@paco @BenAveling it is just a stupid electronic device
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@shinspiegel @elaine @paco
which doesn't make things any better, though -
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@globcoco@mamot.fr @paco@infosec.exchange Do you think your bank is better at cyber security than Google? You give them the same information.
The alternative is giving photos of your photo ID to random websites with no full-time security team.
If the data is collected who has a objectively better cyber security team? Google or a random adult videos website.
We do have an alternative to age verification and it's censorship. It could just be illegal to transmit material harmful to minors across state lines. No age verification because there's no material to age gate.
Unless you're willing to actively advocate that there should be zero safe guards to prevent a small child or teenager from being exposed to the materials, for the sake of adults having easier access to the material.
Governments are going to do something. We can either present them with options that avoid harm as much as possibl, or we can stay silent l, and let them decide and it'll probably mean everyone loses. You might have to provide a government ID to use the internet, and there's censorship. -
@shinspiegel@mastodon.social @ki@chaos.social @paco@infosec.exchange The LLM thing is a bit overblown. Contrary to popular beliefs, large language models do have practical size limits in terms of being able to perform inference. If we collected every single chat message, social media message, every keystroke of every user in the world, the language model would be too big. So instead of a library of all of the information in the world, you need the most popular and most relevant information.
Both xAi and Perplexity both use retrieval augmented generation, a process where they collect information from their index and pass to the prompt, of social media posts rather than including them in the model. -
@paco No one should let anyone get away with "third party". Your subcontractor - you own it, just as if it had been your own employees. Don't like it? Don't outsource your responsibilities.
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I suspect we are all in agreement. Discord is trying to blame a third party to make it seem like they did everything right; that the situation is just that their vendor let them down. None of us think that’s a reasonable excuse, nor that anyone should consider it an acceptable response in these circumstances.
@oscherler @troed -
@globcoco@mamot.fr @paco@infosec.exchange Do you think your bank is better at cyber security than Google? You give them the same information.
The alternative is giving photos of your photo ID to random websites with no full-time security team.
If the data is collected who has a objectively better cyber security team? Google or a random adult videos website.
We do have an alternative to age verification and it's censorship. It could just be illegal to transmit material harmful to minors across state lines. No age verification because there's no material to age gate.
Unless you're willing to actively advocate that there should be zero safe guards to prevent a small child or teenager from being exposed to the materials, for the sake of adults having easier access to the material.
Governments are going to do something. We can either present them with options that avoid harm as much as possibl, or we can stay silent l, and let them decide and it'll probably mean everyone loses. You might have to provide a government ID to use the internet, and there's censorship. -
thank you for sharing and you all for your service






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@paco This is so cool! Thank you for sharing the process. This inspires me

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@paco This is so cool! Thank you for sharing the process. This inspires me

@b_cavello I’m glad! I think it’s fun. I’ve been doing it off and on for 20 years. (I lived outside the US for 10). Almost any eligible voter can be an election officer in most jurisdictions. It’s easy to try once, and no big deal if you don’t like it and don’t do it again.
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@b_cavello I’m glad! I think it’s fun. I’ve been doing it off and on for 20 years. (I lived outside the US for 10). Almost any eligible voter can be an election officer in most jurisdictions. It’s easy to try once, and no big deal if you don’t like it and don’t do it again.
@paco I live in DC, and I feel like they’re overwhelmed with volunteers, but maybe not for special election stuff. I’d like to try it! These quiet moments of democracy in action are really beautiful
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@shinspiegel @elaine @paco
which doesn't make things any better, though@ki @elaine @paco I did write in my blog on this topic year ago, maybe this could better explain my reasonsing. It can be a little outdated, and I after thought this concept can be improved, but it’s a starting point: https://jeferson.me/blog/2025/06/10/pr0n/
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@Virginicus Agreed. Speaking to Ms Hanley, she said of working in the general assembly: it’s the kiss of death on an initiative to say it’s being put forward by Fairfax. Everyone rolls their eyes. It’s an interesting story:
VA law says you can’t have a district bigger than 5000 voters. Fairfax has a lot of people, so lots of 2500-3500 voter precincts. But it also has a bunch of 1000-person precincts. Her expression was that the office of elections is “turning into a moving company” because of how many precincts we have and the amount of equipment we have to send to each. But we have to do things according to the law.
Thankfully, she said, Chesterfield County is running into something similar. So THEY can put forward a bill to get some changes and Fairfax can support them.
She wants to do bigger locations with more of the print-on-demand machines. A location might serve 3-5 precincts. You walk up, we figure out what precinct you’re in, and we print the ballot that you should have. This is what they do at the satellite early voting sites. They just want to do more of it and do it in larger precincts on election day. Sounds like a good idea to me. But it sounds like it requires a change to the law.
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@paco The toilet paper is for fiber.
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@david_chisnall @paco AWS with the Mac Minis -- every time you power them off they wipe storage, takes a couple hours to complete before you can use the server again. Really annoying when you didn't expect it
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@david_chisnall @paco AWS with the Mac Minis -- every time you power them off they wipe storage, takes a couple hours to complete before you can use the server again. Really annoying when you didn't expect it
@feld @david_chisnall @paco David nails it. Also, encryption at rest makes it possible to retire storage devices after End-of-Life without having to worry about data theft after retirement.
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@feld @david_chisnall @paco David nails it. Also, encryption at rest makes it possible to retire storage devices after End-of-Life without having to worry about data theft after retirement.
@vinoth @david_chisnall @paco same reason why I FDE all my disks now. I don't have to care what happens if they fail.
Also I never have to worry about ZFS pool issues from moving disks around. Wiping the encryption key and setting a new one is much simpler than trying to scrub all the ZFS metadata off a disk -
@david_chisnall @paco AWS with the Mac Minis -- every time you power them off they wipe storage, takes a couple hours to complete before you can use the server again. Really annoying when you didn't expect it
The Morello cluster we set up at MS was exposed for GitHub Actions runners. We forwarded the GitHub web hook thing to an Azure message queue thing that the head node read. When it received one, it used an exciting pile of expect scripts to talk to the serial console on a node to boot one of the machines. The node then booted with a read-only NFS mount as the root filesystem, generated a random key, and used that for a GELI-encryped read-write filesystem on the (200GB) local SSD. The GitHub Actions runner (actually, the portable Go rewrite) then pulled the job to run. At the end, we rebooted the node and the next job would get a new key for disk encryption.
If a job left any important data on a node, the next user would get the encrypted data and, unless they deleted the GELI layer, would get it decrypted with a different key. We didn't need to bother scrubbing anything between uses.
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The Morello cluster we set up at MS was exposed for GitHub Actions runners. We forwarded the GitHub web hook thing to an Azure message queue thing that the head node read. When it received one, it used an exciting pile of expect scripts to talk to the serial console on a node to boot one of the machines. The node then booted with a read-only NFS mount as the root filesystem, generated a random key, and used that for a GELI-encryped read-write filesystem on the (200GB) local SSD. The GitHub Actions runner (actually, the portable Go rewrite) then pulled the job to run. At the end, we rebooted the node and the next job would get a new key for disk encryption.
If a job left any important data on a node, the next user would get the encrypted data and, unless they deleted the GELI layer, would get it decrypted with a different key. We didn't need to bother scrubbing anything between uses.
@david_chisnall @paco yes yes yes this is exactly how it should be done (but the use of expect scripts makes me feel like we went back 30 years)
among other things but we generally stay stocked up on TP and French toast.