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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • UBI doesn’t give any power to those who own the means of automation, nor does it take power away from laborers. Automation does that. Automation reduces the leverage of the laborer by reducing the capitalist’s reliance on labor.

    We have the same leverage regardless of whether we have UBI or not, but the leverage of employers is reduced with UBI. That said, if more people opt not to work thanks to UBI, then the people who choose to work will see their leverage increased.


  • They aren’t. From a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ by u/tehdang:

    For people who have stumbled into this thread while googling “ublock vs origin”. Take a look at this link:

    http://tuxdiary.com/2015/06/14/ublock-origin/

    "Chris AlJoudi [current owner of uBlock] is under fire on Reddit due to several actions in recent past:

    • In a Wikipedia edit for uBlock, Chris removed all credits to Raymond [Hill, original author and owner of uBlock Origin] and added his name without any mention of the original author’s contribution.
    • Chris pledged a donation with overblown details on expenses like $25 per week for web hosting.
    • The activities of Chris since he took over the project are more business and advertisement oriented than development driven."

    So I would recommend that you go with uBlock Origin and not uBlock. I hope this helps!

    Edit: Also got this bit of information from here:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/32ory7/ublock_is_back_under_a_new_name/

    TL;DR:

    • gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of “my facebook isnt working plz help” issues.
    • he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic’s version back to himself).
    • chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a “made with love by Chris” note.
    • gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn’t confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic’s version).
    • Google took down gorhill’s extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
    • gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.

  • Is it possible to force a corruption if a disk clone is attempted?

    Anything that corrupts a single file would work. You could certainly change your own disk cloning binaries to include such functionality, but if someone were accessing your data directly via their own OS, that wouldn’t be effective. I don’t know of a way to circumvent that last part other than ensuring that the data isn’t left on disk when you’re done. For example, you could use a ramdisk instead of non-volatile storage. You could delete or intentionally corrupt the volume when you unmount it. You could split the file, storing half on your USB flash drive and keeping the other half on your PC. You could XOR the file with contents of another file (e.g., one on your USB flash drive instead of on your PC) and then XOR it again when you need to access it.

    What sort of attack are you trying to protect from here?

    If the goal is plausible deniability, then it’s worth noting that VeraCrypt volumes aren’t identifiable as distinct from random data. So if you have a valid reason for having a big block of random data on disk, you could say that’s what the file was. Random files are useful because they are not compressible. For example, you could be using those files to test: network/storage media performance or compression/hash/backup&restore/encrypt&decrypt functions. You could be using them to have a repeatable set of random values to use in a program (like using a seed, but without necessarily being limited to using a PRNG to generate the sequence).

    If that’s not sufficient, you should look into hidden volumes. The idea is that you take a regular encrypted volume, whose free space, on disk, looks just like random data, you store your hidden volume within the free space. The hidden volume gets its own password. Then, you can mount the volume using the first password and get visibility into a “decoy” set of files or use the second password to view your “hidden” files. Note that when mounting it to view the decoy files, any write operations will have a chance of corrupting the hidden files. However, you can supply both passwords to mount it in a protected mode, allowing you to change the decoy files and avoid corrupting the hidden ones.


  • It sounds like you want these files to be encrypted.

    Someone already suggested encrypting them with GPG, but maybe you want the files themselves to also be isolated, even while their data is encrypted. In that case, consider an encrypted volume. I assume you’re familiar with LUKS - you can encrypt a partition with a different password and disable auto-mount pretty easily. But if you’d rather use a file-based volume, then check out VeraCrypt - it’s a FOSS-ish [1], cross-platform tool that provides this capability. The official documentation is very Windows-focused - the ArchLinux wiki article is a pretty useful Linux focused alternative.

    Normal operation is that you use a file to store the volume, which can be “dynamic” with a max size or can be statically sized (you can also directly encrypt a disk partition, but you could do that with LUKS, too). Then, before you can access the files - read or write - you have to enter the password, supply the encryption key, etc., in order to unlock it.

    Someone without the password but with permission to modify the file will be capable of corrupting it (which would prevent you from accessing every protected file), but unless they somehow got access to the password they wouldn’t be able to view or modify the protected files.

    The big advantage over LUKS is ease of creating/mounting file-based volumes and portability. If you’re concerned about another user deleting your encrypted volume, then you can easily back it up without decrypting it. You can easily load and access it on other systems, too - there are official, stable apps on Windows and Mac, though you’ll need admin access to run them. On Android and iOS options are a bit more slim - EDS on Android and Disk Decipher on iOS. If you’re copying a volume to a Linux system without VeraCrypt installed, you’ll likely still be able to mount it, as dm-crypt has support for VeraCrypt volumes.

    • 1 - It’s based on TrueCrypt, which has some less free restrictions, e.g., c. Phrase "Based on TrueCrypt, freely available at http://www.truecrypt.org/" must be displayed by Your Product (if technically feasible) and contained in its documentation.”


  • theoretically they can

    Is this a purely theoretical capability or is there actually evidence they have this capability?

    it’s already been proven that they can tap into anyone’s phone

    Listening into a conversation that you’re intentionally relaying across public infrastructure and gaining access to the phone itself are two very different things.

    The use of proprietary software in literally everything

    1. Speak for yourself. And let’s be real, if you’re on Lemmy you’re 10 times more likely to be running Linux.
    2. Proprietary != closed source
    3. Do you really think that just because something is closed source means that it can’t be analyzed?

    the amount of exploits the NSA has on hand

    How many zero-day exploits does the NSA have? How many can be deployed remotely and without a nontrivial action by a user?

    what’s stopping the NSA from spying this much?

    Scale, capacity, cost, number of employees

    —-

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose government surveillance. We absolutely should. But like another commenter pointed out, I’m much more concerned with the amount of data that corporations collect and have.


  • reasonable expectations and uses for LLMs.

    LLMs are only ever going to be a single component of an AI system. We’ve only had LLMs with their current capabilities for a very short time period, so the research and experimentation to find optimal system patterns, given the capabilities of LLMs, has necessarily been limited.

    I personally believe it’s possible, but we need to get vendors and managers to stop trying to sprinkle “AI” in everything like some goddamn Good Idea Fairy.

    That’s a separate problem. Unless it results in decreased research into improving the systems that leverage LLMs, e.g., by resulting in pervasive negative AI sentiment, it won’t have a negative on the progress of the research. Rather the opposite, in fact, as seeing which uses of AI are successful and which are not (success here being measured by customer acceptance and interest, not by the AI’s efficacy) is information that can help direct and inspire research avenues.

    LLMs are good for providing answers to well defined problems which can be answered with existing documentation.

    Clarification: LLMs are not reliable at this task, but we have patterns for systems that leverage LLMs that are much better at it, thanks to techniques like RAG, supervisor LLMs, etc…

    When the problem is poorly defined and/or the answer isn’t as well documented or has a lot of nuance, they then do a spectacular job of generating bullshit.

    TBH, so would a random person in such a situation (if they produced anything at all).

    As an example: how often have you heard about a company’s marketing departments over-hyping their upcoming product, resulting in unmet consumer expectation, a ton of extra work from the product’s developers and engineers, or both? This is because those marketers don’t really understand the product - either because they don’t have the information, didn’t read it, because they got conflicting information, or because the information they have is written for a different audience - i.e., a developer, not a marketer - and the nuance is lost in translation.

    At the company level, you can structure a system that marketers work within that will result in them providing more correct information. That starts with them being given all of the correct information in the first place. However, even then, the marketer won’t be solving problems like a developer. But if you ask them to write some copy to describe the product, or write up a commercial script where the product is used, or something along those lines, they can do that.

    And yet the marketer role here is still more complex than our existing AI systems, but those systems are already incorporating patterns very similar to those that a marketer uses day-to-day. And AI researchers - academic, corporate, and hobbyists - are looking into more ways that this can be done.

    If we want an AI system to be able to solve problems more reliably, we have to, at minimum:

    • break down the problems into more consumable parts
    • ensure that components are asked to solve problems they’re well-suited for, which means that we won’t be using an LLM - or even necessarily an AI solution at all - for every problem type that the system solves
    • have a feedback loop / review process built into the system

    In terms of what they can accept as input, LLMs have a huge amount of flexibility - much higher than what they appear to be good at and much, much higher than what they’re actually good at. They’re a compelling hammer. System designers need to not just be aware of which problems are nails and which are screws or unpainted wood or something else entirely, but also ensure that the systems can perform that identification on their own.


  • That’s still a single point of failure.

    So is TLS or the compromise of a major root certificate authority, and those have no bearing on whether an approach qualifies as using 2FA.

    The question is “How vulnerable is your authentication approach to attack?” If an approach is especially vulnerable, like using SMS or push notifications (where you tap to confirm vs receiving a code that you enter in the app) for 2FA, then it should be discouraged. So the question becomes “Is storing your TOTP secrets in your password manager an especially vulnerable approach to authentication?” I don’t believe it is, and further, I don’t believe it’s any more vulnerable than using a separate app on your mobile device (which is the generally recommended alternative).

    What happens if someone finds an exploit that bypasses the login process entirely?

    Then they get a copy of your encrypted vault. If your vault password is weak, they’ll be able to crack it and get access to everything. This is a great argument for making sure you have a good vault password, but there are a lot of great arguments for that.

    Or do you mean that they get access to your logged in vault by compromising your device? That’s the most likely worst case scenario, and in such a scenario:

    • all of your logged in accounts can be compromised by stealing your sessions
    • even if you use a different app for your 2FA, those TOTP secrets and passkeys can be stolen - they have to be on a different device
    • you’re also likely to be subject to a ransomware attack

    In other words, your only accounts that are not vulnerable in this situation solely because their TOTP secret is on a different device are the ones you don’t use on that device in the first place. This is mostly relevant if your computer is compromised - if your phone is compromised, then it doesn’t matter that you use a separate password manager and authenticator app.

    If you use an account on your computer, since it can be compromised without having the credentials on device, you might as well have the credentials on device. If you’re concerned about the device being compromised and want to protect an account that you don’t use on that device, then you can store the credentials in a different vault that isn’t stored on your device.

    Even more common, though? MITM phishing attacks. If your password manager verifies the url, fills the password, and fills your TOTP, then that can help against those. Start using a different device and those protections fall away. If your vault has been compromised and your passwords are known to an attacker, but they don’t have your TOTP secrets, you’re at higher risk of erroneously entering them into a phishing site.

    Either approach (same app vs different app) has trade-offs and both approaches are vulnerable to different sorts of attacks. It doesn’t make sense to say that one counts as 2FA but the other doesn’t. They’re differently resilient - that’s it. Consider your individual threat model and one may be a better option than the other.

    That said, if you’re concerned about the resiliency of your 2FA approach, then look into using dedicated security keys. U2F / WebAuthn both give better phishing resistance than a browser extension filling a password or TOTP can, and having the private key inaccessible can help mitigate device compromise concerns.




  • The list of instances you shared was updated recently, but I tried the one url in it (the rest are onion links or i2p, and are older versions of libreddit to boot) and the page didn’t even load.

    Libreddit has been discontinued for nearly a year due to not working thanks to Reddit’s API changes, though about a month ago they updated their repo to direct people to RedLib, which allegedly does work. That said, I tried the official instance and got an error. However, it’s being actively developed and looks easy to self-host. I don’t know if there’s a list of unofficial public instances.



  • I haven’t worked with Scribus but I’ve heard good things about it, so I don’t think you’d be making a wrong choice by going with it. For this use case, the main reasons I can think of for why LaTeX would be preferable would be:

    • if you preferred working with it, or with a particular LaTeX tool
    • if you want to learn one tool or the other
    • if being able to write a script to create the output is something you want to do and the equivalent is not possible in Scribus



  • If you’re in the US, unpaid overtime is only permissible if you’re salaried exempt. To be salaried exempt:

    • you must make at least $684 every week ($35,568/year)
    • your primary job responsibility must be one of the following:
      • executive - managing the enterprise, or managing a customarily recognized department or subdivision; you must also regularly direct your work of at least two FTEs and be able to hire / fire people (or be able to provide recommendations that are strongly considered)
      • administrative - office or non-manual work directly related to the management or general business operations, or
      • learned professional - work which is predominantly intellectual in character and which includes work requiring the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment, in the field of science or learning
      • creative professional - work requiring invention, imagination, originality or talent in a recognized field of artistic or creative endeavor
      • IT related - computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer or other similarly skilled worker in the computer field
      • sales
      • HCE (you must be making at least $107k per year)
    • your pay must not be reduced if your work quality is reduced or if you work fewer hours
      • for example, if you work 5 days a week, for an hour a day, you must get the same pay as if you worked 8 hours every day. There are some permissible deductions they can make - like if you miss a full day - and they can require you to use vacation time or sick time, if you have it - and of course they can fire you if you’re leaving without completing your tasks… but they still have to pay you.

    Check out https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime for more details on the above.

    It’s quite possible you’re eligible for back-paid overtime.

    Note also that the minimum exempt wages are increasing in July.

    Re your “cover my expenses just to exist” bit and the follow-up about employers catching on and pushing abusive shit… if this is related to a disability make sure to look into getting that on record and seeking an accommodation. If your primary job duty is X and they’re pushing you to do Y, but your disability makes Y infeasible, then it’s a pretty reasonable accommodation to ask to not have to do Y (assuming your HCP agrees, of course).