• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you’re using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are ‘wordpress security’ applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don’t know a whole lot about what you’re doing.

    There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you’re webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the ‘stories’ as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.

    Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.

    Here’s a nice list of FOSS CMS’ (which includes Wordpress of course).




  • A 30% cut for steam games sold on steam and a 0% cut for steam keys sold by the publisher wherever they want with the caveat that they must give steam users the same sales at around the same time. They get their games hosted on Steam’s industry best CDN, a page with support for images and videos, an API with features users like, workshop API for mod hosting and delivery, and other SteamWorks API stuff for stuff like multiplayer, patch management without charging a fee for it, forum hosting to hit the highlights. Pretty much all of that drives engagement and is mostly turn-key though you do have to programmatically interact with their API when it makes sense.

    Steam provides a lot of benefit for a 30% cut of what is sold on their store front and a lot more benefit for getting all of the above for a 0% cut if they sell steam keys outside of steam.



  • I know shitpost and all that but this isn’t actually true, as in it can’t be verified. It was one small mention in a book (Threshold Resistance) by A&W owner Mr. Taubman. He basically said he wanted to know why his same priced 1/3 burgers weren’t outselling competing 1/4 pounders…from a competitor…that I’m sure you can guess. So, he hired a marketing firm who put together a little focus group in the 80s. Some of those focus group members supposedly didn’t know that 1/3 lb. is bigger than 1/4 lb. burgers.

    Keep in mind that there’s no evidence or any firm mentioned and the bias surrounding the author that is writing a book about his experiences including a failed venture.

    All we know is it is one man’s anecdote and it has been used for 39 years so far to make fun of Americans for supposedly not understanding fractions.


  • Depends on if there’s an IPv6NAT and how your ISP converts between IPv4 and IPv6 or actually supports IPv6 straight through. It also depends on your router.

    Currently, there’s still some debate since IPv6NAT (NAT66/NPT6/NATv6) isn’t really needed for WAN boundaries for the reasons NAT exists. However, without it you are right on that this will be a problem for the consumer because PCs, IoT devices, printers, circuts or whatever my wife has, etc. could all be exploitable and even worse, you may never know you’re contributing to the botnet.

    As an example, I have a global IPv6 on a few on my devices. They can connect to IPv6 if it originates from me but if it originates from them or is UDP it doesn’t route to my IPv6. My router doesn’t care. It’ll route it just fine either way. It would appear that my ISP has me behind one of the IPv6 NATs.

    I’d imagine that’s true for most people at home.


  • NAT provides some measure of security as pure coincidence to how it works. It is not designed or intended to provide security. It does not inspect packet payloads in order to filter them for security. It looks at the header and attempts to route it to an internal IP address (your devices on your LAN) and if it cannot, it will drop the packet because the header will only have the external IP address – the packet has no idea which device it is supposed to go to. Forwarding a port is telling the NAT to assume that when a packet hits a certain port, if it doesn’t know the destination internal IP, forward it to some internal IP anyway.

    The reason you can connect to websites, ssh outside, FTP, whatever, is because your connection comes from your internal IP first to some other IP and therefore, NAT knows which internal IP to route those packets to.

    Take for example this scenario:

    You download some software. It has malware that provides command and control (C2) to someone else outside of your network. A firewall and/or antivirus may be able to stop this and hopefully notify you. NAT will not help here. Furthermore, if you have uPNP enabled (usually it is by default on your router) the malware can forward any ports through your NAT to the compromised device opening it up to bot attacks and the like.

    Another scenario:

    You want to play a video game with you and your friends and you’re going to host it. So either you manually forward those ports or perhaps uPNP just does it for you. That game has an exploit known by attackers, or perhaps it can just be DDoS’d. Your NAT isn’t going to stop that. Hopefully a firewall will help you here. It definitely will if you set up explicit rules so that if they aren’t your friend’s IPs it will drop them. Though it is possible the game is exploitable and your friend’s are compromised.

    Take for example malware has been known to spread via Minecraft.


  • Personally I use FreeIPA for my LDAP. I like that I can create sudoers rules from one centralized place and manage ssh keys across all clients. Granted I could just use Ansible I suppose, which is how I update multiple distributions in my network and online but I like that I can just change SSH keys and sudoers from one place easily instead of changing tasks/roles. I also usually run cockpit even on my non-Red Hat distros with SSH keys just so I don’t have to log into everything though it is somewhat limited outside of the Red Hat sphere.

    If you don’t want to use ProxMox or some other specialized HyperVisor ecosystem, you can also use Cockpit to manager your VMs along with your Pods. I wish there’d be more attention to it for features because it feels like it could do a lot more.

    I also don’t really worry about locking myself out for two reasons:

    1. I use SSH keys.

    2. I also have a break-glass local account on every system…with SSH keys. If its on your local network, you can use VNC/VM console/Remote Desktop with a local account while only allowing SSH with keys if you’d like. Just make sure if you’re going to allow remote access outside of your network that you never forward the VNC/RDP ports. For SSH when I do this I always pick some random port – never default and never common ones like 2222 to at least keep my logs less noisy from the botnet auto attacks.

    For my online VPS’ I use a firewall with geoIP from Maxmind and drop all ports but 443 from the world, except for whatever country I’m in. I drop all packets from certain countries that seem to auto-attack more often than others. I try to drop packets from all known (to me) Shodan scanners. If I’m not traveling I just restrict all other ports to my public IP’s subnet though my IP hasn’t changed for years. For status checking services like StatusCake, I use the “push” method instead using a simple cron job with curl instead of relying on servers around the world checking my ports. In this case, the services just check that my server has successfully hit them within X minutes to be “up”.


  • As much as he may have a case so long as he didn’t act against store policy and actually attempted to he probably has a case, even in an at-will state.

    The problem is that it will likely be difficult to get an attorney to represent him without an actual retainer because these cases usually draw out for a long, long time and are difficult to fight. Unless there’s a legitimate case for a class action, then the chances are slim that anyone can afford to fight the case, even if they ultimately could win because no attorney is going to devote years to this for a ‘maybe’.

    The only route there may be a hope of winning here is for him to apply for unemployment and if he doesn’t get it, to appeal himself. He may get that as small of a win as that is.




  • Just clarification here, a NAT is NOT a firewall. It will drop packets originating from outside the network if the ports aren’t forwarded to an IP simply because the NAT has no idea which device on the network to send the packets to. A forwarded port is you telling the NAT to assume packets coming into a specific port should be forwarded to a specific device. It is acting as a security measure simply by coincidence but not by design. Unlike a firewall it will not inspect any packet payload or attempt to make a security decision on outbound packets. It only routes based on the packet headers.

    A firewall on the other hand actively will reject or drop packets because it is an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). This is why if your router has a built-in firewall, your NAT will still drop the packets – because it isn’t a firewall nor is it what is being referred to if you disable it.





  • Finally. Intuit has been lobbying for years to keep this from happening.

    Derrick Plummer, a spokesman for Intuit, said taxpayers can already file their taxes for free and there are online free-file programs available to some people. Individuals of all income levels can submit their returns for free via the mail.

    A “direct-to-IRS e-file system is a solution in search of a problem, and that solution will unnecessarily cost taxpayers billions of dollars,” he said. “We will continue unapologetically advocating for American taxpayers and against a direct-to-IRS e-file system because it’s a bad idea.”

    And who believes that crap anyway? Intuit markets their solution due to the complicated nature of anything outside of standard deductions and figuring out if you should itemize and how to do that.

    Intuit has spent $25.6 million since 2006 on lobbying, H&R Block about $9.6 million and the conservative Americans for Tax Reform roughly $3 million.

    Now if the states get on board for easy filing online, it’ll be great.