• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

help-circle





  • If this is for live disks or mirrors (not backup), LUKS is reasonable. Backup is different from mirroring since one of the things it protects you from is accidentally deleting files. If you delete a file from your main drive, it also disappears from the mirror drive, so mirrors are not backup. For encrypted backup, I’ve been using Borg backup which is quite well thought out, though confusing at first. The backups go on a remote server which is ok since they are all encrypted.








  • Voip call quality is terrible, it is near unusable over mobile data IME, it adds latency etc.

    I guess an intermediate measure might be to make all your phone calls through a forwarding proxy (e.g. implemented with Twilio API) so that all the mobile carrier sees is that your phone calls all go to the same number. Similarly you’d give out a VOIP DID number that forwards to your mobile, so all your incoming calls would appear to come from the same number.


  • Don’t know about Signal but the way PFS usually works is there is something like a Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange. Each person generates a random (private) number, remembers it, crunches it mathematically into a public number, and sends the public number to the other person. Each then combines their private number with the public number that they got from the other person, and this (because of how DH works) cleverly gives both people the same secret number they use for the encryption, but the secret can’t be reconstructed without knowing at least one of the private numbers. Finally, the PFS part is simply that each person permanently deletes both the shared secret and the private number they generated for that exchange (they will create new ones next time they want to communicate). That means there is no way to reconstruct the secret and re-decrypt the message.

    Of course, authentication also has to be added to all this.

    For more info, probably easiest to look up Diffie-Hellman key exchange online.




  • I’m a chess fan. Men-only events were abolished in the 1980s. There are now women’s events (no men allowed) and open events (everyone allowed). In practice open events are 90% male, and the male players, especially at the lower levels, tend to fit the smelly and socially inept stereotype. Playing in them can be unpleasant for women, and women’s events exist basically to provide playing venues where women can enjoy competitive chess while staying the hell away from us clueless males. As a clueless male myself, I can get behind that, no problem. I understand and I’m fine with it. How do cis women feel about playing alongside trans women? Idk, I’m cis male and I don’t feel entitled to spout off about that. But I think they are the ones I’d want to listen to the most.

    The top levels from what I can tell aren’t as bad as the lower levels, since the effort it takes to reach that level of chess tends to weed out the clueless and lazy. There is still bad stuff though, e.g. the incidents with GM Alejandro Ramirez.

    You might like the book Chess Bi tch (that is the title, damn censor bot),by WGM Jennifer Shahade reviewed here , about her experiences in both women’s and open chess events coming up through the ranks.

    As for FIDE, there currently aren’t really alternatives at the top levels. FIDE on the other hand is not much of a factor in lower and mid level chess. Those events tend to be regulated by national and ad hoc federations, etc.