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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • They don’t need to be a techie. Just someone who can click a button.

    I am remembering Julian Assuage has/had a payload that was distributed via BitTorrent. The file was encrypted with a private key and his public key was posted either as a file in the package or on the site where the magnet file was downloaded.

    Before he was arrested, he encouraged everyone to download the file and sit on it and to keep seeding it. He said in the event of his untimely death, the password would be released for everyone to decrypt.

    That would be another option but you sort of need the notoriety to make this work.


  • I’ve actually given this a lot of thought over the years. The biggest issue for me is all my AWS services that no one in my family knows about.

    So the idea would be to, at minimum, let my family know what services are being used.

    Unfortunately there isn’t a turn-key solution. I’ve seen a number of well-meaning solutions and some that are quite novel but they all suffer from the same problems: how do you deal with false positives and how do you verify your deadness.

    I imagine that the problem is similar to the Yellowstone trash can problem, in that any solution to mitigate one will make it harder on the other.

    The best solution I’ve found is to have a two-person solution, similar to launching a nuke. You have automation that tests if you are active that emails a close friend or relative to verify you are indeed dead.

    Ideally there would be more than one person on this list a confirmation from two people would kick off all of the automations you code.



  • The problem is that they can’t control open source drivers. They could, however, release a printer that ran on proprietary closed source drivers. But they’d have to spend money on developers to maintain that code whereas right now, drivers are more or less stable and developed for free.

    What they could do is require the use of HP printer paper, with embedded RFID or watermarks that would be readable by HP printers. I’m honestly surprised they haven’t gone down this road.





  • The problem is companies that fully take advantage of open source, as is their right, and then fully expect the volunteer dev to provide support them when they have a Sev 1.

    Sure they read the license and saw that it was free, but they didn’t read the part that it was free but offered literally no support.

    The amount of money that my company has made on the backs of open source developers is probably in the literal billions. But we don’t give fuck squat to them outside of one day a year that we contribute code back to a few select libraries.






  • Yeah…but even then they may not get to you.

    Over the holidays, I had a good back and forth with the maintainer of a project that I started using. The documentation needed updating and created a PR.

    Then I went almost 10 comment rounds on why it was necessary, why I wrote it the way I did, and all this bullshit.

    I just left it saying “merge it or whatever. I’m moving on.”

    It’s still open.