• 22 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: May 6th, 2024

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  • uBlock is a content filter. Cookies are set when a server responds to a web (http/https) request. So if uBlock has a domain blocked, not only are any cookies blocked, but no requests make it to that domain (whatever.com) at all.

    If a domain is not blocked by uBlock Origin’s filters, then cookies are set per your browser’s configuration. Firefox I believe blocks some 3rd party tracking cookies by default, but can be configured to block all third-party cookies as well, but this may break site functionality like single sign-on.






  • Part of being an academic is being available to discuss your publications. Your full name will not only be flying around the internet but recorded permanently in libraries and journals.

    Science is about collaboration, and standing behind the work you do, publicly. You will find it extremely difficult or impossible to get your PhD without being known to the academic community.

    I think you won’t find many anonymous scientific papers held in high regard.










  • Let’s say there is a user lmicroservice. I’m on a UI team. I don’t get to tell the user service team what, or when, to implement any features.

    I’m tasked with making a page displaying all the users who have a birthday this month.

    User API service can only search by user id, email, display name, or nickname.

    Now instead of just querying the goddamn database, a one line fucking SQL statement, I have to deal with the user team, getting them to first off even admit that my use case is valid, convince them to work on the feature, coordinate with them to make sure the query works, sorts the data the way I need, etc, et. al, blah blah blah.

    They already have the next 3 sprints full so I’m sitting on my ass for the next month before I can test.

    Meanwhile they decide they’re gonna implement a super generic thing, and so despite me working on code that we talked about using an interface we talked about, they implement something else so i have to throw out half my work anyway.

    Then when I finally start using it I find, oh, it doesn’t support a sort, only returns 100 results max with no pagination, so if there’s 200 this month with a birthday fuck the 2nd hundred they don’t show up because they’re implementing bare minimum and the rest is slated for another sprint.

    And it was then, your Honor, I grabbed the lead dev for the user microservice and tossed him off the 9th story of the building.

    /sarcasm





  • THIS IS THE HILL I DIE ON.

    No one has ever recovered overwritten data, as far as anyone can tell. Go look it up. The technique was only a theoretical attack on ancient MFM/RLL hard drive encoding (Gutmann’s paper). Even 20 year old drives’ (post 2001, approx) magnetic encoding are so small there isn’t an ‘edge’ to read on the bits. A single pass of random data is sufficient to permanently destroy data, even against nation-state level actors. Certainly enough for personal data.

    from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutmann_method :

    Most of the patterns in the Gutmann method were designed for older MFM/RLL encoded disks. Gutmann himself has noted that more modern drives no longer use these older encoding techniques, making parts of the method irrelevant. He said “In the time since this paper was published, some people have treated the 35-pass overwrite technique described in it more as a kind of voodoo incantation to banish evil spirits than the result of a technical analysis of drive encoding techniques”

    More reading material:

    NOW THAT BEING SAID there is no harm in doing a secure, 35-pass overwrite other than the time, energy and disk wear. If watching all the bit-patterns of a DoD-level wipe using DBAN on a magnetic disk tickles your fancy, or you think this is a CIA misinformation campaign to get people to do something insecure so they can steal your secrets, please just go ahead and do a 35-pass overwrite with alternating bit patterns followed by random data. I can tell you that I believe in my heart-of-hearts, that one pass is sufficient.