Four… Fucking… Pixels?

The working hypothesis is that this was some sort of debug or test key that was never meant to be used in production, being used in production.

The encryption that SSL/TLS provides (that puts the “secure” in HTTPS) uses a public–private key pair and a specific mathematical function. Generating the key pair requires a cryptographically secure random number that is impossible or very difficult to guess, which must be kept secret at all times. If this random number is leaked or guessed by a malicious actor, the private key can be reconstructed and used to impersonate a website or break the encryption.

The security of the encryption comes from the fact that the function is easy to calculate one way, but difficult to calculate its inverse. To demonstrate: multiplying the prime numbers 88117 and 44543 is easy, but the inverse, factorizing the semiprime 3924995531, is extremely lengthy in comparison.

One of the factors that determine the security of the key is the size of the number, i.e. the number of digits. In this case, a proper key should’ve had a length of 384 bits (or 116 decimal digits). In reality, the keys that eMudhra used had eight bits, which can only represent 256 possible values, and can be easily guessed even by brute force. The specific private keys were the numbers 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237.

Currently having a very fun day at work.

Fortunately our own certificates are unaffected, but it’s the autumn break and most of the staff are absent and incommunicado.

I have no experience with MAUI, I only heard that it was cross-platform.

Then what other toolkit has stable .NET bindings on both Linux and Windows? This might become relevant to me professionally in the near future.

Adding dependencies, adding complexity, adding points of failure… not to mention that the first sentence in the readme literally says it’s an experimental project. Not something that a production software should ever be built upon.

Except Mono implements the Windows-only .NET Framework, but PDN targets .NET 9. I have no idea how those two could be used at the same time for different parts of the app, what kinds of issues may arise from it, or if it can be done at all. Again, it sounds simple, but it never is.

compiling it for .NET on Linux

It always sounds so simple for the layperson. Just looking through the list of DLLs in the portable ZIP, PDN uses Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms namespace), which, as far as I understand, isn’t included in the cross-platform releases of .NET. They’d have to rebuild the entire UI with .NET MAUI or some other cross-platform toolkit. Then there are lots of other bundled libraries that may or may not work in a .NET-on-Linux environment.

Releasing and then supporting a second platform is never as easy as just compiling the executable. Figuring out the quirks and differences of various systems, especially one as heterogenous as the Linux ecosystem, is a drain on resources that small development studios often can’t afford. Raiguard (hallowed be his name), one of the developers of Factorio, and the person who is single-handedly maintaining the Linux-native build, wrote a blog post about its challenges.

No, we were taught about HTTP, the fundamentals of hypertext and how it gets rendered, how embedded code (Flash at the time; yes, I’m old) runs in the browser, and the concept of the digital footprint. The cybersecurity implications were obvious.

Actually, I have to correct myself. Some of this was taught in the 7th or 8th year of primary school, around ages 12-14. I was fortunate to be born in a country, at the right time, where the public education system was still worth something. My heart bleeds when I hear of what goes on across the ocean.

Not me. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer organic.

Literally none of that should be surprising for people who have a basic understanding of how the WWW works.

Which, I’m starting to realize, is a depressively low fraction of the general population. I was taught this in middle school, for fuck’s sake.

They removed almost every basic networking feature with a firmware update. Even in “expert mode”, all I can do is set up the wifi and pick a single /24 network from 192.168.0.0/16. I can’t even pick a goddamn DNS server. Unfortunately the other ISPs that serve my area are at least twice as expensive.

One obstacle you might encounter is carrier-grade NAT or CGNAT. Some ISPs put residential subscribers behind an additional layer of IPv4 NAT, which makes your public address inaccessible from the internet. In that case, you’ll either need Tailscale or a similar service, or a VPS to act as a relay.

Then there’s Vodafone who have unilaterally removed both the port-forward feature and bridge mode from their residential cable modems, and I hate them, and wish them a hammer to balls.

Bro. Stop. It’s called mockery. A joke at the expense of others. A denigrating remark to the detriment of a person or entity, often (but not necessarily) based on real observations.

Obviously, global shortcuts probably won’t leak personal data, I’m not a fucking moron. But Discord has had several high-profile massive data leaks, with some, frankly, bullshit official responses. It’s fun to mock them by assuming there will be another.

I guess I’m sorry that your life is bereft of whimsy.

Can’t wait to see how this will result in another massive leak of personal data that they totally don’t retain.

It’s actually a new project called BSD Secure. The entire root filesystem is encrypted using TLS, and you need both a domain and a valid certificate to boot. Better not let them expire!

i3-4160 running Proxmox (OPNSense VM and a couple of containers) with 3 spinny drives and no GPU, TP-Link 8x GbE switch, ASUS AX1800 as a Wifi AP, ISP’s own manky cable modem, plus a UPS eats about 66-72 watts at the wall socket. If I install a passively cooled GT-710 for transcoding, it adds 10-15 watts at idle.

It was, in fact, a thing as recently as 2010. I know because I remember having to delete PulseAudio’s config after every second boot on Ubuntu 10.04 otherwise I wouldn’t have any audio. You were spared from the worst, be thankful for that.

This update is weird, did they put AI in my kernel?

(we got a new GEMINI episode before GTA 6)

Removed by mod