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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • ctr1@fl0w.cctoLinux@lemmy.mlIs anyone using awk?
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    6 months ago

    Yes! Awk is great, I use it all the time for text processing problems that are beyond the scope of normal filters but aren’t worth writing a whole program for. It’s pretty versatile, and you can split expressions up and chain them together when they get too complicated. Try piping the output into sh sometime. It can be messy though and my awk programs tend to be write-only





  • If you’re willing to spend the time to learn how to write custom policies, SELinux can be used for this, to some extent. It’s highly customizable and can sandbox your apps, but the process of doing so is quite complicated. I wrote a small guide on custom policy management on Gentoo in another comment if you’re interested.

    There’s also apparently a “sandbox” feature, but I don’t know much about it. I just write my own policies and make them as strict as possible.

    As an example, my web browser can’t access my home directory or anything except its own directories, and nobody (including my own user), except root and a few select processes (gpg, gpg-agent, git, pass) can access my gnupg directory.

    This only covers security/permissions, and doesn’t include many of the other benefits of containerization or isolation. You could also try KVM with libvirt and Gentoo VMs; that works pretty well (despite update times) and I did that for a while with some success.



  • Haha yeah, nicely put. I do enjoy the content, mostly because I’ve been following these creators for some time, and it’s hard to find a replacement for it… there is a lot of great content there, but it makes me feel gross using it. And same, I had no problem finding an alternative for Reddit (this), probably because I was not very attached to individual creators there.

    I’m hoping a decentralized solution gains traction, but in the meantime I’ve been trying to limit the amount of information I share with the platform. I’m not actively trying to restrict my usage (most of that was achieved when I stopped using an account), but maybe it’s a good idea to do so. I mostly use it when eating or going to sleep, and there are better ways to occupy that time.






  • ctr1@fl0w.cctoLinux@lemmy.mlIs gentoo a good choice?
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    11 months ago

    Yes! Depending on how much time you want to spend figuring things out… there is a learning curve, but the documentation is quite extensive. And you do learn a lot about Linux by diving in. The compile times aren’t really an issue today if you have decent hardware- I run it at home and on all of my servers (some of them not very powerful). You can do other things while it’s compiling.

    It’s great if you want to customize everything and learn how your system works, or are interested in optimizing everything for your specific CPU architecture. There are a few pitfalls (especially when learning), but I’ve generally been able to learn how to fix any issues as they arise.

    Also, the package availability is great. If you can’t find something in the gentoo repository or in an overlay, you can usually find its dependencies and build it yourself.



  • The difference is that your ISP doesn’t know where your packets are headed, and the destination doesn’t know where your packets came from. The ISP sees you connect to the entrance node and the destination sees you connect from the exit node, and it’s very difficult for anyone to trace the connection back to you (unless they own both the entrance and exit and use traffic coorelation or some other exploit/fingerprint). Regardless, both parties are generally able to tell that you are using TOR if they reference lists of known entrance/exit nodes. Also the anti-fingerprinting measures taken by TB are a bit more strict than other privacy-focused browsers


  • It’s great for anything low bandwidth that isn’t tied to your identity, and helps for peace of mind, despite its issues. You do run into captcha or DDOS protection issues occasionally, but the new tor circuit for this site button sometimes works. Also it uses letterboxing to prevent resolution-based fingerprinting, which isn’t very pretty, but leaving it at its default size (or locking the size using the WM) works well and is good for privacy.


  • An extension would be cool! I’m currently trying to do something similar, in some sense; I’ve patched my instance to filter out DB results from public queries so that only my posts and comments are visible (unless I am logged in).

    The only thing I’m not sure about yet is if it’s possible - if I create a Post on an instance that’s not my home, who is hosting the data? Do I only send ActivityPub Create Post with the data and the instance then saves it, or do I create the post on my own instance, send an ID, and if someone requests the Post data on the instance I posted to, it will be requested from mine?

    I believe it might be possible, but I’m not sure. It seems that the protocol itself is mostly geared for synchronizing data and distributing updates. From my limited understanding, servers follow users or communities on other servers, which inform those servers that updates should be sent to the requesting inbox. These updates are then used to build up a local copy of the remote page. In the case of a remote community, users interact with their local copy and notify the remote community of those changes.

    For example, I am viewing a local copy of this post that I received from lemmy.ml, and my reply to your comment will be stored locally. My server will notify lemmy.ml of this comment (including its contents), and lemmy.ml will notify my inbox if anyone interacts with it (because I am a follower).

    It seems that at least some of this syncing might not be necessary… a lightweight frontend could rely on the API of each site it connects with to build up the activities it sends. However, this would probably cause some unnecessary traffic, as such a follower would both receive updates and query the API. Also it would probably break some things, such as ap_id (see the multicolored fedilink icon, which points the original copy of the content on my instance).