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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • smb@lemmy.mltolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldCorrect usage of a hand-me-down MacBoo
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    2 months ago

    well there is plenty of what is possible to try. but unless one had looked at the real cause i’ld suspect one of apples hardware backdoors to cause the crashes like if the backdoor doesn’t work, crash the kernel, so we never loose control over the sheeapple thing. or more realistic if you want:

    First maybe just crappy hardware:

    There is a reason why i suspect apple’s hardware, cause my shitty macbook at work should(!) go to something like hibernate, sleep, or its spyveillance-only mode when closing the lid, and it should also lock the screen when doing so, the actual results seem pure randomly choosen, sometimes the sleep mode survives the weekend with lots of accu left, sometimes its completely depleted and i even have to charge it for a while before it has enough power to show the charging logo. for security reasons i have to manually lock my screen, verify it and then close the lid, which is pure annoy. this could just be buggy hardware, a sensor so broken that reading its inputs directly could crash any OS that assumes i.e. no division by zero, pointers to nonexisting ram or whatever, and maybe apple just knows what faulty measurements mean what (but cannot make that stable too, only no crash occurs)

    secondly with a hardware backdoor:

    https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2023_kaspersky-discloses-iphone-hardware-feature-vital-in-operation-triangulation-case

    “The discovered vulnerability is a hardware feature, possibly based on the principle of “security through obscurity,” and may have been intended for testing or debugging. Following the initial 0-click iMessage attack and subsequent privilege escalation, the attackers leveraged this hardware feature to bypass hardware-based security protections and manipulate the contents of protected memory regions.”

    which is that (some/all?) iphones have at least one memory page where one only has to accidently or intentionally write something into it, that could trigger the backdoor feature to let you choose which memory address to overwrite with what bytes, bypassing every(!) security mechanism in hardware AND of course those made of software too. that is how i understood documentation and presentations about it. now apple said they “fixed” it in software, from what i remember that fix was just a “os preventing apps from writing to that memory backdoor page” thus not a fix but only a mitigation, while “fix” is more a lie than only misleading words to just pretend it wasn’t permanent and unfixable. let us assume that linux does not include hardware backdoor mitigations for apple devices AND that apple placed the very same backdoor memory page into macbooks as well but maybe at (an)other physical address(es). now the code that runs on closing the lid “might” just reside at or write to the very same memory page on every boot for a given exact same kernel, which might be a memory page that acts the same or similar like that iphone hardware backdoor, overwriting some other memory page depending on what is actually written to the backdoor page which immediately crashes the kernel. if that’s whats happening there, t2linux is not broken, but macbooks are just insecure costly (loss of money, time, security, trust, work performance, patents, stability, a.s.o. …) waste.

    how to find out? (maybe)

    • get the kernel code.
    • deactivate every driver not needed to boot and run the lidclose stuff like i.e. the sensor, compile the kernel anew and try booting from it.

    changin the kernel a lot by removing everything(!) not needed should in theory/hopefully also change the pages that would be affected when closing the lid. same effect: likely no backdoor. no effect: maybe something you deactivated, maybe yet another backdoor discovery.

    it might also be solveable by sth like acpi settings or such, probably switchable from kernel boot cmdline , maybe change settings for hibernate / suspend to ram (does apple hardware even support such? i mean without the buggy behaviour i experience?)l


  • but you did notice that compilers can be manipulated to include backdoors into resulting binaries AND put the same manipulation into newly compiled compilers as well, right? then where did you get that compiler from? did you have a look at the binary output? then if so, did you look at it using the hexeditor of that same compiler? 😎 plz have a look … 💥 bzzzt … really you are lucky to be alive after a blast like that, especially you, have yourself checked out with ems before you leave!







  • well maybe letting them pay compensation to all(!) victims (not just their customers) for all losses including lost time already would solve that problem.

    that would leave the decades-long unsolved problem of microsoft not beeing held liable for their buggy products (which is the reason for all security-products-as-a-workaround-to-compensate-that-crappy-os companies existance) open.

    why not in general hold companies liable for the damage they cause so they CAN develop beeing more cautious with what they do? i mean not ONLY cs should be sued to hell, but ALL of them should be sued until they are reasonable cautious with all possible damages they can cause (and already did in the past)







  • or maybe even automatically like in any well done CD or CI environment. at least their customers now know that they ARE the only test environment CS actually has or uses. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

    “if only” - poem (“3 seconds” edition):

    if only.

    if only there would exist CEOs in the world that could learn from their noob-dumb-brain-dead-faults instead of always ever speaking about their successes which were always-ever really done by others instead.

    if only.

    if only there were shareholders willing to really look at that wreck that tells all his false success storys and lies, so CEOs could then maybe develop at least a minimum of willingness to learn. maybe a minimum of 3 seconds of learning per decade and per ceo could already help lots of companies a really huge lot.

    if only.

    if only there was damage compensation in effect so that shareholders would be actually willing to take at least some seconds - maybe 3 seconds of really looking at new CEOs could already help, but its only shareholders, not sure if they would be able to concentrate that long or maybe are already too much degenerated over the generations of beeing parasitic only - to look at the CEOs and the damage they cause before giving them ability to cause that damage over and over again.

    if only.


  • smb@lemmy.mltolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldRussian delete
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    6 months ago
     HISTCONTROL=ignorespace
     unset RANDOM
     RANDOM=4
     clear
    ...
    

    If RANDOM is unset, it loses its special properties, even if it is subsequently reset.

    HISTCONTROL If the list of values includes ignorespace, lines which begin with a space character are not saved in the history list.

    RTFM can save your server AND your bet ;-)

    it is cheating of course if the predefined rules tell us about such requirements and if these are not met any more when unsetting RANDOM ahead of it.


  • smb@lemmy.mltolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldThat's why we need two ssds for dual boot
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    6 months ago

    i have two other possibilities at hand, that do not involve two SSDs:

    1. don’t use intentionally broken software in the first place ;-)
    2. use another device for bootloader, could be a readonly CD or a usb drive, PXE/bootp could also do it.

    And if your company wants you to use rotten software, they also want you to give them the delays, downtimes and annoyances that naturally come with rotten decisions, just keep that in mind.

    Here is one thing to remember and why i call it rotten software and rotten decisions:

    Microsoft offers a free “blame the ransomware people” to any CTO who just wants to receive money without working at all or not having to “think” during work. That same CTO can get a bonus after “solving” the ransomware issue and then: “look how ‘invaluable’ that CTO is to the company” he “worked” for month ( yelling at engineers he previously told to install rotten software???) and resolved the ransomware issue!! This is same to those who work. no law has ever given people that many payed breaks from work as “rotten software” vendors did. and if you made a mistake and did not get trained before, you could blame bot beeing trained.

    Look at it from a “fingerpointer” point of view, one cloud always blame someone else for everything and the only one to blame is too big to fail and also untouchable due to their army of darkness lawyers. thus anything happened? no one could be guilty AND be held responsible. Also if one is slow at work, and so is his OS, obviously easy to blame someone else again.

    so microsoft offers a “solution” to “boss wants you to work more and quicker” but remember, that same boss only “needs” a cover for his own ass to be able to point to someone else and the ones creating the rotten software do deliver that ;-)

    i do not know any better wording for such a situation than “rotten” thus i name it so.


  • i am happy to have a raspberry pi setup connected to a VLAN switch, internet is behind a modem (like bridged mode) connected with ethernet to one switchport while the raspi routes everything through one tagged physical GB switchport. the setup works fine with two raspi’s and failover without tcp disconnections during an actual failover, only few seconds delay when that happens, so basically voip calls recover after seconds, streaming is not affected, while in a game a second off might be too much already, however as such hardware failures happen rarely, i am running only one of them anyway.

    for firewall i am using shorewall, while for some special routing i also use unbound dns resolver (one can easily configure static results for any record) and haproxy with sni inspection for specific https routing for the rather specialized setup i have.

    my wifi is done by an openwrt but i only use it for having separate wifis bridged to their own vlans.

    thus this setup allows for multi-zone networks at home like a wifi for visitors with daily changing passwords and another fror chromecast or home automation, each with their own rules, hardware redundancy, special tweaking, everything that runs on gnu/linux is possible including pihole, wireguard, ddns solutions, traffic statistics, traffic shaping/QOS, traffic dumps or even SSL interception if you really want to import your own CA into your phone and see what data your phones apps (those that don’t use certificate pinning) are transfering when calling home, and much more.

    however regarding ddns it sometimes feels more safe and reliable to have a somehow reserved IP that would not change. some providers offer rather cheap tunnels for this purpose. i once had a free (ipv6) tunnel at hurricane electronic (besides another one for IPv4) but now i use VMs in data centers.

    i do not see any ready product to be that flexible. however to me the best ready router system seems to be openwrt, you are not bound to a hardware vendor, get security updates longer than with any commercial product, can 1:1 copy your config to a new device even if the hardware changes and has the possibility to add packages with special features to it.

    “openwrt” is IMHO the most flexible ready solution for longtime use. same as “pfsense” is also very worth looking at and has some similarities to openwrt while beeing different.


  • my 2 cents just in case…:

    A raid6 is not a replacement for backup ;-) i use rdiff-backup which is easy to use, stores only one full backup and all increments are to the past while it is only possible to delete the oldest increments (afaik no “merging”) i never needed anything else. The backup should be one off-site and another one offline to be synced once in a while manually. Make complete dumps (including triggers, etc) from databases before doing the backup ;-)

    i like to have a recreateable server setup, like setting it up manually, then putting everything i did into ansilbe, try to recreate a “spare” server using ansible and the backup, test everything and you can be sure you also have “documented” your setup to a good degree.

    for hardware i do not have much assumptions about performance (until it hits me), but an always-running in-house server should better safe power (i learned this the costly way). it is possible to turn cpu’s off and run only on one cpu with only a reduced freq in times without performance needs, that could help a bit, at least it would feel good to do so while turning cpu’s on again + set higher frequency is quick and can be easily scripted.

    hard drives: make sure you buy 24/7, they are usually way more hassle-free than the consumer grades and likely “only” cost double the price. i would always place the system on SSD but always as raid1 (not raid6), while the “other” could then maybe be a magnetic one set to write-mostly.

    as i do not buy “server” hardware for my home server, i always buy the components twice when i change something, so that i would have the spare parts ready at hand when i need it. running a server for 5+ years often ends up in not beeing able to buy the same again, and then you have to first search what you want, order, test, maybe send back as it might not fit… instable memory? mainboard released smoke signs? with spare parts at hand, a matter of minutes! only thing i am missing with my consumer grade home server hardware is ecc ram :-/

    for cooling i like to use a 12cm fan and only power it with 5v (instead of the 12v it wants) so that it runs smoothly slow and nearly as silent as a passive only cooling, but heat does not build up in the summer. do not forget to clean the dust once in a while… i never had a 5v powered 12V-12cm fan that had any problems with the bearings and i think one of them ran for over a decade. i think the 12volt fans last longer with 5v, but no warranty from me ;-)

    even with headless i like to have a quick way at hand to get to a console in case of network might not be working. i once used a serial cable and my notebook, then a small monitor/keyboard, now i use pikvm and could look to my servers physical console from my mobile phone (but would need ssl client certificate and TOTP to do so) but this involves network, i know XD

    you likely want smart monitoring and once in a while run memtest.

    for servers i also like to have some monitoring that could push a message to my phone somehow for some foreseeable conditions that i would like to handle manually.

    debsums, logcheck logwatch and fail2ban are also worth looking at depending on what you want.

    also after updating packages, have a look at lsof | egrep “DEL|deleted” to see what programs need a simple restart to really use libraries that have been updated. so reboots only for newer kernels.

    ok this is more than 2 cents, maybe 5. never mind

    hope these ideas help a bit