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neoCrimeLabs

626 karma · joined March 5, 2014

Security engineer; Boldly striving toward mediocrity, and beyond.
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neoCrimeLabs··on 'Pink Slime' Is Infecting AI Chatbots Ahead of the Midterms
I presume because if it has a name, it's easier to control the narrative with a larger group of people
neoCrimeLabs··on Show HN: Open-Source eInk Bike Computer
Looks good, but unless I'm severely mistaken it's a SAAS, not self hosted. As long as it's on someone else's service I don't own it and it's not under my control.

I openly admit, I have not spent much time researching this subject, was just in the back of my brain as I migrate away from SAAS and IAAS.

neoCrimeLabs··on Show HN: Open-Source eInk Bike Computer
Within 10 seconds I was convinced I needed to try this.

For me, the next step for this is taking all the sensor data recorded for a ride, and loading it into my own fitness tracking database that I own, control, and isn't tied to someone else's profits.

neoCrimeLabs··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
I am surprised how little Jacob Applebaum's experience border crossing in 2010 is mentioned in relation to this story, because it is relevant.

https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/researcher-detained-at-u-s...

While so many people try to come up with technical solutions for legal concerns, the method Jacob used was pragmatic.

You cannot be compelled to turn over what you do not have

If you're concerned about your digital devices while crossing borders, do not forget a viable option is to simply not have a digital device with you when you cross.

Put simply, do not limit your imagination to purely technical means.

Of course, there may be means to compel you to retrieve that data, but typically at border crossings your primary threat surface is physical possession.

neoCrimeLabs··on Have you restarted your computer this week?
You reminded me of this story. Windows, not *nix, though.

Years ago my cube-mate was called to support a desktop user who has having problems with their machine that couldn't be fixed remotely. He realized the user's HDD was full, so the first thing he did was clear the user's trash bin. Mysteriously the machine came up with a ton of free space.

The user seemed happy their machine was up. Nor long after, the help-desk called my cube-mate asking what they did to the user's machine; The user couldn't find any of their files that they had organized in the trash bin.

neoCrimeLabs··on Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages
Better analogy would blaming a supermarket that hosts an outdoor farmers market because you contracted food poisoning from a stand owned by someone else - NOT for buying food from within the supermarket itself.

Meanwhile one of the other customers has norovirus and is deliberately touching everything so others contract it.

neoCrimeLabs··on Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police
I couldn't help but remember when the police talked to David Hobby (aka Strobist) for photographing a tree.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/chronic...

neoCrimeLabs··on Security through obscurity is not bad
Agreed with your sentiment, and that was a great example.

Just like any security control, if it's your only means of security, it will not offer much risk reduction. Just like all security controls, the if you want risk reduction use more security controls together. Like all security controls, there is no way to eliminate risk, just reduce it as much as possible while still being able to effectively achieve your mission.

Because of this I believe security through obscurity to be important component in a healthy and mature risk posture.

It irks me when it's dismissed because obscurity is not security. No single security control is security on its own.

neoCrimeLabs··on Flickr: The first and last great photo platform
2008-ish?
neoCrimeLabs··on Flickr: The first and last great photo platform
After Yahoo
neoCrimeLabs··on Flickr: The first and last great photo platform
Great?

I remember that time I reported someone for reposting my images.

Flickr's response was deleting my profile, all of my photos, and not responding to any of my attempts to contact them.

On the upside, it was a good lesson to not trust service providers.

neoCrimeLabs··on LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
Not taking sides here. This communication could have been, far, far better handled had a crisis-PR person, or frankly any decent PR person, been involved.
neoCrimeLabs··on OpenScreen is an open-source alternative to Screen Studio
OBS is more focused on live-streaming, even if it can be general purpose.

OpenScreen is more about screen recording, once recorded it turns into a simple-ish NLE that is focused on editing screen-casts.

neoCrimeLabs··on The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner
Yeah, there are also business that provide this as a service.
neoCrimeLabs··on Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk
I expected years ago that the government, at some point, would realize if they are interested in the data that they could purchase, other nation states would be as well and could use it against us. Therefore the logical conclusion would be to declare collection and sale of such data to be a matter of national security and strongly restrict it as such.

The detail I failed to understand at the time was just how much money there is in data collection and brokerage.

neoCrimeLabs··on Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC
The datacenter I built in 2007 was DC.

Many datacenters I'd been to at that point were already DC.

Didn't think this was that new of a trend in 2026, but also acknowledge I did not visit more than a handful of datacenters since 2007.

It just seemed like a undenyably logical thing to do.

neoCrimeLabs··on The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
One of the worst volume controls I have run across is when the UI tries to simulate a physical knob. More often than not I see this on VST Plugins and I have yet to find one that I actually like - they are all equally terrible.

They appear to fall into 3 buckets:

1) Worst: Direction of the cursor has move in a circular pattern as if dragging a physical knob with a cursor.

2) Annoying, but least common: You have to move the cursor horizontally to move the knob

3) Most common, but still annoying: You have to move the cursor vertically to move the knob.

neoCrimeLabs··on Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?
NeXTSTEP was everything from the OS to the user experience and everything inbetween.

I'd say there were 3 distinct abstractions within NextSTEP: - The microkernel / OS (Mach / BSD) (for the hardware) - The Objective C based SDK - The User experience (not just window manager, but largely the window manager)

The SDK is what is still arguably the most highly regarded part of NeXTSTEP even today. That aside, at the time nothing else was so well polished and integrated on almost every level.

neoCrimeLabs··on Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?
Also, https://www.gnustep.org/

That reminds me, I should pull out my NeXT Cube and play with it. That machine is 33mhz of pure power. :-D None the less I still love it.

neoCrimeLabs··on Certbot and Let's Encrypt Now Support IP Address Certificates
Update: Had less time to post than I realized, hence the terse reply.

Meant to say those solutions are in addition to Lets Encrypt. An X509 certificate is an X509 certificate, regardless if its for https, imaps, or smtps. If you're distributing your stuff across multiple hosts or containers, then it makes sense to use some sort of automation, configuration management, or certificate management/distribution system.

neoCrimeLabs··on Certbot and Let's Encrypt Now Support IP Address Certificates
The same thing everyone else does. Build automation, use configuration management, use cert manager or other similar solutions.
neoCrimeLabs··on Certbot and Let's Encrypt Now Support IP Address Certificates
They never stopped supporting it, to my knowledge. I first started using their certs for my IMAP and SMTP servers 10ish years ago, at least.

If you use HTTP-01 challenge method you require an HTTP server on the host.

If you don't want an HTTP server on your imap/smtp server you need to use the DNS-01 challenge method.

neoCrimeLabs··on An old photo of a large BBS (2022)
This makes me wish I took photos of Diversi-Dial (aka D-Dial) setups, which somehow impressed me more due to how much they accomplished with much much less hardware.

They were able to set up a 7 x 300baud modems in real-time chat system on an Apple ][ . The original marketing called it a CB (Citizens Band) Simulator. They were able to run up to 1200baud, but I never saw one of those functioning.

As if 7 people chatting through a single 6502 wasn't impressive enough, many of them dedicated one or two of their lines to interlinking with other D-dials.

Talk about an esoteric memory.

- https://www.ddial.com/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversi-Dial

neoCrimeLabs··on Ask HN: How to be alone?
There are a lot of great comments here and I want to echo so many of them and not duplicate them.

There is one thing I'd like to add:

Learning to be happy while alone takes practice - lots of it. It's not easy, but it does get easier.

Learning to enjoy being along was one of the most important moments in my life, and it changed a lot of how I see the world now. I feel like this is up there with learning self-care that works for you - equally important and yet different.

neoCrimeLabs··on Talos: Hardware accelerator for deep convolutional neural networks
Agreed.

Also, in my experience, a great way to run K8s in IAAS while minimizing vendor lock-in.

neoCrimeLabs··on Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state
Agreed.

That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.

I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.

Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."

My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.

For others', that might be an impossible task.

neoCrimeLabs··on KDE's new Plasma Login Manager is tightly bound to systemd
You are correct. My comment was over simplified deliberately. I felt integration and scope accounted for the details in a TL;DR one slide answer.
neoCrimeLabs··on KDE's new Plasma Login Manager is tightly bound to systemd
To over-simplify, it's about conflicting philosophical alignment:

- systemd: integration and features at the cost of complexity and scope

- traditional: simplicity and composability at the cost of boot speed and convenience

systemd conflicts against the more traditional unix philosophies as well as minimalism.

neoCrimeLabs··on Text-based web browsers
This cannot be repeated enough.
neoCrimeLabs··on Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers
This makes me more likely to buy Bose.

Why would I buy something that a vendor intends to kill off in an attempt to make me buy again?

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