Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • That’s an interesting thought. There’s a lot of cases you see where people have stripped a comic’s name from the bottom of the image, but that’s not really what this project was designed for. Aletheia will guarantee you that the person/company sharing the media is who they say they are, but critically it won’t prevent infringement.

    The example I give in my talk is that InfoWars could take a BBC news story and say “we made this”, but it wouldn’t let them modify that story and claim that “the BBC made this”. The goal is to be able to re-connect what someone is saying with the reputation of the person saying it, with the hope that we can start delegating our trust to individuals and organisations again.




  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlStopping a badly behaved bot the wrong way.
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    3 months ago

    Not throwing any shade, just some advice for the future: try to always consider the problem in the context of the OSI model. Specifically, “Layer 3” (network) is always a better strategy for routing/blocking than “Layer 5” (application) if you can do it.

    Blocking traffic at the application layer means that the traffic has to be routed through (bandwidth consumption) assembled and processed (CPU cost) before a decision can be made. You should always try to limit the stuff that makes it to layer 5 if you’re sure you won’t want it.

    The trouble with layer 3 routing of course is that you don’t have application data there. No host name, no HTTP headers, etc., just packets with a few bits of information:

    • source IP and port
    • destination IP and port
    • A few other firewall-specific bits of information like whether this packet is part of an established connection (syn) etc.

    In your case though, you already knew what you didn’t want: traffic from a particular IP, and you have that at the network layer.

    At that point, you know you can block at layer 3, so the next question is how far up the chain can you block it?

    Most self-hosters will just have their machines on the open internet, so their personal firewall is all they’ve got to work with. It’s still better than letting the packets all the way through to your application, but you still have to suffer the cost of dropping each packet. Still, it’s good enough™ for most.

    In your case though, you had setup the added benefit of Cloudflare standing between you and your server, so you could move that decision making step even further away from you, which is pretty great.




  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlGeneral Advice for shell scripts
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    4 months ago

    I recommend writing everything in Bourne shell (/bin/sh) for a few reasons:

    • Bash is more capable, which is nice, but if you’re fiddling with complex data structures, you probably should be using a more maintainable language like Python.
    • Bash is in most places, but crucially not everywhere. Docker-based deployments for example often use Ash which is very similar to Bash, but lacks support for arrays and a few other things.
    • Bourne’s limitations force you to rethink your choices regularly. If you find yourself hacking around a lack of associative arrays for example, it’s probably time to switch to a proper language.

    Also two bits of advice.

    1. Use shellcheck. There’s a website that’ll check your script for you as well as a bunch of editor extensions that’ll do it in real time. You will absolutely write better, safer code with it.
    2. If your script exceeds 300 lines. Stop and rewrite it in a proper language. Your future self will thank you.

  • Nifty! I wrote something similar a couple years ago using Vosk for the stt side. My project went a little further though, automating navigating the programs you start. So you could say: “play the witcher” and it’d check if The Witcher was available in a local Kodi instance, and if not, then figure out which streaming service was running it and launch the page for it. It’d also let you run arbitrary commands and user plugins too!

    I ran into two big problems though that more-or-less killed my enthusiasm for developing on it: (1) some of the functionality relied on pyautogui, but with the Linux desktop’s transition to Wayland, some of the functionality I relied on was disappearing. (2) I wanted to package it for Flatpak, and it turns out that Flatpak doesn’t play well with Python. I was also trying to support both arm64 and amd64 which it turns out is also really hard (omg the pain of doing this for the Pi).

    Anyway, maybe the project will serve as some inspiration.



  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.catoLinux@lemmy.mlScam bitcoin Snap app!
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    5 months ago

    42,396 installs… Holy shit.

    Edit, from the article:

    This “Exodus” application published in the Snap store was indeed a scam application. There is a genuine organisation that developed a real, seemingly ’legitimate’ cryptocurrency wallet application. This is not that.

    Any chance that the FlatHub one is legit?


  • My guess would be that it’s because Flatpaks are easy. You have a handy GUI tool often pre installed that includes search and one-click install.

    If you want something lower level, Arch users have the AUR, and others may actually do that horrifying curl https://... | sh pattern.

    Nix pancakes on the other hand… I have no idea how to use them and generally assume it’s the thing NixOS uses. Since I don’t use NixOS, I’ve never given them a second thought.





  • No, I haven’t tried to poke a hole in a sandbox. Generally speaking, if I have a choice between pacman -S <app> or “install with Flatpak and then fiddle with sandbox settings” I opt for the former. I get that you think this is important, and Flatpak is a nifty idea, but in terms of usability, it has failed me repeatedly to the point where I don’t want to use it, so I don’t.

    You seem to becoming from a position of “Flatpak good, so everyone must use it”, which is nice, but it’s naïve. Flatpak is ok, but it has usability problems, and since you want people to use it, usability is kind of important. It also introduces a frustrating divide from a user perspective. The idea that “desktop apps” should be installed via Flatpak, and everything else with a proper package manager is madness from a user’s perspective. I don’t understand how you can’t see that, but you’re going to have to accept it 'cause newsflash: not everyone thinks like you.

    Finally, packaging for Flatpack is a Pain In The Ass. I say this as someone who’s tried it. The build system is clearly biased toward particular use cases and particular languages, which is great if you’re in that camp, but for everyone else it comes across as impractical for the intended purpose.

    So yeah, it’s great that this is important to you. Go ahead and develop the shit out of Flatpak, and maybe even work on the user experience some more. I’ll keep having a look from time to time, but for now, it’s not happening, and this attitude of yours, that the rest of us will just “need to adapt” to your preferred way of working… if I wanted that I’d use a Mac. GTFO.