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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • 520@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux for Kids?
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    5 months ago

    I learned to program when I was 10 on a Commodore 64. And we would wear an onion on our belt which was the style at the time… Sorry, where was I?

    Totally get that, but we live in a much more dangerous and predatory computer landscape these days. It would be foolish not to take some precautions.


  • 520@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux for Kids?
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    5 months ago

    Standard Ubuntu should have you covered.

    One word of warning though, don’t be too egregious with the parental controls. If your kids are motivated enough, they will find a way around it.

    Education really is your best weapon here. Tell them about the dangers of the modern web and computing.




  • Imagine your computer is a big block of flats and your applications are all people who live in the building.

    Mail sent to the building address alone isn’t going to reach the intended recipient, because the postman doesn’t know what flat to post it to. So they need additional information such as ‘Flat 2C’

    That’s the basic concept of ports. It’s basically additional addressing information to allow your computer to direct internet traffic to the correct applications.

    When an application is actively listening on a port, it means that they are keeping an eye out for messages addressed to them, as designated by the port number. While an application is sending or receiving messages using a given port number, that port number is considered ‘open’.

    Now, all sorts of applications do all sorts of things. Some are for the public to use and there are some that are useful within trusted circles, but can be abused by malicious people if anyone in the world can send messages to it. Thus, we have a firewall, which acts as a gatekeeper. A firewall can ‘block’ a port, denying access to a given group of people, or ‘unblock’ it, allowing access.

    VPNs are a totally different thing. They are literally middlemen for your internet traffic. Instead of directly posting a message to somewhere and receiving a direct reply back, imagine you flew out to Italy to use a post box there and receive replies from there.








  • 520@kbin.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldWhy don't banks like root on Android?
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    6 months ago

    That’s actually got a solid reason behind it.

    It’s because the OSK is just another program as far as Android is concerned. It can’t directly look into the application, per Android specifications, but it CAN record key presses, even for passwords. It even receives context hints based on the metadata on the input box, so it knows when you’re putting in a password. Then it can send your data off to unknown servers.





  • Danger Will Robinson! Do NOT fuck with company hardware!

    You are going to potentially set off a shit ton of alarm bells, and risk your job, by even attempting this.

    First of all, almost all such devices come with a BIOS lock. You’d need to get the password before you could even begin this (again, do not do it!)

    Secondly, they’ll be able to tell something is up from the foreign UEFI entries.

    Thirdly, if that doesn’t expose you, Intel IME will. Doesn’t matter what operating system you’re running.

    And you’re going to create some royal fucking headaches for a lot of people in your company.

    Let’s start with security. Remember when I said you’ll set off alarm bells? Well, I mean some mother fucking alarm bells. Security will have a god damn aneurysm over this, and they will believe you may be doing this to bypass security, possibly for nefarious reasons. A foreign hard drive with its own OS looks shady as shit.

    Then there’s the regular tech people. You’re going to cause various headaches for them too. Not least because under many service agreements, the company itself may not be authorised to open up the workstations themselves. Many workplaces rent their workstations nowadays, and it is not uncommon to see this language in their SLAs.

    Then there’s the fact that the OS image on the original drive potentially cannot be trusted any more, so they have to wipe the fucker clean and do a fresh image install.

    TL;DR, You are giving your company several solid reasons to fire you for cause by doing this.