"We are all waiting for multiple varieties of shit to hit the fan. Other disasters pushed climate disasters out of the spotlight at the end of 2023, allowing people to maintain the guise that these are all distinct and unrelated events.

You can ignore them or claim that they are all ‘accidents,’ once-in-a-hundred-years events, or it’s always been like this, but they aren’t going away.

...

This is disaster planning that, even if you don’t want to do it, you should think about, or it will haunt you. It is probably hovering in your mind, or you will not read this."

Full article: https://rlandok.substack.com/p/after-2023s-disaster-preview

Via: https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/111822737123718382

#prepper #DisasterPreparedness #prepping #gardening #GrowNostr

Fuck. Qubes seems to have changed something about USB passthrough in version 4.2.0 and it broke Signet. It worked fine in 4.1.x 🫤

Sigh. I guess the good thing about having someone who uses the product they make means you can have confidence that things like this will get fixed ASAP.

I really didn't need more urgent work piled onto me. I have enough things that got messed up from the downtime.

OK, after 14 days of downtime, I am almost recovered from my motherboard failure.

I have all my files recovered, but at least one of my #qubes is having networking troubles. As in, it can get online just fine when connected to sys-firewall, but not with my VPN nor Tor networking qubes.

It should just be a maytter of figuring out which qube is the problem and then rebuilding it (which is actually pretty easy TBH).

Thanks again to all of you who helped me out with this fiasco. 🫂

I also accept BTC, and if I am ever forced to go back to a "real job", I'm going to attempt to demand being paid in BTC (as in, my salary will be denominated that way).

And I get the incentives work against me here. I just want us to get to the point where we use cryptocurreny for paying for things because we don't have dollars to spend, only crypto. That is what can resolve the conflict with Gresham's lsw.

Side note: open source development is a real job, just one that doesn't pay. Similar to being a homemaker (which I can also attest is far more work than people who have never done it realize).

Ofc they will be back, but that doesn't mean that they don't have any valid criticisms that we could learn from and focus on.

The lightning network needs to escape the #bitcoin echo chamber. It could do that now with custodial #lightning providers who manage #liquidity, #channels and so forth, but it risks another Mt. Gox or FTX.

A related problem is that people don't want to accept bitcoin, even the same people who want to buy it. Similarly, most people don't want to spend their bitcoin. The rhetoric is nearly always about stacking sats, not earning, not using, just #hodl them.

nostr:nevent1qqsy0y9fv68y2y0at5xpw6pggjy4mj53444l03kp3ermqe5f0x9l4ncppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5pzp5cw4x82vh5487g6hylkkv82284n83gxlp75nasq5yu6auq249g3qvzqqqqqqykanyyp

Hard truth for bitcoiners: "New product innovations are close, but not quite there yet ... things still feel insular"

Full article: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/01/26/why-is-everyone-suddenly-bearish-about-bitcoin/

#NSA finally admits to #spying on #Americans by purchasing #sensitivedata

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/nsa-finally-admits-to-spying-on-americans-by-purchasing-sensitive-data/

via https://masto.ai/@dustcircle/111824511650682804

I do. I admit that I haven't audited the coffee yet, but it seems to work well enough so far.

The computer's USB port powers an STM microchip that has a couple pins connected to the computer's USB data lines. Passwords are stored in the STM, AES256 encrypted and typically go back to the computer by the device acting as a USB keyboard (though there's also a way to copy to the clipboard or just view them).

To get them out, you need the device password (to do the AES decryption) and physically press a button on the device (to ensure a compromised computer can't just obtain all your passwords without your cooperation). Doesn't have to store passwords, could be your credit card numberes, seed phrases, bookmarks, address book, or whatever. As long as it is small, it'll work.

There's more info, a little demo video, and a link to the source code for the firmware, software, and CAD files for the PCB and case at https://hax0rbana.org/signet

If you try to build one, feel free to hop in the Matrix channel to ask any questions. Or post here and tag me. I'd be happy to help.

OK you two, now you've gone and done it.

I now have a monero markdown file in my personal notes. I've started putting links in there as I read them.

If you see me add an XMR address, you'll know I've successfully got set up and am giving Monero its day in court.

I just saw this post as I was scroling through my 🔔 tab and at first I thought someone was reproducing my work. Then I realized it was my post, it's just that someone reacted to it. 🤣

nostr:nevent1qqs9wftt4drc5zqlhxj7tymvtr4hfynewh3ntk6tvynsd2uax5tddcspr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ez6ur4vgh8wetvd3hhyer9wghxuet5qgsdxr4f36n9a9fljx4e8a4np6j3aveu2phc04ylvq9p8xh0qz4f2ygrqsqqqqqpun3ha4

It seems to be far more common than I'd expect had I not seen evidence to the contrary. I mean, it's a wire.

Humans have been making wires for a while now and I feel like if my speaker wire never goes bad, then my USB wires should not go bad either!

The level of panic I just experienced was huge just now when all of my Qubes backups, going back years, could not be restored. 😳😱

Suffice to say, there's some important stuff on there...

But it's cool, I have it restoring now.

It was either an intermittently bad cable or flakey USB-C port on this new motherboard.

I'm sure as hell not going to touch it now that it is restoring! Once it's done, then I can investigate further to see what's not working and if it's the cable, I'll give it to my worst enemy. 😈

My last ditch attempt to get my previous SSD to boot with the new motherboard has failed.

I thought maybe if I did a fresh install to a fresh SSD, it'd set up the UEFI variables in the BIOS to allow me swap the old SSD in there and boot up.

No such luck. So now I'm finally going to resort to restoring from a backup and then copying over the files that I manually rescued.

And the Qubes 4.2 installer booted just fine. I guess that forum post was onto something there.

Wow, libc. The only times I remember that causing me trouble is when writing exploits, and I can totally understand wanting to yeet it. 🤣

There are frequent updates to the guest OSes (Fedora, Debian) and occassional updates to dom0, but they go faster than Windows or macOS updates. This is even true when Qubes updated go through Tor. They also don't interrupt anything nor force a reboot, which is a stark contrast to Windows and macOS.

I don't use night shift, but it should be an option in dom0 since that is running X11. I'll look for it when I'm back up and running.

No secure boot out of the box is a fair point, but they do have two more secure alternatives (Anti Evil Maid or Heads) which has the advantage of limiting the trust you have to put the BIOS.

I like Tails too. That's my go to solution when I need to use someone else's computer. I can just reboot before and after I do something risky, like downloading and running software vs something more sensitive such as encrypted messaging, moving money around, or signing into certain accounts.

I don't tend to do much of those sensitive things while on the go, let alone using someone else's computer, so it's not very many reboots to switch context in practice.

At home it's nice to have different nyms separated, easy backups, and different networking setups for different things (force everything through various VPNs, Tor, a combination of those two, or no networking). Those are the main three things I like about Qubes (beyond the isolation that prevents one vulnerability from meaning "game over", of course).

Had the latest stable BIOS, updated to one labeled "beta" and got the same results.

Found someone else who ran into IOMMU causing the installer to hang and theonly suggestion was to use a newer version of the installer (e.g. a nightly build). No indication whether it worked or not.

Next up: the Qubes 4.2 installer

Hard disagree here.

I've seen a lot of vulnerabilities in Xen that did not affect Qubes because of how they implemented their system.

The ability to safely get data from one VM to another in Qubes is sublime.

The support for quickly switching VMs between Tor, a VPN, or other network configurations is easy to use.

There are hardware compatibility limitations, which is inherent when you are using security features that other OSes don't use, but once it's up and running, the implementation is solid.