d3Xt3r

d3Xt3r, 1 month ago

Although not the same, this has been going on for about two years now. Jensen Harris, a former MS engineer, criticized the ads as well as the design of the new Start Menu, over here: threadreaderapp.com/…/1564399431545667585.html

d3Xt3r, 5 months ago

Welcome to the Hotel California

Coincidentally, Apple is headquartered in California…

d3Xt3r, 4 months ago

I was reading some thread over at !politics

There you go, that’s your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it’s been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.

d3Xt3r, 3 months ago

They don’t have to be financial - many corporate apps will not work on custom ROMs - the most popular ones being the ones by Microsoft - eg Teams, Outlook etc.

Similarly, some games may also not work, such as all the ones by Niantic (Ingress, Pokemon Go etc) and typically many online multiplayer games.

Finally, this will also affect popular streaming media services, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.

There are workarounds for some of these - some with certain compromises - but there’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to work. So before you look into any workarounds (if you use the above three categories of apps), know that it’s a constant game of cat-and-mouse, so it’s not for the faint hearted.

d3Xt3r, 1 month ago

You don’t.

Long answer: androidcentral.com/…/you-dont-need-to-install-an-…

d3Xt3r, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

That’s not a standard Windows prompt, looks like some third-party application is intercepting the call.

Check the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionImage File Execution Options - for a key named taskmgr.exe. If it exists, see if the taskmgr.exe key has a value called Debugger. If so, delete the Debugger value, or rename the taskmgr.exe key to e.g. taskmgr.exe.old.

Then try launching Task Manager again.

If there’s nothing in the registry, you could monitor the process tree in Process Explorer and watch what happens when you execute taskmgr.exe. You could also use Process Monitor if you want to dig deeper and find out exactly what’s happening - you can filter out Microsoft processes to make it easier to see all thirdparty software interactions.

d3Xt3r, 1 month ago

Waydroid works, but there’s three main things you need to get things going to replicate a typical Android device:

• OpenGapps: For GApps/Play Store. You’ll also need to register your device to get an Android ID.
• Magisk: Mainly to pass SafetyNet / Play Integrity basic checks.
• libndk / libhoudini: For ARM > x86 translation. libndk works better on AMD.
• Widevine: (optional) L3 DRM for things that need it, eg Netflix

There are some automated scripts that can set this all up. I used this one in the past with some success.

Also, stay away from nVidia. From what I recall, it just doesn’t work, or there are other issues like crashes. But if you’re serious about Linux in general, then ditching nVidia is generally a good idea.

Finally, games that use anti-cheat can be a hit-or-miss (like Genshin Impact, which crashed when I last tried it). But that’s something that you may face on any emulator, I mean, any decent anti-cheat system would detect the usage of emulators.

d3Xt3r, 22 hours ago

You can sill use Medicare to create the USB and then add your favorite antimalware rescue CD to it, like the Kaspersky/Avira ones, but if it’s an unknown malware you’d have to use other analysis tools like Sysinternals RootkirRevealer, Autoruns etc. If you want to fix Windows stuff then it’s best to get a WinPE-based live CD with these tools, like Sergei Strelec, Gandalf etc.

d3Xt3r, 21 hours ago

Woah, can’t believe it’s been an year already!

For the anniversary day, maybe we could have a post showcasing a few highlights of our community over the past year, something like Spotify’s Wrapped, but for Lemmy - so maybe a highlight of the most upvoted posts/comments, most profilic posters, membership counts, major server changes and little victories (maybe share some of your experiences in keeping the ship afloat)?

d3Xt3r, 19 hours ago

If you want to make it fancy we could do a presentation type thing, like via slidesgo.com or similar, but since this is on/for Lemmy, I think we should just keep it simple and make it a normal post.

d3Xt3r, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Any phone that can run GrapheneOS, which is arguably the most secure full-featured (as in: all the functionality you’d expect in a modern smartphone + compatible with popular mobile apps) mobile OS right now.

GrapheneOS is heavily focused on protection against attackers exploiting unknown (0 day) vulnerabilities. They employ techniques such as attack surface reduction (stripping out unnecessary code, disabling insecure components etc); using hardened system components (such as the kernel) that makes it much harder for hackers to exploit; and finally using sandboxing technologies (eg per-website browser sandbox, app sandboxing, media codec sandboxing etc).

A more interesting thing is the sandboxed Google Play Services support, which allows the option to use Google apps (such as the Play Store) in a fully sandboxed environment without granting them any special privileges.

You should check out the full feature set, it’s a LOT more impressive than what I hastily summarised above.

This focus on both privacy and security, with minimal negative impact to the user experience, IMO makes GrapheneOS probably the smartest choice for users concerned about mobile security and therefore, phones which run GrapheneOS (currently only Google Pixel phones) would be the smartest smartphone.

d3Xt3r, 1 month ago

Actually, the new new meta is TuneD, apparently you get better better battery life compared to PPD.

Fedora is considering switching to it, and some distros like Bazzite have already made the switch.

d3Xt3r, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

all devices

Lies, there’s no Linux app yet. As usual, Proton Inc continues to treat Linux users as third-class citizens, all whilst claiming they care about privacy and security.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTYljUhrf6W6MF_OJALuwU5MrO7NT8q1UnCwaUpGZWs5FfG4PgVZRhk7Oxf&s=10

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Edit: They don’t even have a macOS app yet lol.

https://i.imgflip.com/8l11x3.jpg

d3Xt3r, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

In the sysadmin world, the current approach is to follow a zero-trust and defense-in-depth model. Basically you do not trust anything. You assume that there’s already a bad actor/backdoor/vulnerability in your network, and so you work around mitigating that risk - using measures such as compartmentalisation and sandboxing (of data/users/servers/processes etc), role based access controls (RBAC), just-enough-access (JEA), just-in-time access (JIT), attack surface reduction etc.

Then there’s network level measures such as conditional access, and of course all the usual firewall and reverse-proxy tricks so you’re never exposing a critical service such as ssh directly to the web. And to top it all off, auditing and monitoring - lots of it, combined with ML-backed EDR/XDR solutions that can automatically baseline what’s “normal” across your network, and alert you of any abnormality. The move towards microservices and infrastructure-as-code is also interesting, because instead of running full-fledged VMs you’re just running minimal, ephemeral containers that are constantly destroyed and rebuilt - so any possible malware wouldn’t live very long and would have to work hard at persistence. Of course, it’s still possible for malware to persist in a containerised environment, but again that’s where the defense-in-depth and monitoring comes into play.

So in the case of xz, say your hacker has access to ssh - so what? The box they got access to was just a jumphost, they can’t get to anywhere else important without knowing what the right boxes and credentials are. And even if those credentials are compromised, with JEA/JIT/MFA, they’re useless. And even if they’re compromised, they’d only get access into a very specific box/area. And the more they traverse across the network, the greater the risk of leaving an audit trail or being spotted by the XDR.

Naturally none of this is 100% bullet-proof, but then again, nothing is. But that’s exactly what the zero-trust model aims to combat. This is the world we live in, where we can no longer assume something is 100% safe. Proprietary software users have been playing this game for a long time, it’s about time we OSS users also employ the same threat model.

d3Xt3r, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

First of all, I’m not the author of the article, so you’re barking up the wrong tree.

You’re using the unstable channel.

That doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things - it doesn’t solve the fundamental issue of slow security updates.

You could literally build it on your own, or patch your own change without having to wait - all you have to do is update the SHA256 hash and the tag/commit hash.

Do you seriously expect people to do that every time there’s a security update? Especially considering how large the ecosystem is? And what if someone wasn’t aware of the issue, do you really expect people to be across every single vulnerability across the hundreds or thousands of OSS projects that may be tied to the packages you’ve got on your machine?

The rest of your points also assume that the older packages don’t have a vulnerability. The point of this post isn’t really about the xz backdoor, but to highlight the issue of slow security updates.

If you’re not using Nix the way it is intended to be, it is on you. Your over-reliance on Hydra is not the fault of Nix in any way.

Citation needed. I’ve never seen the Nix developers state that in any official capacity.

d3Xt3r, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

matching other programs and platforms

Actually, Ctrl+C is the interrupt hotkey for pretty much every CLI app/terminal on every platform. Try it within the Command Prompt/PowerShell/Windows Terminal, or the macOS terminal - they’ll all behave the same.

The use of Ctrl+C as an interrupt/termination signal has a very long history even predating the old UNIX days and DEC - it goes back to the days of early telecommunications, where control characters were used for controlling the follow of data through telecommunication lines. These control characters, along with regular characters, were transmitted by being encoded in binary, and this encoding scheme was defined by ASCII (American Stanard Code for Information Interchange), published in 1963.

In ASCII, the control character ETX (meaning end-of-text; represented by the hex code 0x03) was used to indicate “this segment of input is over”, or “stop the current processing”.

Now what does all this have to do with with Ctrl+C you ask?

For that, you’ll need to go back to the days of early keyboards. Keyboards back then generated ASCII codes directly, and when a modifier key (Ctrl/Shift/Meta) on a keyboard was pressed in combination with another key, it modified the signal sent by the keyboard to produce a control character.

Specifically, pressing Ctrl with a letter key made the keyboard clear (set to zero) the upper three bits of the binary code of the letter, thus effectively mapping the letter keys to control characters (0x00 - 0x1F: the first 32 characters on the ASCII table).

• The ASCII code for ‘C’ is 0x43 (binary 01000011).
• Pressing Ctrl+C clears the upper three bits, resulting in 00000011, which is 0x03 in hex.

And would you look at that, 0x03 is the code which represents the control character ETX.

The use of ETX to interrupt a program in digital computers was first adopted by the TOPS-10 OS, which ran on DEC’s PDP-10 computer, back in the late 60s. It’s successor, TOPS-20 also included it, followed by the RSX-11 (on the PDP-11), and VMS (on the VAX-11).

RSX-11 was a very influential OS, created by a team that included David Cutler. It influenced the design of several OSes that followed, such as VMS and Windows NT. Cutler later moved to Microsoft and became the father of Windows NT. Early NT did not include a GUI, so it was natural to adopt existing terminal operation standards, including the use of ETX. In fact, NT’s internals were so similar to VMS that a lawsuit was in the works, but instead, MS agreed to pay off DEC millions of $$$.

Also, when UNIX first came out (1969), it ran on DEC hardware, and so they followed the tradition of using the ETX signal to stop programs. This convention flowed to BSD (1978) which was based on UNIX, and NeXTSTEP (1989), which was based on BSD. NeXTSTEP was developed by NeXT Computers, which was founded by Steve Jobs… and the rest is history.

Therefore, Ctrl+C is something that’s deeply rooted in history. You don’t just simply change something like that. Sure, you may be able to remap the keybindings, but it’s actually hardcoded into many programs so you’ll run into inconsistencies - that is, if you used the standard remapping tools built into GNOME/KDE etc.

If you want to truly remap Ctrl+C, you’ll want to do so at a lower level (evdev layer) so that it’s not intercepted by other programs, eg using tools like evremap or keyd. But even then, it’s not guaranteed to work everywhere, for instance, if you’re inside a VM or using a different OS, or in a remote session. So it’s best to remap the keys at the keyboard layer itself, which is possible on many popular mechanical keyboards using customisable firmware like QMK/VIA.