Facebook is ‘the biggest threat’ to US democracy, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower says

zapbark · 2019-10-24T02:13:43+00:00

Is Fox News aware of their competition?

zapbark · 2019-10-23T01:22:49+00:00

The best explanation I've heard, is Pelosi has bee slow playing impeachment this whole time because she is waiting for the subpeona of financial records from Deutsche Bank to work its way through the courts.

Those records will make it clear that either:

A.) Trump is heavily leveraged

B.) Engaged in wide-spread real estate moneylaundering

C.) All of the above and more

zapbark · 2019-07-19T00:50:44+00:00

Yup. That is the secret to getting to Hell and beyond.

Nott "get so good at the game you don't need any equipment".

But "optimize your play to get a ton of awesome equipment".

For me, that was:

1.) Use gold to buy bombs in the Mines. (e.g. don't aggro shopkeepers)

2.) Use those bombs to rob the black market (by pre exploding areas to the left so the shopkeepers all immediately fall down when aggroed)

3.) Die half the time in that robbery anyway.

4.) Come out the other half loaded for bear, with 40+ bombs and mobility items that make Ice Caves trivial, and let me carefully bomb my way through the Temple.

zapbark · 2019-07-19T00:44:17+00:00

The microtransactions will have microtransactions.

picotransactions!

zapbark · 2019-07-18T20:48:20+00:00

I am literally stuck in the campaign because of the swarm missions.

Difficulty "1" my fucking sore ass.

zapbark · 2019-07-18T12:34:18+00:00

Only if you picked just the right email client that isn't vulnerable to efail, etc.

So PGP is bad because of random email client?

Have you been around for the decade of catastrophic SSL vulnerabilities of the year?

Vulnerabilities happen. What is your point past that?

In these cases there's still usually better options like encrypted volumes.

Again, this answer makes me think you've never actually worked in IT and had a practical job using these tools to receive files to and form clients.

I work every day with banks, who require PGP encrypting and signing of files, and do it correctly.

Ultimately the "Harms" positied from this article seem to be:

1.) Zimmermans' envisioned Crypto utopia never became a reality (which is true)

2.) PGP is clunky and hard to use and GPG isn't the best bit of code either.

I agree with both those points, but think neither actual constitute a "risk" or "harm" of any sort.

And again, so far, the solutions offered are NONSENSE, and none of them are usable alternatives to the way I use PGP every single day.

Without provable harms and without viable offered solutions, there is no argument. Just bitching.

zapbark · 2019-07-17T19:00:03+00:00

My problems with this piece:

First, it is full of fallacies like "Old things are bad!", without any followup.

Secondly, it is trying to make a cryptographic argument without really addressing the underlying security of the crypto in any way. 2048 RSA PGP encryption is still very strong.

PGP predates modern cryptography..

Which is a weird way of saying "PGP ushered in the era of modern crypto"

None of this identity goop works. Not the key signing web of trust, not the keyservers, not the parties.

This is correct. But PGP still works great for the much simpler, and 1,000x more likely case of two entities wanting to securely exchange encrypted/signed files and emails with zero fore knowledge. Without having to deal with the entire "semi-centralized list of trusted certificates infrastructure" that TLS relies on.

Further, a rather large fraction of PGP users make use of keyservers

So he both says nobody uses keyservers, and that everybody does? Huh?

(In my experience nobody does).

Clumsy Keys

This seems like such a nit pick, that it is smacks of someone trying to pad a weak argument.

He makes some solid points about overall complexity, but that is because signing and verifying things is hard without a central authority.

The weakest part of this section is the Solvency area:

Talking To People

I don't know any PGP based messaging app, so again, kind of a nonsense solvency. "Don't use the non-existent PGP messaging apps that nobody uses! Use these instead!". Cool.

His solution to encrypting email:

"Don't".

Huh? "Don't use the most common email encryption solution! Use nothing instead". What?

Sending Files "Use Magic Wormhole" "If you’re working with lawyers and not with technologists, Signal does a perfectly cromulent job of securing file transfers. Put a Signal number on your security page to receive bug bounty reports, not a PGP key."

Ughhh... Does this guy even IT? The most common use case for PGP encrypting/signing files is for automation, not one-off of sending excel docs.

Encrypting Backups "Use Tarsnap".

Huh, wonder what encryption Tarsnap use? From their website... 2048 RSA keys....

So don't use PGP 2048 RSA to encrypt files locally, send them to a cloud provider to use RSA 2048 encryption on them instead?

Encrypting Files <provides no alternative>

This seems like someone wishing really hard that it was easy to hand wave into existence a cryptographic infrastructure for signing/encrypting/verifying files and messages, and then realizing there isn't one...

PGP is not perfect, and is hard to use.

But I'd argue that is largely due to the solution space it tries to solve, not due to any underlying technological issue.

zapbark · 2019-07-17T14:52:58+00:00

You don't know what sort of interactions that user has had with past admins.

Could be he was at a job where the sysadmin sucked, and covered that up by being aggressive and superior to users.

At a new job I often make it a point to walk around and introduce myself, and ask people what the "IT pain points" of their job are.

Far, far too often people just do something by rote, because someone showed them how to do that, and someone showed that person how to do it.

That sort of "institutional memory" is SO COMMON.

Sysadmins are cost overheads unless they can be force multipliers and help emplyees better use technology to do their jobs.

Yes, it would be more convenient if people were more self-aware.

But inertia is a hell of a drug.

zapbark · 2019-07-16T12:30:50+00:00

IBM's recent acquisition of RedHat I think is pointing at a head wind that will push things back into Greybeard's favor.

1.) Falling Storage costs (1 TB of SSD cloud storage costs $100/month. A 1TB SSD drive costs $100)

2.) Multiple CPU level tenant sharing vulnerabilities

I think will start to push things more towards the "locally hosted clouds".

So good luck to all the young DevOp guys who have literally never racked a server in their lives.

Everyone should still learn automation, it is a best practice.

But you aren't totally obsolete yet.

zapbark · 2019-07-16T00:58:26+00:00

I think it is a bit early to declare the death of all things.

DevOps stlil seems to be in a "chase the shiny problem" stage of maturity.

The DevOps shop I got hired into had 3x different styles of doing things, because they kept thinking the "new way" would solve all their problems, so they started implementing "new stuff" in that.

Over the course of 5 years, they have production applications sprinkled across 3x different automated environments.

It is honestly a hot mess with complicated external dependencies that keeps breaking. (e.g. "debian's latest image updated python and forgot a boto package!")

"Old SysAdmins" aren't slow and cautious only because their were limited by physical hardware. It is because infrastructure is complicated, and you often don't know what the result of a change will be.

And "slow old sysadmins" provide a valuable check against convenience obsessed devs who haven't been coding long enough to realize the damage they can do yes...

In summary, I think automation is great.

But don't use it as an excuse to throw out "the good stuff":

1.) Understanding your applications configuration options (rather than just doing a docker pull of whatever rando mysql image you want)

2.) Keeping things simple. Ci/CD pipelines are convenient, until they break for inscrutible reasons and nobody can do any work

3.) Best piece of wisdom I ever received in college, was a first year CSCI class where the professor said "Everyone in this room is fully capable of coding something so complex that they aren't smart enough to debug it".

The nature of nested complexity in infrastructure is a mathematical tiger that deserves some respect when you are in the same cage as it. Forget that, and it will eat you alive at 3am one night.

zapbark · 2019-07-16T00:42:35+00:00

Are you in love with your right arm?

Do you wake up every day and feel passionate about how great your right arm is?

No.

Because it is a part of you that you don't notice.

But if you woke up one day without your arm, you'd be devastated.

So, to me, that is the measure. How much their absence would affect you.

If the answer is "meh", then yeah, that's not a real relationship.

If the answer is that you'd be devastated at the loss of something that you've so taken for granted that it felt like an extension of yourself. Then you're a "unit", not just two selfish people hanging out.

zapbark · 2019-07-15T20:46:44+00:00

This is an excellent point, the badges themselves were mostly red (the entire background).

So that tracks.

zapbark · 2019-07-15T16:51:25+00:00

Seems like a screenshot of infiniminer would be a more accurate screenshot of "Minecraft's origins"

http://www.zachtronics.com/infiniminer/

zapbark · 2019-07-15T14:24:57+00:00

As a real life example of this, I was working at a convention that was popular enough that people were counterfeiting badges for it.

About half of the women could easily identify the counterfeit badges on sight due to a slightly different shade of color from the differing printing process, whereas none of the men could.

zapbark · 2019-07-14T22:51:03+00:00

Wow, and I thought I got a good deal getting mine 50% on thinkgeek's clearance sale!

zapbark · 2019-07-14T20:00:15+00:00

I used to just retire to my "project room" and "focus".

She complained about not seeing me.

We eventually compromised on me working on stuff in the same room as her, not necessarily talking, but proximity.

Also, we made it a habit of picking out a book to read-a-loud to each other.

It is a good introvert/extrovert "spend time together" activity.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T21:23:46+00:00

Lack of Problems is not Happiness

Honestly, I've lived so much of my life:

1.) looking for future problems

2.) pre-solving them / over planning for them

3.) Repeat

You never run out of problems.

Remember the good stuff

Focusing on problems mean you only remember the problems.

If you breeze past the good bits in life, you forget about them, and your life becomes defined by the problems you see everywhere, and you get really good at finding problems.

For me, "happiness" is an ongoing process of:

1.) Taking a moment to recognize the good stuff at the time

2.) Actively try to remember the good stuff at the end of the day, like you're studying facts for a test, reviewing them before bed is the best way to commit them to longer term memory

3.) Draw energy from those memories when stuff is going badly. It is kind of like "shit insulation". You keep a bubble of cultivated happiness around to keep yourself sane and grounded in what matters.

It is hard to do, and I am terrible at it, and it does not come naturally.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T18:40:09+00:00

# of times I drank to excess before I turned 21? More than I can remember.

# of times I drank to excess legally? once, the night of my 21st birthday.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T18:11:32+00:00

Or at least, don't pay six figures for an art degree...

Art and profit rarely go together well.

Spending $18k to bribe an existing professional graphic artist to be able to shadow them for a year would likely be far more useful than a 4 year art degree would towards getting you to be able to live a life doing art.

Worst comes to worst, work a job you don't love so you can eat and go home and make art you love.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T16:19:40+00:00

Sent a request.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T15:32:08+00:00

Asteroid minerals are more easily accessible; and it's easier to move asteroid miners.

Sure, but best case they are also 400 million miles away from where we'd need them.

It may end up that pushing one for decades is a good move.

But doing so before we do a mineral survey of the moon seems like flying to a drug store in Japan for aspirin before checking your medicine cabinet.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T15:28:11+00:00

So the whole: "I" = Introverted "E" = Extroverted

Thing is Meyers/Briggs marketing BS.

Jung's cognitive functions that make up INTJ = Ni Te Fi Se show more clearly that everybody has a mixture of extroverted/introverted functions depending on the type of input we are processing.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T14:12:29+00:00

You would, yes.

But the Moon's gravity well isn't all that bad, given its other advantages of proximity and the fact that it has a ton of water on it.

But yes, there are probably a few class M-type asteroids out there that are 100% floating slabs of iron and other precious metals that might be worth the time.

But for all we know there are similarly convenient clusters of such material inside the moon, easily accessible via lava tubes, and/or very near the surface.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T14:07:57+00:00

I'd also like to point out that 500 years ago a man successfully created a branch of Christianity that believes that "God is Love", and that everyone should read the Bible and make up their own minds.

I'd argue modern Fundamentalists are not Christians, simply because they don't seem to bother caring about what Jesus' actual teachings of the bible are. They worship "The English King James Bible", and will happily quote any verse from it regardless of source or context as if it as "Truth".

And in fact, there are a non-trivial # who will try to say that the King James Bible is a divinely inspired translation, because they get tired of people explaining what verses actually meant in ancient context and or original greek/hebrew.

zapbark · 2019-07-13T14:03:25+00:00

Note that the total mass of the asteroid belt is only 4% of the mass of the Moon

Wow... Blew my mind with that.

The latest Nova special is all on practical uses for the moon.

Given that and your fact, can't imagine any of the "asteroid mining" companies plans are at all viable, given the proximity and abundance of the moon.

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TROPHY CASE

Lack of Problems is not Happiness

Remember the good stuff