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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2022

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  • My parents treated my device access something they had to keep a keen eye on. They were good at manually making sure I wasn’t sitting around having my brain rot, but their spying on what I was doing into my teens left me with some trust issues.

    They briefly tried to use technological solutions to control my access and monitor me, but all that served was to make me very good at circumventing them. Outsourcing parenting to a computer program doesn’t work, and kids notice when you try.


  • Did the citizens of that country take the loan? No

    Did they benefit at all from the loan? No

    Did the world bank make any effort to ensure the above were answered ‘yes’? No

    When you make a leveraged loan are you supposed to be guaranteed that the it was risk free? No

    If leveraged loans could be made risk-free ‘breal your legs’ style the way the world bank does to countries, banks would be offering loans to every punter who wanted to bet on the dogs.





  • I’m sure the developers are competent, but the reason I care about the design decisions is the same reason the electric brakes on cars don’t interface with its infotainment system; the interface inherently creates opportunities for out of spec behaviour and even if the introduced risk is tiny, the consequence is so bad that it’s worth avoiding.

    If you have to have an airbag be controlled by software (ideally the mechanism is physical, like a pull tab), it should be an isolated real time device with monitoring your accelerometer and triggering the airbag be it’s only jobs. If it’s also waiting to hear back from another device about whether your subscription ran out before it starts checking, the risk of failure also has to consider that triggering device.

    It can be done perfectly, but it’s software so of course it has bugs.



  • Yes, but also from an implementation perspective: if I’m making code that might kill somebody if it fails, I want it to be as deterministic and simple as possible. Under no circumstances do I want it:

    1. checking an external authentication service.
    2. connected to the internet in any way.
    3. have multiple services which interact over an API. Hell, even FFIs would be in the “only if I have to” bucket.

  • The difficulty is that a VPN isn’t just a product like ProtonVPN, it’s a huge family of software and protocols.

    You can block vpn.protonvpn.com, but since most operating systems come with VPN functionality out of the box, you’d have to start listening to all traffic (not just DNS lookups) and blocking ALL packets that might be VPN traffic without causing regular disruption to non-vpn traffic.

    TL;DR: it’s easy to prevent unmotivated users from downloading a VPN app. It’s practically impossible to block a motivated user from using a VPN, and they’re the users you particularly care about.



  • hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.

    I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.

    I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?

    I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.




  • Setting up the PiHole device as a DNS server & DHCP server still won’t make all traffic flow through it, you need it to be a gateway for all traffic that isn’t destined for an internal subnet.

    To do that, you’ll need to set up your device as a router, with the necessary entries in iproute2 and iptables in order to keep lock out external connections without conntracks. You might be able to route to a turnkey container of some kind.


  • Are you trying to route your DNS queries through your VPN device or all of your traffic?

    Just your DNS queries is easy, set up the VPN as the default route for the device (using netplan or iproute2), then all queries from PiHole will go via that.

    All traffic is a bit harder, unless your PiHole device is the only thing between your regular devices and the internet.


  • They made a smart call that has probably increased the long term privacy of their users.

    People were using port forwarding to host illegal shit, and governments were getting pissed off about it. Mullvad has been able to prove in court that they don’t keep logs, but that’s not a perfect deterrent; a properly motivated government, perhaps if somebody is using Mullvad to host CSAM, might attempt to legally force Mullvad to put logging in and add anti-canary clauses.

    Preventing port forwarding keeps customers as consumers rather than hosters, and avoids this issue.




  • They most certainly are not. If you’re buying unhealthy food only as snacks, you mistake your subset as all unhealthy food.

    If you need calories and are on a shoestring budget, your options are potatos, bad bread, Coles cakes etc. You can eat for a week on a few dollars but you’ll become overweight and eventually die of malnutrition. Your options become even more limited if you don’t have a working stove due to being cut off your gas.