wolf

@wolf@lemmy.zip

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wolf,

I have an idea in which federal state Microsoft Germany headquarters will move next…

Why are Denis Villeneuve's Dune movies loved by audience and critics?

When watching movies, I always try to differentiate between my personal enjoyment and the inherent merits of the movies. There are a lot of bad movies, which I totally and thoroughly enjoy watching, and some really great movies, which I don’t enjoy that much, but still can respect/appreciate....

wolf,

Seriously, unless you are extremely specialized and know exactly what you are doing, IMHO the answer is: Always (and even being extremely specialized, I would still enable a firewall. :-P)

Operating systems nowadays are extremely complex with a lot of moving parts. There are security relevant bugs in your network stack and in all applications that you are running. There might be open ports on your computer you did not even think about, and unless you are monitoring 24/7 your local open ports, you don’t know what is open.

First of all, you can never trust other devices on a network. There is no way to know, if they are compromised. You can also never trust the software running on your own computer - just look at CVEs, even without malicious intentions your software is not secure and never will be.

As soon as you are part of a network, your computer is exposed, doesn’t matter if desktop/laptop, and especially for attacking Linux there is a lot of drive by attacks happening 24/7.

Your needs for firewalls mostly depend on your threat model, but just disabling accepting incoming requests is trivial and increases your security by a great margin. Further, setting a rate limit for failed connection attempts for open ports like SSH if you use this services, is another big improvement for security. (… and of course disabling password authentication, YADA YADA)

That said, obviously security has to be seen in context, the only snake oil that I know of are virus scanners, but that’s another story.

People, which claim you don’t need a firewall make at least one of the following wrong assumptions:

  • Your software is secure - demonstrably wrong, as proven by CVEs
  • You know exactly what is running/reachable on your computer - this might be correct for very small specialized embedded systems, even for them one still must always assume security relevant bugs in software/hardware/drivers

Security is a game, and no usable system can be absolutely secure. With firewalls, you can (hopefully) increase the price for successful attacks, and that is important.

Custom shell prompt tips and tricks?

Recently I stumbled over an article, about how to customize your shell prompt. What really surprised me, is that it lacked one of the most basic tips I learned nearly 20 years back: Always display a timestamp in the prompt, to be able to check how long a process is running or when it ended. (Don’t need it daily, but every so...

Competitive games for gamers with slow reflexes

Back then I played Warcraft 3 ladder games and I hit my skill ceiling quite fast because my micro was simply too bad/slow. I still very much enjoy real time strategy games. Is there any real time strategy game that is played competitively with an active community where micro is not that essential? (Ruling out Star Craft 2.)...

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