• 1 Post
  • 363 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle




  • Running it as a VM or even on a server that is running other services and potentially competing for I/O or memory bandwidth also introduces many other potential sources of inefficiency. I always recommend running a firewall on dedicated bare metal hardware, it is a very specialized task with very particular requirements on behalf of both the hardware and the software and it has very little tolerance for other sources of latency or delays. That doesn’t mean you need to use a pre-built appliance, but it does explain why it’s so common, and running it on a VM on a server that is doing other stuff is likely contributing to your issues significantly.

    Personally, I run my firewall/router on a very stripped-down Debian with almost no non-essential services and a custom built kernel. I hand-picked a multi-port PCIe x4 Intel NIC with good Linux compatibility and drivers, and I’m using foomuuri to handle the routing and kea to handle DHCP/DNS for my internal network. This is a very minimal, bare-bones configuration and I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you really know what you’re doing, and it’s absolutely not “idiot mode networking” and if that’s what you want you’re going to have a real bad time if you try to follow in my footsteps, because I am a very different kind of idiot. But it works for me, so it’s proof that it is possible.


  • wat. “hard to get anything to run”? It’s probably hard if you’re completely new to it, yeah, but Is that just because you don’t know how to use proton and wine? were you trying to pirate linux native versions? Were you using a gaming-oriented distro? And do you know how that distro is supposed to work?

    Most Linux distributions you’ve heard of before like, this year, are probably boring, “stable long term support” (out of date) corporate-office-based and programmer-friendly distros and trying to run games on them is like trying to run Windows games on Windows Server Edition. It’s a nightmare, because it’s not intended for gaming, and everything is going to feel like a horrible hack because it is and it sucks don’t do that.

    Use Gaming distros for gaming. Use Windows versions of games. Don’t overthink it, pretend you’re on Windows. Forget you’re on even Linux, this is Windows 12 Nobara Edition. Let Proton and Wine and Bottles and launchers like Heroic handle the dirty work of actually managing all that shit for you. There are a few things you will need to figure out how to translate the Windows-focused installation instructions the lazy pirate guys tell you into Linux-compatible installation instructions, because nobody is going to do that for you. It’s not hard, it just takes a little bit of experience and knowledge, which you probably don’t have yet. But once you do, you’re off to the races and everything runs fine. There might be a few hiccups here and there, but there are when you’re first setting up Windows too. Most of the time, with most stuff, it just fucking works. Source: trust me bro.


  • I consider the article’s criticisms of SMTP, HTTP, XMPP, etc. (and IRC which was not mentioned but falls in the same category) to be positive and desirable traits and I think it’s a shame that the article characterizes them negatively. HTTP’s job is not to prevent corporate takeover of the web and I don’t think it should be. That’s our job, as people. The protocol’s job is to remain neutral so that when corporate takeover of the web happens, HTTP is still there, open to everybody, providing an offramp to escape it, because it’s neutral. It doesn’t belong to the corporations. It belongs to everybody. They can try to take it over if they wish, embrace and extend, but they can’t extinguish a fire that’s smoldering underground no matter how hard they try. It will always be there, ready to flare up at a moment’s notice. The original is always still there ready for us to revert to using it at any time.

    And many of us already have. Fuck Google, fuck Cloudflare, fuck AWS, they’ll never take the web from us.






  • It might be the end of GPL-type licenses. But, at least as far as I’ve understood it, the point of copyleft was to use copyright against itself in the first place, because copyright sucks, and at the end of the day we don’t really want copyright OR copyleft. They’re both asserting “ownership” of stuff that honestly belongs in the public domain free to all humans to use (in an ideal world, that doesn’t contain evil corporations that are considered people for some reason). We already know copyleft open source has been widely abused in proprietary software. This is not new nor surprising. We gave them the richly deserved middle finger whenever we could find out they did it before, and we hate it, but it was never “the end” of open source software because making it publicly available is precisely the defiance we are ultimately aiming for and we will always do that no matter how much they steal it and make it closed source.

    People making closed source software are the enemy, and our war of freedom against them continues regardless of what tactics they use to demean our efforts while they make their closed source software. We will never let them win. They think they’ve found a new way around the GPL, that’s a shame, but so be it. The arms race will continue, but open source will not go away, because the point of it has nothing to do with meekly relying on the law to allow open source to exist, that’s just a method that has been used, with some success, and allowed a lot of people to turn it into a livelihood, and it will be a terrible shame to lose that.

    Those things are not the true goal of open source though. The intention of open source, is to not let proprietary, hidden software dictate the fate of humanity and we will do it for as long as we have to. We’ll do it if we’re protected by copyleft, we’ll do it if we’re not. We’ll still do it even if they make it illegal, and we’ll call it reverse engineering, hacking, and piracy if we have to. Because the information and code that humanity relies on must be free, not owned.





  • Anything you post on the internet is public knowledge forever. End of discussion. Most people won’t care at all, in most cases almost nobody or perhaps even literally nobody will ever even see it, but the harder you try to hide it, the more the Streisand Effect will magnify it until eventually everyone knows about it.

    Anyone telling you they’ll delete your data from the internet without clarifying that it is in fact impossible, is at worst deliberately lying to you usually for their own benefit, and at best making a promise they literally have zero ability to keep.

    I would hope that Fediverse services will never lie to you and tell you your data is deleted, because it can’t be.


  • I’m going down the rabbit hole and people are forced to queue up for what I’m assuming is the equivalent of a serial key?

    Not quite. A serial key is permanent, it lasts forever, although some software did try to use online and update services to identify bad serials this was trivial to block, because it’s essentially trying to backpedal a valid key into an invalid one. It only needs to be valid once, then you make sure to block anything that invalidates it afterwards (usually blocking the update servers at the DNS level), job done.

    That’s different from a token. Tokens use something along the lines of at least rolling-code type security, similar to how your car keys or garage door opener keep generating new codes so someone with a scanner can’t just record the code it uses once and then have that be copied and replayed over and over again indefinitely. The trick with a token like this is that you need to keep updating it or it becomes invalid after some timeframe or number of uses. Hence the online activation. That’s required to get your next token or set of tokens.