You’ll probably soon notice that @daudix is the real star of this show in this issue, and that’s because they are doing the 100 Days to Offload challenge, AKA write 100 blog posts in a year. Well, I guess future exozine issues will have no shortage of blog posts to talk about!
Note from @a: I have a friend who is an extremely prolific blogger, with a goal of writing not just 100 but 200 posts this year. He’s currently badly behind schedule but I guess he still has half of a year left to reach his goal. Earlier this year, his nonstop blogging had the side effect of making me blog more too, but we haven’t talked as much this summer and my blogging output has gone down too. Personally, I don’t think I could do 100 Days to Offload since I have high quality standards for my blog, so maybe I should set up a second blog and do the challenge there instead. Or I guess I could write and not publish 100 posts, but maybe that defeats the purpose of the challenge since its whole philosophy is to just write and not care about what other people think.
@daudix made two posts talking about using two older laptops in 2024, a 2011 MacBook Pro and a 2017 Dell Latitude E7470, demonstrating that they can still be capable machines up to this day with modern Linux distros.
Note from @cloudyy: There is a lot of old hardware that is more than powerful for everyday tasks but is doomed to become obsolete due to lack of software support. Here’s my advice: try to find an old laptop, restore it, put a Linux distro on it and enjoy a good machine for less than half the original price (and help to reduce e-waste a little).
Note from @a: I have an old blog post about reviving a 2012 laptop with Linux. Looking back, my writing style has changed quite a bit and my past self seems a bit stupid in some places. Of course you have to mark a partition as bootable! (Although it’s strange that the installer didn’t handle that.) I guess in retrospect everything is obvious, and maybe I wouldn’t be much smarter if this situation happened today.
Congrats to @daudix, who finally bought a domain name for their website! For anyone contemplating buying a domain, try it out! It’s definitely worth the investment, and you gain more flexibility in switching your hosting provider. And yeah, Porkbun is pretty nice. Just avoid free domain names, sinc you will have problems down the line.
In this post, @iacore explores the hypothesis that the “state of the art software security is to inflict the maximum psychological damage on the enemy.” The basic idea is that vulnerabilities are fine as long as they are sandboxed, so attackers get stuck in your vulnerability tar pits. The post also provides a fun example program using this idea. Is this actually practical though? @iacore mentions social engineering as a powerful attack against any technical security defense, including sandboxing. However, sandboxing still has a lot of importance in today’s world. A lot of modern software like the Linux kernel have absolutely astronomical attack surfaces, so there will be vulnerabilities and you will need sandboxing. There’s an old joke in machine learning that you can do anything simply by stacking more layers and more data, so maybe adding more layers of sandboxing everywhere isn’t as crazy and impractical as it sounds. I’m not a lawyer security expert so don’t take this as legal security advice.
Using Google Drive as a Linux root filesystem, on real hardware. Yes, seriously. Welcome to the future of cloud native computing!
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