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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2024

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  • To give you an actual answer, and you will probably not like this answer - you eat everything. Eventually. And it won’t end well.

    You have only your hands, so you won’t catch any meat. You could try to make tools to make traps or catch fish, but that’s really hard.

    For the first week, you probably won’t eat much at all. The hunger will fade after the first 24 hours. But after a few days it will come back, and it will come back strong. You’ll do what babies do - taste everything.

    You won’t have tribal knowledge passed down, so you’ll rely on the backups - smell and taste.

    Put a little bit of whatever it is in your mouth. If it’s bitter, spit it out. If it makes your mouth tingly after a few minutes, spit it out. Otherwise, swallow it. Wait an hour. If you’re still alive, and feel okay, that thing is probably okay.

    You’re going to eat lichen, moss, tree buds, flowers, lots of roots, and strange berries. You’re going to turn over rocks and eat grubs and worms. You’re smart enough to shy away from mushrooms - at first.

    Eventually you will be so incredibly hungry, and you will see mushrooms with mouse chew marks, and you’ll think to yourself: “if the mice can eat it, so can I!”. You’ll probably be right, and regardless, the gamble between a new food source and death will seem like a win-win.

    Eventually you will get it wrong, and it will hurt the entire time that you’re dying. Life sucks. Your best bet is a few lucky guesses on something relatively abundant so that you can stop guessing.

    Longer term, eventually you will figure out those tools you were attempting between foraging runs. Even longer term, you will re-invent farming, and even might not die of a vitamin deficiency. Good luck!

    —-

    Practical answer: don’t do that. Ignore food. Get rescued. Go downhill. Most of civilization is on the coastlines and/or riverbanks.

    And drink the water! If you only have gross water and no way to filter or boil it - drink it. The difference between death by dehydration and death by bacteria is about one to two weeks, which is more than enough to be rescued. The hospital might be able to fix you sick. They can’t fix dead.








  • I have declared war on notifications. My immediate family, two closest friends, and my boss can call me. In no other circumstances will my phone make a noise or vibrate. I will check my texts when I feel like it.

    Other than a few exceptions, no apps may show the notification badge either. Discord will show DMs and mentions from one or two servers. Everything else is blocked. My work email may show unread email. I’ve even turned off banners on my work chat app. I don’t think I’ve checked my personal email in months.

    All my recurring charges are paperless + autopay. That’s another notification badge I forgot about - I have a budgeting app that can show transactions. I categorize them, make sure their categories are covered, and I’m done.

    On the first of the month, I pay rent and set the budgeting app categories. Then I have nothing to worry about, and near-zero distractions. My biggest pain point in life is deciding what to eat for dinner.


  • Anything exposed to the internet will be found by the scanners. Moving ssh off of port 22 doesn’t do anything except make it less convenient for you to use. The scanners will find it, and when they do, they will try to log in.

    (It’s actually pretty easy to write a little script to listen on port 20 (telnet) and collect the default login creds that the worms so kindly share)

    The thing that protects you is strong authentication. Turn off password auth entirely, and generate a long keypair. Disable root login entirely.

    Most self-hosted software is built by hobbyists with some goal, and rock solid authentication is generally not that goal. You should, if you can, put most things behind some reverse-proxy with a strong auth layer, like Teleport.

    You will get lots of advice to hide things behind a vpn. A vpn provides centralized strong authentication. It’s a good idea, but decreases accessibility (which is part of security) - so there’s a value judgement here between the strength of a vpn and your accessibility goals.

    Some of my services (ssh, wg, nginx) are open to the internet. Some are behind a reverse proxy. Some require a vpn connection, even within my own house. It depends on who it’s for - just me, technical friends, the world, or my technically-challenged parents trying to type something with a roku remote.

    After strong auth, you want to think about software vulnerabilities - and you don’t have to think much, because there’s only one answer: keep your stuff up to date.

    All of the above covers the P in PICERL (pick-uh-rel) for Prepare. I stands for Identify, and this is tricky. In an ideal world, you get a real-time notification (on your phone if possible) when any of these things happen:

    • Any successful ssh login
    • Any successful root login
    • If a port starts listening that you didn’t expect
    • If the system watching for these things goes down (have two systems that watch each other)

    That list could be much longer, but that’s a good start.

    After Identification, there’s Contain + Eradicate. In a homelab context, that’s probably a fresh re-install of the OS. Attacker persistence mechanisms are insane - once they’re in, they’re in. Reformat the disk.

    R is for recover or remediate depending on who you ask. If you reformatted your disks, it stands for “rebuild”. Combine this with L (lessons learned) to rebuild differently than before.

    To close out this essay though, I want to reiterate Strong Auth. If you’ve got strong auth and keep things up to date, a breach should never happen. A lot of people work very hard every day to keep the strong auth strong ;)







  • It really depends on the parameters of the thought experiment.

    If everyone suddenly received a lot of money, there would be a wild period of adjustment before we figure out the pricing system again and life continues as normal. Even though there’s a lot more money, there is not magically more TVs to buy. Nor would we all start building tv factories - there’s not magically more copper or concrete to buy either.

    If we all got more money and buried it in our yards and swore never to use it, then nothing has changed. For the sake of the thought experiment, someone would break the promise (I would - I want air conditioning), and then everyone else would break it too, and we end up in the previous situation.

    If everyone were suddenly truly wealthy - as in stuff / things - some might think we would chill out and coast for a while. But having satisfied our big needs ( I am not being hunted by tigers) and our medium needs (Air conditioning, yay!), I imagine humanity would just keep working - there are always more problems to solve / there is always more work to do.



  • The threat model helps a lot.

    I work for a small consulting firm. We do security assessments, but not the kind you’re looking for. I don’t want to sell you anything.

    From your intro here, I would expect to book a resource on this project at 50% utilization (to avoid burnout) for about 3 weeks. One week of assessment, one week of report writing, and we’ll say a week of overhead / buffer (to get things rolling / ask questions / interviews / report readout). That’s a total of 60 hours.

    My employer is expensive; we charge about $300/hr per resource. That comes out to about $18k. I would call this an upper limit (though in truth there is no upper limit. If you put multiple $700/hr resources on a project and let them bring in SMEs, things get expensive fast)

    If you haven’t done a security review before, I wouldn’t worry - you aren’t ready for the $18k service, or the $1k service. You will need a 3rd-party certificate eventually, but right now all you need is trust from your userbase, and openness and transparency are a good initial strategy.

    When it’s time, throw a hundred bucks at a local college student who’s into cryptography. Then fix / address all their findings. Then go for the next level, and fix their findings. There will always be findings; what you are buying is user trust. The more in-depth the review, the more trustworthy - but you don’t want the expensive service to be distracted by things a college student could have caught.

    I am intoxicated and rambling - let me know what questions you have :)



  • I pay attention to credit card readers.

    I have gotten to know their makes and some models. I have developed preferences. When I go to a run down establishment and they have a nice reader, I am pleasantly surprised. I know that walmart uses ingenico isc250s, and they do not support tap. I know that dunkin has high quality readers, and sometimes tim hortons does too, but less frequently.

    When leaving a place, I might say something like “damn, you don’t see that model of verifone very often”, and my friends will look at me funny.

    Semi-related, did you know that most receipt printers have embedded telnet servers in them?