@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

huitema

@huitema@social.secret-wg.org

Working on that Internet thing...

https://www.privateoctopus.com/about.html

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

TMEubanks, to random
@TMEubanks@astrodon.social avatar

@huitema I saw your Quic to Mars, which I thought was interesting. I am not sure about relying on round trips on long links (to Mars or beyond), which tend to be strongly non-duplex, but I could see using in in cislunar space - i.e., LunaNet.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@TMEubanks @AkaSci Apparently, in the future we will get satellite networks over Mars, relays in space and on the Moon, people watching Netflix after a day of planetary labor. Who knows. Me, I am just answering the simple technical question, can QUIC be made to work on such networks?

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@TMEubanks @AkaSci Sure, would love that. Pretty convinced that QUIC would work fine between Moon and Earth with minor tuning, and ready to explain how. Also, I am much more likely to still be alive by the time people return to the Moon than when they settle on Mars!

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

My sympathy level for the solider who voluntarily ran into North Korea is somewhere south of McMurdo Station.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@lauren That case is weird. Hot headed soldier gets into bar fights when off duty is routine. Gets arrested by local authorities is less routine, but quite frequent. Gets shipped back to home base, sure. Left to his own device to board the plane back starts being a bit weird. But manages to sneak out of the airport with a bunch of of tourists and sneak into North Korea? That escalated quickly!

lauren, to random
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

Once upon a time -- many, many years ago and late one night -- I entered the ARPANET (the Internet's ancestor) computer room at UCLA to do some work on ARPANET host #1 -- the DEC PDP-11/45 that was UNIX UCLA-ATS.

But something was wrong. The system was behaving very oddly. It was up, and not under heavy load, but ... it was as if it kept starting and stopping. When I'd type there'd be activity -- I could see it on the front panel lights, but when I stopped typing ... everything seemed to stop. I could get keyboard echos, and then a response ... but then everything would stop again.

Normal boot wasn't working either, but it was possible to reboot from the emergency DECtape.

But still clearly failing overall.

When we ultimately found out what the problem was, I was quite amused. The real-time clock hardware had failed, so the process scheduler was not cycling properly. However, whenever someone typed, the keyboard interrupt would push the scheduler so there'd be some action -- but then it would stop again until there was more typing and more interrupts.

Basically, the system was operating as if on a hand crank. Live long enough, and you see almost everything. -L

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@SteveBellovin @karlauerbach @lauren I wonder when we learned that piping to a teletype without flow control was a bad idea.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Context matters. Both fighters said "Nationality is not race, and I'm proud to live in an African country." Only 1 was well received.

Efe Ajagba 🧔🏿‍♂️🇳🇬
• AJ is not a Nigerian boxer!
• His parents are Nigerian, he's a UK citizen
• Yes he's Nigerian too: Nigerian and British
• I'm happy for him. I'm not criticizing him
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4UdqPqfZA&t=3m41s

Dricus du Plessis 🧔🏼‍♂️🇿🇦
• Africa hasn't had a UFC champ yet!
• Izzy lives in NZ, Kamaru in US, Ngannou, US
• I live and train in SA

https://youtube.com/shorts/3R31jKG1rMI

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@mekkaokereke to get to 54 countries in Africa you have to include Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. These are not exactly "black" countries.

andy_blum, to random
@andy_blum@drupal.community avatar

Following Twitter's lockdown of tweets, a lot of sites have seen their embedded timelines break.

If you're looking for a way to embed mastodon posts, I've just created a new project that lets you embed your timeline of toots.

🪶 It's lightweight (<2kb).
🙈 No tracking of any kind.
💅 Fully style-able with CSS
📦 One simple web component

Feature requests & contributions are welcome!

https://github.com/andy-blum/fed-embed

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@andy_blum Looks cool. One of the main issue I have with the naive embedding of toots is that users get connected to the author's server, instead of accessing the toot through their own server. That the plugin solve that?

evacide, to random
@evacide@hachyderm.io avatar

I wish people would stop being surprised every time there is a new round of Crypto Wars. There will always be people in power who want to backdoor end-to-end encryption. The only thing that ever changes is the excuse.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@evacide the one change this time is the extreme concentration of the platforms. Governments can go a long way by pressuring Apple, Google, Facebook and a few others.

geerlingguy, to RedHat
@geerlingguy@mastodon.social avatar

May we all go up in mayonnaise one day

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@geerlingguy "Faire monter la mayonnaise" is a very French expression. To make the mayonnaise from scratch, you put oil, yoke, mustard and lemon juice or vinegar in a bowl and whip very quickly until it becomes firm. Hence the second meaning of whipping up a crowd with exciting words, until the fever catches. Or, in French, the mayonnaise goes up.

lauren, to Futurology
@lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

's "Threads", BTW, appears to be essentially a variant of Instagram with federation portals. Logically, it should be straightforward to block (or welcome) as one might wish. But given that its boss and 's boss are still apparently talking seriously about a "cage match", this is all likely to be all about distinctions without any significant differences in the end. Like vampires who are literally dead men and women walking, social media is headed inexorably toward a graveyard of indistinct form and unknown distance. But their ultimate fates are fairly certain, nonetheless.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@lauren I am not so sure about the ultimate fate. I see the parallel with audio/video conference services. The basic tech dates from the early 90's. It went through a bunch of iterations, Skype, Webex, etc. Yet we still saw Zoom's growth explode two years ago...

hrefna, to opsec
@hrefna@hachyderm.io avatar

It seems timely to talk about what is rather than just what it isn't.

OPSEC is about preventing leaks of metadata or auxiliary data in order to prevent revealing your underlying secret. OPSEC is about preventing an adversary from determining your actions from things that are not information about the operation itself.

OPSEC is a process, not a plugin.

For example, if you are worried about plans around an action leaking out, OPSEC asks about elements such as:

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@hrefna It is also darn near impossible. Anything that requires constant attention will fail, because people cannot do that. If you want to keep your metadata hidden, you need tools that actively protect your metadata.

matthew_d_green, to random
@matthew_d_green@ioc.exchange avatar

Something reminded me that I need to finish this project!

image/png

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@SteveBellovin @matthew_d_green insert a QR code in the microdot?

huitema, to random
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

A new RFC, about "Maintaining Robust Protocols". The original draft was titled "Postel was wrong", because Martin Thomson wanted to outline that "being tolerant with what you receive" leads to protocols drifting away from the standards, to the benefit of the largest "deviant". But this was too provocative. The final text is much milder.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9413.html

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@lemmus Yes, but focusing on Jon Postel ended up shifting the discussion away from engineering. Plus, the tolerance principle was probably key to developing the Internet in the 90's...

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@whitequark @lemmus Thanks for forwarding that. No, I had not yet seen that specific exchange. My best guess is that the 75 character limit is a legacy from the days of punch cards, through "standard" 24x80 terminal interfaces. And that the mail protocols were initially gateways to the stand alone mail servers of Multics, Unix and other OSes, which in practice were never completely standard. You may want to send that to Keith Moore. Or Nathaniel Borenstein.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@whitequark @lemmus I am pretty sure I remember Jon Postel explaining why the robustness principle was a good idea, but then my memory is what it is. And it is also very possible that Jon was disapproving of implementations assuming that the other implementations would be liberal, so they themselves don't have to be conservative. In any case, the robustness principle is written down in section 2.13 or RFC 793, the TCP Spec that Jon wrote.

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

On the off chance that you end up banging your head against this the way I did this morning:

The current generation Anker USB PD GaN chargers (models 735, 737, etc) will NOT correctly negotiate 12V. You get 9V instead. The other PD-negotiated voltages appear to work correctly. They claim to do 12V, but they don’t.

When it comes to cheap electronics, trust but verify.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@mattblaze Something like that is going on with car battery chargers. The plug itself may be standard, but there is a protocol running over the wires to decide how much current to send without setting fire to the battery or the house.I fully expect that protocol to go through many revisions...

paco, to internet

One of the arguments people make saying that and will be good for the is to compare it to email. I’m sure the people who make this comparison do not an email server. I’ve done that for paco.to since 1998 or so. Sometimes literally a box in a literal closet under my literal kitchen stairs. You have no idea how hard these big players make running your own small email server.

The problem is not our power to defederate Meta. The problem will be Meta’s ability to defederate us.

If my email can’t be delivered to gmail, my email isn’t email. If outlook.com wont accept my email, or yahoo wont accept my email, I am cut off from the wider world. Big players use massive anti-spam and reputation systems that are opaque. I have no idea why my server does or doesn’t end up on various lists. I am a chief election officer in my county and all my emails to the office of elections were getting tossed in the spam folder. I don’t know why. I have to constantly be vigilant to the point that I pay a monitoring service to alert me when I end up on a list.

Go ahead. Look up paco.to and evaluate the email-correctness. I do fucking all of it. DKIM, DMARC, SPF, etc. I even started playing with the bullshit BIMI until I found out it’s based on X.509 certificate bullshit that costs $1000+. But I am a second class email citizen. Big players arbitrarily drop my email and don’t have an appeal process. They don’t explain and they won’t make changes.

If 90% of “the fediverse” uses big players like Meta, where you don’t even “create an account” because you already have “an account” then it will be difficult to run a small instance. Meta will impose arbitrary and stupid rules about what does and doesn’t get into their walled garden. They can shadow ban or outright block and shape what people see. They will reorder the timelines, allowed paid placement in the timeline, and insert ads.

People who use the email analogy to suggest that Meta joining the fediverse will be GOOD don’t know a damn thing about running email.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@paco Then the question comes, why is it so hard to run your own mail server? What does that teach us for the fediverse? The big issue in mail is spam: dealing with it, discarding it, and even more so dealing with the blowback, the cases where your server gets blocked in random black list, etc. All that increases the cost of running mail servers manifold. And it is largely because the mail protocol did not think of addressing spam directly back then...

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@paco I receive almost 0 spam from Gmail, and I am not overly concerned about spam originating from Facebook. I am concerned about spam or harassment originating from third parties, small servers having a hard time dealing with it and suffering de-federation if they don't, and Facebook dealing well with it because economies of scale. That is what pushed people away from small mail servers and into Gmail. Or Outlook.

tchambers, (edited ) to random

➡️

With news of the probable launch of Meta's I wanted to make clear this servers policy:

"Don't preemptively strike meta w/ a fediblock, but stay vigilant with eyes wide open and a finger on the block button."

The same as we do for all servers.

They can be blocked instantly if they violate our terms of use, and as admins are in a far stronger position if we do so than vs before.

I hope all to consider taking this same policy. 1 of X 🧵

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@mastodonmigration @hrefna @tchambers The privacy risk is something like Gmail: your email may be private, but Google has a copy if you sent it to anyone hosted at Google, thus feeding data analysis and the surveillance machine. But then, the public posts on Mastodon are public, so they already feed that surveillance machine.

timbray, (edited ) to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

MKBHD on Apple’s iFacePlate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvXuyITwBI

I have major MAJOR creeped-out vibes on this one.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@timbray Adding eye-tracking to these devices is "natural" -- see for example this Hololens description: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-reality/design/eye-tracking. I have seen past demo in which the user was reading a text on screen, and the display was mostly black -- except for the words that the user was currently reading. Apparently, Apple has invested a lot in that direction.

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

Something must be in the water, because I just got ANOTHER flare up of people asking me about Faraday bags to prevent phone tracking.

Short answer: A Faraday bag probably doesn't solve your problem; they require great care to use effectively. and your phone can be tracked as soon as you remove it.

But if you DO need one, you want one that actually works. Here's a short writeup I did a while back on the theory and practice of testing them:

https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/

TL;DR: Science is fun.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@mattblaze I wonder how many of your students considered somehow grounding the cage? In theory, grounding the cage should prevent it from acting as an antenna.

michael, (edited ) to random
@michael@thms.uk avatar

PSA: It looks like mastodon.social has implemented hCAPTCHA on their signups yesterday.

So, if you have limited / suspended mastodon.social because of the spam issue, you may wish to reconsider this.

This will also likely mean that spammers will move to different instances (already seeing them targeting mastodon.world).

You may wish to consider implementing hCAPTCHA yourself to protect your own instance, and here is the relevant PR:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/25019

The reason I'm suggesting this, is because if you are a small/medium instance with open registrations, and spammers find and abuse your instance, I imagine that other instances will limit/suspend your instance without hesitation, given how willing some were to limit/suspend the much larger mastodon.social.

But do note this comment on the PR:

“To give some context to people seeing this: this is an emergency feature backport from Glitch SOC to help mitigating an ongoing spam wave, this feature may not make it in a next release, or with significative changes.”

Edited to add: multiple people have rightly commented on the accessibility concerns with hCaptcha: hCaptcha is really really really bad for blind and visually impaired people.

Please have a look at this excellent reply for more details:

https://dragonscave.space/@Mayana/110383119877022255

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@nemobis @erion @michael I would love to see an "open captcha" solution, that would be open source and privacy preserving. First step would be to collect requirements. For example, have solutions for people who cannot actually read the images (or hear sounds). Respect privacy by allowing servers to implement the test locally, without relying on third party. And of course be robust even if the code is public.

mattblaze, to random
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

"Grading is so much fun!" is my duress code.

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@SteveBellovin @adamshostack @mattblaze what happened to the good old staircase method?

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@mattblaze @SteveBellovin @adamshostack Showing how out of touch I am. Last time I graded paper was maybe 30 years ago. On the other hand, if you switch to industry, you get a similar problem -- ordering team members on the equivalent of a bell curve every year. Pick your poison...

mattblaze, to photography
@mattblaze@federate.social avatar

The One World Trade Center tower, occupying its place in the lower Manhattan skyline.

Enough pixels to reach the sky at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49291055921/

huitema,
@huitema@social.secret-wg.org avatar

@SteveBellovin @mattblaze if you want, you can express all that geometry using projection matrices. Game developers use quaternions.

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