• 3 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 1st, 2023

help-circle




  • I’m surprised that other people are surprised that for-profit companies constantly try to increase their profits; such companies only contribute to FOSS when that’s more profitable than the alternative. The Linux kernel, AMDGPU, Steam, etc only exist because some part of the software/hardware stack is proprietary (which becomes a more attractive product as the FOSS portion of the stack improves).

    I’m definitely not justifying the “rug-pulling”, but people need to stop supporting projects with no potential for long-term profitability unless those projects can survive without any support from for-profit companies. Anything else is destined to fail.





  • I’m not a cryptographer (so maybe this is wrong), but my understanding is that although it’s possible to modify the cipher text, how those changes modify the plaintext are very difficult (or impossible) to predict. That can still be an attack vector if the attacker knows the structure of the plaintext (or just want to break something), but since the checksum is also encrypted, the chances that both the original file and checksum could be kept consistent after cipher text modification is basically zero.






  • My biggest problem with The Matrix is where the machines are getting the food from to feed the humans. You need a continuous supply of food to support continuous energy conversion; that energy isn’t being created from nothing. Normally that comes from the sun photosynthesizing plants (which then works its way up the food chain), but with no sunlight then plants can’t grow. They say they feed the liquified remains of dead humans to the living ones, but even if digestion were 100% efficient (which it definitely isn’t), the amount of usable “food” would constantly decrease until there’s nothing left.





  • Pi-hole works by giving clients non-routable addresses in response to DNS queries of known ad-serving domains. If the client (web browser, phone, smart device, etc) doesn’t let you set its DNS server (as many no longer do) and doesn’t obey DHCP, then you can’t feed them those addresses. You could block outbound DNS traffic from all clients except your Pi-hole, but in response some clients will just refuse to work entirely. And if they require DNSSEC (or DoT/DoH with a pinned certificate), there’s nothing you can do.