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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • On the topic of Mullvad, what made me choose Kullvad over LibreWolf was the VPN being bundled in. If I’m not mistaken, the whole point of ToR browser is that you have exactly the same fingerprint as any other Tor browser user, making it a lot harder to distinguish you from others using your extensions, browser and other minor stuff your browser reports about you, that combined makes for a pretty unique fingerprint, evej of you are using a VPN.

    But, if you have a browser that has the same fingerprint for all users, and it has an accompanying VPN, you can partly expect that most of other users of the same VPN will also be using the same browser, making it a lot harder to track you - because while there may be only a few thousands users of Mullvad in the wild, which renders the same fingerprint not much of an advantage (because you would be one of the few users of i.e Proton VPN with Mullvad), if you also use Mullvad VPN, it’s probable that most of other users who share your Mullvad VPN IP are also Mullvad browser users, making it easier to blend in.

    Bit that’s mostly my theory, why (along with being able to pay with Monero) I feel like the combo of Mullvad browser and VPN is the best combination as far as minimizing fingerprint is considered. If someone has more knowledge about the issue, I’d love to hear some counter-arguments or tips how to improve my setup.




  • I cheated the MFAs by switching what I could to SMS, Yubikey or just copying the MFA private keynto Bitwarden. Kind of defeats the point of MFA, but makes stuff definitely easier.

    Anything that’s important however is on yubikey, however.

    Also, good luck! Are you going through the Digital Minimalism book? I should refresh on it, every time I try it, it doesn’t last long, but I always get rid of one more stupid online habit that I don’t pick up when I inevitably return to my pre-reading the book intetnet usage. So, after already going through like 4 attempts in the last 3 or 4 years, my internet usage is slowly but surly changing for the better. But it’s more of a long run, rather than being able to get everything on the first try, in my experience at least.

    If you’re not doing it because of the book/haven’t heard of it, I definitely recommend reading Digital Minimalism by Carl Newport.


  • How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don’t even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.

    We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I’ve encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.

    How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it’s so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn’t there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you “step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>.”

    I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I’m obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I’ve done is shit or useless :D



  • When I tried that, it lasted me for almost a year and a half, before I unfortunately got a second job that required MFA and I needed to be more online in general due to juggling two jobs. And it was amazing!

    What I eventually did however was to get a dumb phone that can do a wifi hotspot, and still carried my smartphone but without simcard and net access, and powered off. When I really needed to get a taxi or look up a way home when I overslept drunk on public transport and ended up who knows where, I could always just fire up hotspot, power on the smartphone and do stuff I needed. Cause when that happened first time, it was when I first realized how much dependent I am on smartphone and net access.

    Thanks for reminding me, I just quit one of the jobs and I can afford to be more offline, so back to the dumb phone I go! Convincing my GF again that she has to text me instead of using discord will be hard, though … Or explaining that I really cant look up the fact she wants, or call a taxi quickly…

    I still have a python bot that forwarded discord messages to my own bare html website, so I can chat with her with the basic web browser of the dumb phone.




  • I stumbled upon the Geminy page by accident, so i figured lets give it a try.

    I asked him in czech if he can also generate pictures. He said sure, and gave me examples about what to ask him.

    So I asked him, again in czech, to generate a cat drinking a beer at a party.

    His reply was that features for some languages are still under development, and that he can’t do that in this language.

    So I asked him in english.

    I can’t create images for you yet, but I can still find images from the web.

    Ok, so I asked if he can find me the picture on the web, then.

    I’m sorry, but I can’t provide images of a cat drinking beer. Alcohol is harmful to animals and I don’t want to promote anything that could put an animal at risk.

    Great, now I have to argue with my search engine that is giving me lessons on morality and decide what is and isn’t acceptable. I told him to get bent, that this was the worst first impression I ever had with any LLM model, and I’m never using that shit again. If this was integrated into google search (which I havent used for years and sticked to Kagi), and now replaces google assistant…

    Good, that’s what people get for sticking with google. It brings me joy to see Google dig it’s own grave with such success.





  • This is the first time ive heard about microg. How is the app support with it? Can you run every app that needs play service? I have Google Sandbox installed only on a second Graphene profile, and use it for bare minimum of apps that dont work without it, Bolt app, mostly weird MFA for work or package tracking apps i use once per month, while disabling most of their permissions. Will microg improve my situation in this case to be worth switching over? Does it work without root?



  • One thing I forgot to mention - last time I recommended cloudflared, I was told that the TOS for cloudflared forbid use for high-volume streaming of data, such as movie/audio streaming, or sharing of large files for download.

    I never had an issue with it, but I didn’t use it for streaming, only to share/download a small to medium sized file once per few weeks. I suppose that if you were to publicly post a link to a few Gb large file, and had hundreds of people download it through the cloudflared, they may take an issue with it. Maybe even if you were regurally watching streamed movies from your server through it. So just a heads up, make sure to check the ToS first.


  • I’m using GrapheneOS, and suprising amount of apps (including my bank app) works without Google Services. And if there’s something I need for work that doesn’t work without them, I have another profile with sandboxed Google play (which isn’t enabled on my main profile), and use the app there, where it’s separated from all of my data. No need to root my phone, and so far it worked great.

    As for sharing your Nextcloud stuff, what I did was for services that need to be public, I just got a cheap (like, few dollars per year) domain and use Cloudflare Tunnel (Cloudflared). It handles all port forwarding for you, and you don’t have to make anything public on your router - just install cloudflared on the server and have it forward the port you want to your domain. You can also set up geoblocking and ACL pretty easily, so it’s perfect for that.

    I’ve however recently moved to using ZeroTier, because it has a nice mobile VPN app, so I just run zerotier (it’s literally two commands to install and join a network) on my server, and if I need to access something there I just launch it on my phone and connect through ZeroTier. This, however, won’t help if you want to share stuff from your server with others, since they’d have to install a ZeroTier client and also join your network. For Jellyfin, Nextcloud and Sunshine, though, it’s amazing.

    And if that still feels like too much hassle for you, I’d recommend looking into Proton Drive. I’d consider that one of the best hassle-free alternatives to GDrive, which launched recently.


  • Well, LLMs are subset of machine learning, and machine learning is a subset of (really old by now) artificial intelligence field. So, LLMs do count as a applied use of AI.

    Aside from ML, you have a lot of ways how to actually make an AI agent for Agent-based models, which is what you mostly use AI for, from GOAP, Behavior Trees or other perception, decision and reasoning algorithms, that could IMO be considered closer to “AIs” than LLMs are. Most of UAVs, robotics, game NPCs or even simple chat/crawl bots are agents by definition and do fall under the umbrella of AI. Even a simple if/then bot does.

    Agent-based simulations are also used for biology, economics, social simulations or modeling in various other fields. That’s also AI.

    However, you’re probably asking about AGIs, and nope, we can’t do those yet as far as I know.



  • I see, stonks are way more bullshit than I thought. Is there anything else you can do with your stock, other than sell it to someone else? I always thought that crypto is such a scam especially because in the end, it has no value in itself, and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. If noone wants to buy it, well, you are fucked. Does it mean that stocks are exactly the same concept? I always thought it has something to do with the vaule of the company and the profits it earns, but if there is no way how to cash them out other than selling your piece of paper to someone, then it’s really the same? I suppose that unlike crypto, the stock price increases if the company is turning profit, but you still have to find someone to sell it to, right, so the price is increasing only because the demand from people willing to buy it is increasing due to it turning profit, but it’s not really tied to the actual value of the company, so it’s exactly like crypto? Or is the price set by some different mechanism than crypto is - pure demand from people willing to buy?