• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle
  • I think that’s a very strong argument and a great metaphor, but you forget relativity.

    All reference frames are valid - you could say the Earth and the people are moving and the train is stationary, you could say the train is moving and the earth and people are stationary, or you could say they each have a vector moving around the sun or anything else

    But when you travel through a portal, the only valid reference frames are you and the entry portal. Your momentum relative to the Earth doesn’t matter - why would it? You can open a portal to the moon and jump through, and we see momentum is preserved. The Earth isn’t a special reference frame, it’s just the most noticeable one.

    So let’s pick the reference frame of someone on the track. Let’s look through the portal and say there’s a sign on the other side - as it approaches, you’d see a sign approaching you through the portal. Relative to you, through the portal the sign is moving at 30mph. The portal passes over you - you haven’t moved, but you enter a new reference frame, a frame in which the Earth and everything on it is moving at 30mph



  • Have you ever had coca tea? It’s amazing - way better than caffeine. It’s more gentle, but stronger - like it gives you more energy, but you don’t get a hard crash, it’s less likely to make it hard to sleep, plus it has all sorts of health benefits - being able to adjust to high altitude for one

    Cocaine probably shouldn’t be sold at the drug stores, but it would be amazing if we treated it like caffeine - you need a license to buy it, but you can get the leaves or products made for it

    Plus we could make a path to legitimize cartels and stop getting people killed over the the war on drugs, which would be nice







  • So what’s going on is the adversaries continuously hitting the lemmy.world server. On its own, a DDOS like that would be manageable - they’re much more defeatable these days

    But they found request paths that run expensive db functions, giving them enough bang for their buck to make an impact, even tucked behind cloudflare.

    As for mitigation, cloudflare and a larger server help, but ultimately lemmy needs some refactoring - right now it’s very liberal with the database calls. It needs to divide those up and get more granular with API calls, look at what can be optimized on the DB side, maybe do some caching/memoization… Basically, it needs to become a more mature piece of software in a hurry

    Going further, there’s things like horizontal scaling - there’s even thoughts of how we could leverage the nature of the fediverse to share the load through federation.

    I’m a dev, I don’t know much about administration so I’m not sure how you could help, but there’s plenty of work to go around. I think a database expert would be the most useful right now.

    There’s messing with configs to tune everything for better performance - that’s out of my expertise, but I’m under the impression that there’s some significant gains to be had there

    If it’s in your wheelhouse, you could look at different technologies that might give better performance - the current stack seems like it was chosen mostly with ease of development in mind, if you could make a strong argument for changing some of it out it might get traction.

    As far as cyber security in general, if you want to get started - step 1 is basically locking things down, and then setting up monitoring tools and getting experience with them. Basically reading logs taken to the next level. I’m pretty sure they have that handled here, but this problem will never go away



  • I have an interesting protocol for this.

    Moonlight rituals. The idea is, you get a bunch of people together, say 20-50, in the same place at the same time. Everyone opens an app, and it takes control of the screens and gives semi-random actions - like hold up your phone to the user to the left of you, get everyone in a circle with phone screens on your chest and walk forward, enter the middle of the circle and slowly spin around, hold it up to take a picture of the moon…

    The idea is, you constantly change the screen, take synchronized pictures, record audio, get flickers in gps signals, record fluctuations in the magnomiter.

    The idea is to synchronize everything with millisecond precision, randomly take snapshots both across the group and between groups, and use all this to corroborate the fact that there was one user per phone present at this point in space and time. By using reality to generate enormously complex data sets, you can make it arbitrarily difficult to simulate, and doing it in real time could use cheap hardware and require processing orders of magnitude faster to spoof.

    Doesn’t matter how much processing you throw at it - a system like this would theoretically be able to measure gravity waves and stellar radiation - no way you to measure that and adjust your data before you time out the recording window

    On top of nodes doing all this, you’d build a web of trust with random nodes spot-checking each other.

    It’s crazy and impractical, but I love the idea just because it’s turning technology to magic - making group rituals to authenticate is just such a fun concept to me