Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

  • 29 Posts
  • 632 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2023

help-circle



  • What if he could be fine with more support and money, should I give him back to animal rescue?

    That’s as tough a call to make as “the call” about his life. When I was in that spot with my last dog, it was during COVID so I was working from home and could be there for him. Thankfully, I got to go full time WFH after that, and I’m here for my senior dog currently as well (though she’s got several good years ahead of her, and the puppy she wanted 2 years ago keeps her plenty active lol).

    My only hesitation about surrendering to animal rescue is that sometimes senior dogs are hard to re-home. Whoever adopts them has to expect medical bills for their care and have time to care for them. Or, worse, they end up in a “bad” home where the new owner doesn’t treat them as well or punishes them for things that have been fine all their life. Sadly, a lot of senior dogs can and do spend the rest of their days in a kennel at the rescue center which breaks my heart to think about (especially if they’re currently in a loving home).

    I don’t know your situation well enough to give any advice (merely things to think about), but if at all possible, I’d say he’s better off in your care than going back through the rescue system. If for no other reason than the shock of re-homing and losing what he considers his best friend (you). Personally, I would only consider surrendering as a last resort if I’m completely unable to care for him financially or otherwise.




  • If you’re on Linux, you can convert that to something more human readable by piping it to base64. It works with any file, but I’ll use an image here:

    cat image.webp | base64

    Which yields:

    UklGRroEAABXRUJQVlA4WAoAAAAgAAAAYwAAQgAASUNDUKACAAAAAAKgbGNtcwRAAABtbnRyUkdC
    IFhZWiAH6AAIABoADgAJACBhY3NwQVBQTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA9tYAAQAA
    AADTLWxjbXMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA1k
    ZXNjAAABIAAAAEBjcHJ0AAABYAAAADZ3dHB0AAABmAAAABRjaGFkAAABrAAAACxyWFlaAAAB2AAA
    ABRiWFlaAAAB7AAAABRnWFlaAAACAAAAABRyVFJDAAACFAAAACBnVFJDAAACFAAAACBiVFJDAAAC
    FAAAACBjaHJtAAACNAAAACRkbW5kAAACWAAAACRkbWRkAAACfAAAACRtbHVjAAAAAAAAAAEAAAAM
    ZW5VUwAAACQAAAAcAEcASQBNAFAAIABiAHUAaQBsAHQALQBpAG4AIABzAFIARwBCbWx1YwAAAAAA
    AAABAAAADGVuVVMAAAAaAAAAHABQAHUAYgBsAGkAYwAgAEQAbwBtAGEAaQBuAABYWVogAAAAAAAA
    9tYAAQAAAADTLXNmMzIAAAAAAAEMQgAABd7///MlAAAHkwAA/ZD///uh///9ogAAA9wAAMBuWFla
    IAAAAAAAAG+gAAA49QAAA5BYWVogAAAAAAAAJJ8AAA+EAAC2xFhZWiAAAAAAAABilwAAt4cAABjZ
    cGFyYQAAAAAAAwAAAAJmZgAA8qcAAA1ZAAAT0AAACltjaHJtAAAAAAADAAAAAKPXAABUfAAATM0A
    AJmaAAAmZwAAD1xtbHVjAAAAAAAAAAEAAAAMZW5VUwAAAAgAAAAcAEcASQBNAFBtbHVjAAAAAAAA
    AAEAAAAMZW5VUwAAAAgAAAAcAHMAUgBHAEJWUDgg9AEAALAQAJ0BKmQAQwA+8WSmTqmlKCYvmWqp
    MB4JZQDLnNaF2NMD2L3xQGb5nmLiGhGWxQuD8kwUSXF0u2UTgX0YrR3MY2SsRCNEQ8hZ6WkCUTih
    LdmsElHZVzoMwO/fj4X/ZSNT2R9qgxwqgEed891j4KCNRLK/tUbG3hZ3Mw2kixguSFIEcAgBtv8w
    eAu0PwAA/upMzBqq+dcN8viO7FpqpV6GvPcRILm+HsOQblnpHx03lASjGlSyGbkKUD3xA5KOqgq/
    VEUJ4qF9VoAYFbFhQRAgkvmREk5umMj8sr9Np95+n/oP2Aq2VW5xU4F1xpD8Vd4Dp7Phwm9w/Dnf
    94djRROFRYPZeg/1Q/qiROFRVRu2nBcgndbhc0x0h+kgvT/naeJOEqwNjYPlIiw/DGuxav7+x09R
    mf2mJto3ineDqfyMWUN83PmKqzGHkYGhZrTU478qjlQucDzWkwobnUmzhE6I+mDYkfiUVPcHyXbf
    xXRStyPiPZAkJZrE9OrjFNUeljRQdVTQqeBsy+O9VwDLU5GcKhBQHa4cj+/DGqUhi74WH0EuHsb3
    EgZVNc1FbRm5QFOpjDSprGIRYxe6sFFDrDOg4DhWZRnOa7s68pGaDDpbqrORxzPHXPbs55/1HTas
    DDGzKFmTG4hJ2GUZKqjPcQ+MAAAA
    

    Copy that into a text file and pass it to base64 with the decode flag, and you’ll get the original binary:

    cat data.txt | base64 -d > data.bin

    Inspect it to see what kind of file it is:

    file data.bin -> data.bin: RIFF (little-endian) data, Web/P image

    Rename it so you can just double-click it to open it:

    mv data.bin data.webp

    Enjoy the surprise.

    You can also print files like that, scan them using OCR, and then restore them. A very inefficient way to do backups, but it works.













  • That would definitely work for rooting out ones local to an instance, but not cross-instance. For example, none of these were local to my instance, so I don’t have email or IP data for those and had to identify them based on activity patterns.

    I worked with another instance admin who did have one of these on their instance, and they confirmed IP and email provider overlap of those accounts as well as a local alt of an active user on another instance. Unfortunately, there is no way to prove that the alt on that instance actually belongs to the “main” alt on another instance. Due to privacy policy conflicts, they couldn’t share the actual IP/email values but could confirm that there was overlap among the suspect accounts.

    Admins could share IP and email info and compare, but each instance has its own privacy policy which may or may not allow for that (even for moderation purposes). I’m throwing some ideas around with other admins to find a way to share that info that doesn’t violate the privacy of any instances’ users. My current thought was to share a hash of the IP address, IP subnet, email address, and email provider. That way those hashes could be compared without revealing the actual values. The only hiccup with that is that it would be incredibly easy to generate a rainbow table of all IPv4 addresses to de-anonymize the IP hashes, so I’m back to square one lol.