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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • While I don’t know the specific post you are referring to, Malware exists for Linux. Here’s a great overview from last year. If someone wants to argue, “oh it’s from a security company trying to sell a product” then let me point you at the Malware Bazaar and specifically the malware tagged elf. Those are real samples of real malware in the Linux specific ELF executable binary format (warning: yes it’s real malware, don’t run anything from this site). On the upshot, most seem to be Linux variants of the Mirai botnet. Not something you want running, but not quite as bad as ransomware. But, dig a bit and there are other threats. Linux malware exists, it has for a long time and it’s getting more prevalent as more stuff (especially servers) run on Linux.

    While Linux is far more secure than Windows by design, it’s not malware proof. It is harder for malware to move from user space into root (usually), but that’s often not needed for the activities malware gets up to today. Ransomware, crypto miners and info stealers will all happily execute in user-land. And for most people, this is where their important stuff lives. Linux’s days of living in “security through obscurity” are over. Attackers are looking at Linux now and starting to go after it.

    All that said, is it worth having a bloated A/V engine doing full on-access scanning? That depends on how you view the risk. Many of the drive-by type attacks (e.g. ClickFix, fake tech-support scams) all heavily target Windows and would fail on a Linux system. The malware and backdoors that come bundled with pirated software are likely to fail on a Linux system, though I’ll admit to not having tested that sort of thing with Wine/Proton installed. For those use cases, I’d suggest not downloading pirated software. Or, if you absolutely are going to, run those file through ClamAV at minimum.

    Personally, I don’t feel the need to run anything as heavy as on-access file scanning or anything to keep trawling memory for signatures on my home systems. Keeping software up to date and limiting what I download, install and run is enough to manage my risk. I do have ClamAV installed to let me do a quick, manual scan of anything I do download. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to buy A/V product. Most of the engines out there for Linux are crap anyway.

    Professionally, I am one of the voices who pushed for A/V (really EDR) on the Linux systems in my work environment. My organization has a notable Linux footprint and we’ve seen attackers move to Linux based systems specifically because they are less likely to be well monitored. In a work environment, we have less control over how the systems get (ab)used and have a higher need for telemetry and investigation.


  • One of the things to look at is the interest rate you would be paying for either loan and how that would effect the total cost of the loan. Also, there is the question of the utility of any money spent up front. For example, if using a loan on the existing house would result in no up front costs and a 5% interest rate over 30 years, and the standard mortgage would cost $20,000 and have an interest rate of 8%, you’re almost certainly better to use the existing house as backing and throw that same $20K in a long term interest bearing investment (e.g. government bonds). All this assuming you plan to hold onto the second property long term.

    Compounding interest is a fantastic tool and a fearful master. If you can make it work for you, then do it. If you are facing the possibility of paying it, you almost always want to lower it as much as possible.






  • A-fucking-men.
    I’m in a similar boat house. We bought in 2011, used a USDA loan and were able to pick our place up for a song ($160k). It now has a “value” of ~$360k. And all that extra “value” is doing for me is increasing taxes and insurance costs. I’m not planning on selling any time soon, so my home “price” going up is a net negative. Sure, we might sell in a decade or so, but today’s price won’t have a major impact on that.

    What I’m getting at is, this doesn’t benefit homeowners, it benefits housing investors, who are the group Trump really wants to prop up.

    What? You’re telling me the pedophile, racist, Nazi sympathizer, billionare son of a racist, Nazi sympathizer who made the family’s billions by wartime real estate profiteering is more interested in protecting real estate profiteering than helping people? Color me shocked, absolutely shocked, I say. Well, not that shocked.


  • I ditched cable TV over a decade ago for a simple antenna (and wrote a notable Reddit post on the antenna while I was at it). That was done because I was tired of my wallet being raped each month, because I had to buy a higher bundle to get the channels I wanted. I was stuck with cable internet for a number of years afterwards, as it was the only option in my area. Then T-Mobile offered up 5G based internet in my area at a low price. That was around 6 years ago and I haven’t looked back.

    The cable companies sat on their laurels while the world moved on. They are now shocked that their terrible offerings for terrible prices are falling to real competition. Sure, I fully expect the new carriers to do everything in their power to enshitify their service offerings. That’s the nature of business/ But, with the market open to competition, there is now a real opportunity for us customers to shop around and get a less shitty experience. Broadband internet is a commodity and is completely fungible. Prices should be falling and it was only rent seeking rules keeping the prices up.




  • This is it exactly. I made a hard cut with Reddit, but I’ll admit to missing the sysadmin subreddit. The place was full of very smart, helpful people and also cranky. The PowerShell subreddit was another great resource. I haven’t been willing to go back, but those sorts of communities only exist when you hit a certain mass of people on a platform.


  • Steam is certainly in a dominant market position. They had a large first mover advantage and have also done a lot of work to make and keep gamers happy with the platform. That said, I can understand companies being upset at the 30% Steam tax on sales. It’s a pretty large cut and other stores (e.g. Epic) have tried to compete based on that cost. The problem being that many games have massive Steam libraries and want to keep everything on one place and they aren’t really affected by the cost to the devs; so, without a significant reason to change, they won’t. It also doesn’t help that some competitors (e.g Epic) have been user hostile in the past and so don’t have a high level of trust. Steam has also built a lot of goodwill with power users for their work on Proton.

    While I do think there needs to be healthy competition for storefronts, as long as Steam resists the temptation to enshitify their dominant market position, I don’t see them losing market share in any meaningful way. Perhaps it would be better if Steam were spun off from Valve, putting them Valve on equal footing with other devs. But, video games aren’t really fungible. It’s not like I’m going to say, “oh darn, Kingdom Come is too expensive, I guess I’ll buy Half Life instead”. They are just fundamentally different games and if I want to play the first one, I’m not able to get that by buying the second. So, the price of one of them isn’t really a factor in pushing me towards the other. Though, Valve might use Steam to push one game over the other, and that could be something that is a problem.


  • Yes, and you can probably get better performance with different block sizes. This is just what I used to fix drives as it was fast enough and I couldn’t be arsed to do any real testing to find the right speed. Also, my stash of drives was no where near homogeneous, so the right size for one type of drive may not have worked for a different type of drive. I also used the 4MB block size when imaging drives to have an ok-ish speed while not losing too much data if there were read errors.





  • You could try using Autopsy to look for files on the drive. Autopsy is a forensic analysis toolkit, which is normally used to extract evidence from disk images or the like. But, you can add local drives as data sources and that should let you browse the slack space of the filesystem for lost files. This video (not mine, just a good enough reference) should help you get started. It’s certainly not as simple as the photorec method, but it tends to be more comprehensive.


  • As @[email protected] pointed out, this seems to be a cover for c’t magazine. Specifically it seems to be for November 2004. heise.de used to have a site which let you browse those covers and you could pull any/all of them. But, that website seems to have died sometime in 2009. Thankfully, the internet remembers and you can find it all on archive.org right here. You may need to monkey about with capture dates to get any particular cover, but it looks like a lot of them are there.

    Also, as a bit of “teach a person to fish”, ImgOps is a great place to start a reverse image search. It can often get you from an image to useful information about that images (e.g. a source) pretty quick. I usually use the TinEye reverse image search for questions like this.