I’ll believe it when we dismantle the nukes, class society, and fossil fuel industry. A better world is possible but only if we fight for it.

It’s really pretty

Thanks for posting

Programmers can trust language security features too much…

Of course, they’re nice to have and really can make things easier to implement securely but it’s still very easy to introduce security problems or bugs into any code. This is just an unsolvable problem of writing imperative code. All imperative code will reliably have memory leaks (even in Java!) and security holes because no compiler can check to see if you thought of everything.

And large and complex compilers/interpreters with these security features can end up introducing their own security problems or bugs in the process of implementing them.

I’m just tired of people entirely dismissing languages like C because they don’t have these features. Especially when the operating systems their code runs on and their languages may even be implemented in C!

Yeahh, you have a good point lol. Bash and the GNU ecosystem have developed their own sprawling problems.

True, but a man page is a different thing from a tool’s built-in usage information.

Running grep without parameters is also pretty fucking useless.

The difference is grep is a simple tool that can take in text, transform it, and output it to a console. It operates in a powerful and easy to understand way by default (take in text and print lines in the text containing the search parameters). This vmalert tool is just an interface to another, even more complicated piece of software.

Claims to have a Unix background, doesn’t RTFM.

Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don’t even come close…

Translation: Author does not understand APIs.

The point is that these abstractions do not mesh with the rest of the system. HTTP and REST are very strange ways to accomplish IPC or networked communication on Unix when someone would normally accomplish the same thing with signals, POSIX IPC, a simpler protocol over TCP with BSD sockets, or any other thing already in the base system. It does make sense to develop things this way, though, if you’re a corpo web company trying to manage ad-hoc grids of Linux systems for your own profit rather than trying to further the development of the base system.

Ok. Now give me high availability

I would hope the filesystems you use are “high availability” lol

atomic writes to sets of keys

You’re right, that would be nice. Someone should put together a Plan 9 fileserver that can do that or something.

caching, access control

Plan 9 is capable of handling distributed access controls and caching (even of remote fileservers!). There’s probably some Linux filesystems that can do that too.

In the end, it’s not so much about specific tools that can accomplish this but that there are alternatives to the dominant way of doing things and that the humble file metaphor can still represent these concepts in a simpler and more robust way.

This reads as “I applied to the jobs and got rejected. There’s nothing wrong with me, so the jobs must be broken”.

This is the maybe the worst way of interpreting what they said. They can come and correct me if I’m wrong but I read that as: they have a particular ideological objection to this “cloud” ecosystem and the way it does things. It’s not a lack of skill as your comment implies but rather a rejection of this way of doing things.

Thanks for deleting your post. I hope our two communities can live and share in peace. There are certainly some hexbears over here who have been too antagonistic as well as some people here who seem to want to stir things up.

:blahaj-heart: (we have no such emoji on our instance but maybe you do lol)

Or maybe terminal emulation needs to be brought up to speed with modern computing. New terminal specs and all that.

Yeah, I agree. I should have been more clear lol. See my other comment.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I agree with you. I’m not talking about text-based interfaces and commands. I just mean the way Unix/POSIX handles “terminals” (devices that accept streams of characters according to a protocol established in the 70s) is an antiquated way of handling simple plain text streams. It made sense back then when there was a need to send commands to dumb terminals in-band with the plaintext but this doesn’t really make sense these days when your “terminal” is actually just a program pretending to be a dumb terminal running inside a window. When was the last time you used job control instead of opening another window?

Satire or not, it’s still correct lol. Terminals and terminal emulation need to be destroyed. Modern systems with graphics and windowing systems are not VT100s and that’s a good thing.

megi is the name of the kernel dev from czechia. He’s put in a lot of work and he’s pretty active in the matrix chats, but he’s not big on upstreaming his changes and some of his side projects he doesn’t even release the code… this seems like a good summary https://momi.ca/posts/2022-09-07-mainline.html

I think he might be doing a bit of “making himself necessary” in the ecosystem of A64 based devices tbh, You can’t entirely blame him but its bad for the community long term.

Thanks for the article! That 500k line diff from mainline is scary…

Plan9 is pretty befuddling still ngl but I’m starting to like what I see. I might have to install it on a raspberry pi and see what the fuss is about

Highly recommend this video to help you get around the UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt3Dr3jUPjo

Hope you have fun if you decide to try!

Partly inspired by this comment I actually fixed my melty pogo pin so I could switch back to using the keyboard!It wasn’t bad. I already had the pine64 replacement pins that are supposed to be a bit better, and thankfully the hole for the pin wasn’t totally destroyed like the ones I’ve seen pictures of online, so I just gave it a nudge with a soldering iron and it settled back into its proper position/angle.

Glad you got it fixed!

Agreed on pine64’s approach. I’m fine if they don’t want to be a software company but they need to just pay some kernel developers to get hardware support done and mainlined quickly for new devices if they want them to succeed. Their model almost kinda worked for the OG pinephone, there was enough buzz and development effort to get it to a usable state, but starting over all that work from scratch for every new device with little to no investment from the company that’s actually collecting the money for these things is so demoralizing. the pinephone/tab/book all just rely on one guy in czechia for the kernel support who is just hoping that if he doesn’t release his source some company will contract him to do similar work for their products.

Yeahh fr

What’s up with the kernel from the guy in Czechia? I knew most of the distros aren’t shipping mainline kernels but it’s so hard to find info online on this topic lol.

and the distro situation isn’t better, pretty sure the “official” ish distro for the pinetab 2 is danctnix which is just run by one very busy weeb hobbyist as far as I can tell lol

lol. Yeahh, even the official distro for most of the other Pine hardware is the most -pilled and mismanaged Linux project out there relative to how popular it is (Manjaro).

But yeah honestly low level software and hardware stuff is mostly over my head. it’s cool though, I try to always check it out when I get a chance. What do you even do on a plan 9 system? seems like it’d be hard to do anything resembling the modern web or run most applications on a system that obscure. but I also know next to nothing about it

Yeah, stuff like the web requires infrastructure like web browsers that is not very portable and on the order of millions of lines of code in size. A web browser is basically like an operating system of its own these days. That being said there is a Netsurf port to 9front and virtualization support on PCs in 9front (so you can run Linux). It’s a very different system and radically simpler than modern Unix or Windows. But it was designed by the people who made Unix with modern networking in mind and with the knowledge that everyone has a computer now (the word everyone used loosely). A lot of people (including me) just find it very easy and pleasing to write software for and use. You can accomplish a lot more with a lot less code. It’s extremely portable too, which makes it appealing as an official OS for a new hardware platform.

Is she a Hexbear user?

Oh I had never heard of that vendor! I’ll have to check them out. I’ve been looking at AliExpress on and off but it’s really hard to find stuff unless you know exactly what you want.

There’s some nice designs in China that seem impossible to get in the West. Would love to check out some of Loongson’s offerings or something like that. There’s also a line of Russian microprocessors called “Elbrus” that have a very interesting VLIW architecture. But that’s definitely impossible to get now with the sanctions.

I guess neither of those would be suitable for a portable device anyway lol. Maybe I’ll just deal with it and get some cheap widely available ARM stuff.

the part where it’s running windows not so much but it’s a better kb layout for sure

Yeahh lol they shipped with Windows CE. The cool thing is most of these have Linux or NetBSD ports!

The ppp is growing on me, especially since suspend and camera and shit work now but it is still janky (mine tried to melt a pogo pin ) and the battery life is atrocious yeah (though not bad with the keyboard’s 6000mAh!!). It may end up being a bridge for me that leads to not having a smartphone at all though lol.

Yeah I’m so glad they fixed the suspend. That really made the difference with it being usable or not. Sorry to hear about your pogo pin. One of my sim card holder pins broke off but I managed to shim it with a piece of tin foil lol. One of my other problems with hardware like this is that it’s so easy to break ;w;

Honestly I don’t mind the boot-up, tow-boot with built in jump drive is nice, and once its in linux I don’t have to care.

I just meant that the de facto standard for bringing up ARM machines is U-boot… which I hate dealing with. I just wish we had Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) everywhere rather than UEFI or U-boot tbh. Tow-boot is at least simple for the end user.

For me it’s just a matter of something that actually works tho, I don’t have nearly the time to build my own shit with custom chips on an architecture with even less support than aarch64. I’m already putting a lot into getting shit to work on mobile linux ARM

Oh of course, I just like hacking on hardware lol. I really dislike how PINE64 has taken such a hands-off approach with their hardware. It took years for the PPP to even get to this mildly-usable point. If I ever complete my hardware I’m gonna port the software it needs personally. Probably Plan 9 and NetBSD. (Linux is a mess all of its own…)

I have one of those! I like it but it just doesn’t have the same feel as a Jornada or something lol

The battery life is atrocious too. The RK3399 and ARM are also pretty janky on their own tbh. Especially boot-up…

Isn’t this beautiful?

I’m looking to design my own board. I’d use a RISC-V chip but they seem to be impossible to find through the usual electronics distributors. I might email SiFive or one of the other vendors but I suspect I won’t be able to acquire just a few chips cheaply…

Well Linux is using rdrand in place of the fTPM one so … from firmware to hardware.

That depends on your distribution’s setting of the CONFIG_RANDOM_TRUST_CPU compile-time configuration option and the random.trust_cpu sysctl setting. I’m not sure what the major distributions are doing with that at the moment.

Then again even if you generate random numbers using pure software, is your CPU or firmware FOSS and without bugs (cough … Debian OpenSSL maintainers, cough …)? If not, and you assume you can’t trust the firmware and hardware - all your random numbers are belong to us.

Like you said, it is impossible to be completely safe. But using proprietary cryptographic hardware/firmware, the inner workings of which are known only to Intel, introduces a lot of risk. Especially when we know the NSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars on bribing companies to introduce backdoors into their products. At least when it’s an open source cryptographic library they have to go to great lengths to create subtle bugs or broken algorithms that no one notices.

Our CPUs are certainly backdoored too, beyond RDRAND. But it’s way more complicated to compromise any arbitrary cryptographic algorithm running on the CPU with a backdoor than making a flawed hardware RNG. Any individual operation making up a cryptographic algorithm can be verified to have executed properly according to the specification of the instruction set. It would be very obvious, for example, if XORing two 0s produced a 1, that something is very wrong. So a backdoor like this would have to only activate in very specific circumstances and it would be very obvious, limiting its use to specific targets. But a black box that produces random numbers is very, very difficult to verify.

Ultimately, the real solution is the dissolution of the American security state and the computer monopolies.

If I’m fucked, they’re fucked.

Not if they’re the only ones who know about the backdoors.

Edit: I started writing that before your edit about the “Ken Thompson hack”. An element of any good backdoor would include obfuscation of its existence, of course. The issue is it is impossible to predict every possible permutation of operations that would result in discovery of the backdoor and account for them. Maybe if you had a sentient AI dynamically rewriting its own code… anyway, backdoors in tooling like compilers is very concerning. But I’m not too concerned about a Ken Thompson type attack there just because of how widely they’re used, how many different environments they run in, and how scrutinized the outputted code is.

👁 Imagine using any commercial firmware/hardware RNGs.

No, by running a relay or exit node you are opting in to routing traffic that could contain CSAM. This is a problem with all anonymous unmoderated distributed systems like Tor. With Freenet, for example, you’re even opting in to storing it (pieces of it in encrypted form that can’t be accessed without the content hash key).

Privacy is good but so is censorship (moderation). The censorship just needs to be implemented by an accountable group of people that share the same interests of the users. Tor is trying to solve a problem that can only be solved through social struggle with institutions of power.