I love Ed. He is a fantastic writer.

Private trackers disgust me. What kind of pirate turns away from the world, to re-seeding fragments of files they don’t care about to other cowards with slightly slower rss feeds; all for a chance at enough ratio to get the show you want? It’s a country club, with self-validating assholes, dry hot dogs, and tall fences.

The Mainline DHT is the way forward. There is no social credit here. The kids in Africa are starving, and I will throw them as much as I can, kilobyte by kilobyte, for no reason at all, for I too was a leecher once.

Did you know that in the first version of php, each function name would be hashed to lookup the code to run it? And the hashing algorithm was: the first letter. So all the functions started with a different letter.

Anything exposed to the internet will be found by the scanners. Moving ssh off of port 22 doesn’t do anything except make it less convenient for you to use. The scanners will find it, and when they do, they will try to log in.

(It’s actually pretty easy to write a little script to listen on port 20 (telnet) and collect the default login creds that the worms so kindly share)

The thing that protects you is strong authentication. Turn off password auth entirely, and generate a long keypair. Disable root login entirely.

Most self-hosted software is built by hobbyists with some goal, and rock solid authentication is generally not that goal. You should, if you can, put most things behind some reverse-proxy with a strong auth layer, like Teleport.

You will get lots of advice to hide things behind a vpn. A vpn provides centralized strong authentication. It’s a good idea, but decreases accessibility (which is part of security) - so there’s a value judgement here between the strength of a vpn and your accessibility goals.

Some of my services (ssh, wg, nginx) are open to the internet. Some are behind a reverse proxy. Some require a vpn connection, even within my own house. It depends on who it’s for - just me, technical friends, the world, or my technically-challenged parents trying to type something with a roku remote.

After strong auth, you want to think about software vulnerabilities - and you don’t have to think much, because there’s only one answer: keep your stuff up to date.

All of the above covers the P in PICERL (pick-uh-rel) for Prepare. I stands for Identify, and this is tricky. In an ideal world, you get a real-time notification (on your phone if possible) when any of these things happen:

• Any successful ssh login
• Any successful root login
• If a port starts listening that you didn’t expect
• If the system watching for these things goes down (have two systems that watch each other)

That list could be much longer, but that’s a good start.

After Identification, there’s Contain + Eradicate. In a homelab context, that’s probably a fresh re-install of the OS. Attacker persistence mechanisms are insane - once they’re in, they’re in. Reformat the disk.

R is for recover or remediate depending on who you ask. If you reformatted your disks, it stands for “rebuild”. Combine this with L (lessons learned) to rebuild differently than before.

To close out this essay though, I want to reiterate Strong Auth. If you’ve got strong auth and keep things up to date, a breach should never happen. A lot of people work very hard every day to keep the strong auth strong ;)

For the Nth time, crowdstrike circumvented the testing process

Edit: this is not to say that cs didn’t have to in order to provide their services, nor is this to say that ms didn’t know about the circumvention and/or delegate testing of config files to CS. I’ll take any opportunity to rag on MS, but in this case it is entirely on CS.

Crowdstrike runs at ring 0, effectively as part of the kernel. Like a device driver. There are no safeguards at that level. Extreme testing and diligence is required, because these are the consequences for getting it wrong. This is entirely on crowdstrike.

Holy color gradient batman

There is no such thing as easy or hard.

Give it a try, fuck it up, and give it a try again. Try not to fuck it up in the same way as the first time. Repeat until it works - it will work eventually.

It took me about 6 hours and 3 disk re-formats my first time. I was particularly bad at it. I barely knew what a disk was, nevermind a partition.

Actually I’m still not sure what a partition is.

You’ll do fine :)

But MS teams is very secure! It’s sandboxed in a web browser :) It’s effectively a single-tab display of an entire ram-eating chromium process :)

The only unfortunate side effect is that it can’t read your system default audio output, so it uses a cryptographically secure random number to decide which other audio output to use. That’s right - it very securely knows about all of your audio outputs, even though they aren’t the system default :)

Did you just try to send someone a file? Don’t worry, I’ve put the file in sharepoint for you, and have sent them a link instead. Actually, wait - you had already sent that to someone else, so I sent file (1).docx instead. Actually wait - that was taken too. Now it’s file (2).docx.

I would like to provide a friendly reminder that you will need to manage the file sharing permissions in sharepoint should anyone else join this 1-on-1 direct message chat :)

I strongly recommend the NAT loopback route over attempting split-horizon dns.

I think it’s a D-tier article. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was half gpt. It could have been summarized in a single paragraph, but was clearly being drawn out to make screen real-estate for the ads.

I’m happy to revisit and explain, but I don’t have much time to type right now - the wikipedia page for estonia has great info; you will need a basic understanding of cryptographic hashing and merkle trees

At what point does a collection of microservices become a monolith that uses http instead of a bus 🤔

As “down”, I hereby grant maculata retroactive permission to make the above joke; and formally proclaim that I found said joke to be at least somewhat amusing

I can’t help but be curious, does udm=13 or udm=15 do anything?

Helix + vim => Helim => Helium?

Vim + helix => velix / vimix / vix / velimix?

We could call it … WebAssembly! And now it’s a C compilation target, which means we can run Node.js in the browser, to get a javascript runtime :)

Tailscale might be the best bet at this point. It will manage the wireguard mesh for you, and use nat holepunching for handshaking instead of needing listening ports.

At least outlook can right click for spellcheck. Wait, actually it can’t do that.

At least you can download your email attachments to a folder? Wait actually you can’t do that either.

At least the 15-minute meeting warnings still pop up consistently? Oh. Oh no.

“Are you sure you want to post this comment? Would you like to upload to sharepoint and send a link instead?”

No outlook I would not like that, I would never like that

Is my file in onedrive? Or on disk? Or is it in sharepoint? Or it could be in a teams chat - but isn’t that just sharepoint? I sent it to Tom also, but it was already in sharepoint because I had sent it to Jim, so it re-named it to something else. Where in sharepoint are my teams files? Or the teams files others have sent me? Is this actually an attachment on my email or is it a “shared link” in disguise?

I’m not sure what’s real anymore!