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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I enjoy reading dead tree books as much as anyone, and whilest the publisher/distributor can’t take it away, there are plenty of ways you can lose access to them. Fire and flood being the two obvious ones, whereas digital books can be backed up offsite. It’s also easier to carry many books when they’re digital compared to physical.

    For books I care about I try to get both a physical and a (drm free) digital copy for the best of both world.





  • It’s a non-starter for me because I sync my notes, and sometimes a subset of my notes, to multiple devices and multiple programs. For instance, I might use Obsidian, Vim and tasks.md to access the same repository, with all the documents synced between my desktop and server, and a subset synced to my phone. I also have various scripts to capture data from other sources and write it out as markdown files. Trying to sync all of this to a database that is then further synced around seems overly complicated to say the least, and would basically just be using Trillium as a file store, which I’ve already got.

    I’ve also be burnt by various export/import systems either losing information or storing it in a incompatible way.








  • If you’re talking about being able to regain access with no local backups (even just a USB key sewn into your clothing) your going to need to think carefully about the implications if someone else gets hold of your phone, or hijacks your number. Anything you can do to recover from the scenario is a way an attacker can gain access. Attempting to secure this via SMS is going to ne woefully insecure.

    That being said, there are a couple of approaches you could consider. One option is to put an encrypted backup on an sftp server or similar and remember the login and passwords, another would be to have a trusted party, say a family member or very close friend, hold the emergency codes for access to your authentication account or backup site.

    Storing a backup somewhere is a reasonable approach if you are careful about how you secure it and consider if it meets your threat model. The backup doesn’t need to contain all your credentials, just enough to regain access to your actual password vault, so it doesn’t need to be updated often, unless that access changes. I would suggest either an export from your authentication app, a copy of the emergency codes, or a text file with the relevant details. Encrypt this with gpg symmetric encryption so you don’t have to worry about a key file, and use a long, complex, but reconstructable passphrase. By this I mean a passphrase you remember how to derive, rather than trying to remember a high entropy string directly, so something like the second letter of each word of a phrase that means something to you, a series of digits that are relevant to you, maybe the digits from your first friend’s address or something similarly pseudo random, then another phrase. The result is long enough to have enough entropy to be secure, and you’ll remember how to generate it more readily than remembering the phrase itself. It needs to be strong as once an adversary has a copy of the file they jave as long as they want to decrypt it. Once encrypted, upload it to a reliable storage location that you can access with just a username and password. Now you need to memorize the storage location, username, password and decryption passphrase generator, but you can recover even to a new phone.

    The second option is to generate the emergency, or backup, codes to your authentication account, or the storage you sync it to, and have someone you trust keep them, only to be revealed if you contact them and they’re sure it’s you. To be more secure, split each code into two halves and have each held by a different person.




  • Having consistent interface names on servers that have several is useful, but we already had that option. The interface names they generate are not only hard to remember, but not terribly useful as they’re based on things like which PCI slot they’re in, rather than what their purpose is. You want interface names like wan0 and DMZ, not enp0s2. Of course, you can set it up to use useful names, but it’s more complicated than it used to be, so while the systemd approach looks like a good idea on the surface, it’s actually a retrograde step.




  • In news that will shock no-one, dbus was, of course, initially created by a Redhat engineer. I get the idea of having a general purpose bus that everything can communicate on, but they somehow managed to even make that complex.

    You make a compelling case for Void Linux. I use Debian or a RHEL derivative for work, primarily so there’s at least a chance to hand systems off to someone else to maintain, the less known distros seem to meet with blank looks.

    I want to give NixOS a try sometime, as I like the idea of declaritively defining the system