@bigzaphod@mastodon.social
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bigzaphod

@bigzaphod@mastodon.social

You may know me from Twitterrific or Frenzic: Overtime or as the ex-galactic president. I'm just this guy, you know?

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bigzaphod, to Ds9
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Kai Winn was a real piece of work. #ds9

bigzaphod,
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@ramiro @gedeonm @CStamp @steveshives amazingly, she was only in something like 14 episodes.

bigzaphod, to random
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Is there an easy way to write a data file (like something internal in Application Support or something) that's encrypted or otherwise secured? I swear there was. Maybe not, though? CloudKit's CKRecord has the encryptedValues thing that makes it easy to do it in that context, but what about a local file?

bigzaphod,
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I guess a better question is... we have a web access token. We could put it in the keychain (which syncs if iCloud keychain is enabled), but how does that differ from storing it in a CKRecord using encryptedValues? Or writing the key to a file on disk using the protection mode .completeFileProtectionUntilFirstUserAuthentication?

Twitterrific stored keys with Keychain flag kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlock which seems comparable to . completeFileProtectionUntilFirstUserAuthentication on a file.

bigzaphod,
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@_inside the goal is storing user access tokens. (https://mastodon.social/@bigzaphod/112441829691142034)

bigzaphod,
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So one issue with this access token thing is, users can disable iCloud keychain but leave the rest of iCloud enabled. So if a Tapestry feed needs an auth key, the feed would sync to their other devices using CloudKit but the password for the feed might not be there due to keychain being disabled (or sync lag). That seems... unfortunate. Storing the key in CloudKit along with the feed record would be a lot easier. Is that as secure, though? I don't know.

bigzaphod,
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Even if it was, though, data needs to be stored on disk and not just in the cloud since iCloud could be disabled. It would make a lot of sense to store the key along with the feed record on disk. But is that secure? I suspect not.

Data protection doesn't say it restricts access to the file only to the app that wrote it. It talks about when the user has authenticated their device. That seems like a big difference. As long as the user is logged in, I think any app can read any of the files.

bigzaphod,
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On iOS, with everything sandboxed, maybe that'd be harder to pull off. I think on macOS, though, it'd be easy for other apps to potentially read these the files as long as the user is logged in.

Keychain, on the other hand, has an additional layer - items are linked to the app/developer/app-group. So other apps cannot get items that aren't theirs. That seems better except for the issue where the user might have disabled only the keychain syncing. (Or if the sync is delayed for some reason.)

bigzaphod,
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So anyway, probably the thing to do is put those keys in the keychain and, unfortunately have to deal with the fact that users can independently disable keychain sync while leaving iCloud sync on. Which means they might have to auth again on their other devices sometimes. For certain things. Which means the app has to handle that somehow. Meh.

bigzaphod, to random
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I have been waiting for this all day so far. I don't why this is being so slow. It is downloading - just at glacial dialup modem speeds. Meanwhile my speed tests and random web sites, etc. all seem as speedy as usual.

bigzaphod, to random
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My music box video (https://youtu.be/uECxNR_g7-0) is now my most viewed YouTube video of all time. I just noticed this morning that it has surpassed some old software demo videos I posted nearly 15 years ago that inexplicably managed to slowly accumulate thousands of views.

bigzaphod, to random
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Tonight's movie night movie will be, "Deep Impact (1998)." We have to check out Armageddon's competition. 😛

bigzaphod,
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Deep Impact was pretty good, but the general consensus here is that while Armageddon was a considerably dumber movie, it was more fun and memorable and therefore better. Deep Impact is definitely sadder, but maybe a fair bit more realistic. Also, Morgan Freeman was a presidential bad ass.

bigzaphod, to random
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A day or two ago I was seeing a lot of mainstream news articles about the geomagnetic storm trying to drum up fear about how all our technology was going to collapse and cell phones would stop working and maybe there'd be blackouts and all sorts of other disasters. Did anything at all happen anywhere?

gruber, (edited ) to random
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Thoughts on Apple no longer including stickers with new devices to reduce waste:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/05/09/no-more-stickers-with-new-ipads

bigzaphod,
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@gruber I bet they aren't lowering the price by 25 cents to compensate, are they? 😛

bigzaphod,
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@Fairaday @gruber I honestly haven't used them in years, either. I don't really care too much if they go away. What pisses me off is companies removing things and scaling things down, citing the environment, but then not lowering the prices to compensate. (Not that there'd be much lowering in this situation, but you know what I mean.)

bigzaphod, to random
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On an unrelated note, there are certain types of stores that I really dislike going in to and one of those are automotive stores.

It seems to be a requirement that everyone in an automotive store has to puff themselves up with bravado, swear every other word, be covered in oil, and loudly complain that the goddamn fucking bullshit engine nozzle dunked in the fucking spigot and tore the alter-not-er to hell because some cockass left it in park and drove off while filling up the blinker fluid.

bigzaphod,
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Meanwhile I'm struggling to find a headlight bulb among the 10,000 variants on display while not being able to remember what year my car is.

bigzaphod,
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Car go vroom. This is pretty much the extent of my automotive knowledge and interest.

bigzaphod, to random
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My new soldering iron has a 32-bit RISC processor and 132KB of RAM because why not? https://pine64.org/documentation/Pinecil/

bigzaphod,
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As if that wasn't ridiculous enough, it even has bluetooth. 😛

bigzaphod,
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It's kind of funny that all I'm probably going to use this soldering iron for is to assemble parts from the 1980s to build an elaborate circuit that could be run on the processor INSIDE OF THE SOLDERING IRON ITSELF with ~20 lines of code.

bigzaphod, to random
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Time for my morning raktajino.

bigzaphod, to random
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That's amazing! Almost the same combination as on my luggage!

bigzaphod, to random
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I haven't used eBay in so long they apparently deleted my account. So now I have a new account. And now I have attempted to purchase a couple of old long-discontinued TTL chips from some seller in China for $11. I wonder what the odds are that I'll ever get the chips.. or that they'll work.. or how long it'll take. 😛

bigzaphod,
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@dxzdb hmmm that looks like a cool site. I haven't done this before - just bought various "packs" of stuff from Amazon before, but now I'm playing with an idea that's gonna need (or would benefit) from some specific stuff that used to exist but now isn't made anymore.. so I'm trying to find old stuff.

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