fairly sure hezbollah has more than 2800 members

if you can’t connect to a vpn using only open source software, that’s a crappy vpn

importantly it’s (hopefully) an ISP that operates from a less copyright-happy country and isn’t tied down to tons of expensive infrastructure and long-term contracts

to be even more pedantic, if we follow the relevant official RFCs for http (formerly 2616, but now 7230-7235 which have relevant changes), a 403 can substitute for a 401, but a 401 has specific requirements:

The server generating a 401 response MUST send a WWW-Authenticate header field (Section 4.1) containing at least one challenge applicable to the target resource.

(the old 2616 said 403 must not respond with a request for authentication but the new versions don’t seem to mention that)

with another OS nix is not going to be “in control” so it’s probably more limited. I’m not sure how common using nix is outside of nixos.

also I’ll point out that many other linux distros I think recommend doing a full system backup even immediately after installation, the “grep history” thing is not very stable as eg. apt installing a package today will default to the newest version, which didn’t exist 1 year ago when you last executed that same command.

with nixos, the states of all the config files are collected into the nix configuration which you can modify manually. And if there’s something that can’t be handled through that, I think the common solution is to isolate the “dirty” environment into a vm or some other sort of container that I think comes with nixos

(and there’s always going to be “data” which isn’t part of the “configuration” … which can just be used as a configuration for individual applications)

assuming you have never used anything except apt commands to change the state of your system. (and are fine with doings superfluous changes eg. apt install foo && apt remove foo)

it’s replicable and “atomic”, which for a well-designed modern package manager shouldn’t be that noticable of a difference, but when it’s applied to an operating system a la nixos, you can (at least in theory) copy your centralized exact configuration to another computer and get an OS that behaves exactly the same and has all the same packages. And backup the system state with only a few dozen kilobytes of config files instead of having to backup the entire hard drive (well, assuming the online infrastructure needed to build it in the first place continues to work as expected), and probably rollback a bad change much easier

Actually I think he has already had an adequate amount of recognition:

• “In 1999, Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation.[29] That year both companies went public and Torvalds’s share value briefly shot up to about US$20 million”

• his autobiography is in several hundred library collections worldwide

Awards he’s received:

• 2 honorary doctorates

• 2 celestial objects named after him

• Lovelace Medal

• IEEE Computer Pioneer Award

• EFF Pioneer Award

• Vollum Award

• Hall of Fellows of the Computer History Museum

• C&C prize

• Millenium Technology Prize

• Internet Hall of Fame

• IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award

• Great Immigrants Award

the direct chain I can see is

“can you string words to form a valid RSA key”

“I would hope so, [xkcd about password strength]”

“words are the least secure way to generate random bytes”

“Good luck remembering random bytes. That infographic is about memorable passwords.”

“You memorize your RSA keys?”

so between comments 2 and 3 and 4 I’d say it soundly went past the handcrafted RSA key stuff.

I think this specific chain of replies is talking about that actually… though it is a pretty big tangent from the original post

if you know there are exactly two additional characters

this is pretty much irrelevant, as the amount of passwords with n+1 random characters is going to be exponentially higher than ones with n random characters. Any decent password cracker is going to try the 30x smaller set before doing the bigger set

and you know they are at the end of the string

that knowledge is worth like 2 bits at most, unless the characters are in the middle of a word which is probably even harder to remember

if you know there are exactly two additional characters and you know they are at the end of the string, the first number is really slightly bigger (like 11 times)

even if you assume the random characters are chosen from a large set, say 256 characters, you’d still get the 4-word one as over 50 times more. Far more likely is that it’s a regular human following one of those “you must have x numbers and y special characters” rules which would reduce it to something like 1234567890!?<^>@$%&±() which is going to be less than 30 characters

and even if they end up roughly equal in quessing difficulty, it is still far easier to remember the 4 random words

you memorize the password required to decrypt whatever container your RSA key is in. Hopefully.

and some people will try to just hold a key down until it reaches the length limit… which is an even worse way to generate a password of that length

this assumes a dictionary is used. Otherwise the entropy would be 117 bits or more. The only problem is some people may fail to use actually uniformly random words drawn from a large enough set of words (okay, and you should also use a password manager for the most part)

realistically, the linux foundation gets all its funding from corporations who have interests in servers, android and embedded. So all the funding goes to those things and not to the linux desktop.

because the goal of tamper resistance is to make it harder to unscrew without apple’s approval

other techbros have praised him, citing the exact list of symptoms google gives for “high-functioning psychopath”

(disclaimer: google may give bad medical advice)

This description could be anyone.

CIA assassination is the leading cause of death worldwide

for a large project, you can probably look at the history of issues, if there are lots of issues that are 5 years old, it’s almost certainly legit