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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Other comments here do a great job pointing to DH key exchange; I’d like to try explaining it with the paint analogy.

    You and Youtube need to agree on a “color of paint” (encryption key) without ever sending it over the network.

    You and Youtube agree on a common “yellow” in the clear, and you each pick a secret color. Youtube mixes yellow and their secret and sends it to you. This is okay, because un-mixing paint (factoring large prime numbers) is really hard. You add your secret to the mixture, and now you have yellow+Youtube’s secret+your secret.

    You mix yellow and your secret and send it to youtube. Youtube adds their secret; now they’ve got yellow+Youtube’s secret+your secret. You both have the final color!

    An eavesdropper can’t reconstruct this - everything sent over the network had yellow mixed in, and un-mixing paint can be really hard. Maybe you can guess that green minus yellow is probably blue, but you can’t get close enough to decrypt anything. And what if it’s brown? Is that blue + orange, or is it red + green?

    Cryptographers have worked very hard to make the communications secure. I would be more worried about the other end ratting you out - using a relay / proxy / vpn that you trust is a good idea :)














  • You’ll want to learn the difference between SAS and SATA connectors. You can very probably use either. 3.5 inch is the “standard” size, while 2.5 inch was more popular for laptops. However, in the interest of density, servers started accepting 2.5 inch drives to fit more drives per rack.

    You can get great deals on used sas drives on ebay, but if you don’t know how to monitor s.m.a.r.t. data / rebuild a zfs array, that can be very very risky. You need to be able to survive concurrent disk failures.

    Honestly your best bet is brand new western digital or seagate drives. Buy them on amazon, but double check that the seller is legit. That’s it.


  • I must disagree.

    We need not wait for marginalized groups to be impacted to decry T1 ISP censorship. Ban whatever speech you want; the method of enforcement should be to arrest the perpetrators - not stop the sale of paper, the delivery of mail, or blocklist class A ip ranges.

    On a more philosophical level, this is the question of “kindergarten policy” - do we punish those who crayon on the walls, or do we take away everybody’s crayons. To punish the ability to do wrong, or the act of doing wrong. Like most philosophical questions, there’s no good answer to this.