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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 17th, 2022

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  • I agree, but it’s a hard pill to swallow that Meta is the best partner to grow the fediverse. There are real lessons to learn from Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (look at XMPP and Google), not to mention privacy concerns and content moderation issues that seem to be a “feature” for Meta products vs bugs.

    I’m not sure what Zuck is up to, but for whatever it’s worth I think the best think the fediverse can do is be somewhat reactive to Meta’s movements.

    If instances start getting overwhelmed with content, then block.

    If Meta starts showing signs of EEE, then instances can block.

    And us users can move to instances that we feel match our personal stances on things - hate Facebook like the plague? Look at one of the defederated/blocking instances. Do you miss interacting with a larger audience? Stay on instances that are embracing (or withholding judgment) the Meta federation.

    It’s a complex topic to be sure, and the only way we’ll know the right way to deal with it is with the benefit of hindsight in a few years




  • As I get older and the abuse I put my ears through starts showing up, I completely agree. After upgrading my music library to FLAC from VBR mp3s, I stopped having the, “Oh! There’s a subtle instrument going on in this part of the song!” moments.

    It doesn’t stop me from trying to listen to the highest quality music formats that I can get my hands on, but I 100% know if I think there’s a difference to my mid-40s ears, it’s probably a placebo.





  • I use KDE as my go-to desktop environment - it’s the only option for my Steam Deck (which is shockingly good when hooked up to an external monitor), and I chose it for my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS work laptop.

    Yes, it does look different from windows, but depending on what global theme you use, it’s shockingly similar:

    • click on the icon in the far lower left to access “Applications”
    • Time/calendar, sound, wifi in the far lower right
    • Single task bar along the bottom that shows currently opened apps and pinned apps

    I spent maybe 10 minutes with my 70 year old mother and she felt comfortable using it despite being a Windows user since 3.1 days.

    Users are more resilient than you’d think - provide documentation on what’s new and you may even be able to sell it as “The upgraded version” of your old platform.

    Hell, the fact that you’re on Linux already is great! Most of the significant issues I run into when converting people over to the OSS side is software availability (coincidentally the thing that made my Mom switch back to Windows).


  • So first, let me be clear - I don’t know if an alternative to that software you first brought up. But some of our earlier CTFs had a similar issue with isolation.

    We ended up spinning up new VLANs per contestant, each having a single Kali Linux VM with xrdp, along with each contestants target systems. Our router/fw blocked all access in/out of those VLANs, save for RDP/SSH traffic from our Apache Guacamole server on the DMZ.

    So contestants would hit our portal (Guacamole), then from there connect into their own dedicated Kali instance and environment.

    Later, we had to make additional fw exemptions for our scoreboard/docs, etc.