I prefer security keys. At work I use a yubikey, and I have Google’s security keys for my personal stuff. I tend to use totp as a backup.

For everything not banking, it’s great, I agree. I still prefer my security keys to everything. It’s hard to duplicate a digital key when it only exists on protected storage on a physical device, where that key never exists outside of that physical device.

In case anyone doesn’t know: FIDO works using a pair of asymmetric digital keys, the public key is sent to the remote site, and only the private key can decrypt anything encrypted by the public key. So a challenge (usually some mathematical calculation, not sure), is encrypted by the site/service that is handling the login, it sends over the encrypted request, which is passed, in it’s entirety to the fob. The fob requires a physical activation to process the challenge (usually a touch, but some require a fingerprint). The challenge is then decrypted, processed, the response is encrypted, and sent to the site for login, which decrypts the response with the public key, and compares the result to the result of the challenge that was sent.

There’s no part of this that can really be compromised. An eavesdropper can obtain the encrypted challenge (unable to be decrypted in any reasonable manner), and the response/public key… The public key isn’t useful, and the response is only valid for that specific login because there are aspects of the challenge that are unique per login.

All information in flight is unreadable nonsense. The only unique information to the key that is sent anywhere is the public key, which is supposed to be public.

Totp has the vulnerability of needing to relay the seed, usually by QR code. The only vulnerability there is when you set it up and the seed is shared to you, it can be intercepted. If that seed is stored anywhere that becomes compromised, then it becomes meaningless. It can be mined from an authenticator, or captured in flight.

Both of these are better than alternatives. Email/sms codes can be intercepted, either by an administrator or by an internet relay, or by sim duplication, etc. You know that already.

I don’t hate totp, I just recognize the faults in it.

There’s problems with physical security keys too, mainly in the fact that, if you lose the fob, you’re screwed. So it’s recommended to have a backup. Either in the form of a second fob, which is setup for all the same accounts which is stored securely, or in the form of another authentication method like totp.

Personally, I use a backup FIDO key for my accounts whenever possible. I also have a password manager that can store my totp so everything is in a single vault. If the vault is compromised then I’m screwed though… 90% of my accounts use a password reset email which is not stored in my vault. Only two things are not in my manager: that recovery email login (secured by my Fido key) and my bank (obviously also the vault login).

At work, I use the yubikey for everything that supports it, with totp as backup in my work’s duo authenticator account (duo is also setup to use my yubikey). So it’s all Fido/totp.

The only service I really want to use my security keys with that doesn’t support it, is my bank account… I suppose, also my government stuff, but almost all of that is informational. I can’t really make changes to my government stuff from their webpages. It’s generally just the government telling me things about my tax returns and whatnot (all SMS secured).

I hate the trend of companies requiring an app for 2FA… Something that’s not totp, but similar. You have a specific authenticator app for a single service on your phone only and it’s not great… Obvious examples include steam and Blizzard. Fuck that. I hate it. Go away. Give me normal MFA options… Dick.

I’ve ranted enough. Back to work for me.

Well, I have no arguments with what you’ve said. I think security keys/FIDO tokens should be more prevalent too. Otherwise this is 100% correct and I feel the exact same way.

Your story reminds me of something that my bank started doing. I got a robocall about something to do with my credit card, and the voice said to verify using x and y using my keypad, I think it was day/month/year of birth or something and I immediately noped out of the call. I hit all the wrong buttons until it got me to a person and I ripped them apart, and their supervisor for basically training their userbase to answer security questions given by an automatic voice on the other end of the line with no way to verify who is calling.

You can spoof your caller ID, you can get a text to speech robocall bot with DTMF recognition and just spam call a whole area where the bank operates and gather a bunch of personal information because it sounds just like the bank and there’s no way to prove who called.

What a crock of shit. It’s a security nightmare.

I did call my bank after at a known valid number, verified them as they verified me, and there was something going on, so the call was legit, and totally unacceptable.

These clowns want us to trust them completely, and give us no reason to do so, but they want us to bend over backwards to validate ourselves. Fuck that.

Ipmi is your friend.

Is that the same database my user couldn’t connect to today?

There’s always backups… Right?

… Right?

I agree with the idea of bodily autonomy. Above all, someone should have the right to do, or not do, whatever they want with their own person.

Whether that is to listen to doctors advice, buy pharmaceuticals and self-administer as prescribed, or even end your own life, and everything in between.

Quick disclaimer, suicide should still be evaluated by a psychiatric professional, and simply being suicidal shouldn’t necessarily mean that nobody can, or should stop you from committing that act. I’m mostly referring to medically assisted self termination, after the appropriate safeguards, checks, and balances have been cleared. Simply wanting to off yourself without being cleared as having sound mind should be something we, as a society, should address carefully, with the assistance of mental health professionals.

With all that being said: I probably would DIY some pharmaceuticals. Anything that’s an opiate or other restricted substance, definitely not. But if I can buy the ingredients without needing a special permit or license, I definitely would.

Something I’ve noticed with institutional education is that they’re not looking for the factually correct answer, they’re looking for the answer that matches whatever you were told in class. Those two things should not be different, but in my experience, they’re not always the same thing.

I have no idea if this is a factor here, but it’s something I’ve noticed. I have actually answered questions with a factually wrong answer, because that’s what was taught, just to get the marks.

What if this lifetime is also a dream.

Like inception.

The closest thing to a thin and light that I own is my framework.

I felt like anything less than what framework offers for repairability wouldn’t be sufficient for me.

There’s actually an argument that makes the point of driving prices down with soldered RAM.

The individual memory chips and constituent components are cheaper than they would be for the same in a DIMM. We’re talking about a very small difference, and bluntly, OEMs are going to mark it up significantly enough that the end consumer won’t see a reduction for this (but OEMs will see additional profits).

So by making it into unupgradable ewaste, they make an extra buck or two per unit, with the added benefit of our being unupgradable ewaste, so you throw it out and buy a whole new system sooner.

This harkens back to my rant on thin and light phones, where the main point is that they’re racing to the bottom. Same thing here. For thin and light mobile systems, soldered RAM still saves precious space and weight, allowing for it to be thinner and lighter (again, by a very small margin)… That’s the only market segment I kind of understand the practice. For everything else, DIMMs (or the upcoming LPCAMM2)… IMO, I’d rather sacrifice any speed benefit to have the ability to upgrade the RAM.

The one that ticks me off is the underpowered thin/lights that are basically unusable ewaste because they have the equivalent of a Celeron, and barely enough RAM to run the OS they’re designed for. Everything is soldered, and they’re cheap, so people on a tight budget are screwed into buying them. This is actually a big reason why I’m hoping that the windows-on-ARM thing takes off a bit, because those systems would be far more useful than the budget x86 chips we’ve seen, and far less expensive than anything from Intel or AMD that’s designed for mobile use. People on a tight budget can get a cheap system that’s actually not ewaste.

At this point, “centrist” is slang for, “I want to argue for what I believe in under the guise of being the ‘Devils advocate’”.

Remember you absolutely must not go to these specific sites.

Do not do it.

See you all tomorrow for class.

But how else is he going to pay for his yacht… I mean, pay to feed his children… Yeah, that’s relatable with millennials and zoomers that are so far in debt and earning so little that they can’t afford kids, right?

There’s reasons behind this. LPDDR IIRC works most efficiently when it’s closer to the CPU than what dimms would allow for.

Boosts speed and lowers the power requirements.

It also incentivizes people to buy larger SKUs than they originally wanted, which, bluntly, is probably the main driver for going that direction… I’m just saying that there’s technical reasons too

I’d say to try chromium, but you basically need to compile it yourself to get support for all the video codecs.

Yep. I work in IT support, almost entirely Windows but similar concepts apply.

I see people pushing 6G+ with the OS and remote desktop applications open sometimes. My current shop does almost everything by VDI/remote desktop… So that’s literally the only thing they need to load, it’s just not good.

On the remote desktop side, we recently shifted from a balanced remote desktop server, over to a “memory optimised” VM, basically has more RAM but the same or similar CPU, because we kept running out of RAM for users, even though there was plenty of CPU available… It caused problems.

Memory is continually getting more important.

When I do the math on the bandwidth requirements to run everything, the next limit I think we’re likely to hit is RAM access speed and bandwidth. We’re just dealing with so much RAM at this point that the available bandwidth from the CPU to the RAM is less than the total memory allocation for the virtual system. Eg: 256G for the VM, and the CPU runs at, say, 288GB/s…

Luckily DDR 4/5 brings improvements here, though a lot of that stuff has yet to filter into datacenters

I made this decision when I purchased a house… Or rather, the bank purchased it, I just live here and pay them instead of a landlord.

I went with DeWalt and I don’t really have any regrets. I had one of the really basic 12v drills from them for like 10+ years. It mostly rattled around my car’s trunk during that time. I’ve purchased two additional batteries for it, one was shortly after I bought it, so I’d always have a charged battery on hand, the other to keep on the drill. When I needed to swap, I’d just take the dead battery into my home at the end of the day and charge it overnight, then dump it back in the car the next day.

I used it mainly for computer stuff, since I work in that industry… Racking equipment in server racks, opening computers, etc. Rarely did I need to actually make holes or anything with it… The third battery was purchased when the original battery that came with it, stopped working. The drill and two remaining batteries still work fine, though I don’t really need/use them anymore.

I might “donate” it to a young relative someday, for now it collects dust in my basement.

When I replaced it, I got all 20v DeWalt everything. I bought a pack of tools that came with a couple of fairly basic battery chargers, a couple batteries, a hammer drill, impact driver, reciprocating saw, oscillating tool, a circular saw, and a portable light… It even came with a carry bag, which was promptly tossed in a corner and hasn’t been touched since, except to kick it further into the corner.

After a short while of owning the house, we added a small (additional) set of batteries… I think 3 more? And picked up lawn equipment that’s also 20v from DeWalt. A string trimmer (aka a “whipper snipper”), and a hedge trimmer. I feel like I’m forgetting something… Oh well.

The odd man out, so to speak, is the lawnmower, we ended up picking up a DeWalt mower, but it’s 20v/60v, so it will take either pack. We had all 20v so we just stuck with that.

Then, I think last year? DeWalt released a snowblower, but it’s 60v only. So we had to get specific batteries just for that. The 60v ones are compatible with the 20v tools, but the blower will only take the 60v packs, so we have two 60v packs for it (and the lawnmower, I suppose, since they can take advantage of the extra juice), and 20v packs for everything else.

Everything is cross compatible, with the one exception of the snowblower, so we’re all set.

My experience with the 12v drill heavily biased me towards sticking with DeWalt.

I won’t tell anyone to buy DeWalt or Milwaukee, or any other brand. You’ll have to make that decision got yourself. I don’t have any strong feelings about other brands because I simply don’t have the experience with them to have an opinion… Except Ryobi. Fuck Ryobi. My brother used Ryobi for a long time, and he had nothing good to say about them besides the fact that their tools are cheap. They’re cheap in every way. You’ll spend more trying to keep them working than you’ll spend simply by buying better tools. Don’t do it.

To be fair, I knew a lot of people who struggled with word problems in math class.

Aww, C’mon, don’t sell yourself short like that, I’m sure you’re great at… Something…

For example, you would probably be way more useful than an AI, if there was a power outage.