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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • They aren’t. From a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ by u/tehdang:

    For people who have stumbled into this thread while googling “ublock vs origin”. Take a look at this link:

    http://tuxdiary.com/2015/06/14/ublock-origin/

    "Chris AlJoudi [current owner of uBlock] is under fire on Reddit due to several actions in recent past:

    • In a Wikipedia edit for uBlock, Chris removed all credits to Raymond [Hill, original author and owner of uBlock Origin] and added his name without any mention of the original author’s contribution.
    • Chris pledged a donation with overblown details on expenses like $25 per week for web hosting.
    • The activities of Chris since he took over the project are more business and advertisement oriented than development driven."

    So I would recommend that you go with uBlock Origin and not uBlock. I hope this helps!

    Edit: Also got this bit of information from here:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/32ory7/ublock_is_back_under_a_new_name/

    TL;DR:

    • gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of “my facebook isnt working plz help” issues.
    • he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic’s version back to himself).
    • chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a “made with love by Chris” note.
    • gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn’t confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic’s version).
    • Google took down gorhill’s extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
    • gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.

  • Is it possible to force a corruption if a disk clone is attempted?

    Anything that corrupts a single file would work. You could certainly change your own disk cloning binaries to include such functionality, but if someone were accessing your data directly via their own OS, that wouldn’t be effective. I don’t know of a way to circumvent that last part other than ensuring that the data isn’t left on disk when you’re done. For example, you could use a ramdisk instead of non-volatile storage. You could delete or intentionally corrupt the volume when you unmount it. You could split the file, storing half on your USB flash drive and keeping the other half on your PC. You could XOR the file with contents of another file (e.g., one on your USB flash drive instead of on your PC) and then XOR it again when you need to access it.

    What sort of attack are you trying to protect from here?

    If the goal is plausible deniability, then it’s worth noting that VeraCrypt volumes aren’t identifiable as distinct from random data. So if you have a valid reason for having a big block of random data on disk, you could say that’s what the file was. Random files are useful because they are not compressible. For example, you could be using those files to test: network/storage media performance or compression/hash/backup&restore/encrypt&decrypt functions. You could be using them to have a repeatable set of random values to use in a program (like using a seed, but without necessarily being limited to using a PRNG to generate the sequence).

    If that’s not sufficient, you should look into hidden volumes. The idea is that you take a regular encrypted volume, whose free space, on disk, looks just like random data, you store your hidden volume within the free space. The hidden volume gets its own password. Then, you can mount the volume using the first password and get visibility into a “decoy” set of files or use the second password to view your “hidden” files. Note that when mounting it to view the decoy files, any write operations will have a chance of corrupting the hidden files. However, you can supply both passwords to mount it in a protected mode, allowing you to change the decoy files and avoid corrupting the hidden ones.


  • It sounds like you want these files to be encrypted.

    Someone already suggested encrypting them with GPG, but maybe you want the files themselves to also be isolated, even while their data is encrypted. In that case, consider an encrypted volume. I assume you’re familiar with LUKS - you can encrypt a partition with a different password and disable auto-mount pretty easily. But if you’d rather use a file-based volume, then check out VeraCrypt - it’s a FOSS-ish [1], cross-platform tool that provides this capability. The official documentation is very Windows-focused - the ArchLinux wiki article is a pretty useful Linux focused alternative.

    Normal operation is that you use a file to store the volume, which can be “dynamic” with a max size or can be statically sized (you can also directly encrypt a disk partition, but you could do that with LUKS, too). Then, before you can access the files - read or write - you have to enter the password, supply the encryption key, etc., in order to unlock it.

    Someone without the password but with permission to modify the file will be capable of corrupting it (which would prevent you from accessing every protected file), but unless they somehow got access to the password they wouldn’t be able to view or modify the protected files.

    The big advantage over LUKS is ease of creating/mounting file-based volumes and portability. If you’re concerned about another user deleting your encrypted volume, then you can easily back it up without decrypting it. You can easily load and access it on other systems, too - there are official, stable apps on Windows and Mac, though you’ll need admin access to run them. On Android and iOS options are a bit more slim - EDS on Android and Disk Decipher on iOS. If you’re copying a volume to a Linux system without VeraCrypt installed, you’ll likely still be able to mount it, as dm-crypt has support for VeraCrypt volumes.

    • 1 - It’s based on TrueCrypt, which has some less free restrictions, e.g., c. Phrase "Based on TrueCrypt, freely available at http://www.truecrypt.org/" must be displayed by Your Product (if technically feasible) and contained in its documentation.”


  • hedgehog@ttrpg.networktoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    15 days ago

    Tons of laptops with top notch specs for 1/2 the price of a M1/2 out there

    The 13” M1 MacBook Air is $700 new from Best Buy. Better specced versions are available for $600 used (buy-it-now) on eBay, but the base specced version is available for $500 or less.

    What $300 or less used / $350 new laptops are you recommending here?


  • theoretically they can

    Is this a purely theoretical capability or is there actually evidence they have this capability?

    it’s already been proven that they can tap into anyone’s phone

    Listening into a conversation that you’re intentionally relaying across public infrastructure and gaining access to the phone itself are two very different things.

    The use of proprietary software in literally everything

    1. Speak for yourself. And let’s be real, if you’re on Lemmy you’re 10 times more likely to be running Linux.
    2. Proprietary != closed source
    3. Do you really think that just because something is closed source means that it can’t be analyzed?

    the amount of exploits the NSA has on hand

    How many zero-day exploits does the NSA have? How many can be deployed remotely and without a nontrivial action by a user?

    what’s stopping the NSA from spying this much?

    Scale, capacity, cost, number of employees

    —-

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose government surveillance. We absolutely should. But like another commenter pointed out, I’m much more concerned with the amount of data that corporations collect and have.



  • That’s still a single point of failure.

    So is TLS or the compromise of a major root certificate authority, and those have no bearing on whether an approach qualifies as using 2FA.

    The question is “How vulnerable is your authentication approach to attack?” If an approach is especially vulnerable, like using SMS or push notifications (where you tap to confirm vs receiving a code that you enter in the app) for 2FA, then it should be discouraged. So the question becomes “Is storing your TOTP secrets in your password manager an especially vulnerable approach to authentication?” I don’t believe it is, and further, I don’t believe it’s any more vulnerable than using a separate app on your mobile device (which is the generally recommended alternative).

    What happens if someone finds an exploit that bypasses the login process entirely?

    Then they get a copy of your encrypted vault. If your vault password is weak, they’ll be able to crack it and get access to everything. This is a great argument for making sure you have a good vault password, but there are a lot of great arguments for that.

    Or do you mean that they get access to your logged in vault by compromising your device? That’s the most likely worst case scenario, and in such a scenario:

    • all of your logged in accounts can be compromised by stealing your sessions
    • even if you use a different app for your 2FA, those TOTP secrets and passkeys can be stolen - they have to be on a different device
    • you’re also likely to be subject to a ransomware attack

    In other words, your only accounts that are not vulnerable in this situation solely because their TOTP secret is on a different device are the ones you don’t use on that device in the first place. This is mostly relevant if your computer is compromised - if your phone is compromised, then it doesn’t matter that you use a separate password manager and authenticator app.

    If you use an account on your computer, since it can be compromised without having the credentials on device, you might as well have the credentials on device. If you’re concerned about the device being compromised and want to protect an account that you don’t use on that device, then you can store the credentials in a different vault that isn’t stored on your device.

    Even more common, though? MITM phishing attacks. If your password manager verifies the url, fills the password, and fills your TOTP, then that can help against those. Start using a different device and those protections fall away. If your vault has been compromised and your passwords are known to an attacker, but they don’t have your TOTP secrets, you’re at higher risk of erroneously entering them into a phishing site.

    Either approach (same app vs different app) has trade-offs and both approaches are vulnerable to different sorts of attacks. It doesn’t make sense to say that one counts as 2FA but the other doesn’t. They’re differently resilient - that’s it. Consider your individual threat model and one may be a better option than the other.

    That said, if you’re concerned about the resiliency of your 2FA approach, then look into using dedicated security keys. U2F / WebAuthn both give better phishing resistance than a browser extension filling a password or TOTP can, and having the private key inaccessible can help mitigate device compromise concerns.




  • I haven’t worked with Scribus but I’ve heard good things about it, so I don’t think you’d be making a wrong choice by going with it. For this use case, the main reasons I can think of for why LaTeX would be preferable would be:

    • if you preferred working with it, or with a particular LaTeX tool
    • if you want to learn one tool or the other
    • if being able to write a script to create the output is something you want to do and the equivalent is not possible in Scribus



  • If you use that docker compose file, I recommend you comment out the build section and uncomment the image section in the lemmy service.

    I also recommend you use a reverse proxy and Docker networks rather than exposing the postgres instance on port 5433, but if you aren’t familiar with Docker networks you can leave it as is for now. If you’re running locally and don’t open that port in your router’s firewall, it’s a non-issue unless there’s an attacker on your LAN, but given that you’re not gaining anything from exposing it (unless you need to connect to the DB directly regularly - as a one off you could temporarily add the port mapping), it doesn’t make sense to increase your attack surface for no benefit.


  • I haven’t personally used any of these, but looking them over, Tipi looks the most encouraging to me, followed by Yunohost, based largely on the variety of apps available but also because it looks like Tipi lets you customize the configuration much more. Freedom Box doesn’t seem to list the apps in their catalog at all and their site seems basically useless, so I ruled it out on that basis alone.


  • I am trying to avoid having to having an open port 22

    If you’re working locally you don’t need an open port.

    If you’re on a different machine but on the same network, you don’t need to expose port 22 via your router’s firewall. If you use key-based auth and disable password-based auth then this is even safer.

    If you want access remotely, then you still don’t have to expose port 22 as long as you have a vpn set up.

    That said, you don’t need to use a terminal to manage your docker containers. I use Portainer to manage all but my core containers - Traefik, Authelia, and Portainer itself - which are all part of a single docker compose file. Portainer stacks accept docker compose files so adding and configuring applications is straightforward.

    I’ve configured around 50 apps on my server using Docker Compose with Portainer but have only needed to modify the Dockerfile itself once, and that was because I was trying to do something that the original maintainer didn’t support.

    Now, if you’re satisfied with what’s available and with how much you can configure it without using Docker, then it’s fine to avoid it. I’m just trying to say that it’s pretty straightforward if you focus on just understanding the important parts, mainly:

    • docker compose
    • docker networks
    • docker volumes

    If you decide to go that route, I recommend TechnoTim’s tutorials on Youtube. I personally found them helpful, at least.