A face full of alien wing-wong

I think that makes you a “humanitarian”.

Given WINE’s focus on gaming, the execution of the malware could run into issues with system calls which the malware relies on not being fully implemented or acting in unexpected ways. That said, if the if the execution works, the malware may run to completion and have some impact, depending on what the malware was designed to do.

• Infostealers - On a Windows system, this class of malware pulls credentials from browsers (never, ever save your passwords in a browser. Use a password vault. e.g. KeePass, BitWarden). In the ones I have analyzed, they pull the passwords from the browser storage files directly and rely on known file paths. I think this would ultimately fail, as the files in those known paths won’t actually be your browser profile. Under the same logic, stealing cookies won’t work out either. They are just files in a known location, which won’t actually be the right location when running under WINE. Similarly, stealing credentials from Windows Credential Manager will fail, as that won’t have anything useful there. There is other stuff they can go after, but I think you get the point. The stuff it tries to steal won’t actually be in the locations it’s expected to be in. So, I’d think this class of malware would ultimately fail. Of course, attackers could always rewrite the malware to detect the WINE environment and then have it pivot to the the right locations for all this stuff. So, all of this analysis could become wrong.
• Ransomware - On a Windows system, this class of malware will search through the filesystem and encrypt files with specific extensions (.docx, .pdf, .png, and so on). Given that the Linux filesystem is reachable from the WINE environment, I kind think this has a chance of working. One interesting question would be if the encryption routines in the malware would actually work. Again, I think they would. The malware is likely to leverage cryptographic libraries built into Windows and I’d think that WINE would mostly handle those due to DRM/Anti-Cheat in games. It would just be down to how gracefully the malware deals with Unix file paths. My guess would be that the WINE translation layer would make it work. That just leaves the communications back to the attacker’s server for delivery of the keys. I’d guess this would work as WINE is setup to allow communications out to the internet.
• Remote Access Tool (RAT) - I’d guess that some of these would work though they may act funny for the attacker. As with ransomware, the communications back to the attacker’s server should work. This isn’t going to be terribly different from communicating with a game server. There might be some issues around the local agent working correctly though. The attacker may be relying on cmd.exe or powershell to run their commands. So, that might run into issues. At the same time, the malware could implement any commands directly via system and API calls. I’d think most of those would work. So, the attacker may have enough capability to fully compromise the Linux system, if they are willing to put the time into it.

That’s just three possible classes of malware, though it’s most of what I run into professionally (I work in Incident Response). Overall, I’d recommend not relying on Linux to keep you safe from malware bundled into pirated games. While I don’t expect that the infostealer parts of the malware would work correctly (for now), a lot of malware does more than one thing. The attacker may not get your credentials with the initial infection, but you could be opening yourself up to other malware. And, if the attacker includes a RAT, he could come back later and ruin your day.

So ya, be very, very careful about running stuff which you don’t know is safe.

The US Government hasn’t given a shit about harmful monopolistic practices in a long time. They only pretend to care from time to time to force large companies to start donating to politicians.

I remember the Great Digg Exodus. One of the common reasons was the shit UI which was the new Digg. Looking at the screenshots in the article, it looks like they made it even worse. And the descriptions they give makes it sound like a cut-rate Twitter clone.

What’s next, is Fark going to do a major re-brand and attempt to launch as a Twitter clone as well?

I think the real answer was “we wanted to charge $90 for the game, but knew we’d get our shit pushed in over that. So, we released a stripped down version at $60 and then did a $30 up-charge for the Premium edition, which is the full game”.

On the upshot, the game and it’s “DLC” will probably hit the usual Steam sales in a year or three. I can snag it then.

Fun fact, in some countries the 3.5" floppies were called “stiffy disks”. You know, because the outer casing was “stiff” as opposed to the floppy 5.25" disks. This discovery led to a lot of chuckling among the team I worked with when we opened a new product from one of those countries and read the manual. The instruction to “insert stiffy disk” still leads most of us to chuckling today.

ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

Yes, also you parked it before shutting down the system every time. Once the hard drive was powered down, the heads would just crash into the platters. While not instantly fatal, it wasn’t good for the drive. So, you’d park the drive before flipping the power switch.

You’d think that a competent technology company, with their own AI would be able to figure out a way to spoof Cloudflare’s checks. I’d still think that.

AOL was dead to me the day they dropped support for Neverwinter Nights.

While not the same thing, cellular internet is not bad these days. I’ve been on T-Mobile’s internet connection for a couple years and other than CGNAT making self-hosting harder, it’s been pretty solid. This is in a rural area where we got to choose between Cable or go get fucked for high speed internet for a long time.

It’s been a few of years since did my initial setup (8 apparently, just checked); so, my info is definitely out of date. Looking at the Ubuntu site they still list Ubuntu 16.04, but I think the info on setting it up is still valid. Though, it looks like they only list setting up a mirror or a stripe set without parity. A mirror is fine, but you trade half your storage space for complete data redundancy. That can make sense, but usually not for a self hosting situation. A stripe set without parity is only useful for losing data, never use this. The option you’ll want is a raidz, which is a stripe set with parity. The command will look like:

zpool create zpool raidz /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

This would create a zpool named “zpool” from the drives at /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd.

I would suggest spending some time reading up on the setup. It was actually pretty simple to do, but it’s good to have a foundation to work with. I also have this link bookmarked, as it was really helpful for getting rolling snapshots setup. As with the data redundancy given by RAID, it does not replace backups; but, can be used as part of a backup strategy. They also help when you make a mistake and delete/overwrite a file.

Finally, to answer your question about hardware, my recollection and experience has been that ZFS is not terribly demanding of CPU. I ran a Intel Core i3 for most of the server’s life and only upgraded when I realized that I wanted to game servers on it. Memory is more of an issue. The minimum requrement most often cited is 8GB, but I also saw a rule of thumb that you want 1GB of memory for each TB of storage. In the end, I went with 8GB of RAM, as I only had 4TB of storage (3 2TB disks in a RAIDZ1). But, also think about what other workloads you have on the system. When built, I was only running NextCloud, NGinx, Splunk, PiHole and WordPress (all in docker containers). And the initial 8GB of RAM was doing just fine. When I started running game servers, I stared to run into issues. I now have 16GB and am mostly fine. Some game servers can be a bit heavy (e.g. Minecraft, because fucking Java), but I don’t normally see problems. Also, since the link I provided mentioned it, skip ECC memory. it’s almost never worth the cost, and for home use that “almost never” gets much closer to “actually never”.

When choosing disks, keep in mind that you will need a minimum of 2 disks and you effectively lose the storage space of one of the disks in the pool to parity storage (assuming all disks are the same size). Also, it is best for all of the disks to be the same size. You can technically use different size disks in the same pool; but, the larger disks get treated as the same size as the smaller disks. So long as the pool is healthy, read speeds are better than a single disk as the read can be spread out among the pool. But, write speeds can be slower, as the parity needs to be calculated at write time. Otherwise, you’re pretty free to choose any disks which will be recognized by the OS. You mention that 1TB is filling up; so, you’ll want to pick something bigger. I mentioned using spinning disks, as they can provide a lot more space for the money. Something like a 14TB WD Red drive can be had for $280 ($20/TB). With three of those in a RAIDZ1 pool, you get ~28TB of storage and can tolerate one disk failure , without losing data. With solid state disks, you can expect costs closer to $80/TB. Though, there is a tradeoff in speed. So, you need to consider what type of workloads you expect the storage pool to handle. Video editing on spinning rust is not going to be fun. Streaming video at 4k is probably OK, though 8k is going to struggle.

A couple other things think about are space in the chassis, drive connections and power. Chassis space is pretty obvious, you gotta put the disks in the box. Technically, you don’t have to mount the disks, they can just be sitting at the bottom of the case, but this can cause problems with heat shortening the lifespan of the drives. It’s best to have them properly mounted and fans pushing air over them. Drive connections are one of those, you either have the headers or you don’t. Make sure your motherboard can support 3 more drives with the chosen interface (SATA, NVMe, etc.) before you get the drives. Nothing sucks more than having a fancy new drive only to be unable to plug it into the motherboard. Lastly, drives (and especially spinning drives) can be power hungry. Make sure your power supply can support the extra power requirements.

Good luck whatever route you pick.

Microsoft is following in the grand tradition of IBM.
Assisting in genocide.

Probably the easiest solution would be to just chuck a larger disk in the system and retain the original drive for the operating system. If you do not need the high speed of an SSD, you may be able to get more storage space for the money by going with a spinning disk. 7200RPM drives are fast enough for most applications, though you may run into issues streaming 4K (or higher) resolution video.

Another option would be to start building out a storage pool using some type of RAID technology. On my own server, I use ZFS for the data partition. It is basically a software RAID. I use a RAID-Z1 configuration, which stripes the data over multiple disks (three in my case) and uses a parity calculation to provide data redundancy. It also has the advantage that it can be expanded to new disks dynamically and does not require that all disks are the same size. Initial setup does require more work and you are now monitoring multiple physical disks, but having a unified storage pool and redundancy is a nice way to go.

Any way you go, just make sure you have good backups. Drives fail, and sometimes even early in their life. Backblaze reports can be an interesting read when looking at drive options, as they really do put the drives through the wringer.

Yup, that’s a bug in the chair-keyboard interface.

Everyone except the people who make the laws. They are the only people who really matter. If they get upset, regulations might get enacted and those can be bad for business.

I think it’s less about the tech picked and more about developers with no sense of security and a poor understanding of networking. I’ve seen far too many web applications where the developer needed some sort of database behind it (MySQL, PostGres, MSSQL) and so they stood up either a container or entire VM with a public IP and whatever the networking layer set to allow any IP to hit the database port. The excuse is almost always something like, “we needed the web front end to be able to reach the database, so we gave the database server/container a public IP and allowed access”. Which is wonderful, right up until half of the IP addresses in Russia start trying to brute force the database.

Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we’ve put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it’s parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.

As for performance, it moves well enough. It’s a mini-van, so you’re not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I’ll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I’ve been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I’d also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.

We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I’d take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.

So ya, we’ve been happy with it and I’d give it a recommendation.

American made car? Ya, I own a Toyota Sienna. And ya, I don’t think I’d buy an American brand again.

But have you considered, line goes up?

Sadly, there are probably a lot of developers who are burning the candle at both ends to push this out the door, on an unrealistic schedule. And who will then burn the candle in the middle as well when the release is a buggy mess. Only to finally be tossed aside like so much trash when the game fails to realize these unrealistic expectations. And all of that will squarely be the fault of management, who will wipe away crocodile tears with the profits this game will generate. Just not the profit they unrealistically promised investors; so you know, the game was actually a failure. Fuck EA’s management, the world would probably be a better place if the C-Level suite and board room got emptied out by some disaster.