Hiker, software engineer (primarily C++, Java, and Python), Minecraft modder, hunter (of the Hunt Showdown variety), biker, adoptive Akronite, and general doer of assorted things.

  • 0 Posts
  • 819 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 10th, 2023
  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Paid SSL vs LetsencryptEnglish
    81·
    4 days ago

    So, the web uses a system called chain of trust. There are public keys stored in your system or browser that are used to validate the public keys given to you by various web sites.

    Both letsencrypt and traditional SSL providers work because they have keys on your system in the appropriate place so as to deem them trustworthy.

    All that to say, you’re always trusting a certificate authority on some level unless you’re doing self signed certificates… And then nobody trusts you.

    The main advantage to a paid cert authority is a bit more flexibility and a fancier certificate for your website that also perhaps includes the business name.

    Realistically… There’s not much of a benefit for the average website or even small business.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•Port Fowarding minecraft server hardening question (gentoo)English
    4·
    7 days ago

    So the local machine doesn’t really need the firewall; it definitely doesn’t hurt, but your router should be covering this via port forwarding (ipv4) or just straight up firewall rules (ipv6).

    You can basically go two routes to reasonable harden the system IMO. You can either just set up a user without administrative privileges and use something like a systemd system level service to start the server as that user and provide control over it from other users … OR … if you’re really paranoid, use a virtual machine and forward the port from the host machine into the VM.

    A lot of what you’re doing is … fine stuff to do, but it’s not really going to help much (e.g. building system packages with hardening flags is good, but it only helps if those packages are actually part of the attack surface or rather what’s exposed to the remote users in someway).

    Your biggest risk is going to be plugins that aren’t vetted doing bad things (and really only the VM or using the dedicated user account provides an insulation layer there – the VM really only adds protection against privilege escalation which is pretty hard to pull off on a patched system).

    My advice for most people:

    • Make a new user on the system to run each game you want to run
    • Run the game using systemd and that user
    • Use something like kopia + the root user’s crontab (easier than systemd timers, but systemd timers also work) to backup the files on disk

    For Minecraft in particular, to properly back things up on a busy server you need to disable auto save, manually force save, do the backup and then enable auto save again after your backup. Kopia can issue commands to talk to the server to do that, but you need a plugin that can react to those commands running on the server (or possibly to use the server console via stdin). Realistically though, that’s overkill and you’ll be just fine backing up the files exactly as they are periodically.

    Kopia in particular will do well here because of its deduplication of baked up data + chunking algorithm that breaks up files. That has saved me a crazy amount of storage vs other solutions I’ve tried. Kopia level compression isn’t needed because the Minecraft region files themselves are already highly compressed.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•American tourists visiting the EU, what do you think of it?English
    50·
    7 days ago

    I didn’t feel particularly safer in Europe… About the same… Watch your wallet, don’t go down dark alleys alone, etc.

    Some things definitely felt more grandiose, but on average things felt like they could be in an American city if not for their vintage.

    Public transportation was definitely the biggest difference I observed, trains in Germany were an all but fantastic experience.

    I was surprised how heavy German food was and how much smoking folks in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria do. It seemed elevated compared to the average US city.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?English
    1·
    12 days ago

    Yeah, BlueSky has this concept of user moderation lists. It’s effectively like subscribing to a adblock filter. There might be some things blocked by patterns (e.g., you could have one that blocks anything that involves spiders) and there might be others that block specific accounts (e.g., you could have one that blocks users that are known to cause problems, are prone to vulgar language, etc).

    I think the problem with credibility scores in general though, is it’s sort of like a “social score” from black mirror. Real people can get caught in the net of “you look like a bot” and similarly different algorithms could be designed to game the system by gaming the metrics to look like they’re not a bot (possibly even more so than some of the real people).

    This is kind of what lead me down the route of bringing things back into the physical world. Like, once you have things going back through the normal systems … you arguably do lose some level of anonymity but you also gain back some guarantees of humanity.

    It doesn’t need to be the level of “you’ve got a government ID and you’re verified to be exactly you with no other accounts” … just “hey, some number of people in the real world, that are subject to the respective nation’s laws, had to have come into contact with a real piece of mail.”

    Maybe that just turns into the world’s slowest UDP network in existence. However, I think it has a real chance of making it easier to detect real people (i.e., folks that have a small number of overlapping addresses). The virtual mailbox the other person gave has 3,000 addresses… if you assume 5 people per mailing address is normal that’s 15,000 bots total before things start getting fishy if you’ve evenly distributed all of those addresses. If you’ve got 3,000 accounts at the same address, that’s very fishy. Addresses also change a lot less frequently than IP addresses, so a physical address ban is a much more strict deterrent.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?English
    3·
    12 days ago

    Hm… I’m not sure if this is enough to defeat the strategy.

    It looks like even with that service, you have to sign up for Form 1583.

    Even if they’re willing in incur the cost, there’s a real paper trail pointing back to a real person or organization. In other words, the bot operator can be identified.

    As you note, this is yet another additional cost. So, you’d have say … $2-3 for the card + an address for the account. If you require every unique address to have no more than 1 account … that’s $13 per bot plus a paper trail to set everything up.

    That certainly wouldn’t stop every bot out there … but the chances of a large scale bot farms operating seem like they would be significantly deterred, no?

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Bots are running rampant. How do we stop them from ruining Lemmy?English
    81·
    12 days ago

    I’ve been thinking postcard based account validation for online services might be a strategy to fight bots.

    As in, rather than an email address, you register with a physical address and get mailed a post card.

    A server operator would then have to approve mailing 1,000 post cards to whatever address the bot operator was working out of. The cost of starting and maintaining a bot farm skyrockets as a result (you not only have to pay to get the postcard, you have to maintain a physical presence somewhere … and potentially a lot of them if you get banned/caught with any frequency).

    Similarly, most operators would presumably only mail to folks within their nation’s mail system. So if Russia wanted to create a bunch of US accounts on “mainstream” US hosted services, they’d have to physically put agents inside of the United States that are receiving these postcards … and now the FBI can treat this like any other organized domestic crime syndicate.

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggtoTechnology@lemmy.world•EE warns parents against giving children under 11 a smartphoneEnglish
    1·
    13 days ago

    Sorry for the late reply…

    Calls and texts aren’t really a thing any more, and most people communicate through apps instead. That means that even without a phone, there’s a pretty good chance you can still be included if you have access to a computer at home.

    I find this varies a lot within different social groups … some people I know use different apps some people don’t use anything other than SMS/iMessage and/or maybe Facebook messenger.

    My friends and I definitely communicated with Skype and things like that. I just never really had the chance to “grow my social network” if you will as a younger teen. Like summer 2009 I did a summer gym thing (my school let students take gym in the summer before high school for the high school PE credits and lots of kids did) … if I had a cell phone there’s a good chance I might have made connections with kids that had interests other than “get on the computer and play video games (and associated ‘nerdy’ interests).”

    So in my mind, this means that not providing a phone doesn’t cut them off, it just delays communication. That means they’ll have less of a chance to become addicted to all the SM BS, while still being able to be included in things. I think that’s a healthy boundary to set.

    That could be fair; it just kind of depends on what their peers are doing. I’d also caution against artificially creating hard barriers that won’t be for them later in life. My parents didn’t lock the fridge they just said we couldn’t have ice cream more than one time a week. It was ultimately on us to be able to honor that agreement.

    Of course that wasn’t a bullet proof “solution”, I’m sure we snuck some ice cream here or there … and I’m sure we got caught at least one. But, IMO that’s just part of being a kid and a couple of bowls of ice cream when we broke the rule didn’t hurt anything, the rule still did its job (keeping our diets tilted towards good).

    That said, absolutely none of my friends communication during HS or my communication in college was productive. We didn’t “discuss homework” or anything related to school, we merely arranged hangouts and flirted, with a little gossip to round things out. I highly doubt things have changed much, because that’s just what kids do. When I was young, cell phones weren’t a thing, and my sister spent hours on the phone talking about nonsense with her friends. That’s just how teenagers work, if they’re talking to friends, they’re not talking about school work.

    I think this varies too. Of what I remember of college, sure the vast majority of stuff was non-school communication. However, there definitely was communication over projects (especially if I was doing something with friends vs random people in class).

    That said, I’ll certainly be paying attention as my kids get older.

    I think this is the biggest thing. Like, nobody can tell you how to parent your kid and I’m not trying to tell you what’s right. I’m just saying, my parents took a hard line stance on this, based on some made up rules about what I should or shouldn’t have that was way different than what nearly every other parent was doing. I didn’t have the gumption (arguably due to a mostly unrelated, hidden, depression that my parents attributed entirely to “teenage angst”) to advocate for that access or ask for help and largely just accepted my situation as the best I was going to get.