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Hey! Please contact me at my primary Fedi account: @lemann@lemmy.dbzer0.com

https://lemmy.one/u/lemann@lemmy.dbzer0.com

  • 4 Posts
  • 308 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Dang, that thing is the bees knees!

    Would make more sense to replace just the batteries rather than the whole unit IMO. Looks like it takes standard 12v 7Ah sealed lead acid batteries, so should be doable for under $120 (if you buy them individually and use the existing battery harness)

    I have three other UPSes, but none of them are as good as yours lol:

    • APC SUA1500RM2U - was a great online rackmount unit, stopped using this a few years back because of its tendency to overcharge batteries without a charge controller ADC calibration mod. It wrecked my last battery pack bad 😭 plan to convert it to LiFePo4 and put it back into service 🤞
    • Zigor Ebro - cheap and cheerful line-interactive UPS for the modem, network switch and CCTV cameras. Switchover time is pretty much instantaneous, worth every cent paid and has kept my network up through many outages
    • Cyberpower UT650 - A temporary offline UPS to hold the server gear specifically until I get the APC back in service. Honestly not worth the cheap price, the switchover delay is long enough to shut off anything that’s not a server PSU with massive bulk capacitors

    Edit: fix bullet list formatting


  • Flash drive hidden under the carpet and connected via a USB extension, holding the decryption keys - threat model is a robber making off with the hard drives and gear, where the data just needs to be useless or inaccessible to others.

    There’s a script in the initramfs which looks for the flash drive, and passes the decryption key on it to cryptsetup, which then kicks off the rest of the boot mounting the filesystems underneath the luks

    I could technically remove the flash drive after boot as the system is on a UPS, but I like the ability to reboot remotely without too much hassle.

    What I’d like to do in future would be to implement something more robust with a hardware device requiring 2FA. I’m not familiar with low level hardware security at all though, so the current setup will do fine for the time being!



  • If MIT AppInventor is still kicking around, you should be able to use it for this… although sadly you won’t have access to the source code since it’s a Scratch-like way to create apps.

    By default the Android voice assistant uses Google tech AFAIK, if you’re after a truly source-available solution then there’s ”Futo voice input" to handle STT, and “RHVoice” to handle TTS - though these would still need a HTTP API bridge to do what you want






  • It’s not natively supported by the base RCS standard, in the section at the end of the paper in the section titled “Third Party RCS Clients” Google explains that they’ve built the e2ee their Messages app themselves, (on top of standard RCS).

    A developer has to use Google’s implementation specifically in order to send and recieve e2ee messages to Google’s Messages app (and Samsung Messages who also implemented this recently)

    Although the e2ee implementation is using the Signal protocol under the hood, it’s for message content only - this is what is transmitted in cleartext (taken from the paper)

    • Phone numbers of senders and recipients
    • Timestamps of the messages
    • IP addresses or other connection information
    • Sender and recipient’s mobile carriers
    • SIP, MSRP, or CPIM headers, such as User-Agent strings which may contain device manufacturers and models
    • Whether the message has an attachment
    • The URL on content server where the attachment is stored
    • Approximated size of messages, or exact size of attachments

    Without using this implementation of the Signal protocol on top of RCS, the message will deliver to the contact’s phone, but shows up as unencrypted garbled text

    That is a very useful resource though, never knew there was a paper available on the implementation. Saving 😁










  • I’m sorry to say this but, your way of picking software is wrong. You should always look for the open source software first, then use proprietary software.

    I agree here, this is what I generally do nowadays. The exception for me is only software that I’ve been using for years, such as Plex and Niagara - finding an open source alternative for a proprietary solution is the easy part, the hard part is actually making it fit into your workflow.

    This is why I’ve settled on just jumping ship to an open source option when the existing proprietary option is no longer fit for purpose (hackable, “transparent” etc) because of the time sink.

    Niagara to Kvaesitso was really easy though, thanks to that developer and contributors absolutely knocking it out the park with the amazing search and UX.

    But using Plex when Jellyfin exists is just wrong. I personally have a jellyfin instance, and there’s nothing jellyfin can’t do when compared to Plex.

    Jellyfin is great, particularly for us and tech enthusiasts. For non-techies though, the first hurdle of different clients for mobile/desktop/insert-platform-here is a very tough sell (each with a slightly different UX, rearranged settings etc) and is even trickier when there are no apps available for games consoles and some smart TVs. I share my Plex server with my partner and parents, so moving to something else seems like more trouble than its worth at the moment.

    Regardless I do have my eye on Jellyfin (and particularly the music apps like Finamp, since that is my personal primary use case for Plex) - for TV libraries and Movies the gap is closing fast, I believe the only major thing that is missing is the “Skip intro/outro” on some of the clients, but for music sadly the gap is only widening. It’s very much a watch-this-space type thing though as the community catches up, but I feel the sonic analysis in Plexamp and the many features built on top of that are going to take a lot of volunteer time to replicate

    Encouraging proprietary software makes them stronger and erodes our rights. Like using chrome instead of Firefox is voting for a future where remote device attestation and forced DRM is a normal thing. Do you want the corps to eradicate your free will?

    I agree.

    With remote attestation sadly we are already there on Android: most apps require GMS even when they don’t need it, and some paranoid non-banking apps unnecessarily call Google’s attestation API, and subsequently block some actions if your device doesn’t pass.

    I personally run a rooted device for full control over app backups, my device’s BMS, and various other stuff - where possible I pretty much use open source& source-available apps, as well as browser shortcuts and PWAs, where I have the freedom to perform any desired action without being restricted by any attestation. My partner has a very keen interest in the freedom offered and is actually very annoyed at the state of things on modern Android - but sadly the attestation issues and Samsung Knox in particular are big showstoppers (I use an FP3, so no “security void” hardware fuses here)