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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • Salt the hash with something unique to that specific user so identical passwords have different hashes

    Isn’t that… the very definition of a Salt? A user-specific known string? Though my understanding is that the salt gets appended to the user-provided password, hashed and then checked against the record, so I wouldn’t say that the hash is salted, but rather the password.

    Also using a pepper is good practice in addition to a salt, though the latter is more important.








  • I love steam, but let’s get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.

    Steam is an example where I’m not sure when it would happen.

    It already comes with a hefty fee of 30% per sale on the platform. I don’t think they can raise that without serious backlash. And there also isn’t really a need, Steam prints money. It prints money because it’s where users are. Users are there because they like the features. Some good features are only there because of laws (e.g. refunding); Valve can’t remove these.

    So how would you make the service even more profitable?

    Enshittification happens because corporations want (more) money out of a service that built a userbase. These were often running at a loss. To turn a profit, they need to change.

    Steam can sell you licenses to games you don’t own already. It’s up to each publisher. Valve doesn’t care, they just deliver.




  • The big issue that the author kind of mentions is that while the kernel has all these neat features, the overlaying OS seems to use them in such a way that they’re often not effective. XP before SP1 was a security nightmare and we got lucky that blaster was not working correctly. A secure token for the processes in your session? It doesn’t really help if every process you spawn gets this token with the user being the administrator (I know this is kind of different nowadays with UAC). A very cool architecture that allows easy porting? Let’s only use it on x86. Even today, it’s big news for Windows running on ARM, which the not-by-design-portable Unices have been doing for years.

    Maybe if Microsoft had allowed the kernel to be used in other operating systems - not expecting a copyleft license - the current view is that Windows Is Bad, and the NT kernel is an inseparable part of Windows. And hell, even Windows CE which did run on other devices and architectures, doesn’t use the NT kernel.

    So while the design and maybe even large parts of its implementation may be good and clean, it’s Microsoft’s fault that the public perception of the NT kernel.


  • I, a systems guy, have a better time learning go than nix packages.

    Go is a simple and elegant imperative language (that does come with its downsides); Nix the DSL is a functional language which requires a different way of thinking. Systems usually are operated imperatively, so it’s normal that you’d find it easier.

    It’s not an easy language at all and one might ask if another one wouldn’t do the job better, which is what Guix System kind of explores, but its (nix) design goals make a lot of sense.





  • A good first approximation.

    So where in this setup would you mount a network share? Or am additional hard drive for storage? The latter is neither removable nor temporary. Also /run is quite more than what this makes it seem (e.g. user mounts can be located there), there is practically only one system path for executables (/usr/bin)…

    Not saying that the graphic is inherently wrong or bad, but one shouldn’t think it’s the end all be all.



  • The only hint at the other topic I see is this:

    (not even considering some hostile emails that I recently received from the upstream developer or his public rants on lkml and reddit)

    I guess this is about https://www.reddit.com/r/bcachefs/comments/1em2vzf/psa_avoid_debian/, and while I think the title is too broad, the actual message is

    If you’re running bcachefs, you’ll want to be on a more modern distro - or building bcachefs-tools yourself.

    I don’t consider Kent’s reasoning (also further down the thread) a rant - it might not be the most diplomatic, but he’s not the only one who has problems with Debian’s processes. The xscreensaver developer is another one for similar reasons.

    I think, in fairness, bcachefs and Debian currently aren’t a good fit. bcachefs is also in the kernel so users can rest it and report, but it wasn’t meant to be stable; it’s meant to not lose data unrecoverably.

    Anyhow, while I think that he’s also not the easiest person on the LKML, I don’t consider him ranting there; and with the author’s and my judgement differing in these points, I’m led to believe that we might also disagree on what qualifies as hostile.

    Lastly, while I’m not a big fan of how Rust packaging works, it ensures that the program is built exactly the same on the developer’s and other machines (for users and distributors); it is somewhat ironic to see Debian complain about it, since they do understand the importance of reproducibility.

    You must have missed the last half of the post then. Especially the last two paragraphs.

    There’s isn’t much more to that issue than that sentence, while all other paragraphs cover the packaging. It’s tangential at best.