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 love Ed. He is a fantastic writer.

r/theydidthemonstermath

r/theydidthemath

Private trackers disgust me. What kind of pirate turns away from the world, to re-seeding fragments of files they don’t care about to other cowards with slightly slower rss feeds; all for a chance at enough ratio to get the show you want? It’s a country club, with self-validating assholes, dry hot dogs, and tall fences.

The Mainline DHT is the way forward. There is no social credit here. The kids in Africa are starving, and I will throw them as much as I can, kilobyte by kilobyte, for no reason at all, for I too was a leecher once.

Did you know that in the first version of php, each function name would be hashed to lookup the code to run it? And the hashing algorithm was: the first letter. So all the functions started with a different letter.

I wanted a countertop dishwasher. Home depot doesn’t have them in stores, it was online only. I figured it would probably make me make an account in order to check out. I said nah.

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.

This is absolute gold. To the right person, this comment is priceless. Thank you for typing all this out. This is wisdom right here.

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 ;)

Tailscale might be the best bet at this point. It will manage the wireguard mesh for you, and use nat holepunching for handshaking instead of needing listening ports.

At least outlook can right click for spellcheck. Wait, actually it can’t do that.

At least you can download your email attachments to a folder? Wait actually you can’t do that either.

At least the 15-minute meeting warnings still pop up consistently? Oh. Oh no.

“Are you sure you want to post this comment? Would you like to upload to sharepoint and send a link instead?”

No outlook I would not like that, I would never like that

Is my file in onedrive? Or on disk? Or is it in sharepoint? Or it could be in a teams chat - but isn’t that just sharepoint? I sent it to Tom also, but it was already in sharepoint because I had sent it to Jim, so it re-named it to something else. Where in sharepoint are my teams files? Or the teams files others have sent me? Is this actually an attachment on my email or is it a “shared link” in disguise?

I’m not sure what’s real anymore!

I love i2p. I wish it had more adoption / was easier to use.

I work in cybersecurity. This quote is gold and I’m putting it on our office whiteboard.

I have not heard spiritbox, but I have heard that they are similar to Reliqa, who I absolutely love

TTL in the packet header is 29 instead of 30