• 0 Posts
  • 99 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 23rd, 2023

help-circle



  • An overarching principle of security is that of minimum privilege: everything (every process, every person) should have the minimum privileges it needs to do what it does, and where possible, that privilege should be explicitly granted temporarily and then dropped.

    This means that any issue: a security breach or a mistake can’t access or break anything except whatever the component or person who had the issue could access or break, and that that access is minimal.

    Suppose that you hit a page which exploits the https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/mozilla-firefox-remote-code-execution-vulnerability_20230913 vulnerability in Firefox, or one like it, allowing remote code execution. If Firefox is running as root, the remote attacker now completely controls that machine. If you have SSH keys to other servers on there, they are all compromised. Your personal data could be encrypted for ransom. Anything that server manages, such as a TV or smart home equipment, could be manipulated arbitrarily, and possibly destroyed.

    The same is true for any piece of software you use, because this is a general principle. Most distributions I believe don’t let you ssh in as root for that reason.

    In short: don’t log in to anything as root; log in as a regular user and use sudo to temporarily perform administrator actions.

    P.S. your description of the situation shows you don’t know the nature of vulnerabilities and security - if you’re running servers then this is something you should learn more about in short order.


  • Swearwords are categorised differently than ordinary words for a reason: it’s a tool that is useful to express things more forcefully than is otherwise possible. “More forceful” takes it beyond the realm of “mundane” never mind “most mundane ever” and, yes, makes it flaming, as is calling someone a “miserable cunt.”

    No-one here is actually getting worked up (maybe except you? I don’t call people “miserable cunts” unless I’m at least a bit annoyed) You’re imagining that people talking to you calmly are worked up, because you can’t imagine someone disagreeing with you on this calmly. That failure of imagination is far from the worst thing in the world, but it’s causing you to be unpleasant and, I think, to be blind to a change that has taken place over the last 20 years.

    I’ve never had death threats in the past or now, so rather than taking that as an indication of the state of internet users I’d rather be looking inward, no?

    One thing I know about death threats is that only a handful of people actually deserve them, but vast numbers of people receive them. Death threats therefore indicate more about the people who send them than the people who receive them. That in turn means if they have become more prevalent, something in [internet] society has changed. Telling someone to “look inward” over death threats is messed up.

    And from further down the thread:

    Mate, you’re the one trying to enforce some prudish seppo standards about language etiquette onto others. Why would I do anything but not consider that a miserable existence, and thus call it out?

    Nobody here is telling you that you have to not swear, so this is not accurate. But swearing at people is rude, and rudeness is on the rise online. More to the point, this is exactly the angry flaming that I thought I detected in your original comment. You are incapable of judging the prevalence of flaming online because to you it was always happening - because you were doing it!

    In the spirit of the post, let’s find something we both like to improve the atmosphere. I skipped through your comment history to find something I agree with and found: “Housing is a necessity, not an investment opportunity.” And hey, my country has been in a housing crisis for years and I wish it were not treated as an investment opportunity here - common ground :)


  • Are you fucking kidding me? What rose-tinted crap is this.

    Flaming, trolling, etc. have been around from the start.

    Maybe you have this impression because you have been doing the flaming? That’s an honest suggestion there - swearing at people just because you strongly disagree (and you even have a possible understanding of why, in your view, I might be wrong - “rose tinted spectacles”) is flaming for sure.

    And yes, flaming and trolling have existed since the beginning, but I don’t agree it was as bad as it is today. That is a not-unpopular view so I think just dismissing it is a bit much. There was far more willingness to engage with a disagreement and try to convince each other.



  • Damn this couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past months how it used to be that when you disagreed with someone, you’d still have something shared with them. Not quite the same as the social media aspect, but when TV was all broadcast on a few channels, you’d probably find a show in common. When the only news was national newspapers and broadcasters, you might both be reading the same paper but disagreeing on the articles. My thinking was going down the lines of “this meant everyone had a shared truth” which is kind of like the social media bubble that the research seems to disagree with, but also down the lines of “this meant everyone had, to an extent, a shared identity” at least within a large group like a country, linguistic or ethnic subdivision.

    There was something special about the old internet. The idea that the acrimonious disagreements might have been less bitter due to their nature is tantalising. There’s also something to bear in mind for Lemmy: the old internet, as much as the interest groups it spawned, was united by a shared interest in the internet specifically - and technology in general. The internet wasn’t as necessary and ubiquitous, so most people there had to have some other motivation to be on it. That itself was a shared interest that allowed people to find commonality. Lemmy is the same: people here are a subsection of the internet, brought here because they’re drawn to openness not provided by unfederated platforms. That is its own commanlity, and it won’t exist if Lemmy outgrows those other platforms.



  • I’m afraid that’s not the right kind of logic. Laws don’t always use words with the exact same meaning throughout, especially when considering a body of law rather than a single document. And here we’re not even talking about an inconsistency within the constitution, but consistency between a clause in it and the usage of people in other contexts. Suppose you have a document which says:

    The Field Marshal may appoint officers as he sees fit

    Clearly that does not mean the Field Marshal can appoint a new Field Marshal, so in that document we may think “officers” doesn’t include Field Marshal. On the other hand in general usage, Field Marshal clearly is an officer. Let’s say later on in the document there’s a clause which says:

    Generals, Lieutenant generals, major generals, brigadiers, colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants and other officers are eligible for…

    Do we think that “other officers” should include the Field Marshal, here? Sure, we know that in general usage, he is an officer. But also, why did whoever wrote this start with General and then work their way down? Wouldn’t they have included the Field Marshal, the most important guy, if they meant for him to be included? Is it not more likely that “other officers” only includes the lower ranks? Besides, in this document we have evidence that “officer” is not always used to include Field Marshal, because he can’t appoint a new Field Marshal.

    Now in the actual case it’s not exactly the same: there are only three things listed besides “officer of the United States” so the argument from the ordering is not as strong. But the argument that officer in general usage included the presidency is also less strong - military ranks are much better defined.

    I’m not trying to convince you the argument is right, but to allow you to see the logic of it.







  • They’re so obviously unnecessary I’m surprised more places haven’t banned them. They’re also new, so conservatives should instinctively hate them.

    We need a more generic approach to throwaway culture: the societal cost of disposing of things needs to be embedded in the price of those things. But in the case of vapes, I don’t see how that can have a big impact: reusable vape pens only seem to be about twice the cost of a disposable, so anyone who is even remotely thinking rationally about price would be getting reusable ones.