looks like there are missing some trees at the stairway to complete the picture…

one example of a program that did multiple things is sfdisk, it used to make the kernel reload the new partition table but that was not its main job, only changing them. the extra functionality moved to blockdev which is nearer to doing such as it also triggers flushing buffers and i think setting read/write status. i am fully ok with that change as it removes code from a program that doesn’t need it to another that already does similar things so that other partitioning programs like gdisk fdisk or parted could go the same way so that maintainers of the reread-partition-table things can concentrate on one solution at one place (in userspace) instead of opening issues at an unknown number of projects that also alter partitioning. the “do one thing” paradigma is good for developers who maintain the code and i pretty much appreciate their work. if you are up to only want one-day-flies that either die or take huge amounts of resources only for keeping them alive (image of a mayfly in an emergency room and a heart-lung machine attached while chirurgs rushing around trying to enlenghten its life a few seconds more) then you are good with monolithic tools that could hardly be maintained and suck allday as no one wants to fix any bugs or cannot without creating new ones due to the tightened dependency hell it has internally.

the point is not a lack of examples doing wrong but where one wants to be heading towards.

Lol what???

wouldn’t that be the definition of stable?

the computer on voyager 2 is running for 47 years now, they might have rebooted some parts meanwhile but overall its a long time now, and if the program is free of bugs the time that program can run only depends on the durability of the hardware, protection from cosmic rays (which were afaik the problems the voyager probes faced mostly, not bugs) which could be quite long if protected from hazardous environments and maybe using optoelectronics but the point is that a bug free software can run forever only depending on hardware durability and energy supply, in any other way no humans are needed for a veery long time ;-)

However, systemd makes the system much more secure and reliable as it is

less secure and less reliable day-by-day you meant? systemd introduces needless dependencies ever since as if that was it sole intention ever from its very beginning, which already were used for wide attacks, and exactly those attacks that the people working hard to remove unneeded dependencies for security reasons meant to prevent by things like “do one thing only” (but security was not the number 1 reason for this one i think), systemd instead: ‘lets add another level of that exponential dependency tree from the insecurity hell’ felt like they did this stupid thing intentionally every month for a decade or more.

and stability… if you don’t monitor what systemd does, you’ll never know how bad it actually is. i’ve made custom scripts to monitor systemd’s failures (failing in doing a very primitive of its job) and there are hundreds (actually varying around 200 to 300 sometimes more) of such per day on all our systems for one particular(!) measurement only that was breaking service stability and i wrote a measure-and-fix+monitor workaround. other fixes were not monitored however, only silently fixed by workarounds, thus just unnumbered systemd bugs/instabilities in the dark that stole a lot of work capacity…

if you run distros with systemd, unreliability is your daily experience unless you don’t really care or have never experienced stability before - like running a service (a single process) for 8 years without any interruption then it suddenly stops and you go like “was it maybe an attack? the process died, how could that be? were there any connects from outside at that moment?” not talking about not updating something that long, but “stability” itself CAN be like if you dont stop it, it’ll still run in 10000+ years maybe millions, more likely that humans extincted themselves way earlier than of a process “just dying” by a bug… while systemd even randomly stops things that were running well for no reason (varying) once a month more or less (also varying in what it actually randomly stops, sometimes (2 times) it even stopped ssh on my servers, me asking myself if i should create yet another workaround for systemds buggyness to not locking me out again from network or ratjer go for the real solution for most* of all systemd problems - *see below) on the few standard installs i personally have as i didn’t have the way to automatically replace provider installed distro on VMs in the DC. i want this replacing automatically for the same reason why i don’t like systemd, it causes manual work for a thing that should go automated. however due to systemd’s perpetuated instability i now managed to have this way, and every second working on getting rid of systemd is worth it 100k times. this however does not solve all systemd-introduced problems as the xz attack showed (a systemd-dependency on xz made the infected xz library beeing useful-for-the-atracker during compiletime of sshd binary with which then the attacker could infect the newly built sshd binary),one could still be attacked through systemd’s dependency hell even if one does not use systemd by oneself, but the build machines used for your distro could be affected/infected by systemd’s needless dependencies when “also” compiling for systemd-affected distributions thus there is the risk of becoming a victim of needless-systemd-dependencies while not using systemd at all. however the attack through systemd dependency (and that the public solution was not the removal of needless dependencies only included as source for superflous third party “needs”) made clear that systemd is an overall problem for security that will not be solved quickly but stay just like all windows insecurities will stay as long as they whish to push them to their “users”.

systemd reducing overall security and its unreliability combined with some builtin impediments (i.e. when debugging its defects) is what drove me away from systemd. there are solutions way more stable and way more secure (and way better documented btw) that do not call in for needless dependencies, reducing risks, attack vectors and increases overall debuggability i.e. by deterministic behaviour as an easy example. and none of its important (to me) promises have been fulfilled yet by systemd, drop-in-replacement? have heared that lie thousands of times, but in the last decade i have not experienced it a single time in a distro and it does not seem to be included/finished any more.

for windows users or windows admins a linux with systemd on it IS an improvement in stability, security and of course for updating, yes. but all of that does not come from systemd, rather the opposite is the case, systemd reduces it month by month, thats my experience and thats the most important experience for me, idc what lies whitdepapers tell or what broken promises are believed by anyone or the masses, i want secure and stable servers and services and systemd does not fit in for any of these goals and the time it was still “young” and early problems could be accepted in the hope they get fixed soon are gone, but without those fixes having ever appeared.

poor country they live in. seems that country needs external help to develop a minimum bit of civilisation. 🤷‍♀️

ads with install buttons always are traps. and traps are always bad (except snmp traps, those are good but unreliable)

same way ads at download pages stating “proceed to download” are traps.

also ads at search result pages stating " 1 2 3 4 … next" are traps too.

for the “sponsored” note: there is no boundary here that makes it really clear for what that ‘sponsored’ is meant for. without any boundary it could be for something above it, below it, on the side or maybe even something that opens when you click on “sponsored” itself (seen it this way once). it could be for an ad that just failed to load (noticed the free space above that “sponsored” text? maybe the ad loads a bit later just to shift the real contents down so you “accidently” click on the ad that loads intentionally late for this very accident to be likely to happen?) if you use adblockers - which you should do for security reasons anyway - then you’ll see “sponsored” or “advertising” often even without the ad it was meant for after full load of the page. so a single “sponsored” without a clear boundary showing what would be that sponsored content, does not state anything to be an ad, it is purely meaningless and the lack of such boundary always is intentional to distract the user from what he wanted and trap him somehow.

a clear thumbs-down for ‘zoho assist’ from me here just for paying for (or trying out for free or such) such an advertising type.

And in most cases ads simply beeing ads are traps too. by the very concept of ads.

around 80 % of all things i actually still wanted after i bought them were recommendations by people i met in person. 15 % are things recommended by real persons i met on the internet. around 5% are things i bought without it beeing recommded by anyone (not even an ad) things i still wanted after i bought it due to an ad are nearly not existant. ok, i have stopped viewing television in 1997, have a sticker at my postbox that forbids to throw ads in (works where i live), use dns entries to remove most ads in my network, use browsers/extension that remove most crapjunkwastelitterrubbishads and skip webpages that still show too many ads or too offensive cookieterrorbanners. i use google search only sometimes for comparison of results, but near to zero for actual searching. i feel safe to say i am not that much distracted by ads. (however open source projects and authors do get money from me on a monthly basis, where i want to support them, either direct lly sent from my bank account or indirect).

for me personally an ad just saying “you might like this” drives me away from that product, if it needs or wants an ad, i don’t want it, even more so the more it states how difficult and horrible my life would be without the product or how easy it’ll be with it, go away ad-needing products, get recommended personally by those who actually use it, not by those who want to sell it. period. there is no better ad than true recommendation and its also free, no marketing monkey needs to get payed for bs, only an actually good product is needed… and there we go what types of products actually need ads…

once in my life i discovered a product that i first explicitly not bought for a decade because of the awful ad for it, but bought it another decade later by an absentminded accident and found it to be a good product despite its awful ad. then they increased packaging/reduced the product within to cover up a price increase in trade of more waste production, so i abandoned that product again and found something cheaper more eco friendly instead, yes, the cheaper one is really not as good, but i feel better with it and especially less betrayed by the vendor, so the eco one is the better one alltogether. and also i think its better to buy products where you don’t see ads for cause this behaviour could actually fix this advertising storm in the long run, so in this way its the better choice to buy products that don’t have ads for it.

again:

An ad with an install button is always a trap, even more so when the real install follows a single misclick on it. il’d say it would be quite fair to downvote/zerostars an app for how foulish-sneaky it was positioned in the search results if it is shown like an actual result with a f’ing install button. as its advertising type is always also part of the brand and the product itself. maybe make a sports out of that, klick the clickbait install buttons only to downvote the app for beeing intrusive and deinstall it again without even starting the app once, just to train advertisers to do it right instead of wrong next time. maybe. but for security reasons better don’t do that (at least not with a device with sensitive data on it)

please do not blame users to fall for ads. advertising industry now had centuries to learn to trap users and literally thousands or millions of marketing guys, designers, psycologists, neurologists or whatever only to learn and establish new abusive ways to distract and trap users. but a user only has his own lifespan to counteract that and learn to avoid those manipulations, and he also has to do other important stuff in his life too.

please don’t blame users for beeing humans. blame the industry where they are intentionally abusive, inhumane and/or counterproductive.

we need an adblockers blockers blocker

no, what is needed is an app that helps track who benefits from thr apps that annly you most:

• ownership of companies pushing annoying ads
• management of companies pushing annoying ads
• find the connection between those and the products you maybe want to buy in shops or in internet before you buy, then instead of buying, let the app send the seller a message that you did not buy because of that connection.
• do this in numbers with lots of people and see what happens to the advertising jungle

the point is NOT buying because of advertising AND let them know it, so they can learn to improve themselves.

they wanted your data? let them have it the way you want them to.

same with any platform. ask the creator of your choice to also publish using patreon and you’ll become a member then, getting the content free of ads. better more directly pay who does the actual work, not all the big tech harvesting all the benefit inbetween.

so what maybe is needed here could be a free or even self-hostable platform that also allows payed subscriptions.

really, yt stopped to play sound on the website for me (beeing logged in), there is a banner to “activate sound” but it always disappears unclickable fast, so i searched and found webtube, an app that basically loads their website, but has one feature youtube has not: “sound” *lol

now i wonder how many of these apps really are “third” party apps and not really theirs only masked as third party for getting that gain of trust all the “others” get when it comes to big techs with their very own “public” crime records …

would be too easy for them to create some small apps, act as if those were 3rd party software but harvest that spyoil (of the 21 century) anyway.

What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.

its not about paying for the site a user uses, its about paying those who run the site (and less to pay for someone only “managing” the site by doing actually nothing)

maybe these could be alternatives:

• patreon
• flattr
• micropayment in general
• donations (somafm runs on donations)
• link to shopping platforms (musicians on somafm mostly have links to the songs on amazon that you see while playing the song for free)
• communities, like FSF, local groups
• some small payed supporter part (like lwn.net) while the important stuff that makes the win-win of the site is free to use
• maybe the list from this page can help too: https://kinsta.com/de/blog/patreon-alternativen/ Kickstarter Indiegogo Podia Sellfy Buy Me a Coffee Memberful Hypage Ko-fi Substack Kajabi Gumroad WooCommerce Mighty Networks MemberPress Uscreen

maybe even a combination of multiple of those *whoa!!! mindblow!!! could be a good choice to allow usersvto choose how to contribute.

so really only choosing to offer exactly one option that also puts all users at a real risk of real attacks where they can get ripped off of all or lots of their real money and data for the sake if earning 0.003 ¢ per each putting them at high risk is not really what should be done, or do you personally profit from their users high risk and are thus completely okay with it? hope not.

if you have to earn money with your project or whatever, why not offer several options to choose from? why only one? and while we’re at it, offering an ad-free “membership” for 400 times the price of what they would earn by the same visitor with ads like they try here sometimes, does not make any platform look good, but the opposite.

there are many platforms that i would pay for monthly and i would spend much more money alltogether than now on that if their price would not be artificially pushed into astronomically heights per service…

there is one project where i do donate each month a little bit via recurring bank transfer since years. my transfer says the name of the project and “donation” thats pretty easy to setup for both sides, but too complicated for those who pay designers money so they can place the ad layers on top of the 400 other layers of spypixels and navigation controls… really ? lol*

if those you are talking about cannot afford to have a bank account for some reason, i guess they also cannot receive the revenue of ads on their webpages ;+)

saying there are no alternatives to ads is rather a candidate for the lamest excuse award ;-)

unfuckingbelievable

if you want that without the “un” prefix, then youtube is maybe just the wrong platform for you.

and i strongly believe that youtube “wants” to force more usage of peertube, vimeo and others by enshitting yt every day a bit more. and they really work hard for that.

its not just ads and malware, and its not only about beeing sorry for them. ads are also manipulating how people think. not only the obvious things like “that product is good”, but also that products in general would help (with problems you didn’t have). and the format itself of ads (even without considering its contents) already has a changing effects on the minds of those who watch it. i am thinking of some parts of neil postmans thoughts about television back then and i guess there is plenty of possibilities to make a realistic conspiracy theory out of it why exactly the most poisonous parts of television are replicated to the internet with massive force even though everyone ignores ads in the net. i like theories

unfortunately, feeling sorry for them does not help society to stability. 😥

you should definitely know what type of authentication you use (my opinion) !! the agent can hold the key forever, so if you are just not asked again when connecting once more, thats what the agent is for. however its only in ram, so stopping the process or rebooting ends that of course. if you didn’t reboot meanwhile maybe try unload all keys from it (ssh-add -D, ssh-add -L) and see what the next login is like.

btw: i use ControlMaster /ControlPath (with timeouts) to even reduce the number of passwordless logins and speed things up when running scripts or things like ansible, monitoring via ssh etc. then everything goes through the already open channel and no authentication is needed for the second thing any more, it gets really fast then.

isn’t a security feature. At most it can be a safety feature.

o,O

no bad politics

😭

not the home screem

if had to use windows at home i’ld screem too.

not too surprised they didn’t change that.

The whole point of ssh-agent is to remember your passphrase.

replace passphrase with private key and you’re very correct.

passphrases used to login to servers using PasswordAuthentication are not stored in the agent. i might be wrong with technical details on how the private key is actually stored in RAM by the agent, but in the context of ssh passphrases that could be directly used for login to servers, saying the agent stores passphrases is at least a bit misleading.

what you want is:

• use Key authentication, not passwords
• disable passwordauthentication on the server when you have setup and secured (some sort of backup) ssh access with keys instead of passwords.
• if you always want to provide a short password for login, then don’t use an agent, i.e. unset that environment variable and check ssh_config
• give your private key a password that fits your needs (average time it shoulf take attackers to guess that password vs your time you need overall to exchange the pubkey on all your servers)
• change the privatekey every time immediately after someone might have had access to the password protected privkey file
• do not give others access to your account on your pc to not have to change your private key too often.

also an idea:

• use a token that stores the private key AND is PIN protected as in it would lock itself upon a few tries with a wrong pin. this way the “password” needed to enter for logins can be minimal while at the same time protecting the private key from beeing copied. but even then one should not let others have access to the same machine (of course not as root) or account (as user, but better not at all) as an unlocked token could also possibly be used to place a second attacker provided key on the server you wanted to protect.

all depends on the level of security you want to achieve. additional TOTP could improve security too (but beware that some authenticator providers might have “sharing” features which could compromise the TOTP token even before its first use.

My theory is that you already have something providing ssh agent service

in the past some xserver environments started an ssh-agent for you just in case of, and for some reason i don’t remember that was annoying and i disabled it to start my agent in my shell environment as i wanted it.

also a possibility is tharlt there are other agents like the gpg-agent that afaik also handles ssh keys.

but i would also look into $HOME/.ssh/config if there was something configured that matches the hostname, ip, or with wildcards* parts of it, that could interfere with key selection as the .ssh/id_rsa key should IMHO always be tried if key auth is possible and no (matching) key is known to the ssh process, that is unless there already is something configured…

not sure if a system-wide /etc/ssh/ssh_config would interfere there too, maybe have a look there too. as this behaviour seems a bit unexpected if not configured specially to do so.

antarctica:

• no bad politics
• no wars so far
• people there are mainly interested in science
• no economic abuse or exploitation
• pinguins!
• no air conditioning needed to survive the summer.
• winter is offline time, visitors won’t arrive or leave then.
• last place to stay cool during boomers heritage “heat death of our planet”

well sure, it has downsides too. Next Rollercoaster park is -tbh- unreachable, internet connection is sloo.oo…oow (or did they already finish the submarine fibre cable?) and sunbathing basically only brings you frost bites (if you’re lucky).

However i am not planning to migrate there.

news from msn…

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/microsoft-ai-publishes-fake-news-on-msn-angers-the/464775

“MSN’s editorial AI published stories from low-quality outlets that are patently untrue, […]”

maybe this is also just some cheap msn lies?

since bots are better at solving captchas and humanoid services exist that solve them, the only ones negatively affected by captchas are regular legitimate users. the bad guys use bots or services and are done. regular users have to endure while no security is added, and for the influx i guess it is much more like with the better lock on the front door: if your lock is a bit better than that of your neigbhour, theirs might be force-opened more likely than yours. it might help you, but its not a real but only relative and also very subjective feeling of 'security".

beeing slower than the wolves also isn’t as bad as long as you are not the slowest in your group (some people say)… so doing a bit more than others always is a good choice (just better don’t put that bar too low like using crowdsnakeoil for anything)