Estudante de Engenharia Informática apaixonado pela área; algures em Portugal.

Administrador da instância lemmy.pt.


Computer Science student, passionate about the field; somewhere in Portugal.

lemmy.pt instance administrator.


https://tmpod.dev

  • 5 Posts
  • 106 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2021

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  • This is a good suggestion. Docker is more mature and has more resources, so it’s better to learn the ins and outs of containers. After getting comfortable with it, you can move to Podman and have a much better time tackling its peculiarities regarding permissions and rootless.

    I used Docker for years and only recently decided to give Podman a try, porting my Lemmy instance to it.




  • How can I make using Arch Linux my personality

    That cracked me up x)

    Anyway, I’d say it’s good that the OS is out of your way once set it up. Even though I don’t use Arch directly, I like how comprehensive the AUR is (even though there may be repositories more packages, like nix and whatnot), think the ArchWiki (like the GentooWiki) is a very useful resource, even if you use a completely different system.




  • encrypted email

    Besides being a form of messaging (so the text somewhat contradicts itself), typical email is a deeply insecure protocol.
    In my opinion, it’s probably impossible to secure without making a new protocol or making such drastic changes that it might as well be considered one.

    Here are some key concerns regarding the usual PGP-powered encrypted email:

    • Email, at a simple level, works much akin to physical email — there’s an “envelope” containing important info regarding the communicating parties, which can’t be encrypted, otherwise the mailing servers wouldn’t know where to forward the messages. This essentially leaks a lot of metadata that can be almost as valuable as the message body itself.
    • There’s no forward secrecy — one of the best cryptography features that has become pretty much a commodity in modern systems is forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from decrypting older messages after gaining access to one of the keys.
    • While not an issue with the protocol itself, it’s the sad reality and we need to consider — most people use GMail, Outlook and the like, which ultimately need to read your emails in plaintext, for better or worse reasons (search is incredibly useful, but some big players don’t stop there of course :p).
    • Another thing is the fact that it’s incredibly easy to have an imbalance of encryption, i.e. someone is encrypting their messages, but others aren’t. With the very popular email culture of quoting (be it top or bottom posting), an unencrypted party in the the conversation can leak important information.
    • PGP is… peculiar, so to speak. I has a lot of issues, mostly stemming from its age (which could also be a source of robustness and security, due to being very battle-tested, but I don’t think that’s quite the case with PGP/GPG), tries to do too much and typically has a clunky UI, which impedes wider and proper adoption by less technically people.

    This isn’t to say people should definitely stop using and promoting encrypted email, since it can be useful.
    It’s just it gives, more often than not, a false sense of security and can lead less proficient users to send sensitive data through this medium which isn’t nearly secure enough for such use cases. Preferably, people with such threat models should opt for better alternatives, most suggested in that article (such as, but definitely not limited to, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix+Olm, XMPP+OTR/OMEMO, sharing files via MagicWormhole, encrypting with tools like age).

    On a slightly tangential note, I think someone should make a Matrix client with an email client interface. I started working on a new traditional chat client (completely nonfunctional still, very much in-dev), but I’ve been honestly thinking more and more about making one looking like an e-mail client, where there isn’t much focus on instant room-based chats, but rather on longer-lived 1-to-1 and list-like exchange of messages.


  • I went through my subscription list on FreeTube and filtered these out (the list was much lengthier initially :p)

    • Alt Shift X — well detailed and narrated videos about fantasy series such as Dune, ASOIAF.
    • Captain Disillusion — very well made videos about VFX.
    • Computerphile — computer science twin of Numberphile; neat videos about the field with a wide range of guests.
    • EthosLab — pretty much the only Minecraft creator I still watch; witty, quiet and virtually the same for a long time.
    • hbomberguy — well known video essayist, easily one of the best in the platform
    • Jacob Geller — another quality essayist, exploring different themes, such as horror
    • Lemino — very well known creator focusing on mysteries, with incredible narration and stunning visuals
    • LockPickingLawyer — very simple, to the point and informative channel about locks and lockpicking; also virtually unchanged for years
    • Oversimplified — great overviews of major history events and periods, with funny narration and visuals
    • Tantacrul — fairly unknown essayist on music, with well researched material and nice takes :P
    • Then & Now — possibly my favorite atm (alongside hbomberguy); extremely well researched and presented video essays about history, politics and philosophy; very underrated imo