Futuristic Robert [KJ5ELX] :donor:

I'm an atheist and an anarchist leaning libertarian socialist. I do cybersecurity for a living. In my spare time I tinker with electronics, radio, and various computer things. I use Arch by the way.

Pronouns: He/Him
Amateur Call/GMRS: KJ5ELX/WRVU796
Blog: https://blog.occurative.com
Github: https://github.com/0xF21D
Website: https://roberthollingshead.net
QRZ Profile: https://www.qrz.com/db/KJ5ELX

Public Key

npub1hc7wzctejny6kj4pp2ckzasg2r3eyt993uhh8m2e3x56yh7a3s7qxn7yk4

NIP-05 Address

0xf21d_at_infosec.exchange@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstu08pv9uefjdtf2ss4vtpwcy9pcuj9jjc7tmna4vcn2dztlwcc0qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dszyuy5p

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1hc7wzctejny6kj4pp2ckzasg2r3eyt993uhh8m2e3x56yh7a3s7qxn7yk4

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Last Notes

2025-11-04 16:16:40 UTC

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thank you for sticking with Mastodon!

2025-10-25 17:12:28 UTC

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I wonder if there's going to be an income tax boycott next year.

2025-10-23 20:46:20 UTC

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the headline is a chefs kiss.

2025-10-20 20:42:02 UTC

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I'm aware of some security tools that are still having problems. My only guess is that the inability of back-end systems to contact other back-end systems for multiple hours made said systems angry/upset.

2025-10-20 16:46:46 UTC

Future Children's playground song.
SpaceX
StarLink
Falling from the Sky
Who is
going to
get hit in the eye?
#spacex #starlink

2025-10-19 13:43:03 UTC

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the lesson here is that registry keys are butt plugs.

2025-10-15 20:33:06 UTC

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I wonder how long it was up.

2025-10-07 14:55:45 UTC

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did you see all the Ansible playbooks for Apache Guacamole?
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/115/333/458/491/059/644/original/a1add85634ac3289.png

2025-10-06 20:03:34 UTC

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alright, thanks. I was looking at the txt file becuase it said "tree" at the end.

2025-10-06 20:01:22 UTC

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that file tree is now zero length by the way. I tried downloading it multiple times and each time I end up with nothing.

2025-10-06 01:39:53 UTC

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Texas would be a great state if it wasn’t for all the fascists. There’s beautiful green areas around here. Or there was. If there’s a lush green area with trees, I guarantee it’ll become a huge warehouse or a white bread neighborhood in no time.

2025-10-06 01:30:58 UTC

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We have two different police departments. The Harris county sheriff and the Harris county constable. The constables make no sense.

2025-10-06 01:29:38 UTC

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The nearest grocery store is a Kroger that has so many cameras you feel unwelcome the minute you walk in.

2025-10-06 01:28:13 UTC

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The power grid is an unstable joke.

2025-10-06 01:27:56 UTC

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And oh is it ever fuck you hot. Like every day. It’s a humid heat so you can’t escape it. And it’s getting worse.

2025-10-06 01:27:03 UTC

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Forget riding a bike. You’ll probably get run over. Want to go to a park, hope you’re ready to sit in traffic. The nearest parks are only available to homeowners in whatever upscale planned community pays for it.

2025-10-06 01:25:10 UTC

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The sprawl is maddening. There are intersections with 3 gas stations.

2025-10-06 01:24:19 UTC

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I hate driving here because everyone drives like an entitled prick.

2025-10-06 01:23:39 UTC

Have I ever mentioned how depressing it is to live in Texas?

2025-09-03 13:42:13 UTC

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as opposed to a cat where you worry more about what the cat will do to the vet.

2025-08-19 19:46:38 UTC

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the mobile industry as a whole makes use of binary blobs at the core of many modern features. Not even Graphene is immune to this.

2025-08-19 15:18:20 UTC

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in an industry (mobile) that thrives on walled gardens and lacks a privacy/freedom preserving alternative this is not a good set of receipts.

2025-08-10 20:22:57 UTC

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they paid a lawer how many dollars to write this ambiguous press release?

2025-07-23 13:27:35 UTC

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I've seen a lot of Black users ditch Mastodon for Bluesky and it saddens me. Bluesky is not the free and open platform that everyone thinks it is and reeks of oligarch funny money. I don't blame those users however.

2025-07-09 21:40:17 UTC

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as seen on PornHub.

2025-07-07 21:49:19 UTC

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wasn't this heavily inspired by, if not a descendant of, NeXTSTEP?

2025-07-06 03:44:52 UTC

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part of me wonders if part of this is an offshoot of the 1970’s counterculture that birthed Richard Stallman and John Draper (Captain Crunch). One being a pedo-apologist who hates it when you say “Linux” without adding GNU, and the other being a known charlatan who also became persona non-grata after it turned out he likes molesting boys.

2025-06-08 04:28:32 UTC

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, did you see this?
https://globe.adsb.fi/?icao=~299c2d

2025-06-07 19:42:39 UTC

Stop calling them #ICE. Start calling them the Gestapo.

2025-05-23 13:54:01 UTC

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as a fellow atheist I'm seeing the same thing going on here in the US, and with this tragic killing of two Iraeli embassy staffers in DC it's only going to get worse.

2025-05-23 13:52:20 UTC

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thank you!

2025-05-23 13:51:54 UTC

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thank you, I'm going to check this out.

2025-05-23 04:50:08 UTC

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holy shit that excerpt! Are there any good books on early 20th century Zionism and its relationship to World War II?

2025-05-13 17:52:26 UTC

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who is on the helpdesk is important as well. You want troubleshooters, not ticket pushers.
Heck, you could even hire someone who has no idea how to use a computer as long as they're not afraid to do the research, ask questions, and try things. Those are the people who are truly curious and not there exclusively for a paycheck, and they end up advocating for end users as well as learning things.

2025-05-13 13:57:32 UTC

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to be fair it isn't just the security people. I have been in situations where a user was written off by tech support.
Had one case where a user was constantly complaining about files in microsoft excel refusing to load and or save, and everyone just assumed she was just using excel wrong so they'd ignore the tickets.
Finally one of these tickets got to me, and asking around I got the same story, that I'd be wasting my time with said user becuase they just don't know how to use excel. Not buying that, i worked with them, saw what they were complaining a bout, and through troubleshooting found a very real configuration issue with our file servers that was global enough for people to take notice.
Fixed it, improved network performance, and had a happy user to top that off.
Never write off users. :)

2025-05-13 13:50:36 UTC

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It's also a bit enabling; when you have an older user who's ability to use a computer is limited to remembering what to click for what task. They're not paid to be a computer expert, yet when they do something dumb on the computer we pretend like they're just the stupidest person in the world instead of what they are, a person who will never understand the training material presented because the concepts are foreign to them.
We can help them but the metrics win out.

2025-05-13 13:42:50 UTC

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THIS!
We have decades worth of evidence that positive re-enforcement is the way to go, but instead what we get is a combination of:
* Users reporting everything they get unsolicited as phishing, causing more work for SOCs.
* Improperly implemented automated security tooling that auto-fails people.
* Users who use their personal email instead of their work email for business.
* Etc, etc, etc.
All for the sake of metrics.

2025-04-16 18:42:51 UTC

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here's an AI bro:
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/114/349/111/280/075/954/original/97b7c44d093d9caa.png

2025-04-15 21:58:43 UTC

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that's if the API stays up.

2025-04-07 18:34:10 UTC

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I've been watching the dow for a while now and I expect it to start dipping right before close.
I wonder how much of this "rally" is finance bros "buying on the dip" because they seemed to be taking a beating on Friday. Not that I feel sorry for them.

2025-03-31 17:46:48 UTC

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It seems to me you're making the right decision if they're trying to associate themselves with you. "Hey we gave an award to person X, are we cool now?"

2025-03-23 21:00:49 UTC

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take a break from social media. It’ll still be here. As I stated on Bluesky, we’re all in a dark place right now…

2025-03-21 17:56:21 UTC

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this is very much within AYFKM territory.

2025-03-17 16:14:38 UTC

So, Cloudflare analyzed passwords people are using to log in to sites they protect and discovered lots of re-use.
Let me put the important words in uppercase.
So, CLOUDFLARE ANALYZED PASSWORDS PEOPLE ARE USING to LOG IN to sites THEY PROTECT and DISCOVERED lots of re-use.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/password-reuse-rampant-half-user-logins-compromised/
#cloudflare #password #cybersecurity

2025-03-15 15:47:29 UTC

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I kind of hope they do though.

2025-03-15 15:40:42 UTC

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I wonder if that’s a mistake they’ll make twice.

2025-03-10 20:23:08 UTC

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Receiving WEFAX is like watching a fishing show. You know you could be looking at the advisory online, but gosh darn it you're decoding a black and white image out of thin air!

2025-03-10 20:20:03 UTC

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it has a sci-fi horror movie vibe where the satellite signal finally comes in just enough, at the last minute, to show the cataclysm approaching before all signal is lost, forever.

2025-03-06 00:55:30 UTC

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LibreWolf is mature enough that I use it as my main driver.
LibreWolf takes advantage of the Firefox extension ecosystem, and because of that there are two really nice extensions to get the functionality of multiple browsers in one. Multi Account Containers will allow you to define different account containers and then open tabs in a specific container. If you log in to the same site with different accounts this will allow you to do exactly that. You can also completely isolate a site in its own containers.
For tab organization I recommend Tree Style Tabs or Sidebery. Both integrate Multi Account Containers.
It is my understanding that LibreWolf supports rolling your own sync account. I have not tried that yet but I know it’s possible.

2025-02-18 18:31:13 UTC

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for my LTO-4 drive connected through SAS, backing up from a SATA hard drive, I'm averaging around 75 MiB/s. The drive can go faster but it doesn't stop completely. My drive is half height so it's going to be slower than a full-height LTO drive. The important part is that it's constant and doesn't slow down much, and only stops when it reaches the end of the tape and has to switch directions to continue writing.
I think the most important two parts is the drive connections and the drives themselves. Make sure their throughput is close, with the hard drive higher than the tape drive.
Anecdote: At my previous employer we bought completely new LTO drives, I forget what version but very high capacity. We had to replace the drives because we weren't writing to them fast enough and they wore out waiting for data.
BTW, If you're going to use linux, the simplest way to back up is to use tar and mbuffer. Tar packs the files and mbuffer makes sure there's plenty of data for the drive in case tar needs to slow down at any point.
Example command:
tar -b512 --multi-volume --one-file-system -c -f - ./Archive | mbuffer -f -s 262144 -L -m 10G -P 100% -o /dev/st0
When you reach the end of a tape it will prompt you eject and insert a new tape. :)

2025-02-18 18:18:17 UTC

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What I've learned so far based on both work and personal experience.
* Go with LTO. The more recent the better but what you can afford also works. I'm using LTO-4, which can store between 800gb to 1.5 TB with compression enabled.
* Make sure your system is fast enough given the specs of the drive you get. This will make your backups faster and also avoid "shoe shining" where the drive spends a lot of time going back and fourth and wears down the media.
* If you're doing long term archiving, tapes last about 10 to 15 years or more depending upon how they are stored.
* Follow the 321 rule. 3 Copies on 2 different forms of media with 1 copy off site. I'm archiving to two hard drives and one tape. One hard drive will be stored off site (for me, at my parents house).

2025-02-18 15:36:08 UTC

I've been learning a lot about the use of tape drives for use in long term archiving. I feel kind of dumb, I didn't realize that GNU tar support spanning multiple volumes and that using it with mbuffer is totally fine. I'm able to pack more on tapes.

2025-02-11 22:47:09 UTC

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ah, yes I agree with that completely.
Everything is just Corporate Memphis style now.

2025-02-11 22:37:08 UTC

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I agree, but I think the style would change with the culture, being unable to change the interface to your liking, the inability for the end user to define their own style, is more about control than anything else.

2025-02-11 17:51:36 UTC

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IMHO, it's because the major GUIs are all about "User Experience" now, whereas the older stuff was more about frameworks that anyone could customize to their liking.
Framework > User Experience

2025-02-06 18:42:46 UTC

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pathtruths.com has a TORRENTMAGNETT.XT file that contains a torrent magnet link for all the site content. I think it's a good idea to seed this so that stuff like this cannot be memory-holed.

2025-02-05 14:55:38 UTC

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done. I apologize for the unintentional spam.

2025-02-05 14:48:00 UTC

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the archive.org torrent seems to be alive and well and hopefully everyone will keep seeding it.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/951/824/040/190/951/original/bd637a203620f737.png

2025-01-30 17:52:45 UTC

I feel so sorry for the Air Traffic Controllers who were working at Reagan last night. They do not deserve the vile putrid lies that #trump spewed from his horrific face orifice during that press briefing.
#atc #uspol #AA5342

2025-01-25 22:18:55 UTC

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popular sci fi is in a slump at the moment. Unfortunately it seems like it has to have a lot of action sequences or else it just doesn’t get green lit.
I think but I’m not 100% sure this started in the early 80’s with the rise of Star Wars. I use Star Trek: The Motion Picture as an example. I loved that movie. I also really like The Wrath of Khan.
But people don’t remember the early Star Trek movies for huge self aware spaceships and “carbon based units.” They remember “khaaaaaaaaan!!!!”
There’s always exceptions, just something I’ve noticed over the years.

2025-01-25 21:28:26 UTC

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I was considering watching this over the weekend but now I’m going to avoid it. Thank you for all this insight.

2025-01-23 23:37:25 UTC

You can track the impact of fascism on us government websites using github.
#uspol #fascism #github
https://www.404media.co/github-is-showing-the-trump-administration-scrubbing-government-web-pages-in-real-time/

2025-01-19 16:56:00 UTC

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back at you. I interact with people more with people on Mastodon than I ever did on those other social media sites. It’s so much more authentic. Even the bots are great.

2025-01-18 17:53:50 UTC

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while I cannot donate anything I do want to comment and I apologize if you know this stuff already.
Biggest challenge to local hosting is, you only get one IP address and its dynamic. There are ways around this. Using a provider that allows for dyanmic DNS, and also implementing IPv6 will help. Reverse proxy is the way to go for IPv4, which I'm looking at doing.
I'm looking for excuses to move from 1gbps FTTH to 4gbps. :)
I have a half rack that I'm using and yes I wish it was a full rack.

2025-01-16 16:06:15 UTC

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there are CDE themes out there for various window managers. AFAIK they still work though a bit dated.

2024-12-29 22:24:07 UTC

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of course it is. Why wouldn't it be.

2024-12-28 18:17:14 UTC

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ghosts never haunt a house where there’s a cat because all attempts to haunt would be blamed on the cat.

2024-12-23 16:24:58 UTC

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I'm going to date myself, but, imagine a beowulf cluster of these things. 😅

2024-12-19 17:31:58 UTC

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also the stories of legendary hackers at MIT wiring new instructions into a PDP.

2024-12-19 16:59:49 UTC

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I find myself wondering if there's a way to do this without wire wrapping. I mean, an expensive custom backplane with everything as a trace would make sense but would also be expensive. Something in the middle perhaps.

2024-12-19 16:56:37 UTC

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it really seems like the only real challenges to such a project would be BOM and backplane design.

2024-12-19 16:42:28 UTC

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oh man, this is so amazing and my Wife SO is going to be scratching their head. :D

2024-12-19 16:39:15 UTC

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DTL would be neat to see. Are you planning on making any of these?

2024-12-19 16:31:51 UTC

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I've been thinking about doing something like this lately, and this may be the kick I need to begin serious planning.
Thank you for this post!

2024-12-19 16:29:25 UTC

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omg this! Yes. Here’s one of the two Flip-Chips I have in my collection plus a quick and dirty DIY Flip-Chip I cobbled together by-hand just to see how long it would take without custom PCBs.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/680/433/896/224/389/original/9217756126252413.jpeg

2024-12-04 14:47:19 UTC

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the desperately need the money, the ruble is in the toilet.

2024-11-28 21:25:34 UTC

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this, but let’s also ban the use of warfare/military terminology in cybersecurity. I hate that intersection a lot and wish it would go away. It only benefits the big cats.

2024-11-22 16:42:21 UTC

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this is not crazy.

2024-10-10 15:03:21 UTC

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oooh. I like that one better because I love frogs.

2024-10-10 14:50:54 UTC

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They need to paint that yellow and call it something cute like Wheely McBigWheels.

2024-09-02 22:10:09 UTC

The more I peruse Facebook lately the more I ask the same question over and over again. That question is “is this public post part of a foreign influence campaign designed to destabilize the United States by taking advantage of the general lack of science literacy, knowledge of history, and critical thinking skills?”

2024-08-21 15:54:54 UTC

What is the best source for cheap low/mid-mileage solar panels? I would not mind second hand. They wouldn't be going on my roof.
I do search eBay but I'm not interested in pallets of hail damaged solar panels. :D
#solarpunk #solarpower #solar