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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • All of the mainstream router manufacturers have critically insecure firmware. Nearly all routers ship with hundreds of vulnerabilities, and sometimes even zero-days, even when initially released.

    It’s why it is so important to find and acquire routers that are capable of being re-flashed with third-party firmware such as DD-WRT or OpenWRT.

    Check with the router database of each project to see if what you currently own is eligible. DD-WRT enjoys wider support but is more limited in functionality. OpenWRT is more powerful but needs more capable hardware to run on.


  • I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

    It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

    Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

    The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.





  • And I self-host precisely because of the money I save using surplussed hardware. I have a symmetrical 1Gb SOHO fibre connection from my ISP, so I can host whatever the hell I want, I just need to stand it up. And a beefy older system with oodles of RAM is perfect for spinning up VMs of various platforms for various tasks. This saves me craploads of money over even a single VM on cloud platforms like Vultr. Plus, even if I were to support a “heavy” service sufficiently in demand to warrant its own iron, it still costs me less than a year’s worth of hosting to obtain a decent platform for that service to run on all by it’s lonesome.

    My only cloud costs end up being those services which are distributed for redundancy and geographical distance, such as DNS and caching CDNs.




  • flip phone

    Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

    I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

    If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.




  • About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

    Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.



  • In that way it’s become adversarial.

    Back in the 2000s, I was able to say that while a fundamental install took only about a half hour to set up, usability tweaks and a full fleshing out of functionality took another 4-8 hours depending on what the user was going to use the machine for.

    I just did a Win11 24h2 install. It took nearly 24 working hours before I considered it even minimally functional for my needs. Cycling through Win10Privacy two or three times was particularly frustrating. Registry work alone took me a good 8-10 hours of trying stuff a step at a time and then rebooting to see how it worked.

    At this point, the only reason why I am still running with a Windows rig is for those half-dozen programs that don’t have appropriate non-Windows variants. It’s why I’m also running a Mac Mini and an OpenSUSE tower through the same 4-port, 6-head KVM.



  • I have an apostrophe

    Scottish/Irish?

    some companies see it as a SQL injection hack and sanitize it.

    Which kind of apostrophe?

    A straight apostrophe, fine - that can and does get used in valid SQL injection attacks. I would be disgusted at any input form that didn’t sanitize that.

    But a curly apostrophe? Nothing should be filtering a curly apostrophe, as it has no function or use within SQL. So if you learn how to bring that up in alt codes (Windows, specifically), Key combos (Mac) or dead keys (Linux), as well as direct Unicode codes for most any Win/Mac/*Nix platform, you should be golden.

    Unless the developer of that input form was a complete moron and made extra-tight validation.

    Plus, knowing the inputs for a lot of extended UTF-8 characters not found on a normal keyboard is also a wee bit of a typing superpower.


  • A line break is a non-printable character. So it would only work in the scope of electronic storage. The minute it hits other media, the line break character is subject to how that media handles it’s presence, and then it is lost permanently from that step forward.

    Plus, many input forms make use of validation that will just trim anything that isn’t a character or number, removing the line break character.