Everything comes with a risk, I just believe it’s up to you, not me, what risks mean in your environment. Might be you’d like to have the convenience on the home dev server, but rather have as much security as possible on a public facing one.

    Or maybe you’d like to get really dialed in and only allow specific commands to be run without a password, so you can be quick and convenient about rebooting but lock down the rest. Up to you, really, that’s the power of Linux.


  • If you’ve got a VPS at your disposal, many of the homepage softwares I’ve tried over the years have some amount of caching to make them quite fast or even operate offline(“Homer” for one required me to deeply purge my cache as it would still appear when my site was offline…despite having replaced it long ago! 😂). Or, if you wanted to roll your own static HTML page, you can absolutely add a Service Worker for your own offline caching.

    That’s where I’m at now. I use a custom ServiceWorker static HTML for my homepage and tab page on all my devices. This page is a bouncer, checks if I’m at home or not(or if my local dashboard is offline) and either redirects me to the local homepage which has all my HomeLab services on it, or if it fails just tells me I might be abroad or offline and lists a few public websites.

    And yes, this works offline or over a shitty connection. Essentially the service worker quickly provides the cached page from the browser storage, then tries to take the time to check the live version. If it gets one, it updates the cache, if not, enjoy the offline version.



  • In Debian, you will want to modify your /etc/sudoers file to have the NOPASSWD directive.

    So where you find something like this in that file:

    %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

    Make it like this:

    %sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

    In this example, powers are given to the sudo %group, yours might just say pi or something else the user fits into.

    Also, please note that while this is convenient, it does mean anyone with access to your shell has a quick escalation to root privileges. Some program you run has a shell escape vulnerability and gets a shell without a password, this means they also get root without one too. Unlikely to happen, sure, but I believe one should make informed decisions.




  • Yeah, I can see more of this happening as demand for quality products increases.

    Things that don’t need replaced don’t bring in more money year over year, which means they have to keep coming up with other excuses for you to buy a new one just to stay above water.

    Any time purchases reach critical mass and mostly everyone has bought the “last gizmo you’ll ever need”, they’ll have to release the last-last gizmo you’ll ever need.

    One-time purchase forever mouse would just mean once sales drop they need to release the forever-ever mouse, now with an extra button, then when that one peaks, the forever-and-ever mouse, with one more button than that.

    Or they’ll hit a ceiling and go the way of Instant Pot.

    It feels like a choice between rental(this) or rental with extra e-waste(any time you replace a cheaply made or planned obsolescence product) and it sucks.


  • Now would be a good time to look for a .com you like, or one of the more common TLDs. And register it at Namecheap, Porkbun, or Cloudflare. (Cloudflare is cheapest but all-eggs-in-one-basket is a concern for some.)

    Sadly, all the cheap or fun TLDs have a habit of being blocked wholesale, either because the cheap ones are overused by bad actors or because corporate IT just blacklists “abnormal” TLDs (or only whitelists the old ones?) because it’s “easy security”.

    Notably, XYZ also does that 1.111B initiative, selling numbered domains for 99¢, further feeding the affordability for bad actors and justifying a flat out sinkhole of the entire TLD.

    I got a three character XYZ to use as a personal link shortener. Half the people I used it with said it was blocked at school or work. My longer COM poses no issue.


  • Some would think this is horrible, but to me, it would be wholly dependent on the title/what was bought and sold.

    Nothing in this world is free. Development, servers, character licensing, it all costs money and if those costs aren’t passed down, you’ll never afford to continue. So for a game, especially one with online content or continuing content, to be free to play, money has to come from somewhere.

    Where the road splits is what is being sold. Things that give an edge in the game, pay-to-win? Uninstalled. Time limited FOMO triggers? Disgusting. Random loot boxes? Begone foul spirit.

    On the other end, if all that is for sale is shiny baubles and trinkets, things no one needs but can have as a reward for “supporting development”? I’m cool with that. If I feel no requirement to pay up, it’s being handled right, and if I like they game, sure, I can part with a fiver to look like I’m dipped in gold or whatever the supporter pack adds to help them keep the lights on(at least until I get bored of it in a week or two and switch back :P).

    I’d be curious what the divide is between the two kinds of purchases are. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to find it was mostly P2W scum, though.


  • Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?

    Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.



  • You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.

    Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.

    A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.


  • Plug it into a monitor or TV and keep an eye on the console.

    I have an older NUC that will not cooperate with certain brands of NVMe drive under PVE…the issue sounds like yours where it would work for an arbitrary amount of time before crashing the file system, attempting to remount read-only and rendering the system inert and unable to handle changes like plugging a monitor in later, yet it would still be “on”.