The Doctor

They said straight up, “I googled you and couldn’t find a Twitter or Facebook account. What are you hiding?” I had to teach them who Armand Jean du Plessis was.

Opting out of social media these days is considered inherently suspicious. It definitely came up the last time I had to undergo a background check for work.

There are two models I’ve used for this over the years, the Linksys EA8300 and the WRT 1900AC. Here’s how I did it both times (though I only got around to writing up my notes the second time.

Just defining the threat model of hardware addressing, as it stands.

I don’t agree with them sending more than the first half either.

Not that the local DHCP servers falling over has anything to do with it…

A MAC address isn’t really unique. Each has six octets, of which three refer to the manufacturer. The other three octets have at most 16,777,216 possible values. That seems like a lot but it really isn’t; a MAC is supposed to be unique on a LAN, not globally. Rollovers during manufacturing happen, and collisions are rare but happen once in a while.

What do you mean, custom firmware? Are you trying to boot a different distro of Linux?

When you have the USB drive plugged in, how are you booting up? What’s the process you’re using?

The first three octets of a MAC specify the manufacturer of a NIC chipset. That could come in handy for driver debugging.

Manufacturers and firmware versions of storage devices? You can make the argument; perhaps it would have helped figure out the SSD firmware bugs years ago.

But stuff like whether or not you have video capture card or your current system temperature stats? Nah… that’s getting into “identifiable information as toxic waste” territory.

I think I still have a copy of that book in a box somewhere. I know I have a scanned copy in my archive. Lots of fun.

This is a thing that folks have done in the past:

• http://kacangbawang.com/encrypting-stored-email-with-postfix/
• https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email and https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email_Part_2
• https://jnphilipp.org/posts/auto-encrypt-all-incoming-email-with-postfix/
• https://www.mydreams.cz/en/hosting-wiki/9663-configuring-automatic-email-encryption-in-postfix-on-centos-7-using-gpg.html

You can have them installed next to one another. Just like you can have Firefox and Links installed at the same time. Or twm and gnome3. It comes down to how much work you want for yourself.

Depends on your distro, I think.

If only for the sake of one’s CV. Making your bones by having a couple of 0-days under your belt helps a lot of folks find jobs these days.

It is. That’s why Wayland is being pushed so hard, it’s a codebase that’s actually maintainable, with hopefully some more modern design and engineering principles.

Agreed.

You can install more than one desktop environment at a time. Your login manager should let you pick which one you want to log into.

I’m running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don’t care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don’t get in my way because I have work to do.

I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven’t decided yet.

It’s pretty nice. The REST API for running searches makes running SearxNG worth it, if nothing else.

When I could get away with it at work, I did.

In the last… I want to say six or seven years, issuing Macbooks to sysadmins has been a common thing in the sectors I work in. Rather than put up with us going rogue and messing up license tracking by rebuilding our stuff with a distro of choice, management just throws OSX at the problem (us, we’re the problem) because operationally it’s close enough for our purposes.

It’s not my choice or preference, but the money’s green.

I’ve tested wifi calling on AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. How well it works (call quality, whether or not the call gets dropped, how often it gets dropped) has always been a crapshoot. Using a real VoIP client to connect to my Asterisk box? Significantly more stable and usable.