sylver_dragon

A few from my list:

• Darknet Diaries - Interviews with interesting people around hacking and cybersecurity. This includes a lot of the actual criminals themselves and you get to hear their motivations and how they did what they did. Really neat for understanding the minds of folks who do bad things.
• FiveThirtyEight Politics - This one is good for staying abreast of US politics, polling. While the political bias of the hosts is pretty obvious, this is less punditry and more about the numbers.
• Risky Business with Nate Silver Maria Konnikova - A neat podcast covering risk, poker and politics. Just a good listen for thinking about risk and probabilities in life.
• The Lawfare Podcast - Lawyers talking about the law, and how it shapes and is shaped by whats in the news. Great for getting a legalistic view of the world.

Honor is a social construct which is used to promote “pro-social” behavior. It can be useful in the absence of or in concert with other systems of social control (e.g. laws, religion). Of course, “pro-social” is very much a construct of what the creating society considers to be positive. This can include acting in ways which we, in our current social constructs, would consider “anti-social”. Honor ends up getting idolized in media because it often includes an element of self-discipline and self-sacrifice and is usually associated with warrior cultures. Though, it also tends to be conservative and resist changing as social mores change. This has led to some famous consequences as honor based systems tried to cling to social constructs which were no longer tenable. For example, the Satsuma Rebellion saw the existing feudal class seek to maintain it’s grip on power in then face of a changing society.

Ultimately, any system of honor would need to be taught to new adherents. It’s no different from a religion or legal system in that regard. No one comes out of the womb fully indoctrinated to a system of honor. So no, it isn’t really self-explanatory. Like any social construct, you would need to define the system and how it interacts with the society in which is was created. Otherwise, it’s just naming a system for social control and hoping no one notices that it’s a hollow shell.

This would go one of two ways:

1. States would take the money, and money being fungible, State budgets for payroll would ultimately go down by that same X. Teacher pay might get a short term bump, but the long term result would just be States relying on the subsidy and using the extra budget room to do other stuff, without meaningful long term changes to teacher pay.
2. The money comes with regulations around teacher pay (to prevent the issue above) and many States refuse to take the money to avoid the regulations. The whole thing becomes a political football and nothing really changes.

Ultimately, the US is a Federal system which means a lot of stuff is handled at the State and Local level. A wholesale takeover of those responsibilities by the Federal Government is not as simple as “hand money to the States”. Decentralized authority has long been both a feature and a bug in the US system, but it’s not one which is likely to be changed anytime soon. The upshot of this decentralization is that States can use their authority to push and demonstrate policies before there is a national consensus on those policies. The downside is that some policies need to be fought on a State by State basis, which is a lot harder than a top-down, command style government.

The two issues have little to do with each other. Teacher pay is handled at local and State levels. US Foreign Aid is a Federal issue.

Just waiting for MAGA idiots to start buying EVs to “own the libs”. I mean, I’d rather people shift to EVs because it’s less damaging to the environment; but, a win is a win, I guess.

If you care about privacy and are running Windows, you don’t care about privacy.

Humans are pretty terrible and we’ll find any excuse to justify our terribleness. One of the parts of the French Revolution was the Dechristianization of France. While this may sound like a good thing, which should lead people to live their lives based on reason, it also led to violence against priests. And the lack of religion did nothing to stop the Reign of Terror. In short, it was less an atheist utopia and more just humans finding different excuses to be terrible to one an other.

Similarly, the Soviet Union was founded on the Marxist principal that “religion is the opiate of the masses”. This meant that the Soviet Union was officially athiest. However, unlike some of the French Revolutionary governments, the USSR largely tolerated religious practices. At the same time, the officially a theist state got up to a lot of horrible stuff.

At the same time, there is an argument to be made that Christianity helped reign in some of the worst excesses of monarchs during the Middle Ages. It’s important to remember that people really believed this stuff. Kings really did think about their immortal soul and what they would be forced to answer for on “judgement day”. Fear is a powerful motivator and it may be that, for all their terrible selfishness, some monarchs may have been led to moderate the worst of it based on that fear.

All that said, I’m not sure how much differently history would have played out, without religion. As I led with, humans are pretty terrible. Many wars may have had a religious veneer, to get the people to go along with them, but they were more often about power, control and ego than religious conviction. Religion provides a convenient excuse to define “the other”. The othering of people creates a permission structure where we will not only tolerate, but often gleefully engage in, truly horrible acts against “the other”. And it doesn’t require religion to do it. Take a look around the Lemmyverse and you’ll find videos of Russian soldiers being blown apart by drone dropped munitions. And the comment sections will be talking about how “they deserve it” or making jokes and light of another human being ripped apart. And these comments will be defended because of the horrible actions of the Russian Government and some Russian soldiers. Russian soldiers have been placed firmly in “the other” and so we can celebrate their horrible deaths, and be cheered on for it in many corners of Lemmy. No religion required.

So ya. I’m not a fan of religion, nor am I religious myself. But, I have no illusions that religion has a lock on people being terrible to each other. It has absolutely been involved in making it happen throughout history. But, I am skeptical of the idea that history without it wouldn’t have been just as filled with humans doing terrible things to each other. Human nature tends towards tribalism and the creation of “in groups” and “out groups”. With those in the former more than willing to do anything and everything to the latter.

It’s getting Fark’d

So how about hacking CrowdStrike and obtaining that access? I’m guessing it might be easier than hacking Microsoft?

Maybe. CrowdStrike is a company which specializes in security and has some pretty smart folks in that area. They also live and die by the perceived value of their security products. So, security is pretty important to the company. Microsoft is a conglomerate, and while it does have some arms which specialize in (and are pretty good at) security, the company’s continued existence doesn’t depend on their performance. So, the Microsoft President can go in front of Congress and promise to do better, and we all know this is bullshit and Microsoft will continue to be Microsoft.

As for an attacker actually leveraging the CrowdStrike platform as part of an attack. It’s entirely possible. Security products have been found to have vulnerabilities in the past. IIRC, McAfee’s ePO server was vulnerable to Log4j. And given CrowdStrike’s engine runs in Ring 0 on the endpoints, it’s certainly an attractive target. Finding a Remote Code exploit in it seems like something an APT like the NSA or PLA Unit 61398 might get up to. That said, as I mentioned above, CrowdStike also employs a lot of smart folks and is likely doing it’s level best to find those vulnerabilities first and fix them.

Are there other companies having the same access level as CrowdStrike? How vulnerable are they?

Ya. Really, any EDR or A/V product is going to run in Ring 0. And any such kernel level driver crashing is going to cause a BSOD. That’s just the way Windows is designed. I have personally dealt with bad updates from several other products causing BSODs. Including one which brought down the entire site I was working at, at the time. I believe it also took down a number of other sites as well. Since, once I figure out how to get the bad update out of our system, the folks responsible for the update actually reached out and asked me what I did.

Ultimately, products like these exist in a very trusted state on systems, because they have to. if and when they crash, you can expect a BSOD. In this case, I suspect CrowdStrike is going to receive (and they deserve) a lot of shit for the way this one went down. The reporting I’ve seen states that the update file was just a mass of null bytes. And it seems there was no sanity checking or error handling for a corrupt update being pushed by CrowdStrike. I suspect that’s gonna get fixed pretty quick, but it was a pretty bad oversight for a product with regular, live updates.

Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.

Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it’s a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.

That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being “install your updates”. And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it’s running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.

The process generally looks something like:

• Install your updates.
• Install the server software.
• Apply updates to the software (the installer may be an outdated version).
• Apply security hardening based on guides from the software vendor.
• Configure your firewall to forward the required ports (and only the required ports) from the WAN side to the server.
• Figure out your external IP address.
• Try accessing the service from the outside.

Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you’re willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.

Good luck, and in case I didn’t mention it, install your updates.

No, because your vote won’t encourage investment in flipping the State. I agree that the current duopoly sucks. I was an ardent Bernie supporter and would very much like viable third parties. But, the DNC isn’t going to be looking at those third party votes. They need to believe that the Democrats have a chance of winning before they will invest in a State. If all they see are protest votes, then they won’t see a viable path to them winning and they will continue to ignore the State.

Ya, it sucks, but we really do need to just keep holding our nose and pulling the lever for the Democrat in the general election.

Cleopatra had huge tracts of land. And all of the Romans wanted to plow her fields.
I’m walking about the wheat production of Egypt here, what were you thinking of?

If you are in a deep red state, it will seem that your vote won’t matter. Because it mostly won’t. However, the way States vote changes over time. The closer the vote totals in a State, the more likely the National Democratic Party is to invest resources into building up and promoting candidates in those States. That sort of thing can shift the needle, if slowly. Keep in mind that California voted Republican from '68 to '88 (source) but shifted over time.

It sucks to vote and feel like you’re just pissing in the wind. But, each vote moves the needle just a bit more and maybe, eventually, things will swing.

Did you live in a cheap wood-frame (aka Fire’s Favourite Food) apartment where all the noises echo in the walls and then in our heads?

Yup, and that’s been just about the only thing available. I’m sure that some high end places will be decently soundproofed; but, about that “Unless you can continue to be rich” bit, projecting much? Honestly, nothing about a city is attractive to me. I do recognize that we need a lot more mid and high density housing in the cities. And those cities need proper, modern transportation networks and to kick cars out of the city centers. I just have zero desire to live in one. I have a nice little home, out in the sticks, and have every intention of dying out here. I work remotely, so I don’t even have to drive in for that. At best, I come play tourist from time to time and that’s all the city I want in my life. Y’all can keep them and quit trying to force everyone to live the life you want.

As for demographic issues, birth rates in the US are below replacement level. It’s only via immigration that our population is growing. And that’s probably a good thing, as a shrinking population has a lot of negative economic consequences. But, we have plenty of room for both people and agriculture. We just waste a lot of it on feed crops and ethanol production.

This sort of issue is why I will never live in a shared space again. I had the neighbor who’s girlfriend screamed like a porn star at all hours of the morning. I mean, great for them, but could ya not do it with the windows open at 3am? We also had issues with their sound system rattling the walls. They were pretty polite about that one, but it just kept creeping back up. I suspect it was a bass unit near a wall and it can be hard to understand how much it affects nearby people. Eventually, we moved. Now live in a detached single family home and fuck ever sharing a wall/roof/floor again.

they get the name from the shape rather than the ingredients

I was under the understanding that the main difference was that quick breads used chemical leavening agents (e.g. baking powder) instead of yeast. Hence the “quick” in “quick bread”. Wikipedia (always a source of unblemished truth /s) seems to agree with my understanding.

I had dabbled with Linux before, both at home and work. Stood up a server running Ubuntu LTS at home for serving my personal website and Nextcloud. But, gaming kept my main machine on Win10. Then I got a Steam Deck and it opened my eyes to how well games "just worked’ on Linux. I installed Arch on a USB drive and booted off that for a month or so and again, games “just worked”. I finally formatted my main drive and migrated my Arch install to it about a week ago.

I’m so glad that I won’t be running Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11.

Holy Misleading Headline, Batman…
The actual first sentence of the article:

Since 2019, the U.S. Department of Defense has been asking for a waiver from legislation barring it from doing business with companies reliant on telecommunications equipment manufactured by Huawei.

Emphasis added. This isn’t the DoD saying “we need to use Huawei hardware”, it’s the DoD saying “a fuck-ton of companies we do business with use Huawei hardware.” And that’s because Huawei hardware is cheap and businesses like cheap. While I do think the DoD has some leverage in contracts to say, “welcome to the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), you cannot use anything manufactured by Huawei in infrastructure which is within scope”. If the text of the law says that the DoD can’t do business with companies who use Huawei hardware at all, then that’s going to be very limiting.

1. It’s never going to happen. Turkiye would give us another (probably US backed) genocide in the Middle East before they let that happen.
2. Even with proven oil reserves in those regions, the lack of access to the world’s oceans is going to hurt that country. For all of the modern advancements in the world, trade still goes by boat. Land locked countries face issues with moving goods into and out of the country, which usually adds costs and makes goods from that country less competitive. With almost certain poor relations with Turkiye, Iraq and Syria, this new country would be trying to move goods though Iran, which is just a bad plan. Or, some combination of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Russia. Again, if none of that sounds promising, it’s because it isn’t. They would be far better off to give up some land further north and try to get connected to the Mediterranean Sea.

It’s down to the expected use case.
If you have some reason to want portability, like you travel for work or expect to want to game at a place other than you home, then a laptop is likely the right choice.
If you only expect to game at home and don’t have a need to constantly move your system around, a desktop is usually a better “bang for the buck”.

Personally, I don’t travel and don’t have a need to move my gaming rig around. I also like having the ability to upgrade in a piecemeal fashion. So, I have a desktop. This particular PC of Theseus has been going for a decade and a half now and shows no sign of stopping.