• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • One of the basic elements of a democracy are three branches. In fact, democracy is an inherent instable system where these three branches must keep eachother in check. A natural concequence thereof is that every one of these three branches has the right to conduct and lead investigations.

    That the courts can act proactive or reactive is more a cultural element then a core element of democracy. There are quite some countries where judges are part of the investigative process and can unilateral.

    As Brazil, as a number of other countries in Latin America, has been in the situation in the past that both the gouvernement and the parlement are controlled by people with a … euh … not so good reputation on their democratic values, a judicial branch that acts in a more proactive manner should not be that IMHO unexptected.


  • Here there are two issues: free speech and the judicial system in Brasil. I’ll reply to the later in a different mail.

    The freedom of speech is the result of democracy. No democracy, no freedom of speech. It is also inherent part of the democractic process.

    On the other hand, it is not the only element of a democracy. and it can also be used against these other elements?

    My question to you: can you use a fundamental freedom, granted to you by the fact you line in a democracy, to attack democracy?







  • Just watched some videos on btrfs. I start to understand the conceps. Perhaps I should also look into how exactly

    On windows and the “recovery partion”. I guess what you say is that it should always be possiblity to boot in some kind of system, but it will not happen automatically as there is no way for a system to detect that the system completely hangs.

    Thinking about it. It kind of strange. Embedded systems have watchdog interrupts that get fired if the system hangs (i.e. if it does not provide a “yes, I still live” signal every “x” milliseconds). Does a PC not have something similar?





  • Concerning linux, yesterday I was watching this video on computerphile on the crowdstrike incident. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlaNMJeA1EA (*)

    What is interesting is the comment made in the video on how chromebooks do software upgrades with dual “OS” disk-partitions and the ability to rollback to the previous OS-partition.

    Question: is something like this also possible on one of the major linux distros? (debian, ubuntu, rocky, …) What would be the procedure to do this kind of “dual partition” system-upgrade?

    (*) a great video that explained some of the technical details in a very clear way, including some very interesting ‘lessons learned’ and "what if"s If you ever need to explain crowdstrike to your manager, this video is a good start.









  • I have been thinking the same thing.

    I have been looking into a way to copy files from our servers to our S3 backup-storage, without having the access-keys stored on the server. (as I think we can assume that will be one of the first thing the ransomware toolkits will be looking for).

    Perhaps a script on a remote machine that initiate a ssh to the server and does a “s3cmd cp” with the keys entered from stdin ? Sofar, I have not found how to do this.

    Does anybody know if this is possible?


  • Yes. Fair point.

    On the other hand, most of the disaster senarios you mention are solved by geographic redundancy: set up your backup // DRS storage in a datacenter far away from the primary service. A scenario where all services,in all datacenters managed by a could-provider are impacted is probably new.

    It is something that, considering the current geopolical situation we are now it, -and that I assume will only become worse- that we should better keep in the back of our mind.