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People often forget that Threat Actors (TA) are the ones keeping the infosec alive. They are doing a good job of scaring people into implementing actual security protocols and thereby improving everyone's security posture. The whole infosec would collapse without TAs, let's not forget that. They create jobs.

This is the “Broken Window” fallacy[1] which was explained by Bastiat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window


I don't fucking care about made up terms. If you can't see the actual economic growth (not some vague, theoretical fallacy) they create, you're just another moron in denial.

It's not a "made-up term", it's shorthand for a well-known argument. Not allowing re-usable arguments is like not allowing the use of libraries in software: It wastes time better spent on moving the frontier forward.

The wildfire industry brings growth but it would be a whole lot better if we didn't have wildfires.

The same thing is true with computers. Imagine all the nice things we could have if we didn't have to worry about people abusing the systems we build.


Well, to be honest, those old enough remember when cryptography was considered someting for the military and special services, and considering using encryption would put you under immediate suspicion. Now we can at least argue we need it to protect us from the cyber crime, even if we really have privacy and free speech in mind

If economic growth at all cost is the solution, then you are wasting your time giving your fiction away for free.

That's right. They also create jobs for police though, and now German police is doing theirs

German govt is also one of the most corrupt and vastly incompetent govt. It's run by bunch of boomers. Most of the prolific ransomware gangs have terrible opsec. De-anon'ing them is child's play. Most of the opsec-aware TAs never even get attributed, let alone get caught for any breaches.

> One of the most corrupt

It's on like place 10 out of 180, which makes it one of the least corrupt places.

It also has some surprisingly non-boomer departments, like the Sovereign Tech Fund. Either way you need to celebrate police doing good things and immoral actors being exposed, it can only have good outcomes.

Perhaps it deters them, or deters the next generation of such hackers. Or at least it makes their life less enjoyable, which is fair since they were only able to afford their travels due to their illicitly acquired wealth.


> surprisingly non-boomer departments, like the Sovereign Tech Fund

The one that has just invested in Scala? In year 2026? There are many good things about Germany, but competence in tech is not one of them.


More than money, it's the curse of going mainstream.


Bullied? When they find out how much money there is to be made in surveillance business, they will do it voluntarily.


Anyone looking to use jails might find BastileBSD helpful. It's a nice and modern jail manager.


I was looking at TrueNAS CORE to see if it was a viable way to bsd-jail Linux containers. I'm really only doing this to get some protection from supply chain attacks given I'm fairly promiscuous at git-clone-and-run-a-build. Before that I was aiming for the same with Bastille and had got to the give up stage because it felt too fiddly to set up. This was a year ago. Maybe its better now


Unfortunately trunas core is dead now.

zVault is a fork that is effortless to migrate in-place, but pointless because it has had no updates since the fork, it's no different from just continuing to run the derelict final version of truenas core.

That just leaves xigmanas which I have not tried yet, but looks like a simpler more pure nas without the jails or vm manager, which people have told me can be filled by bastille.

Or really, I'm thinking rather than even xigmanas it probably makes more sense to just use plain freebsd and never get stuck like this again.

The host is stuck at 13.3. 13.3 went fully EOL December 2024. The pkg repos don't even supply packages for that any more. I have a bunch of services that run in jails, and currently I can just barely squeak by by "illegally" updating the jails to 13.5. It's not officially supported by upstream freebsd but I seem to be getting away with it for now. But even 13.5 is not going to last much longer. Then what?

So really the FreeNAS ui was nice an all, but not so nice as to be worth being stuck like this now. I probably should have just skipped it and just used plain freebsd which would never have had any such problem.

So maybe assuming zvault continues to not update when I finally need to move some jail past 13.5, maybe the next move is not even to xigmanas but just plain freebsd.


Never understood why satoshi was a prime windows user.


I know this comment is effectively a side tangent on a side tangent. but that was always the strangest thing to me as well. I remember in 2012 when I was debating fiddling around with Bitcoin. that was one of the things that turned me off. I was sure that there was no way something as brilliant as this was supposed to be was developed by windows user.

Which surely says something about all these ideological purity tests


Windows developers (like sysadmins) are of two kinds in my experience.

People who don't understand shit about how the system behaves and are comfortable with that. "I install a package, I hit the button, it works"

.. and

People who understand very deeply how computers work, and genuinely enjoy features of the NT Kernel, like IOCP and the performance counters they offer to userland.

What's weird to me is that the competence is bimodal; you're either in the first camp or the second. With Linux (+BSD/Solaris etc;) it's a lot more of a spectrum.

I've never understood exactly why this is, but it's consistent. There's no "middle-good" Windows developer.


The (install package, press button, it works) is great when you just want a boring OS since the interest is elsewhere rather than an itch on making the machine as perfect extension of onself.

The machine and installation is just fungible.

I think I've had Linux as a primary OS 2 times, FreeBSD once and osX once, what's pulled me back has been software and fiddling.

I'm on the verge of giving Linux or osX another shot though, some friends has claimed that fiddling is virtually gone on Linux these days and Wine also seems more than capable now to handle the software that bought me back.

But also, much of the software is available outside of Windows today.


Unix is easier to understand than the NT mess and everything it's in the open and documented, so you can achieve a good level of knowledge in the middle. OTOH in order to understand NT deeply you must be a reverse engineer. Also, on the other side, crazy experts under Wine (both ways, Unix and NT) OpenBSD and 9front do exist on par of these NT wizards. It just happen with Unix/9f you climb an almost flat slope (more in the second) due to the crazy simple design, while with NT the knowledge it's damn expensive to earn.

With 9front you OFC need expertise on par of NT but without far less efforth. The books (9intro), the papers, CSP for concurrency... it's all there, there's no magic, you don't need ollyDBG or an NT object explorer to understand OLE and COM for instance.

RE 9front? Maybe on issues while debugging, because the rest it's at /sys/src, and if something happens you just point Acid under Acme to go straight to the offending source line. The man pages cover everything. Drivers are 200x smaller and more understandable than both NT and Unix. Meanwhile to do that under NT you must almost be able to design an ISA by yourself and some trivial compiler/interpreter/OS for it, because there's no open code for anything. And no, Wine is not a reference, but a reimplementation.


That's kinda true for older/integrated parts of Windows, lots and lots of functionality that people have come to rely on over the years, but also huge black-boxes that you need to not be intimidated at probing into to solve weird issues (that often becomes understandable if you have enough experience as a developer to interpret what the API surface tells about the possible internal implementation).


Probably bc, Windows users live in walled knowledge domains that tend to reinforce levels of competence (or lack of competence).

Gamers tend to be somewhere in the middle though.


Is there any technical writeup which explains how the isolation exactly works, on containers and VMs? I have always heard the high level arguments of weak isolation, same kernel, etc but never the implementation details.


"Since the abstraction layers have quadrupled, let's not just care about the actual performance anymore!"


Krebs lack any sort of real credibility. He's pushing out slop with a govern-mentalist propaganda. Tech journalists are the worst form to gather any actual information.


Krebs has some credibility in this space because he used to post well-informed takes on these topics, not stuff like this.

His record has never been flawless, but the guy actually put in the work to learn Russian to be able to read these forums. He just doesn’t anymore.


All of his dox articles are based on sloppy practices from threat actors.


So? At least the reporting used to be mostly accurate and trustworthy.

Here we can see that Krebs is now willing to publish stories he hasn’t even attempted to verify


Are you paid by the NSA to spread krebs propaganda? It seems like it.


Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


The NSA has an interest in half-heartedly defending Krebs’s past record, while trashing his current work? Weird.


State sponsored cyber attacks are news to you? It's been a thing since more than 2 decades now.


Not the attacks themselves, I would expect that kind or sabotage that actively provokes negative outcomes in people’s lives to have a more respectful/competent reasoning behind than “meh there’s a few leftovers and we had to do something”


The mentioned botnet didn't intentionally take down I2P. It's run by bunch of kids who don't know what they're doing.


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