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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 23rd, 2023

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  • An overarching principle of security is that of minimum privilege: everything (every process, every person) should have the minimum privileges it needs to do what it does, and where possible, that privilege should be explicitly granted temporarily and then dropped.

    This means that any issue: a security breach or a mistake can’t access or break anything except whatever the component or person who had the issue could access or break, and that that access is minimal.

    Suppose that you hit a page which exploits the https://www.hkcert.org/security-bulletin/mozilla-firefox-remote-code-execution-vulnerability_20230913 vulnerability in Firefox, or one like it, allowing remote code execution. If Firefox is running as root, the remote attacker now completely controls that machine. If you have SSH keys to other servers on there, they are all compromised. Your personal data could be encrypted for ransom. Anything that server manages, such as a TV or smart home equipment, could be manipulated arbitrarily, and possibly destroyed.

    The same is true for any piece of software you use, because this is a general principle. Most distributions I believe don’t let you ssh in as root for that reason.

    In short: don’t log in to anything as root; log in as a regular user and use sudo to temporarily perform administrator actions.

    P.S. your description of the situation shows you don’t know the nature of vulnerabilities and security - if you’re running servers then this is something you should learn more about in short order.



  • Damn this couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past months how it used to be that when you disagreed with someone, you’d still have something shared with them. Not quite the same as the social media aspect, but when TV was all broadcast on a few channels, you’d probably find a show in common. When the only news was national newspapers and broadcasters, you might both be reading the same paper but disagreeing on the articles. My thinking was going down the lines of “this meant everyone had a shared truth” which is kind of like the social media bubble that the research seems to disagree with, but also down the lines of “this meant everyone had, to an extent, a shared identity” at least within a large group like a country, linguistic or ethnic subdivision.

    There was something special about the old internet. The idea that the acrimonious disagreements might have been less bitter due to their nature is tantalising. There’s also something to bear in mind for Lemmy: the old internet, as much as the interest groups it spawned, was united by a shared interest in the internet specifically - and technology in general. The internet wasn’t as necessary and ubiquitous, so most people there had to have some other motivation to be on it. That itself was a shared interest that allowed people to find commonality. Lemmy is the same: people here are a subsection of the internet, brought here because they’re drawn to openness not provided by unfederated platforms. That is its own commanlity, and it won’t exist if Lemmy outgrows those other platforms.






  • I don’t think a good response to " breaks " is to say "yes, because was designed to work with and hasn’t been updated to use ". Part of the task of replacing something old - onerous though it be - is to provide a smooth route to support old programs and functionality.

    Wayland deliberately broke everything, but then was rolled out prematurely at least on some distros, before giving the vast X ecosystem enough time (which was guaranteed to be a long time, due to how large and entrenched it was) to update. Besides which, the “OUTDATED” post has an awful lot of things you acknowledge are still issues!