Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast

  • 3 Posts
  • 142 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle
  • As expected, nobody cares about “reader mode”. Only once in my life has it ever come in handy… It was a website that was so badly designed I swore never to go back to it ever again.

    I forget what it was but apparently I wasn’t the only one and thus, it must’ve died a fast death as I haven’t seen it ever again (otherwise I’d remember).

    Basically, any website that gets users so frustrated that they resort to reader/simplified mode isn’t going to last very long. If I had my way I would change the messages:

    “This website appears to be total shit. Do you want Firefox to try to fix it so your eyes don’t bleed trying to get through it?”

    I want an extension that does this, actually! It doesn’t need to actually modify the page. Just give me a virtual assistant to comiserate with…

    “The people who made this website should have their browser’s back button removed entirely as punishment for erecting this horror!”


  • Just a point of clarification: Copyright is about the right of distribution. So yes, a company can just “download the Internet”, store it, and do whatever TF they want with it as long as they don’t distribute it.

    That the key: Distribution. That’s why no one gets sued for downloading. They only ever get sued for uploading. Furthermore, the damages (if found guilty) are based on the number of copies that get distributed. It’s because copyright law hasn’t been updated in decades and 99% of it predates computers (especially all the important case law).

    What these lawsuits against OpenAI are claiming is that OpenAI is making a derivative work of the authors/owners works. Which is kinda what’s going on but also not really. Let’s say that someone asks ChatGPT to write a few paragraphs of something in the style of Stephen King… His “style” isn’t even cooyrightable so as long as it didn’t copy his works word-for-word is it even a derivative? No one knows. It’s never been litigated before.

    My guess: No. It’s not going to count as a derivative work. Because it’s no different than a human reading all his books and performing the same, perfectly legal function.





  • You had corruption with btrfs? Was this with a spinning disk or an SSD?

    I’ve been using btrfs for over a decade on several filesystems/machines and I’ve had my share of problems (mostly due to ignorance) but I’ve never encountered corruption. Mostly I just run out of disk space because I forgot to balance or the disk itself had an issue and I lost whatever it was that was stored in those blocks.

    I’ve had to repair a btrfs partition before due to who-knows-what back when it was new but it’s been over a decade since I’ve had an issue like that. I remember btrfs check --repair being totally useless back then haha. My memory on that event is fuzzy but I think I fixed whatever it was bitching about by remounting the filesystem with an extra option that forced it to recreate a cache of some sort. It ran for many years after that until the disk spun itself into oblivion.


  • I wouldn’t say, “repairing XFS is much easier.” Yeah, fsck -y with XFS is really all you have to do 99% of the time but also you’re much more likely to get corrupted stuff when you’re in that situation compared to say, btrfs which supports snapshotting and redundancy.

    Another problem with XFS is its lack of flexibility. By that I don’t mean, “you can configure it across any number of partitions on-the-fly in any number of (extreme) ways” (like you can with btrfs and zfs). I mean it doesn’t have very many options as to how it should deal with things like inodes (e.g. tail allocation). You can increase the total amount of space allowed for inode allocation but only when you create the filesystem and even then it has a (kind of absurdly) limited number that would surprise most folks here.

    As an example, with an XFS filesystem, in order to store 2 billion symlimks (each one takes an inode) you would need 1TiB of storage just for the inodes. Contrast that with something like btrfs with max_inline set to 2048 (the default) and 2 billion symlimks will take up a little less than 1GB (assuming a simplistic setup on at least a 50GB single partition).

    Learn more about btrfs inlining: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Inline-files.html


  • One point: ext4 has a maximum file size of 16TiB. To a regular user that is stupidly huge and of no concern but it’s exactly the type of thing you overlook if you “just use ext4” on anything and everything then end up with your database broken at work because of said bad advice.

    Use the filesystem that makes the most sense for your use case. Consider it every single time you format a disk. Don’t become complacent! Also fuck around with the new shit from time to time! I decided to format my Linux desktop partitions with btrfs over a decade ago and as a result I’m an excellent user of that filesystem but you know what? I’m thinking I’ll try bcachefs soon and fiddle around more with my zfs partition on my HTPC.

    BTW: If you’re thinking about trying out btrfs I would encourage you to learn about it’s non-trivial maintenance tasks. btrfs needs you to fuck with it from time to time or you’ll run out of disk space “for no reason”. You can schedule cron jobs to take care of everything (as I have done) but you still need to learn how it all works. It’s not a “set it and forget it” FS like ext4.



  • Tom’s Hardware tested this software version of BitLocker last year and found it could slow drives by up to 45 percent.

    WTF‽ In Linux full disk encryption overhead is minimal:

    While in pure I/O benchmarks like FIO there is an obvious impact to full disk encryption and other synthetic workloads, across the real-world benchmarks the performance impact of running under full disk encryption tended to be minimal

    https://www.phoronix.com/review/hp-devone-encrypt/5

    There’s like five million ways you can use disk encryption on Linux though and not all of them are very performant. So keep that in mind if you see other benchmarks showing awful performance (use the settings Phoronox used).

    I suspect Microsoft made some poor decisions in regards to disk encryption (probably because of bullshit/insecure-by-design FIPS compliance) and now they’re stuck with them.









  • If you install Firefox Focus and make it your default browser on Android the Jerboa client (and others I think) will use it when loading links unless you have a specific app associated with a given URL (e.g. NYT app, NPR app, etc).

    If you’re not familiar with Firefox Focus it’s a version of Firefox built for privacy. It basically makes it so that every URL you load behaves like a private browser tab. It also has ad-blocking built in which is sweet (though it doesn’t work on everything/not as good as uBlock Origin).

    Oops: Just realized your question is related to Mastodon and not Lemmy. Though I’m certain that Firefox Focus would work the same way for Mastodon clients.

    Actually, I just checked Tusky and yes, it does load URLs in Firefox Focus. So my advice is still good 👍



  • There’s not much to learn in Windows land! Learn how to set file permissions, how the registry works (and some important settings that use it), and how Active Directory works (it’s LDAP) and you’ll be fine.

    If you’re used to using Linux nothing will frustrate you more than being forced to use a Windows desktop. The stuff you use every day just isn’t there. You can add on lots of 3rd party tools to make it better but it’ll never measure up.

    When you have to go out on the Internet to download endless amounts of 3rd party tools the security alarms in your head might start going off. Windows users have just learned over time to ignore them 🤣