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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • Not chmod related, but I’ve made some other interesting mistakes lately.

    Was trying to speed up the boot process on my ancient laptop by changing the startup services. Somehow ended up with nologin never being unset, which means that regular users aren’t allowed to log in; and since I hadn’t set a root password, no one could log in!

    Installed a different version of Python for a project, accidentally removed the wrong version of Python at the end of the day. When I started the computer the next day, all sorts of interesting things were broken!





  • Well completion-ignore-case is enough to solve this particular problem, the other options are just sugar on top :)

    I’m going to add completion-prefix-display-length to these related bonus tips (I have it set to 9). This makes it a lot easier to compare files with long names in your tab completion.

    For example if you have a folder with these files:

    FoobarSystem-v20.69.11-CrashLog2022-12-22 FoobarSystem-v20.69.11.config FoobarSystem-v20.69.12 FoobarSystem-v20.69.12-CrashLog2023-10-02 FoobarSystem-v20.69.12.config FoobarSystem-v20.69.12.userprofiles

    Just type vim TAB to see

     ...1-CrashLog2022-12-22   ...1.config   ...2   ...2-CrashLog2023-10-02   ...2.config   ...2.userprofiles
    $vim FoobarSystem-v20.69.1
    

    GNU Readline (which is what Bash uses for input) has a lot of options (e.g. making it behave like vim), and your settings are also used in any other programs that use it for their CLI which is a nice bonus. The config file is ~/.inputrc and you’d enable the above mentioned options like this

    $include /etc/inputrc
    
    set completion-ignore-case on
    set show-all-if-ambiguous on
    set completion-map-case on
    set completion-prefix-display-length 9
    




  • Here I was thinking they would tone it down for the sequel because a lot of the DLC for the first game was pretty worthless. Who buys a dozen songs for 4€ when you can just play spotify/youtube/mp3s in the background?

    I guess this is to get you to pay for their subscription to enjoy the full game. But unless they are going to make the base game free it just feels like a ripoff.



  • I’m honestly really pleasantly surprised that Nexus Mods are willing to take this fight head on. That they are willing to tell these potential customers to sod off, and that they have the tact and understanding to tell the difference between a superficially benign mod with a malicious purpose like this, and the many vulgar mods that they do allow on the site. (Shout out to Schlongs of Skyrim, you magnificent beast)

    Gamers, in the general, being the worst people I don’t have high expectations from gaming companies but it all seems to be moving slowly in the right direction, even as gamers gnash their teeth and waddle their fingers.


  • But that post is Mozilla clearly speaking out against SREN because they do not want to be compelled to block certain sites.

    Are you then talking about Google Safe Browsing? Which is enabled by default in Firefox, but which does not “monitor your activities”. It compares the site you are about to visit to a downloaded list of known bad ones and warns you if it’s on the list. Hardly an Orwellian nightmare. Just turn it off or ignore the warning if you do not want it. I keep it on because I’ve never seen a false positive on that list and I understand that even I’m vulnerable to attack.

    We should be free to customize programs, free to block what we don’t need

    And you are. If you don’t want to use safe browsing, turn it off, is right there in the menu. They have given you a default that’s best for most people and the option to customize.

    Further, since it’s free software there’s really no limit to your power to customize or get rid of what you don’t need. (I understand that this is not possible for most people, but that’s why you have the menu options, this is just a final line of defense.)


  • Security for the user is obviously what we are talking about. Regular people do not have the knowledge or patience to make informed decisions regarding their technical security; any model that relies on that is going to fail because people will click whatever they need to make stuff work. Even people who do understand the technology do stuff like disabling SSL verification, rather than going through the effort of adding the new CA to their cert list.

    Firefox is not doing the same as Chrome. Firefox is adding a feature to disable unverified add-ons on particular domains to stop attacks from malicious add-ons. Chrome is adding a feature that tracks the sites you visit and shares them with other sites to improve ad tracking.

    How are these features comparable at all?


  • That’s interesting. The first site on the list is the self-service login page for Banco do Brasil. Doing a little bit of digging suggests that attacking the users local environment to steal money via self-service is a widespread problem in Brazil. That would explain the need to block all add-ons that are not known safe for a page like this so they can’t swap that login QR-code. Here’s an (old) article detailing some of these types of attacks https://securelist.com/attacks-against-boletos/66591/

    I wish Mozilla would be more transparent about this, but I speculate that they might be provided these domains under NDA from the Brazilian CERT or police.

    TBH I think malicious add-ons are the new frontier of cybercrime. Most classic attacks methods are well mitigated these days, but browser add-ons are unaffected by pretty much all protections and all the sensitive business happens in the browser anyway.

    remotely monitored their browsing real-time

    it’s kind of inevitable that sometimes they have to support that giant

    What more specifically are you talking about here? The functionality we are talking about can not be used for remote monitoring. Are you saying Mozilla added this feature under duress from Google?



  • While I don’t completely understand the use cases for Mozilla’s add-on domain blocklist, I also don’t see any reason to assume malicious intent. Malicious add-ons are a very real and serious threat and it’s obvious that Mozilla need a way to quickly and remotely protect users. Doing so on a domain level is much less impactful than completely shutting down an add-on.

    Since it is obvious to the user if this is triggered, and the user has the option of disabling it per add-on or completely, what’s the real problem?

    (That said I think it’s great that people are being skeptical even of Mozilla)

    Edit: Sorry I misunderstood how this is displayed, it is not as obvious as I thought. Hopefully this will be improved. Though doing so might come with the drawback of making unwitting users more likely to disable the protection.




  • People think it’s about Stallman being bitter. But it’s because GNU is a political project with the goal of total user freedom and control over their computer. The software is a step on the way there. But if people use free software without understanding, valuing or taking advantage of the freedom it gives them, the GNU project has failed.