sylver_dragon

Ultimately, it’s going to be down to your risk profile. What do you have on your machine which would wouldn’t want to lose or have released publicly? For many folks, we have things like pictures and personal documents which we would be rather upset about if they ended up ransomed. And sadly, ransomware exists for Linux. Lockbit, for example is known to have a Linux variant. And this is something which does not require root access to do damage. Most of the stuff you care about as a user exists in user space and is therefore susceptible to malware running in a user context.

The upshot is that due care can prevent a lot of malware. Don’t download pirated software, don’t run random scripts/binaries you find on the internet, watch for scam sites trying to convince you to paste random bash commands into the console (Clickfix is after Linux now). But, people make mistakes and it’s entirely possible you’ll make one and get nailed. If you feel the need to pull stuff down from the internet regularly, you might want to have something running as a last line of defense.

That said, ClamAV is probably sufficient. It has a real-time scanning daemon and you can run regular, scheduled scans. For most home users, that’s enough. It won’t catch anything truly novel, but most people don’t get hit by the truly novel stuff. It’s more likely you’ll be browsing for porn/pirated movies and either get served a Clickfix/Fake AV page or you’ll get tricked into running a binary you thought was a movie. Most of these will be known attacks and should be caught by A/V. Of course, nothing is perfect. So, have good backups as well.

I know that, during my own move from Windows to Linux, I found that the USB drive tended to lag under heavy read/write operations. I did not experienced that with Linux directly loaded on a SATA SSD. I also had some issues dealing with my storage drive (NVMe SSD) still using an NTFS file system. Once I went full Linux and ext4, it’s been nothing but smooth sailing.

As @MagicShel@lemmy.zip pointed out, performance will depend heavily on the generation of USB device and port. I was using a USB 3.1 device and a USB 3.1 port (no idea on the generation). So, speeds were ok-ish. By comparison, SATA 2 can have a transfer rate of 2 GB/s. And while the SSD itself may not have saturated that bandwidth, it almost certainly blew the transfer rate of my USB device out of the water. When I later upgraded to an NVMe drive, things just got better.

Overall, load times from the USB drive is the one place I wouldn’t trust testing Linux on USB. It’s going to be slower and have lag compared to an SSD. Read/Write performance should be comparable to Windows. Though, taking the precaution of either dual booting or backing up your Windows install can certainly make sense to test things out.

And we’re just supposed to trust the word of partisan hack. Ya, no.

I do get that there is a lot of intransigence in Federal IT. I was an IT and IS contractor for a couple sites within the US FedGov and there were places where “that’s the way we’ve always done it” was the trump card for any proposed change. And this led to some abysmal security practices which should have resulted in a lot of management getting shown the door (and mostly not just IT/IS management, culture gets set from the top). And I’ve worked at others where we had a large staff of folks whose entire job was ensuring compliance with all required cybersecurity controls and documentation. While I’ll be one of the first to state that compliance is not security, I also have yet to see a site which got security mostly right which didn’t also have compliance on lock. If you are doing things the right way, compliance is actually pretty easy to achieve, since good documentation is the foundation of security. If you go into a site and they can’t even spell CMDB, expect a shitshow.

So ya, if the DHS team went to FEMA’s IT team and started asking for network diagrams, data flow diagrams, system and network baseline checklists and system documentation; and the FEMA IT team’s response was, “sorry, we don’t have that”. Then yes, I would get cleaning house. Though, I’d have started by figuring out if the problem is the IT team just not getting it done; or, if the IT team was prevented from getting it done. My experience has been that IT teams are willing to patch and correct configurations; but, this means downtime and risk to applications. So, upper management will side with the application owners who want five nines uptime on a “best effort” budget, which ends up blocking patching and configuration changes. Also, if the IT team is spending 40 hours a week putting out fires and dealing with the blow-back from accumulated technical debt, that’s an upper management problem.

The problem, of course, is that the DHS is led by a two-bit partisan hack. And this administration is known for straight up lying to clear the board for it’s own partisan interests. I have zero faith that they did any sort of good faith analysis of the FEMA IT department. Especially since this is the same administration which gave us Russian compromised DOGE servers.

force binary choices that don’t align with household rules or with children’s maturity levels.

This has been my main experience with “parental controls”. As soon as they are turned on, I lose any ability to manage the experiences available to my children. So, in areas where I see them as mature enough to handle something, the only way I can allow them access to that experience is to completely bypass the controls. In many ecosystems, if I judge that one of my children could handle a game and the online risks associated with it, I can’t simply allow that game. Instead, I need to maintain a full adult account for them to use. You also run into a lot of situations where the reason a game is banned from children is unclear or done in an obvious “better safe than sorry” knee-jerk reaction. Ultimately, parental controls end up being far more frustrating than empowering. I’d rather just have something that just says, “this game/movie/etc your kid is asking for is restricted based on reasons X, Y and Z. Do you want to allow it?” Log my response and go with it. Like damned near any choice in software settings, quit trying to out-think me on what I want, give me a choice and respect that choice.

The US Government hasn’t given a shit about harmful monopolistic practices in a long time. They only pretend to care from time to time to force large companies to start donating to politicians.

I remember the Great Digg Exodus. One of the common reasons was the shit UI which was the new Digg. Looking at the screenshots in the article, it looks like they made it even worse. And the descriptions they give makes it sound like a cut-rate Twitter clone.

What’s next, is Fark going to do a major re-brand and attempt to launch as a Twitter clone as well?

You’d think that a competent technology company, with their own AI would be able to figure out a way to spoof Cloudflare’s checks. I’d still think that.

Yes, though depending on the media you are running the OS and game from, the performance could be worse than you would expect from an install on the main system media. For example, when I was testing moving over, I had Arch installed on a USB device and had some issues with I/O bandwidth. But, I also had a folder on my main storage drive to run Steam games from and this performed OK. It was formatted NTFS; so, there were some other oddities. But, it worked just fine and managed to convince me that I’d do OK under Linux. Took the plunge and I’ve been happy with the decision ever since.

Valheim.

Mistlands - Not because “whaaa, Mistalnds hard”, but because the whole area is built around verticality and the game engine most certainly is not. Combat is Valheim is generally pretty good, but after a reasonable amount of playtime, you will experience the frustration of swinging under/over enemies, because of minor variations in terrain height. Mistlands dials this problem up to 11, with the added bonus of enemies which specifically take advantage of this problem.

The Mistlands also turns exploration into a boring, grindy chore. The shorelines are a nightmare to sail around and even with the wisp, the mist is always too close to deal with said shorelines. So, you’re hoofing it through terrain which is designed to be difficult to navigate and move across. The feather cape helps, a bit. But, you’re still going to spend way too long faffing about, jumping up one side of a ridge and floating down the other, only to find that you’re in a gully with nothing useful and need to jump up the other side. Seeing dungeon entrances at any range is impossible. Enemies regularly pop out of nowhere and you’re forced into dealing with the combat verticality problems.

I’ll also throw a bit of shade at “Refined Eitr” as a resource, though I think the problem is less the resource and more the grind to get the parts for it. To start with, you need to make a Black Forge, to make that you need Black Cores, to get Black Cores, you need to spend hours in the mists hoping to stumble across one or more dungeons to get the cores. And inside the dungeons, expect lots of combat where the verticality problem is on prominent display. Now that you have the Black Table, you get to make the Eitr Refinery, which requires more Black Cores. Hope you enjoyed getting them the first time! Ok great, more cores obtained, time to go stumbling about again looking for Soft Tissue. With any luck, you’ve been mining (or at least marking) nodes along the way. Though, expect to spend more time lost in the Mists, you need a shit ton of Soft Tissue. Thankfully, this is a resource you can take through a portal, so that’s nice.

And finally, you get to raid Dverger towns for a required material to extract sap, a Sap Extractor. “What about trade? Vikings were well know traders”, you ask. Nope, fuck trade, all that gold you’ve been collecting, go spend it on some clothes which you will never actually use. You want a Sap Extractor, put on your killing pants and get raiding. Ok fine, we have our Sap Extractor covered in Dverger gore. And that gets us to the least horrible part of our Refined Eitr. Sap extraction is not terrible, find a spot with several roots in close proximity and just rotate a few extractors through them.

Right let’s get our Eitr Refinery built…and why the fuck is one of the input ports on the top? Ok whatever, I’ll build some stairs and…why the fuck is this thing tossing off damaging sparks? Yes, I know you can wrap it in iron bars, but seriously what the fuck? Why is this even a game mechanic? It’s really the perfect metaphor for all of the Mistlands. It’s needlessly annoying and doesn’t really provide anything positive for gameplay or fun. Just another pointless grind tossed in because, “players like hard things, right?”

The initial access seems to include an Apache CVE from 2019 and a WordPress plugin CVE from 2017. Honestly, UCSD should write a “thank you” letter to Androxgh0st for highlighting their poor patch management, and only using it for C2 in the process. Rather than as a beachhead into the network for a full-blown ransomware attack.

If your patch management is this bad, you shouldn’t be allowed to put stuff on the internet.

First question which popped into my mind was, “Will they force Defender out as well?”
Or, is Microsoft about to abuse it’s position to stifle competition? Again.

do anticheat count as antivirus?

No. But, from the article:

Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage

The CrowdStrike fiasco was finally enough for Microsoft to look at forcing drivers out of the kernel. This is absolutely a good thing and will hopefully lead to a more stable Windows.

Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place.

The NoScript extension is basically this. Most of the client side stuff is off by default and you can enable it per-domain. It breaks a whole lot of websites, but often in ways where the main content of a website is still readable. Over time, you can build up a list of “allow by default” domains and most of the web you care about works. Though, you may have to spend a moment or two sorting out permissions when you visit a new site.

While I don’t doubt that Iranian backed groups are more likely to target US based assets, I’ve been reading these reports for the last couple days and the “guidance” coming out of the US Government (USG) has been incredibly lackluster. CISA is basically saying, “use MFA and don’t use default passwords.” No shit, should I also plug in the power cord? It’d be great if some sector of the USG would publish something useful. Like a rundown of TTPs or even IoCs. The USG no doubt has a ton of SIGINT on these groups, and I understand that they can’t share all of it; but, fuck me could you at least put something more useful out than “use MFA”?

That actually sounds like a reasonable response. Driving assist means that a human is supposed to be attentive to take control. If the system detects a situation where it’s unable to make a good decision, dumping that decision on the human in control seems like the closest they have to a “fail safe” option. Of course, there should probably also be an understanding that people are stupid and will almost certainly have stopped paying attention a long time ago. So, maybe a “human take the wheel” followed by a “slam the brakes” if no input is detected in 2-3 seconds. While an emergency stop isn’t always the right choice, it probably beats leaving a several ton metal object hurtling along uncontrolled in nearly every circumstance.

War is Peace. Freedom is slavery.
And now for your Five Minute Hate.

I’m willing to withhold judgement. But, Chosen’s website reads like bog standard vulture capital trying to pretend they are not going to ride in and enshitify anything they touch. With lots of broad claims about being “community driven” and AI art. Maybe this will work out; but, I wouldn’t be putting money on it.

That said, I don’t blame Dark0ne for wanting to step back. He’s be running this wonderful site for the community for a long time and deserves the opportunity to go do other things. I wish him the best of luck and I hope that NexusMods survives this transition.

I work for a fairly large company, and we’re hearing about “AI” constantly. CoPilot is available and its use encouraged. Also, in the cybersecurity space, AI is fucking everywhere. Vendors won’t shut up about their “AI Enabled” products. And the new hotness is “Agentic AI”, which is basically automation, but we’re going to let AI hallucinations fire off the automated process which could bring production systems down.
Good times are surely coming. /s

As other folks have already covered, most modern websites use TLS (formerly SSL) which will encrypt any thing going to/from those sites. Someone could redirect a page to a server they own and try to get you to enter your credentials into their site for harvesting, though you’d probably notice due to errors related to the security certificate. There is a risk here, but it’s not all that bad. Just pay attention to any security errors and maybe don’t go to high value sites (e.g. banking websites). There are some highly technical attacks (e.g. TLS downgrade) which could pose a risk. But, it’s not all that likely, and you’re probably fine. For the most part, you can ignore the “zomg! you need a VPN” ads clogging up YouTube. Yes, they have a use case. No, that’s probably not you.

The other consideration is the security of your system itself. If you are running and old and vulnerable OS, it’s possible that an attacker could use the greater exposure to attack your system. For example, if you are running a Windows 7 system, there’s a real chance that you don’t have the EternalBlue patch applied or some other remote exploit vulnerability can be used to compromise your system. Even with a newer OS, if you haven’t been installing updates, you could have some holes which would allow an attacker in. Though, for most situations, there’s not going to be an attacker just waiting to pounce on your system. So, you probably don’t need to be worried. But, it’s also a good reminder to keep your system up to date, if you’re going to be using WiFi regularly. Some folks just get bored and start poking at anything around them. Make sure the doors are locked when those folks rattle the handle. It can also be useful to have a host based firewall running, even just setting the network to “Public” in Windows will do a lot to mitigate this risk.

Security is always going to come down to a trade off between risk and convenience. Public WiFi can be very useful, but it does carry some risk. In most situations, you can mitigate that risk by keeping your system up to date, having a host based firewall running (even if its just Windows setting the network to “Public”), watching URLs/Links carefully and watching for certificate errors in your browser.

On the Privacy side, assume someone can track the domains you are visiting (though likely not the full URL). If you use normal DNS, the network owner can look at DNS logs and know all the sites you visited. Even if you use a different DNS server, the network owner could be sniffing the packets on the wire (DNS is not encrypted). Additionally, WiFi is logically a bus topology; so, anyone on the same network could be sniffing packets and also get all your DNS traffic. This is a good use case for DNS over HTTPS (DoH). With DoH, you can stick to a DNS provider of your choice and get TLS encryption to keep things private. Anyone sniffing packets would know that you are using DoH and would likely know what provider you are using, but not see the contents of the DNS queries.

Of course, even with DNS traffic encrypted, most web servers still rely on Server Name Identification (SNI) to determine the host you are connecting to. The end result of this is that the domain you are visiting is sent, unencrypted over the wire and could be sniffed. There are solutions for this (e.g. eSNI), but they are not widely adopted yet. So, assume that anyone sniffing packets can get a list of the domains you are visiting. If this poses a serious risk to your safety (e.g. you are a journalist working in a repressive regime), this is a use case for a VPN. Though, using a VPN may be obvious to anyone monitoring and they could apply Rubber Hose Cryptanalysis to the problem.

The tl;dr of this all is, you’re probably fine. The fact is, it’s more likely that no one gives a shit about you and all the other folks on that public WiFi are too busy looking at cat pictures to try and hack you. A few simple security hygiene things will cover the 99% situation, and the other 1% isn’t worth worrying about.

But, we’ll know where the aircraft is. It’s a built in, instant location flare. No more aircraft disappearing and not being found.