• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • It’s been 8+ years since I last used Ubuntu on my laptop. I faced massive issues with staying on the latest version of Firefox because apt had a much older version, and installing using the gui installer wouldn’t replace the apt version etc etc. Probably a PEBKAC issue…

    But, I do want to know- is this not an issue any more? Will apt install the latest (or almost latest) version of Firefox? Can I update it from the inbuilt update tool in Firefox?














  • Monkeys paw = you get what you asked for but it takes a nasty path to get there. Example from the OG story, the parents ask for money, then their son dies, and they get the insurance money.

    Genie = chooses to ignore the spirit of the wish and gives you something that technically meets the criteria. Ex: you ask for a “hot chick”, and get a boiling hot baby chicken.

    You can try to work around the genie’s trickery with more and more precise wording till there isn’t any ambiguity. The monkey will fuck you over anyway, because fuck you, that’s why.

    99.99% of the comments on r/monkeyspaw are just granting wishes like they’re genies and not like they’re a monkey’s paw, and it rubs me the wrong way.





  • ELI5 of certificates:

    The “s” in “https” in urls like “https://wikipedia.com” stands for “Secure”.

    When you connect to Wikipedia’s computer to read something, how do you know if the content you get back is what they actually sent and wasn’t altered by your friendly neighborhood hacker?

    Wikipedia can “sign” the content before sending it you. They also give you a certificate telling you how they have a particular signature which has been verified by someone else whom you already trust, and how long this particular signature is valid for.

    If a hacker tries to alter the document returned by Wikipedia, they wouldn’t be able to sign the document correctly. If they tried to give a certificate with a different signature too, you would catch it because they wouldn’t be able to fake the verification of the “someone you trust” so you’d catch the fake certificate.

    Browsers handle all this stuff for us. If it detects something fishy, it’ll just show an error along the lines of “could not verify certificate”. In some cases, it’s genuinely an issue where you/the website is under attack and you may get a virus.

    In some other cases though, it’s an issue of the certificate expiring and the guys at Wikipedia not being proactive about getting a new signature and certificate. If you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you’re just dealing with a lazy developer and not a malicious hacker, you can tell your browser to ignore whatever issue it detected and show you the content that was returned by Wikipedia.

    Thanks for attending my TEDx talk.