i’m lizard 🦎

  • 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • Given that the UUID changed, you almost certainly made a new LUKS container, overwriting the old one. That’s bad, because the LUKS header is the only source of the actual encryption key that was used, and making a new one will overwrite both the main header as well as its backup copy immediately. Your password/keyfile/whatever is merely used to decrypt the part of the header that has the actual encryption key, and that’s gone in that case.

    Unless you have access to a header backup from before that, there’s a fairly strong chance it’s irrecoverable. I’d suggest going through any archives you might have to see if you have such a backup - most of the instructions on the Gentoo wiki encourage making one, so you might have made one through the power of copying & pasting instructions. Should be a file of around 16MB.



  • Some people are opposed to sudo being a fairly complex program with an awkward to understand configuration language and a couple of methods that can fetch config from elsewhere. Fixing upstream sudo can’t happen because those features exist and are presumably used by some subset of people, so straight up removing them is not good, but luckily doas and sudo-rs exist as alternatives with a somewhat stripped featureset and less footguns.

    Others are opposed to the concept of SUID. Underneath all the SUID stuff lies far more complexity than is obvious at first sight. There’s a pretty decent chunk of code in glibc’s libdl that will treat all kinds of environment variables differently based on whether an executable is SUID, and when that goes wrong, it’s reported as a glibc bug (last year’s glibc CVE-2023-4911 was this). And that gets all the more weird when fancy Linux features like namespaces get involved.

    Removing SUID requires an entirely different implementation and the service manager is the logical place for that. That’s not just Lennart’s idea; s6, as minimal and straight to the point as it tends to be, also implements s6-sudo{,d,c}. It’s a bit more awkward to use but is a perfectly “Unix philosophy” style implementation of this very same idea.


  • This is a fork of the evaluator/language implementation/daemon/builder/whatever you want to call it. The other one (Auxolotl) is a fork of Nixpkgs, the repository of build scripts and all the NixOS misc pieces.

    Or put into other terms, this is a fork of APT/RPM as well as their associated builder tools, while Aux is a fork of Debian/Fedora/whatever. The Nix evaluator is a much more complex piece of software than most other package managers so it does benefit from having a dedicated team working on it.


  • If you’re a gamedev trying to make a decent mobile game, you’re competing on all the usual fronts like price and perceived quality, but competing for attention has gotten a whole lot harder when [arbitrary card game] has a hour of dailies, [arbitrary gacha game] always has a special campaign going and [arbitrary fake gambling game] is about to have its battle pass end and they’re only halfway through. And that has gone up by so, so much over the past decade. It was never good but it’s gotten absolutely egregious. At this point, even any generic snake clone will have a battle pass.

    Every person that ends up committed to a couple of those long-term-commitment games ends up having much less time for other games. And they make a lot of money, which means they also end up having a hell of a marketing budget.


  • Looking at the implementation, it doesn’t really implement sudoers or tools like sudoedit in any way. systemd-run has already been an existing tool for quite some time and this is really just a different CLI for it. That tool asks systemd to make a temporary new service and immediately run it. That, in turn, requires blanket yes/no approval for org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units via polkit.

    So with run0, you can either do everything or you can do nothing. In-betweens are just not a thing at the moment. There’s very little new backend code running as root.

    run0 bash should behave very similar to something like systemd-run --uid=0 --gid=0 --wait --same-dir --send-sighup --pty --pipe --collect bash and the majority of those options have been available for quite a while.



  • It’s not what the buttons look like, it’s what they do. In Krita, making an ellipse involves clicking the ellipse button and dragging it somewhere. You now have an ellipse, and you hold shift if you want to make it a circle instead.

    In GIMP there is no direct ellipse tool, there’s only an ellipse select tool, likewise you hold shift to make it a circle. Then you use a menu item to select the border of your selection, getting a popup to let you determine how much pixels you want. And then, you use the fill tool or fill menu item to fill it. That’s a surprising amount of clicks to accomplish what’s most likely the single most common task for anyone opening a screenshot in an image editor. I’m not aware of any easier/faster method to do it. Feels like it should exist, but this is also what you get if you search for how to draw a circle in GIMP, so if it exists everyone’s missing it.

    GIMP’s method gives you more power, but you rarely ever need that power. But when you do, Krita also has ellipse select, border select and various fill tools that can be strung together in the same way.



  • The argument does exist. This article by PEN America is one of the most widely spread ones and largely misrepresents the situation. It’s based on a PopSci article with a similar headline, though the contents of the article tell a rather different story.

    Nothing really says out loud what’s going on: Republicans enacted an extremely vague and unrealistically short deadline book ban as part of a bill (that does some other stuff like removing AIDS education), forcing schools to either throw out every book that might be vaguely suspect or resort to funny measures like this. This school’s use of ChatGPT was purely to save books that were on a human-assembled list of challenged books, to reduce the negative effect of the book ban, while being potentially defensible in court (remains to be seen how that’ll work out, but they made an “objective” process and stuck to it - that’s what matters to them).


  • Okay, the thing that really matters to me:

    “Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books,” Exman tells PopSci via email. “At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here really is a defensible process.”

    According to Exman, she and fellow administrators first compiled a master list of commonly challenged books, then removed all those challenged for reasons other than sexual content. For those titles within Mason City’s library collections, administrators asked ChatGPT the specific language of Iowa’s new law, “Does [book] contain a description or depiction of a sex act?”

    It really only got rid of things that would’ve otherwise had to go to begin with, while saving a few others.

    It feels a bit closer to malicious compliance more than truly letting the AI decide the fate of things, and doing full proper compliance within the 3 months they were given would’ve been nigh impossible. I’m suspecting that the lawmakers were hoping that by giving them such a small timeframe, schools would throw everything vaguely suspect out. This ultimately leaves more books accessible, which I consider to be a good end result, even if the process to get there is a little weird.



  • I do and I can confirm there are no requests (except for robots.txt and the odd /favicon.ico). Google sorta respects robots.txt. They do have a weird gotcha though: they still put the URLs in search, they just appear with an useless description. Their suggestion to avoid that can be summarized as: don’t block us, let us crawl and just tell us not to use the result, just trust us! when they could very easily change that behavior to make more sense. Not a single damn person with Google blocked in robots.txt wants to be indexed, and their logic on password protecting kind of makes sense but my concern isn’t security, it’s that I don’t like them (or Bing or Yandex).

    Another gotcha I’ve seen linked is that their ad targeting bot for Google AdSense (different crawler) doesn’t respect a * exclusion, but that kind of makes sense since it will only ever visit your site if you place AdSense ads on it.

    And I suppose they’ll train Bard on all data they scraped because of course. Probably no way to opt out of that without opting out of Google Search as well.