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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Hi! Although your post is full of reasonable advice on maintaining privacy online I want to challenge you on the statement that the threat model matters. The contrapositive of the statement “I don’t need privacy if I have nothing to hide” is “I have something to hide, if I need privacy”. This puts those marginalized groups you mentioned in a position where simply by using a privacy tool or technique, they draw suspicion to themselves. It might immediately raise subconscious alarms in internet communities like facebook, where the expectation is that you use your real name.

    The only way privacy measures work for anyone, is if they’re implemented for everyone.

    Further, I’d like to challenge the concept that a cis white tech bro has nothing to hide. There’s a big invisible “for now” at the end of that statement. The internet, mostly, never forgets. We’ve had waves of comedians get “cancelled” over tweets they made years ago. Times change, people grow, laws regress. Posting statements about abortions is as of this year, suddenly unsafe. Maybe posting about neurodivergence comes next. Who knows with the way the world is going, maybe 5 years from now you’ll regret having posts on /c/atheism associated with you.

    I think a good way to be considerate of privacy is to think in terms of identities, what those identities are for, and what links those identities. Does your identity on github need make comments about your political leanings? Should your resume have a link to your github? Does your identity on etsy need to have a link to your onlyfans? Does your dating profile need a link to your reddit account? Your “2nd” reddit account? Not all of these are clear yes or no answers, they’re just things to consider and make decisions about. Also, consider what class identities you only have one of, and what class of identities are for the most part unchangeable, e.g. attaching your phone number to two separate identities functionally links them.







  • Not sure what you’re doing, but if we’re talking about a bog standard service backed by a db, I don’t think having automated reverts of that data is the best idea. you might lose something! That said, triggering a snapshot of your db as a step before deployment is a pretty reasonable idea.

    Reverting a service back to a previous version should be straightforward enough, and any dedicated ci/cd tool should have an API to get you information from the last successful deploy, whether that is the actual artifact you’re deploying, or a reference to a registry.

    As you’re probably entirely unsurprised by, there are a ton of ways to skin this cat. you might consider investing in preventative measures, testing your data migration in a lower environment, splitting out db change commits from service logic commits, doing some sort of blue/green or canary deployment.

    I get fairly nerd-sniped when it comes to build pipelines so happy to talk more concretely if you’d like to provide some more details!








  • Not a security scientist, but in my interpretation, it’s the “categories” of the factors that matter. Ideally, you use some two of three of:

    • something (only) you know - generally represented by passwords
    • something (only) you have - most commonly represented by some device. you prove that you have the device by providing a token only that device can generate.
    • something (only) you are - generally represented by biometrics

    the goal then is maintaining the "only"s.

    if you tell someone your password, or they see you type it in, or they beat it out of you with a wrench, it’s no longer something “only” you know, and it is compromised.

    if you use the same password on two websites, and one website is compromised, the password is compromised.

    OTPs from a key fob or yubikey or something are similarly compromised if the device that provides them is left out in public/lost/stolen/beaten out of you with a wrench.

    biometrics are again, are compromised if it’s not “only” you with access to them - someone scans you face while you’re asleep, or smashes your finger off with their wrench.

    having multiple factors in the same category, like having two passwords, or two otp tokens, or two finger prints, doesn’t significantly improve security. if you give up one thing you remember, it’s likely you’ll give up more. if one fob from your keychain is stolen, the second fob on that keychain is of no additional help.

    you can start shifting what categories these things represent though.

    if you write down your password in a notebook or a spreadsheet, they become thing you have.

    OTPs can become something you know if you remember the secret used to generate them.

    knowing many different things is hard, so you can put them in a password vault. the password vault is then something you have, which can be protected by something you know. so although your OTPs and passwords are in one place, you still require two factors to get access to them.

    you still need to protect your "only"s though. and don’t put yourself in situations where people with wrenches want your secrets.