Cyber security specialist.
Perpetual blue team botherer and a glorified network janitor.
Specialty coffee addict.
Slow regard of silent things.
Trying to leave it better than I found it.

Mastodon: @0xtero

  • 0 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • What’s really wild is that you don’t have to go that far into the past (just ca. 20 years) when the Internet was all about Information wanting to be Free. It was hopeful time of people coming together around new technology. There were a lot new businesses with wild innovations.

    And then, just in a decade it was all gone. Replaced by unregulated behemoths that merged until there’s a dirty dozen left, controlling most of global money and information.

    Enshittification of the Internet.



  • In words of Dan Geer from his 2014 Black Hat keynote:

    Today the relevant legal concept is “product liability” and the
    fundamental formula is “If you make money selling something, then
    you better do it well, or you will be held responsible for the
    trouble it causes.” For better or poorer, the only two products
    not covered by product liability today are religion and software,
    and software should not escape for much longer.

    The EU legislation has good intentions. Software should not escape product liability. However, the current proposal is somewhat flawed (unless EU actually intends to finance security testing for FOSS projects!) and it needs some language to protect open-source innovation and distributed development models.

    I’m hoping the EU will allow a model where FOSS developers can receive donations/charge for support without having to risk huge penalties.






  • First - we’re all using alpha/beta software (Lemmy is 0.17.4, Kbin is 0.10.). None of these services are “production quality” software yet, so let’s keep that in our minds - we’re all early adopters.

    The points mentioned in the OP are a bad look. Naturally. User should have expectation of their data being deleted on request - especially since this request might be regulatory privacy request (GDPR related). It’s a clear failure from the software and should be improved and iterated upon.

    The expectation shouldn’t be “oh well it’s on the Internet, live with it”. While Facebook might keep mining your data after deletion request, our software shouldn’t behave like that, we should strive to be better with this stuff.

    And finally, ensuring privacy in federated system is hard. Mastodon suffers from same problems. We shouldn’t give up on the idea though.


  • Once, many moons ago, a group of devs at my old work got deny on internal zone-to-zone Firewall open request that they needed for integration between two internal systems, so they ended up making a script that e-mailed the info to a hotmail.com (SMTP was open) account and then wrote a script to login and screenscrape the mail info from hotmail back to the other server (https was open through surf proxy).


  • Meta should be considered “harmful to humankind” (the list of atrocities is long) and I personally really don’t want anything to do with them.

    It was only matter of time before one of the big players took interest. Too bad it had to be Meta, but I don’t think the others would have been much better.

    The protocol itself isn’t secure, so if anyone is worried about data harvesting, better log off now and never return. Meta and anyone else can do that already (and is probably doing) without having to roll in with their own instances.

    Federating with someone who might have 1.2 billion MAUs is kinda scary because most protocol implementations (like Mastodon) are huge mess of bloat and inefficiencies under the hood. Someone paying their hosting out of their own pocket or trusting on kindness of strangers should be wary of the amount of data that’s going to hit them with federation.

    It’s probably silly to expect “unified blocklist”. Some people are fixated with the idea of growth and equate mass popularity with success. Others would rather “wait and see”. Let them. The fediverse used to be much more homogeneous place 3-4 years ago, but we’re nearing 10M users. That’s simply too many people and voices for there to be just one response.

    Luckily there doesn’t need to be. The protocol allows for creation of spaces that don’t have to interact with Meta.


  • I’m always annoyed how these types of news are categorized as “technology”, when they’re clearly just “business and finance”.
    Yeah Elon owns companies that do “tech”. He has lot of money, because he’s “business and finance” type.

    I wish we’d talk more about actual tech than just the rich white dudes who sit on a pile of gold.