The comparison to 1999 is not entirely accurate. It doesn't take into account that most physical banking locations closed down. At least here in Belgium for example, you have to go far to find one, and it's often on appointment only.
It's not about being secure. Google allows devices with up to 10 years without any patches to pass their integrity API. Meanwhile Graphene OS, which is very secure and up-to-date, doesn't pass.
This. Plus if I want to access my bank account on a device I trust, the bank shouldn’t say “hey we don’t trust it so buzz off”. It’s my money in that account.
I understand there’s some stupid compliance thing that makes banks do this, but it clearly isn’t a hard requirement, as there’s still plenty of banks that don’t participate in this security theatre.
I’d very much love to have an option to waive that cover though! Just give me a scary warning “hey, we’ve determined your device is unsafe; so if you get hacked through that device, you agree not to hold us liable for that. proceed? [y/N]”
For more specific mitigations, they could issue shorter-living tokens to such devices, in case it gets stolen and it didn’t store the token properly (say, the user did something stupid like “hey I’ll substitute secure enclave with a shim that writes secrets to an SD card”). And they could limit certain critical functions that do require attestation for some reason (e.g. Host Card Emulation, aka “tap your phone to pay”, which they usually delegate to Google Wallet/Pay/Wallet anyway).
Wise seems to do it correctly. It works on rooted phones, even, just gives a scary warning and blocks some app functions. They also have a fully functional webapp, so you mostly don’t need the app anyway. Revolut, on the other hand, has outright blocked me from my account – so I’m not using it anymore.
You may waive that cover, but when (not if) you get hacked and your money gets stolen, someone still has to pay it back or you will die. Neither of those options are okay with the government and only one is okay with your bank.
They allow old devices to report to Play Integrity. That doesn't mean the service provider requesting attestation has to allow such devices. These things usually give just a risk grade to the service provider and it's up to them to make the decision.
Graphene OS says they are secure, but the definition of secure they're using isn't the same one the service providers are using, so that doesn't help much.
The best route forward here is to push for a separation of certification types. Ideally it would be possible to pass the security related aspects of Google's CTS test suite and get approved by Play Integrity without triggering the other parts of Android certification.
They may be wrong on that particular point, but Cloudflare definitely profits from increased crime as it drives increased sales of Cloudflare's security products. There are rumors they even knowingly help protect DDoS botnets because they benefit from there being more DDoS.
Because upstream LineageOS doesn't support microg out of the box. You can install it but it needs signature spoofing to pass Google's SafetyNet garbage.
Bonus point for some roms that allow you to relock the bootloader after the install (iodéOS, CalyxOS).
I'm biased but when I see Discord as the only way of communication, it doesn't make for a serious project. I wish more projects would rely on IRC/Matrix + forums.
For better or worse, plenty of serious projects are using Discord for communication. It's not great, but IRC and Matrix have their own problems (IMO Zulip is the best of the bunch, but doesn't seem to be particularly widely adopted).
We are under an article which tells you that you can have problems with Wayland and hiDPI screens. And for example I’m one of those people, who uses X11, because Wayland failed on many levels, like buggy video playing, crashing while changing monitors, or simply waking up my laptop with an external monitor, and I didn’t give more than a few days to fix these (cheers to the author to try this long), so I went back to X11. Which is still buggy, but on a “you can live with it level” buggy.
Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11.
You can scale down from a higher resolution to make the UI perceptively the same size. You can do this with xrandr --scale OR for example the GUI in Cinnamon on Mint after you check "fractional scaling" under X mind you.
I have a setup with a high DPI monitor mixed with a normal DPI monitor and KDE over Wayland just works fine. The only issue that I found are with Libre Office doing weird over scaling and Chrome/Chromium window resizing his window to the oblivion.
Not to mention that fractional scaling is practically required in order to use the majority of higher DPI monitors on the market today. Manufacturers have settled on 4K at 27" or 32" as the new standard, which lends itself to running at around 150% scale, so to avoid fractional scaling you either need to give up on high DPI or pay at least twice as much for a niche 5K monitor which only does 60hz.
Fractional scaling is a really bad solution. The correct way to fix this is to have the dpi aware applications and toolkits. This does in fact work and I have ran xfce under xorg for years now on hi-dpi screens just by setting a custom dpi and using a hi-dpi aware theme. When the goal is to have perfect output why do people suddenly want to jump to stretching images?
That doesn't gel with my experience, 1080p was the de-facto resolution for 24" monitors but 27" monitors were nearly always 1440p, and switching from 27" 1440p to 27" 4K requires a fractional 150% scale to maintain the same effective area.
To maintain a clean 200% scale you need a 27" 5K panel instead, which do exist but are vastly more expensive than 4K ones and perform worse in aspects other than pixel density, so they're not very popular.
4K monitors aren't a significant expense at this point, and text rendering is a lot nicer at 150% scale. The GPU load can be a concern if you're gaming but most newer games have upscalers which decouple the render resolution from the display resolution anyway.
I used to be like this. I actually ran a 14" FHD laptop with a 24" 4k monitor, both at 100%. Using i3 and not caring about most interface chrome was great, it was enough for me to zoom the text on the 4k one. But then we got 27" 5k screens at work, and that had me move to wayland since 100% on that was ridiculously small.
Because although I don't care much about the chrome, I sometimes have to use it. For example, the address bar in firefox is ridiculously small. Also, some apps, like firefox (again) have a weird adaptation of the scroll to the zoom. So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable.
Also, 200% on an FHD 14" laptop means 960x540 px equivalent. That's too big to the point of rendering the laptop unusable. Also, X11 doesn't support switching DPI on the fly AFAIK, and I don't want to restart my session whenever I plug or unplug the external monitor, which happens multiple times a day when I'm at the office.
This really isn't this far off. If we imagined the screens overlayed semi-transparently an 16 pixel letter would be over a 14 pixel one.
If one imagines an ideal font size for a given user's preference for physical height of letterform one one could imagine a idealized size of 12 on another and 14 on the other and setting it to 13 and being extremely close to ideal.
>So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable.
This is because it's scrolling a fixed number of lines which occupy more space at 300% zoom notably this applies pretty much only to people running high DPI screens at 100% because if one zoomed to 300% otherwise the letter T would be the size of the last joint on your thumb and legally blind folks could read it. It doesn't apply to setting the scale factor to 200% nor the setting for Firefox's internal scale factor which is independent from the desktop supports fractional scaling in 0.05 steps and can be configured in about:config
Right, and 27" 5k is 218 ppi, which isn't that much more than the 24". But don't forget that viewing distance plays a big role in this, and my 14" laptop is much closer than a 27" monitor. Bonus points for our specific model having an absolutely ridiculous viewing angle, so if it's too close the outer border are noticeably dark.
I don't really care about this but here's an example:
I have 2 27" screens, usually connected to a windows box, but while working they're connected to a MBP.
Before the MBP they were connected to several ThinkPads where I don't remember what screen size or scaling, I don't even remember if I used X11 or Wayland. But the next ThinkPad that will be connected will probably be HiDPI and with Wayland. What will happen without buying a monitor? No one knows.
It does work and has worked for over a decade. You can configure scaling under settings in Cinnamon or plasma for instance or via environmental variables in a simple environment like i3wm.
The post is from the Dev of i3wm an x11 window manager complaining among other things about how well his 8k monitor works under x11 and how poorly it works under Wayland.
You can also consult the arch wiki article on high DPI which is broadly applicable beyond arch
In that time I've had Hidpi work perfectly on first on Nvidia then recently on AMD GPUs on several different distros and desktops all running on X on several distros. They all worked out of the box and were able to scale correctly once configured.
The totality of my education on the topic was reading the arch wiki on hidpi once.
AFAIK one cannot span one x session across multiple GPUs although AMD had something that it once referred to as "eyefinity" for achieving this.
It is rarely needed discreet GPU often support 3 or even 4 outputs
One may wonder if you tried this a very long time ago back when AMD sucked and Nvidia worked well in 2005-2015
My ISP refuses to give you a static IPv6 prefix unless you're a business customer, despite having an "unlimited" amount of them. This results in me not bothering to set it up properly and focusing on IPv4 still.
I don't have a static IPv4 address and I have to use a DDNS built into the Caddy plugin on my OPNSense router. From what I understand, you can't get a static "local" (I know, IPv6 has no direct equivalent) address to use for a reverse proxy — at least not in an easy manner. I might be completely wrong but that's why I don't bother with IPv6.
Yep. ULA addresses are the equivalent of 10.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/24, and 172.16.0.0/12 space. [0] And you can use them to do NAT, just like with IPv4.
The huge difference from the IPv4 world is that the procedure for generating your /48 ULA prefix ensures that it's very, very unlikely that you will get the same prefix as anyone else. So, if everyone follows the procedure, pretty much noone has to worry about colliding with anyone else's network.
Following the procedure has benefits. For example, VPN providers who want to use IPv6 NAT can do that without interfering with the LAN addressing of the host they're deployed to... companies that merge their networking infrastructure together can spend far less (or even zero) time on internal network renumbering... [1] etc, etc, etc.
[0] And link-local addresses are the equivalent of 169.254.0.0/16 space.
[1] Seriously, like a year after one BigCo merger I was subject to, IT had still not fully merged together the two company's networks, and was still in the process of relocating or decommissioning internal systems in order to deal with IPv4 address space constraints. Had they both used ULA everywhere it was possible to do so, they could have immediately gotten into the infosec compliance and cost-cutting part of the network merging, rather than still being mired in the technical and political headaches forced upon them by grossly insufficient address space.
> Problem with ULA is that it's functionally useless on a dual-stack network.
Nope, it works just fine. I use it for stable local addressing and LAN host AAAA records and let my ISP-delegated global prefix drift as my ISP wishes it to.
And -as it happens- the prose in that article about source address selection is incorrect.
On Linux, source address preference appears to be application-specific. For example, curl prefers IPv6 addresses, and falls back to IPv4 if the v6 connection fails. I checked just now by removing my globally-assigned IPv6 address, and capturing the traffic created by executing 'curl https://www.google.com'. I know for a fact that BIND 9 prefers non-link-local IPv6 source addresses over IPv4 addresses because until I set up my home-built router to reject Internet-bound traffic coming from my ULA, a sufficiently-long failure of the DHCPv6 server run by my ISP would cause name resolution to get very, very, very slow when the global prefix expired and BIND started using its host's ULA as a source address and my router dutifully relayed that traffic into my ISP's black hole. I'm certain that very many applications unconditionally prefer non-link-local IPv6 addresses over IPv4 ones. You might also care to pay attention to this comment and its publication date: [0]
OTOH, Firefox prefers IPv4 connections in that scenario and doesn't even attempt a v6 connection. I assume Chrome is the same way.
And, that article suggests GUA space as a replacement for ULA space:
> All of these are serious pitfalls that arise when attempting to use ULA. The simple and more elegant answer is to simply leverage GUAs.
Which... uh... no. I'd have to go through my local RIR to get an allocation, and then negotiate with my ISP to get it routed. Given that I'd have to go through ARIN because I'm in the US, and I have a boring residential account with my ISP, neither of those things will ever happen. The entire point of ULA is that no coordination with external entities is required to do network-local addressing.
Also, the documentation that that article links to to discourage people from deploying NAT66 is almost literally "It's exactly as complicated as NAT44. Why do it when you can get global IPv6 addresses?!?", which isn't a useful complaint when your intent is to exactly replicate what you get from IPv4 NAT in an IPv6 world. I agree that globally-routable addresses are better, but if your site admin demands (for whatever reason) that you not have them, then -because of the collision-avoidance property of the ULA prefix generation procedure- you're better off than with IPv4 NAT.
Note that although the policy is that you choose a random prefix, nothing actually enforces this and nothing stops you using fd00::1, fd00::2, etc just like 10.0.0.1 etc.
My ISP is xfinity. They say the same thing but my IPv6 address hasn't changed any more frequently than my IPv4. In my experience it changing isn't any more annoying than my v4 changing so I'm not sure why people still get up in arms about it.
On the other end of the connection, there are physical servers and routers. Every once in a while they change how things are connected/deployed for maintenance, upgrades, etc.
Pretty much, I have my cable modem on continuous power and it will keep the same address pretty much forever. Two times it changed is when I had a 48 hour power outage and shut everything down, and the other time was maintenance at the cable companies side where they rebooted their equipment.
My xfinity ipv4 changes once every few years, if that. I treat it as static and update things if or when it changes, which fortunately isn’t too much work. I never requested anything special regarding it, and I have a normal/non-business account. I wonder why some change often and others don’t?
I had Xfinity for 4 years and my IP changed once in that time! Now I have fiber from centurylink, and it changes anytime I need to reboot the fiber modem or my firewall. Different companies, same metro area though. That too makes me wonder about how both manage their allocations give the difference in IP assignments.
This should be illegal. Yes, in this case, I'm not saying that as a figure of speech. ISPs are a utility, and building that kind of artificial scarcity into something that is really damned near infinite is highly anti-consumer.
Get a virtual server and do the things on it that you'd want a static address for. Use a VPN connection back to your home to merge it with your network. This is a great way to deal with CGNAT.
I recently moved house and looked at a new offer from a new ISP for a long term lockin but a cheap price. They used CG-NAT. I instead chose one which gives me as many ipv4s or ipv6s as I can reasonably use, doesn't oversubscribe its upsteam connectivity etc.
For home internet service I would prefer to pay extra for a better service, it's too important to try to penny-pinch 0.1% of my income on it.
But then I live in a capitalist country where there's competition, I believe some countries you don't get a choice.
FYI it's practically impossible not to oversubscribe your upstream connectivity unless they either spend way too much money or offer very slow service to users. Consider ten thousand users with 1G connections - should they have 10 terabit upstream?
The more practical thing to look for is that they aim to upgrade it based on need, instead of arbitrarily throttling the users.
100g interconnects are very cheap, but I'm more talking about oversubscription in the ISP network -- as they have multiple peering and transit arrangements it's clear that if you have 10,000gbit worth of customers, you don't need 10tbit of connectivity for each transit provider.
Where I live the cable system is fine, and the cellular system is fine... until one goes down, then the other gets flooded with traffic and stops working leaving no internet at all.
For those in the UK who want a static IPv4 or IPv6 block AAISP offer a L2TP service for £2/month. It's limited to 3 megabit/s but might be enough for some use cases.
I'd switched my father from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, but the upgrade story was painful & years ago switched him back to OpenOffice after it was given to Apache. Figured the projects would consolidate under Apache, but no
& wow checking up on it now, things have not been going well at Apache for last decade
What exactly do you mean by upgrade story? The Libre Office UI hasn't changed for a long time (although there are new UI options l'île the ribbon, etc), I'd think the switch would be pretty straightforward.
I realized when posting this reply that these experiences are from over a decade ago. This was on Windows, the self upgrade option just didn't work well (large download, wouldn't complete or something, would end up reinstalling instead)