Glorified network janitor. Perpetual blueteam botherer. Friendly neighborhood cyberman. Constantly regressing toward the mean. Slowly regarding silent things.

  • 4 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 27th, 2023

help-circle






  • I’m a consultant so whenever I’m applying for a new gig I need to provide a consultant profile, which is very similar to resume.

    Over the years I’ve learned that most customers are not very interested in the “personal stuff” sections - they just want to know you have the skills required, so try to minimize the amount of personal data and concentrate on skills and past gigs (anonymizing customers/companies) etc.

    But - unfortunately you have to tell something about yourself and your ability to work together with others, there’s really no way around it. It’s also more and more customary that (for some reason) they want your photo. Stuff like education, certifications need to be there, but keep it very short. Think about “social media profile page”.

    Provide stuff like contact info, address, phone, date of birth (if required) and references separately - don’t put them into your resume. You can add something like “Personal information and references provided separately by request” in there, that way, even if the document is shared, all they get is something resembling a LinkedIn profile.

    You can also try to add “confidential” to the document header, but I’ve noticed it’s not respected very often.


  • I’ve been paying for Nebula account for a while now. It’s got high quality stuff and it’s owned by creators making the content.

    There’s also peertube and other fedi variants.

    Works great for me, I don’t feel like I need YouTube or I’m missing out on important stuff.

    NewPipe/Piped to watch occasional video linked from an article.


  • Teaching kids good, healthy anticapitalist values is important. It’s also good to teach them some basic computing and privacy skills, because they’re not going to get that anywhere else. They’re going to be under lot of social peer pressure to have the latest phones and being connected on social media, consuming information from algorithms.They need to understand how to minimize the harm from Meta and the big tech.

    Same applies to the copyright industry and their practices (along with corps who are heavily anti-repair like Apple) - they need to understand the exploitation model of capitalism and lobbying - from there, let them make their own choices.







  • A symlink is a file that contains a shortcut (text string that is automatically interpreted and followed by the operating system) reference to another file or directory in the system. It’s more or less like Windows shortcut.

    If a symlink is deleted, its target remains unaffected. If the target is deleted, symlink still continues to point to non-existing file/directory. Symlinks can point to files or directories regardless of volume/partition (hardlinks can’t).

    Different programs treat symlinks differently. Majority of software just treats them transparently and acts like they’re operating on a “real” file or directory. Sometimes this has unexpected results when they try to determine what the previous or current directory is.

    There’s also software that needs to be “symlink aware” (like shells) and identify and manipulate them directly.

    You can upload a symlink to Dropbox/Gdrive etc and it’ll appear as a normal file (probably just very small filesize), but it loses the ability to act like a shortcut, this is sometimes annoying if you use a cloud service for backups as it can create filename conflicts and you need to make sure it’s preserved as “symlink” when restored. Most backup software is “symlink aware”.




  • Kinda tired of the constant flow of endless “analysis” of xz at this point.
    There’s no real good solution to “upstream gets owned by evil nation state maintainer” - especially when they run it in multi-year op.

    It simply doesn’t matter what downstream does if the upstream build systems get owned without anyone noticing. We’re fucked.

    Debian’s build chroots were running Sid - so they stopped it all. They analyzed and there was some work done with reproducible builds (which is a good idea for distro maintainers). Pushing out security updates when you don’t trust your build system is silly. Yeah, fast security updates are nice, but it took multiple days to reverse the exploit, this wasn’t easy.

    Bottom line, don’t run bleeding edge distros in prod.

    We got very lucky with xz. We might not be as lucky with the next one (or the ones in the past).