gerowen, 3 months ago to privacy

So my brother called today saying he wanted to run a #Tor node to help folks in need, and asked for my help.

I told him that one of the more beneficial options in my opinion would be a dedicated snowflake proxy. It's simple to set up and helps to relay/proxy people who might otherwise have access to Tor blocked, which would be helpful for people under oppressive regimes or on restricted networks.

An hour after getting it going it had already handled a couple GB worth of traffic, 🙂

#Privacy

A video of a raspberry pi 4 with a wired ethernet connection. The link lights are blinking without interruption.

gerowen, 2 months ago to random

Thought on #COVID19 . It's still a thing, and still deadly, but it's my impression that it's tapering off and becoming our new influenza. Just like the Spanish flu killed everybody and their dog and now we just have an annual shot and relatively low risk of serious illness, so too has Covid weakened and become less of a threat. It killed all kinds of people here during the #pandemic, but my son has it right now and he's croopy, but I'm still allowed to work and nobody around here wears masks. 1/

gerowen, 7 months ago to philosophy

"Horton Hears a Who" is a lot more profound than people realize. Perhaps our entire universe exists on a speck of dust that itself exists within an entire other universe, which in turn is on another speck. And what if the atoms that make up our universe in turn contain their own entire universes. Reality is both infinitely large and infinitely small. It extends infinitely in all directions and dimensions.

#Philosophy #DrSeuss #HortonHearsAWho #DoctorSeuss

gerowen, 25 days ago to Steamdeck

I don't think it comes thru in this compressed, tone mapped JPG screenshot, but #HorizonZeroDawn with HDR enabled on a #SteamDeck OLED looks and runs way better than it has any right to on a handheld device. This has got to be one of if not the best looking game I've played on the Deck yet. With the "original" graphics preset (PS4 equivalent?) and HDR enabled on a 90hz OLED display it's holding 50+ fps, looking and feeling great. Really looking forward to this, 🙂

#Gaming #PCGaming #PlayStation

gerowen, 4 months ago to homelab

So after 4.5 years it's time to replace the batteries in our UPS again. I don't think the runtime or battery charge level is accurate since I literally just put them in. I'll give them a day to charge and warm up and run a calibration and self test on them. Started getting emails from the server the other day that the battery needed changing and its runtime was down into the sub 20 minute range. They've been pretty abused by this Kentucky electrical grid.

#HomeLab #SelfHosted

gerowen, 1 month ago to random

Headline: Opinion | Will the #MAGA faithful actually read #Trump’s bible?

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/28/trump-bible-2024-grift/

gerowen, 4 months ago to FreeSpeech

So much for #freespeech

"#Twitter Suddenly Suspends Journalists Critical of #ElonMusk
No explanation was given."

#X

https://futurism.com/the-byte/twitter-suspends-journalists-critical-elon-musk

gerowen, 1 year ago to random

#Brave #search is officially 100% independent and doesn't depend on any other search engine for its results.

#privacy

https://brave.com/search-independence/

gerowen, 17 days ago to privacy

If you use Dropbox you should probably change your password.

Headline: #Dropbox Hacked! Threat Actor Accessed Passwords and Phone Numbers

Snippet: A quick analysis revealed that a threat actor had broken in to access customer information such as emails, usernames, phone numbers and hashed passwords, as well as general account settings and certain authentication information (API keys, OAuth tokens, and multi-factor authentication).

https://www.bitdefender.com/blog/hotforsecurity/dropbox-hacked-threat-actor-accessed-phone-numbers-and-passwords/

#Privacy #Security #Cybersecurity

gerowen, 5 months ago to linux

So I was working on a computer for my mom earlier. It's dual booting Debian #Linux with KDE because she wants to learn Linux, and I figured KDE resembles Windows. Anyway, I was setting up shortcuts so she could find all of her files she normally uses, but there's one problem. #Microsoft #OneDrive appears to do something weird. There's an empty file called "OneDrive", that appears to be a pointer, but the OneDrive "folder" isn't present. Anybody know where OneDrive "actually" stores files?

gerowen, 10 months ago to linux

Ever forgotten what number means what in terms of #Linux permissions? Here's a little note I keep on hand.

#security

CHMOD By the Numbers

0 = No permissions
1 = x
2 = w
3 = wx
4 = r
5 = rx
6 = rw
7 = rwx

gerowen, 9 months ago to privacy

The problem with all of these plans to "protect the children" by banning encryption, is that if the government can break #encryption then so can anybody else.

Mark my words, if bills like this pass, the government keys WILL be compromised and WILL be used to attack online infrastructure, and I don't mean just some unclassified emails sitting on a Microsoft Outlook server somewhere.

And it will not work for "protecting the children."

#privacy #security #cybersecurity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8kOT0B9WVU/

gerowen, 7 months ago to Facebook

If you ever want to feel depressed about humanity, just do a search for things like #newbadge on your social media platform of choice. I found this one on #Facebook. This guy works for a bank.

Don't be this guy. He could be impersonated, or this picture could be used as a template to forge a fake ID complete with a valid barcode to gain access to bank facilities or infrastructure.

I censored the bar code and ID#, they were visible in the original.

#OPSEC #OSINT #Privacy #Security

gerowen, 6 months ago to kentucky

Just ran down to #vote and noticed that in #Kentucky, the parties are not represented by the elephant and donkey on the ballots, they are represented by a log cabin and a chicken.

#Election

gerowen, 1 month ago to gaming

You know why people pirate stuff? Because even when you pay for it, you get hit with garbage like this. Was reading thru the EULA for the #MetalGear Master Collection bonus content on Steam, and this little paragraph jumped out at me.

Shit like this is the reason I built my own home server to keep backups of everything, including the installation files of all my Steam games. "No CD" or "No Steam" cracks are a thing, should worse come to worse.

#Gaming #PCGaming #Cloud #Piracy

gerowen, 7 months ago to privacy

Disabled the default "Allow ping" rule in #OpenWRT on my router. Let's see if that reduces the amount of people that go poking around and get banned by #Fail2Ban.

#Privacy #Networking #Security

gerowen, 11 months ago to random

I have a Pixel 6a. I'm considering flashing it with a more #privacy respecting #Android ROM like Lineage, Graphene or /e/. Which one would you guys recommend? I don't know a lot about them but would like to avoid using software that's only developed by 3 guys in their spare time. I'm not saying it has to be #Google, but I don't want to stop getting security updates because one guy in a corn field in Nebraska got tired of building an operating system for free.

gerowen, 9 months ago to security

Had an interesting notification from #Fail2Ban yesterday. Instead of Nextcloud, this one came from the "apache-auth" jail, which protects a pseudo-hidden/password protected service that has links intended for my family.

Anyway, somebody at the "Children's Hospital Colorado" found it, probably via port scan. Instead of failing auth, they got booted for trying to escape the web root to look at files like "/etc/passwd" and "/winnt/win.ini". I notified their IT dept.

#security #cybersecurity

gerowen, 3 months ago to art

One of the greatest animators and storytellers of our time.

#hiyaomiyazaki #ghibli #art #ai #anime

gerowen, 9 months ago to linux

Tech tip.

If you want to read an article with a pay wall in place, like the one I just shared from Wired, and your ad blocker doesn't circumvent it, and it's not within your means to pay for it (which you should certainly consider) here's one way to get around it, on #Linux at least.

Just use "curl" to download the URL of the page, then redirect it to a local .html file, then open that local file in your web browser.

Example:
curl someurl > somefile.html

A screenshot of a terminal running the curl command on a URL and redirecting it to a .html file.

gerowen, 9 months ago to programming

Anybody got any good, novice friendly, visual tutorials on how to build simple #GTK user interfaces with #Glade? I would like to move away from basic python tk windows and layer a proper looking user interface on top of my projects.

#programming #development #python

gerowen, 2 months ago to politics

This whole "both sides are bad" nonsense is getting really old, and I'm to the point that I'm just done protecting people's feelings on important issues, lifelong friends or not. You have to be willing to stand up for your principles, and this tendency towards fence riding will be our downfall because intelligent people are too afraid of being divisive. Even if you disagree with me, take a position and defend it.

Just posted this reply in a debate about American #politics.

Cont... 1/

#Trump

gerowen, 1 month ago to technology

I'm at Rupp Arena in Lexington, KY for the state STLP (Student #Technology Leadership Program) championships. Students present their projects which describes using technology in productive and engaging ways.

I made this observation a month or two ago when I taught a class to the STLP kids, but now that I'm here I'm even more convinced that #Microsoft #Windows has lost the next generation. My kids use #Linux at home and Chromebooks at school, and almost every kid here is using a Chromebook.

A poster board from one of the projects after the kids had walked away. It describes how they used technology to make mental health resources available to other students in the aftermath of a student death.

gerowen, 1 month ago to linuxmint

Anybody know how financially stable #LinuxMint is? I am considering recommending it to people like my mom as support for #Windows 10 winds down, but looking at their sponsors page looks like they only bring in between $3k and $4k per month. That's not a lot of money for several developers to maintain an entire operating system. What happens if they lose one of the 2-3 big sponsors they have? Does the whole project cave or just stop getting timely #security updates?

#Linux

gerowen, 10 months ago to kentucky

It's gonna be another scorcher tomorrow here in eastern #Kentucky, and it's supposed to break 100 the day after. Plus, the smoke from those Canadian wildfires is pretty thick.

#climatechange