i’m lizard 🦎

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Lemmy (and Kbin for that matter) very much do the same thing for posts. I don’t think they fetch URL previews for links in comments, but that doesn’t matter: posts and comments are both fairly likely to end up spreading to Mastodon/etc anyway, so even comments will trigger this cascade.

    Direct example: If you go to mastodon.social, stick @fediverse@lemmy.world in the search box at the topleft and click for the profile, you can end up browsing a large Mastodon server’s view of this community, and your very link has a preview. (Unfortunately, links to federated communities just result in a redirect, so you have to navigate through Mastodon’s UI.)


  • If you’re a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you’re competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they’re only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it’s gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

    Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.


  • It’s not what the buttons look like, it’s what they do. In Krita, making an ellipse involves clicking the ellipse button and dragging it somewhere. You now have an ellipse, and you hold shift if you want to make it a circle instead.

    In GIMP there is no direct ellipse tool, there’s only an ellipse select tool, likewise you hold shift to make it a circle. Then you use a menu item to select the border of your selection, getting a popup to let you determine how much pixels you want. And then, you use the fill tool or fill menu item to fill it. That’s a surprising amount of clicks to accomplish what’s most likely the single most common task for anyone opening a screenshot in an image editor. I’m not aware of any easier/faster method to do it. Feels like it should exist, but this is also what you get if you search for how to draw a circle in GIMP, so if it exists everyone’s missing it.

    GIMP’s method gives you more power, but you rarely ever need that power. But when you do, Krita also has ellipse select, border select and various fill tools that can be strung together in the same way.


  • For any given tag, GitHub will always have an autogenerated “archive/” link, but the “release/” link is a set of maintainer-uploaded blobs. In this situation, those are the compromised ones. Any distro pulling from an “archive/” link would be unaffected, but I don’t know of any doing that.

    The problem with the “archive/” links is that GitHub reserves the right to change them. They’re promising to give notice, but it’s just not a good situation. The “release/” links are only going to change if the maintainer tries something funny, so the distro’s usual mechanisms to check the hashes normally suffice.

    NixOS 23.11 is indeed not affected.



  • Sam Jones’s FAQ is by far the best single source, links to other solid sources for more in-depth technical details and also lightly debunks a few things.

    The main thing sources online disagree on are which distros are affected. That’s because it’s not a simple yes/no and some distros are taking a nuanced approach in their public communication, while others have chosen the sledgehammer in an attempt to get people to upgrade their systems but keep/kept the nuance in the back room where the audience understood not everything was known yet. Some distros are underselling how vulnerable they were, others are overselling it.






  • Realistically, there is only a trivial pure security difference between logging in directly to root vs sudo set up to allow unrestricted NOPASS access to specific users: the attacker might not know the correct username when trying to brute force. That doesn’t matter in the slightest unless you have password auth enabled with trivial passwords.

    But there is a difference in the ability to audit what happened after the fact if you have any kind of service storing system logs remotely or in a tamper-proof way. If there’s more than one admin user on a service, that is very very important. Knowing where the compromise happened is absolutely essential to make things safe.

    If there’s only ever going to be one administrative user (personal machine), logging in directly as root for manual administrative tasks is fine: you already know who the user is. If there’s any chance there might be more administrative users later (small but growing business), you should consider doing it right from the start.


  • You’re most likely booted, otherwise you might need a live USB. Hopefully, the system isn’t in read-only mode. What I’d recommend doing is:

    cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup
    
    

    To make a copy once. Then, nano /etc/fstab to run nano, a basic CLI editor. You can use the arrow keys to navigate and type freely in it. The hints like ^O shown on the bottom mean ctrl+o.

    You’d use the arrow keys to go down to the line that probably says /dev/md0 /mnt/raid morecrap, put a # in front of it, press ctrl+w then enter to save. If that worked, ctrl+x to exit and try a reboot again.

    Obviously can’t promise this is “the” error preventing the system from booting, but it’s generally a good idea to disable broken stuff like this to get the system working again, then fix it from there. Hopefully, this does the trick. Your RAID setup will not be activated on reboot after you do this but it’s not going to permanently delete data or anything.


  • The RAID1 seems to be failing according to that screenshot. That breaks the “Local File Systems” task and since quite a lot of things tend to depend on that, many things usually end up failing in an annoying cascade failure. It’s also failing with a timeout instead of a strict error, which is odd.

    Either way, I’d try commenting that line for /mnt/raid in /etc/fstab for now and seeing if that makes the system boot. It’s possible that journalctl -u dev-md0.service or systemctl status dev-md0.service might tell you more, but it’s 50/50 if it’ll be anything useful.




  • A biggie you miss is the toolchain: the compiler/binutils/linux-headers/libc/libstdc++ combination. The libc and usually libstdc++ are key components of any install. The other parts usually don’t make it to non-dev-desktops, but the distro couldn’t be made without them, so they’re virtually always available as packages.

    Only exception is if the entire distro is cross-compiled or it’s made exclusively for containers, but those kinds of special distros break every rule imaginable anyway. Some might not even ship a bootloader or a Linux kernel by themselves.


  • Don’t bother “securing” directories like that. The meaningful permission bit is the write permission on the directory holding the file. cat ~/.bashrc > ~/.bashrc.new; put-malware-in ~/.bashrc.new; rm -f ~/.bashrc; mv ~/.bashrc.new ~/.bashrc or the like will still work if you have write permissions to /home/username at all. Marking the file immutable with chattr +i as root might be slightly more effective, but realistically still not enough in a lot of cases as the parent directory can still be renamed. Not to mention you’ve only found some of the low-hanging fruit; your text editor most likely also has a few ways to accomplish arbitrary code execution in its config/scripting/plugin files but it absolutely doesn’t stop there.

    Don’t bother buying old systems because they can have free firmware. Ever since Spectre, CPU vulnerabilities have made old machines completely unsuitable for high-security purposes time and time again. Not all mitigations are equally effective and with mitigations on, performance takes a massive hit on those 10 year old machines. If you can get a reasonably new system with free firmware, that’s good, though.