• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle








  • The biggest red flag is when they try and stop you from pasting your password (or anything else for that matter) breaking password managers.

    There are years-long arguments on social media with companies who do this with actual security experts telling them they’re hurting security (including referencing organisations like the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre) and their only response is “we don’t allow pasting for security reasons” but they can never explain how it helps security - because it doesn’t. It drives me mad.


  • That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?

    Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.

    These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.




  • I particularly enjoy the “if you need immediate assistance” note for a telephone line that’s open even fewer hours than the website. it’s positioned as an alternative to the site, but absolutely isn’t. Also, if that message is only displayed when the site is closed, there are no hours when the phone line is open but the site is closed, so who’s it helping? You couldwrite it down and call it when it’s open, but the site is also going to be open then, several hours earlier in fact, so is less “immediate” than the site that’s closed.


  • It’s really hard. And really expensive. I used to work in five nine environments, life or death type use cases, and my rule of thumb was that you double your cost for every extra nine you add.

    When we got to five nines it was multiple hot standbys with a custom control and orchestration plane - literally custom hardware we had to build. This was for local installations, so not modern cloud environments (it was over a decade ago), but many of the challenges are similar, like session handling, transmission replay and caching, locking, clashing, routing, jitter, latency etc.


  • Don’t do any port forwarding, and test your network’s external exposure regularly. If you do that, you’ll set yourself up in the right way.

    If you need to access anything you’re self-hosting from outside your network, do it through a VPN and open up one single port, the one the VPN users, rather than accessing services directly. And use a non-standard VPN.

    This has other benefits too. For example, if you’re running a pihole, you’ll be able to use it when out and about on your phone if you’re going through your own VPN.