[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 14 points 3 months ago

This poll tracking is showing Harris barely ahead on national polls. This millennium, Republicans have won the presidency in 2000, 2004, and 2016.

In 2000 and 2016, the Democratic candidate won the popular vote.

Winning the popular vote doesn’t mean shit. The electoral college is what matters.

That same NYT poll link lists 9 tossup states: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, and Virginia.

You’ll notice all but the first three are in alphabetical order. That’s because all but the first three don’t have enough polling to make a prediction. Of those first three: a statistical tie in Wisconsin and Michigan with a Trump lead in Pennsylvania.

If you include Kennedy, Harris is ahead by 1% in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania but still tied in Michigan.

National polling trends are going in the direction I want, but they really don’t matter.

I write this from a state whose electoral college votes have never gone for a Democrat in my lifetime and won’t ever before my death. I’ll be voting for Harris, but that vote is one of those national votes that won’t actually help my preferred candidate.

The only way I can help is via monetary donation.

And if you’re a Harris voter in a solidly blue state, your vote means as much fuck all as mine does. Yes, it actually makes it to the electoral college, but, like mine, that’s a forgone conclusion. You should be donating money too and hoping it’s used wisely to affect those swing states.

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Under the CMB method, it sounds like the calculation gives the same expansion rate everywhere. Under the Cepheid method, they get a different expansion rate, but it’s the same in every direction. Apparently, this isn’t the first time it’s been seen. What’s new here is that they did the calculation for 1000 Cepheid variable stars. So, they’ve confirmed an already known discrepancy isn’t down to something weird on the few they’ve looked at in the past.

So, the conflict here is likely down to our understanding of ether the CMB or Cepheid variables.

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 100 points 8 months ago

Except it’s not that they are finding the expansion rate is different in some directions. Instead they have two completely different ways of calculating the rate of expansion. One uses the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. The other uses Cepheid stars.

The problem is that the Cepheid calculation is much higher than the CMB one. Both show the universe is expanding, but both give radically different number for that rate of expansion.

So, it’s not that the expansion’s not spherical. It’s that we fundamentally don’t understand something to be able to nail down what that expansion rate is.

89
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by phase_change@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

I’m a guy approaching 60, so I’ll start by saying my perception may be wrong. That could be because the protest songs from the late 60’s and early 70’s weren’t the songs I heard live on the radio but because they were the successful ones that got replayed. More likely, it’s because music is much more fractured than what I was exposed to on the radio growing up. Thus, today, I’m simply not exposed to the same type of protest songs that still exist.

Whatever the reason, I feel that the zeitgeist of protest music is very different from the first decade of my life compared to the last.

I’m curious to know why. My conspiratorial thoughts say that it’s down to the money behind music promotion being very different over those intervening decades, but I suspect it’s much more nuanced.

So, why are there fewer protest songs? Alternatively, why I am not aware of recent ones?

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 year ago

Me too, but I’d put Usenet in there before Slashdot.

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

Spock, Uhura, Chapel, heck even M’Benga don’t make it a prequel, but a lieutenant Kirk does?

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As a guy responsible for a 1,000 employee O365 tenant, I’ve been watching this with concern.

I don’t think I’m a target of state actors. I also don’t have any E5 licenses.

I’m disturbed at the opaqueness of MS’ response. From what they have explained, it sounds like the bad actors could self-sign a valid token to access cloud resources. That’s obviously a huge concern. It also sounds like the bad actors only accessed Exchange Online resources. My understanding is they could have done more, if they had a valid token. I feel like the fact that they didn’t means something’s not yet public.

I’m very disturbed by the fact that it sounds like I’d have no way to know this sort of breach was even occurring.

Compared to decades ago, I have a generally positive view of MS and security. It bothers me that this breach was a month in before the US government notified MS of it. It also bothers me that MS hasn’t been terribly forthcoming about what happened. Likely, there’s no need to mention I’m bothered that I’m so deep into the O365 environment that I can’t pull out.

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago

I believe you are correct. Any paying Red Hat customer consuming GPL code has the right to redistribute that code. What Red Hat seems to be suggesting is that if you exercise that right, they’ll cut you as a customer, and thus you no longer have access to bug fixes going forward.

I suspect it’s legal under the GPL. I’m certain it violates the spirit of the GPL.

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

Upvotes and downvotes.

Right now, I can browse by New on my subscribed communities and see every post since the last time I did that.

I can view or re-view posts and read every response. If the responses are legion, I can play with hot/top and get the meat of the discussion.

Did you notice that last sentence? On the few posts where there are too many responses to view all, I’ll try to get at those that are relevant.

If the Lemmy community grows large enough, I’ll need to do the same for posts. I will no longer be able to regularly view by new and have time to see everything.

So, I’ll need to rely on some sorting method to make certain I see relevant stuff.

Someone with millions of bots that never post have millions of upvotes and downvotes to influence the score used by the sorting algorithm that I’ll use to decide what to read.

39

Ok, this is not going to be a well formulated question, because the concerns behind it are nebulous in my own head.

Some assumptions I have, that clearly inform the question that follows: I believe commercial, state, and others have sophisticated methods of influencing what I see on social media and thus, in part, what I think. I also believe that someone more willing to believe in the types of conspiratorial beliefs I’ve just expressed are more likely to be manipulated by information they’re exposed to. And, yes, I fully appreciate the irony of those beliefs.

My child is adult enough that belief patterns I encourage are very unlikely to become deep patterns. That is, I’d have to work to indoctinate my son, and he’d actively resist if my indoctrination was outside of societal norms.

He didn’t grow up exposed to the social media I suspect children do now.

How does a parent inoculate a child to the influence of social media without also creating a mindset willing to believe in a nebulous “them” that controls things—a mindset, I believe, that makes a person more likely to be controlled?

3
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by phase_change@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhost@lemmy.ml

So, I’ve been self-hosting for decades, but on physical hardware. I’ve had things like MythTV and an asterisk voip system, but those have been abandoned for years. I’ve got a web server, but it’s serving static content that’s only viewed by bots and attackers.

My mail server, that’s been active for more than two decades is still in active use.

All of this makes me weird in the self-hosted community.

About a month ago, I put in a beefy system for virtualization with the intent to start branching out the self hosting. I primarily considered Proxmox and xcp-ng. I went with xcp-ng, primarily because it seems to have more enterprise features. I’m early enough in my exploration that switching isn’t a problem.

For those of you more advanced in a home-lab hypervisor, what did you go with and why? Right now, I’m pretty agnostic. I’m comfortable with xcp-ng but have no problems switching. I’m particularly interested in opinions that have a particularly negative view of one or the other, so long as you explain why.

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

It doesn’t stop you from being hacked, but if you are hacked, it helps you to understand how so you can defend against it. So, I agree it doesn’t improve security for your instance, but it can improve security for your future instances.

34
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by phase_change@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

TL;DR: old guy wants logs and more security in docker settings. Doesn’t want to deal with the modern world.

I’m on the sh.itjust.works lemmy instance. I don’t know how to reference another community thread so that it works for everyone, so my apologies for pointing at sh.itjust.works, but my thoughts here are inspired by https://sh.itjust.works/post/54990 and my attempts to set up a Lemmy server.

I’m old school. I’m in my mid-50’s. I was in academia as a student and then an employee from the mid-80’s through most of the 90’s. I’ve been in IT in the private sector since the late 90’s.

That means I was actively using irc and Usenet before http existed. I’ve managed publically facing mail and web servers in my job since the 90’s. I’ve run personal mail and web servers since the early 00’s. I even had a static HTML page that was the number one Google hit for an obscure financial search term for much of the 2000’s. The referer ip’s and search terms could probably have been mined for data.

On the work side, I’ve seen multiple email account compromises. (I’d note zero when it was on premise Lotus Notes. All of the compromises were after moving to O365. Those stopped for years once we moved to MFA, but this year we’ve seen two where the bad actors were able to MitM MFA. That said I don’t regret no longer supporting an on-prem Domino server: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1dbsBWQ3k )

I’ve also seen a sophisticated vendor typo squatting email, combined with an internal email compromise cost us significant cash.

Other than email compromise, I’m not aware of any other intrusions. (There are two kinds of companies: those that know they’ve been hacked and those that don’t). I am friends with some IT people in a company where they were ransomwared. I still believe they have a tighter security stack than we do.

I’m paranoid about security because like Farmer’s I’ve seen a thing or two. We keep logs for a year, dumped into a SIEM that is designed to make it unlikely bad actors can get into it even if they take over A/D or VMWare. My home logging is less secure but still extensive. The idea is even if I’m hit, I hope I have the logs to help me understand how and how extensively.

I still have public websites at home, but they don’t contain any content that matters. The only traffic they see is attack attempts and indexers that will index them and then shove them down into oblivion. I’m fine with that.

I still run a mail server at home. It’s mostly used so all my unique email addresses (sh.itjust.works@foo.com) can get forwarded to my personal O365 instance. If I need to reply using a unique address, I use alpine in an ssh session.

Long prolog to explain my experience playing with a Lemmy instance this weekend. I’ve got an xcp-ng instance in the home lab and used it to get a Lemmy docker instance running. It’s not yet exposed to the outside world.

I’m new to docker. I’m new to Lemmy. I’m new to Nginx. (See the “old school” in the title.). At work and at home, I deal with Apache. I’ve got custom mod_rewrite rules and mod_security in place to deal with many attacks. I’m comfortable dealing with the tweaks on both for websites that break because of some rules.

I’ve tried putting an Apache proxy in front of my xcp-ng Lemmy instance, but it won’t work because Lemmy assumes an initial contact via http/1.1 with an http status code of 101 to push to http/2.0. Apache can proxy either but not both. And Lemmy isn’t happy of the initial connection is http/2.0.

I’m also uncomfortable with my lack of knowledge regarding Nginx. I don’t know how to recreate my mod_rewrite rules and I don’t think there’s an equivalent to mod_security.

Worse, I don’t see an easy way to retain docker logs. Yes, I can likely use volumes in a docker-compose.yml to retain them, but it’s far from clear what path that would be.

I know all of these are solveable concerns with some effort, but I suspect few put in that effort.

How do all of you who run containers in a home lab sleep at night knowing all that log data is ephemeral unless you take special effort? How do you sleep knowing the sample configs you are using in containers have little security built in?

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 year ago

Yeah, my hope is the small learning curve to join the fediverse means we don’t end up with the bulk of the active posters on reddit.

My fear is that Lemmy is about to see some attacks the fediverse isn’t ready to defend against.

224

It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.

I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.

Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.

I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.

I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.

I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.

9

I signed up and am currently logged in via an iPad. I wanted to browse and post on a computer. I’ve tried multiple browsers and incognito modes. With all of them, when signing into sh.itjust.works, I get nothing but the spinning button after clicking login.

I’m not sure if it’s some capacity issue, or if Lemmy doesn’t allow the same user logged in via multiple browsers.

I’m a bit scared to logout and see if that’s the case.

Anyone have any insight?

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago

Just want to say, thanks for this instance and thanks for this type of transparency. I’ve never given Reddit money, but if you do get to the point of wanting/needing help with keeping this going, I’m ready.

I was involved with moderating a listserv of around 15k users in the early 90’s. Most of you won’t know what a listserv was or that the early 90’s was pre-web. I can only imagine the issues you’ll soon be dealing with.

Thank you!

18

So, in thinking about how bad actors might manipulate Lemmy, I have some questions.

In this scenario, I’m an entity that wants to influence social media, a government, a corporation, a collection of dedicated degenerates—pick your boojum. I see this growing Lemmy thing. I figure it’s not a serious threat, but if I’m wrong, I’d like to be placed to influence things via what people see. I want to be able to upvote or downvote posts.

If I’ve got a decent budget, I’d spin up a bunch of new Lemmy instances and encourage signups when there’s this mad rush from Reddit. I’d want as many real users as I can get. I’d also create a bunch of sock puppet accounts on all of my instances. I’d probably have some of them post and comment.

If Lemmy attains critical mass, I’d be able to use those sock puppets to upvote/downvote posts I want to influence.

I (now the OP, not the hypothetical bad actor) imagine this is hard to defend against. I also imagine federation is all or nothing. That is, either you federate everything from a server or you federate nothing.

Are their granular federation options, like allowing post federation but ignoring upvote/downvote federation?

[-] phase_change@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 year ago

Hardly surprising. Any popular app is going to have enough users that it doesn’t make economic sense to stay. A niche app that’s halfway decent will soon have enough users they’ll need to fold to.

41

Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion.

I can vaguely understand the federation concept, the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account. What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?

Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail? I’m assuming some servers can keep up under the load and some can’t. If sh.itjust.works goes down under the load, can I still browse other servers? Or, do those servers think I should have some token from sh.itjust.works, because my cookies say I’m still logged in, and I can’t even do that?

Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?

I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs? The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.

I can imagine lots of different worse case scenarios, but I’m curious what those of you who run servers imagine for the best case scenario? A manageable growth that just gets more vibrant communities, which can’t ever lead to the breadth and variety of Reddit?

Also, for those running servers, have any of you experienced issues during this growth? What scares you?

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phase_change

joined 1 year ago