My first thought: If it isn’t always running it honestly not a major concern how much memory the weather app uses.

My second thought: 1.2GB WTF? Ok, that is way over the top. The executive in charge should be fired.

My third thought: 250MB? That is still a little unnecessary, even if it probably does fall under the “doesn’t matter” threshold.

My fourth thought: gnome-weather uses 180MB, not great, not bad.

In theory it is safe. When a Nix package is built it isn’t “installed”. Unless root is running/installing random packages out of the Nix store there is no problem. As long as the user’s aren’t added to the trusted-users option they shouldn’t be able to cause any problems for other users.

However like any multi-user system you are sharing a Linux kernel. A kernel is a very complex piece of software with a huge attack surface. Privileged escalation vulnerabilities are commonly found. (This also applies to the nix-daemon, but it is a bit smaller attack surface but vulnerabilities are still occasionally found.) So you shouldn’t assume strong security isolation. I would say that a setup like this is acceptable for mostly-trusted people like coworkers or friends that are not expected to actively exploit vulnerabilities but definitely wouldn’t let random unknown users use the system.

So if you want strong isolation use a VM or separate hardware, but then you won’t be able to share the builds and packages defeating the point in this case.

I understand that this is frustrating but it is arguably the right option. If the correct owner can recover the account without TOTP then the TOTP isn’t really protecting the account.

Of course there are various ways to authenticate and it can make sense to have authentication to be (username + password + OTP) OR (email verification) but for a lot of people that email verification is a weaker link. It is more secure to only allow the former.

What I wish is that more sites would document their account recovery procedure. Often times they ask for a phone number for verification or notifications and that silently becomes a backdoor into the account. Even better would be if users can select what authentication combos are supported on a per-account basis (there are a few companies with “lockdown” settings that are a simplified version of this).

Of course it then becomes important to make it clear to the user “if you ever loose you X your account is forever lost”. It shouldn’t be surprise.

This advice feels like “Have you moved to the surface of the sun? Make sure to drink lots of water.” It’s not wrong, but also not particularly helpful. The only solution is to stop buying these things. Ideally take them back and get a refund if it isn’t too late.

Please explain what you mean and how this could be abused. What does “real” mean in this context? They both have the same code. It would probably help if you can provide a specific attack that could actually cause harm rather than just stating facts that have unclear risk.

It doesn’t mutate history. It just creates a new branch of history in their own fork. Just like any new commit would do.

I don’t understand. Why does having two commit IDs with the exact same code cause problems.

A green “Verified” badge on GitHub is supposed to mean that a trusted author signed it

The author did sign it. It is the exact same code.

An attacker can reissue the same signed code under a fresh ID that’s still verified to slip past.

To split past what? At best it seems that they would be able to have a different ID for the exact same code, which seems harmless? Slightly confusing at worst.

Nix also doesn’t use PGP signatures, it requires a separate hash of the resulting commit (the files with the .git directory stripped by default).

I’m a little confused by what this is saying. It seems that you can create a basically identical commit with a different signature and thus a different (hashed) ID.

So basically you can take a Signature S1 and produce a valid Signature S2 over the same data that is not identical.

This doesn’t seem like a very useful exploit primitive to me. Not nothing, but doesn’t seem like a big deal. I feel like I am misunderstanding something.

No, the DRM wouldn’t work at higher levels so you would have the same requirements with regard to 4k.

The idea that putting this on your phone is bonkers is bonkers to me. Why would you want to carry around a journal or paper when you have everything on your phone? It can also be more easily backed up and synced.

It shouldn’t be normal that this data is stolen and sold. That is 100% the problem, not the fact that people track things on computers.

Nah, 90% chance that they do something stupider.

It’s also super locked down. You are only allowed to use it if Google or Apple says that your device is authorized. So no root, no custom ROMs. Unless your phone is owned by a corporation and that corporation is blessed by Apple or Google you are out of luck. (There are currently ways around this but the gaps are slowly being closed as older devices are phased out.)

This is a case of the streetlight effect. Evaluating the skills needed to do the job is very difficult in an interview setting, so most of the focus going on evaluating skills that are easy to evaluate in an interview (such as people skills).

It isn’t wrong, as all else being equal it is still better to hire the person with better skills that you can measure but obviously is not a strong evaluation of candidate quality.

those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total

This is actually a good thing for longevity. Start up and stopping is the hardest part of a drive’s life. So you will see more failures on a personal PC that you turn off every night than a server drive running 24/7. Laptop drives will typically fare the worst as they may be power cycled many times a day, often fully stop when idle for power saving and get shaken much more than other drives.

For me the biggest benefit is the ease of applying patches. For example in Nix I can easily take a patch that is either unreleased, or that I wrote myself, and apply it to my systems immediately. I don’t need to wait for it to be released upstream then packaged in my distro. This allows me to fix problems and get new features quickly without needing to mess with my system in any other way (no packages in other directories that need to be cleaned up, no extra steps after updates to remember, no cases where some packages are using different versions and no breaking due to library ABI breaks).

Another benefit that you are pointing at is changing build flags. Often times I want to enable an optional feature that my distro doesn’t enable by default.

Lastly building packages with different micro-architecture optimizations can be beneficial. I don’t do this often but occasionally if I want to run some compute-heavy work it can be nice to get a small performance boost.

Credit: https://sarahcandersen.com/post/770488479034605568

Your Firefox install contains a file called omni.ja. For example on many Linux machines it will be at /usr/lib/firefox/browser/omni.ja. This file is a ZIP archive and contains your places.xhtml as well as other browser files. The exact paths are not always obvious as there is some remapping taking place (see the .manifest files in the archive) but I think the vast majority of chrome:// paths come from this archive.

We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy.

Why are these TypeScript + JSX rather than just SVGs? It seems that the paths are defined as SVG but they are using some JavaScript framework to define the animations rather than just using SVG or CSS animations.

Even then how you you know? I don’t think anyone can reliably look at a vegetable and tell you how nutritious it is. I don’t think it is reasonable to have the general population being experts in evaluating vegetables.

I think what could work here is mandated labeling. This is required for most foods but generally not produce. I think there are some reasonable reasons for this, but for farms producing huge volumes it seems that occasional testing that gets reported at the store would make sense.