you’re welcome.

what i’ld suggest… a general rule that i like to always follow is to use a test system for everything new. but that does not need to be a full separate system every time.

lets say you have your mailbox and want to try getting new mails from it using fetchmail. first you can use uidl mechanisms to only fefch every mail once and besides that leave them all on the server, but i like it a bit more secure: create a second email adress/account at your mail providers service only for testing. thus you can do whatever you like to to test the mechanisms only without even touching your real inbox (maybe even fill it up with large emails and look how the system reacts, i once had an email account with a cheap provider that deadlocked the inboxes when full…). then when everything is as you want it, switch the account and password (or create another config file for fetchmail) and your’re done. every change (not only fetchmail things) could go tested this way before going live with the changes. filtering could be done with procmail for example, but when the mda that is called by procmail somehow exits with success when the email really isn’t delivered, then the email might get lost forever depending on the settings of course. so fiddling with new stuff always carries the risk of not fiddling correctly ;-)

have fun !

Its possible to tell your mta (like postfix) to use another mta for all mails, or only some domains etc, so using a third party to play the internet facing service then getting the mails by fetchmail, storing them in a dovecot server is easy. on the sending part you could use your standard email client (i.e. thunderbird on pc or k9-mail on smartphone) to send it to your postfix instance that also sits on the server hosting your dovecot service. the mta there takes the mail and delivers it by rules which could just be using the mta of your freemailer using username/password of your account for all outgoing emails. i am doing this but the “external” mail system are my servers as well, i just don’t want emails to stay too long on VMs in the datacenter where i have no access to the physical disks in case something goes wrong.

a raspberry pi is sufficient for such a aetup (i am using a pi4 currently but for emails only i’ld say a 3 or older would do too), adding a disk via usb makes storage huge and cheap then, i use two usb ssd’s in a raid1 for storage… that server could be only accessible through vpn if you whish, depending on your skills and needs (i mainly use ssl client certificates that are supported by k9mail and thunderbird so it fits seamless to be connected through a haproxy that authenticates these before proxying the plain connection to the pi) clients like thunderbird can offline-store all emails (configure download-or-not per imap folder) making searches easy and quick while my k9 client can search locally or on the server if needed.

maybe adjust maximum mail size of your own mta to exactly match (or slightly less) that of the freemailer you use to prevent surprises of big but later then unsent emails.

its possible to have a nextcloud instance on that same pi that acts as an email web mailer just in case of (i really dont need it, but i’ve set this up anyway). nextcloud is also great for syncing/backup files pictures, contacts notes todo lists and calendar of your phone (where i use davx5 opentasks and foldersync for). there are other webmailers available but installing /using nextcloud is not a too bad idea either ;-)

i suggest also setting up some automatic offsite backup with snapshots of that pi then to cover emails and the setup and its configs ;-)

one example of a program that did multiple things is sfdisk, it used to make the kernel reload the new partition table but that was not its main job, only changing them. the extra functionality moved to blockdev which is nearer to doing such as it also triggers flushing buffers and i think setting read/write status. i am fully ok with that change as it removes code from a program that doesn’t need it to another that already does similar things so that other partitioning programs like gdisk fdisk or parted could go the same way so that maintainers of the reread-partition-table things can concentrate on one solution at one place (in userspace) instead of opening issues at an unknown number of projects that also alter partitioning. the “do one thing” paradigma is good for developers who maintain the code and i pretty much appreciate their work. if you are up to only want one-day-flies that either die or take huge amounts of resources only for keeping them alive (image of a mayfly in an emergency room and a heart-lung machine attached while chirurgs rushing around trying to enlenghten its life a few seconds more) then you are good with monolithic tools that could hardly be maintained and suck allday as no one wants to fix any bugs or cannot without creating new ones due to the tightened dependency hell it has internally.

the point is not a lack of examples doing wrong but where one wants to be heading towards.

Lol what???

wouldn’t that be the definition of stable?

the computer on voyager 2 is running for 47 years now, they might have rebooted some parts meanwhile but overall its a long time now, and if the program is free of bugs the time that program can run only depends on the durability of the hardware, protection from cosmic rays (which were afaik the problems the voyager probes faced mostly, not bugs) which could be quite long if protected from hazardous environments and maybe using optoelectronics but the point is that a bug free software can run forever only depending on hardware durability and energy supply, in any other way no humans are needed for a veery long time ;-)

However, systemd makes the system much more secure and reliable as it is

less secure and less reliable day-by-day you meant? systemd introduces needless dependencies ever since as if that was it sole intention ever from its very beginning, which already were used for wide attacks, and exactly those attacks that the people working hard to remove unneeded dependencies for security reasons meant to prevent by things like “do one thing only” (but security was not the number 1 reason for this one i think), systemd instead: ‘lets add another level of that exponential dependency tree from the insecurity hell’ felt like they did this stupid thing intentionally every month for a decade or more.

and stability… if you don’t monitor what systemd does, you’ll never know how bad it actually is. i’ve made custom scripts to monitor systemd’s failures (failing in doing a very primitive of its job) and there are hundreds (actually varying around 200 to 300 sometimes more) of such per day on all our systems for one particular(!) measurement only that was breaking service stability and i wrote a measure-and-fix+monitor workaround. other fixes were not monitored however, only silently fixed by workarounds, thus just unnumbered systemd bugs/instabilities in the dark that stole a lot of work capacity…

if you run distros with systemd, unreliability is your daily experience unless you don’t really care or have never experienced stability before - like running a service (a single process) for 8 years without any interruption then it suddenly stops and you go like “was it maybe an attack? the process died, how could that be? were there any connects from outside at that moment?” not talking about not updating something that long, but “stability” itself CAN be like if you dont stop it, it’ll still run in 10000+ years maybe millions, more likely that humans extincted themselves way earlier than of a process “just dying” by a bug… while systemd even randomly stops things that were running well for no reason (varying) once a month more or less (also varying in what it actually randomly stops, sometimes (2 times) it even stopped ssh on my servers, me asking myself if i should create yet another workaround for systemds buggyness to not locking me out again from network or ratjer go for the real solution for most* of all systemd problems - *see below) on the few standard installs i personally have as i didn’t have the way to automatically replace provider installed distro on VMs in the DC. i want this replacing automatically for the same reason why i don’t like systemd, it causes manual work for a thing that should go automated. however due to systemd’s perpetuated instability i now managed to have this way, and every second working on getting rid of systemd is worth it 100k times. this however does not solve all systemd-introduced problems as the xz attack showed (a systemd-dependency on xz made the infected xz library beeing useful-for-the-atracker during compiletime of sshd binary with which then the attacker could infect the newly built sshd binary),one could still be attacked through systemd’s dependency hell even if one does not use systemd by oneself, but the build machines used for your distro could be affected/infected by systemd’s needless dependencies when “also” compiling for systemd-affected distributions thus there is the risk of becoming a victim of needless-systemd-dependencies while not using systemd at all. however the attack through systemd dependency (and that the public solution was not the removal of needless dependencies only included as source for superflous third party “needs”) made clear that systemd is an overall problem for security that will not be solved quickly but stay just like all windows insecurities will stay as long as they whish to push them to their “users”.

systemd reducing overall security and its unreliability combined with some builtin impediments (i.e. when debugging its defects) is what drove me away from systemd. there are solutions way more stable and way more secure (and way better documented btw) that do not call in for needless dependencies, reducing risks, attack vectors and increases overall debuggability i.e. by deterministic behaviour as an easy example. and none of its important (to me) promises have been fulfilled yet by systemd, drop-in-replacement? have heared that lie thousands of times, but in the last decade i have not experienced it a single time in a distro and it does not seem to be included/finished any more.

for windows users or windows admins a linux with systemd on it IS an improvement in stability, security and of course for updating, yes. but all of that does not come from systemd, rather the opposite is the case, systemd reduces it month by month, thats my experience and thats the most important experience for me, idc what lies whitdepapers tell or what broken promises are believed by anyone or the masses, i want secure and stable servers and services and systemd does not fit in for any of these goals and the time it was still “young” and early problems could be accepted in the hope they get fixed soon are gone, but without those fixes having ever appeared.

ads with install buttons always are traps. and traps are always bad (except snmp traps, those are good but unreliable)

same way ads at download pages stating “proceed to download” are traps.

also ads at search result pages stating " 1 2 3 4 … next" are traps too.

for the “sponsored” note: there is no boundary here that makes it really clear for what that ‘sponsored’ is meant for. without any boundary it could be for something above it, below it, on the side or maybe even something that opens when you click on “sponsored” itself (seen it this way once). it could be for an ad that just failed to load (noticed the free space above that “sponsored” text? maybe the ad loads a bit later just to shift the real contents down so you “accidently” click on the ad that loads intentionally late for this very accident to be likely to happen?) if you use adblockers - which you should do for security reasons anyway - then you’ll see “sponsored” or “advertising” often even without the ad it was meant for after full load of the page. so a single “sponsored” without a clear boundary showing what would be that sponsored content, does not state anything to be an ad, it is purely meaningless and the lack of such boundary always is intentional to distract the user from what he wanted and trap him somehow.

a clear thumbs-down for ‘zoho assist’ from me here just for paying for (or trying out for free or such) such an advertising type.

And in most cases ads simply beeing ads are traps too. by the very concept of ads.

around 80 % of all things i actually still wanted after i bought them were recommendations by people i met in person. 15 % are things recommended by real persons i met on the internet. around 5% are things i bought without it beeing recommded by anyone (not even an ad) things i still wanted after i bought it due to an ad are nearly not existant. ok, i have stopped viewing television in 1997, have a sticker at my postbox that forbids to throw ads in (works where i live), use dns entries to remove most ads in my network, use browsers/extension that remove most crapjunkwastelitterrubbishads and skip webpages that still show too many ads or too offensive cookieterrorbanners. i use google search only sometimes for comparison of results, but near to zero for actual searching. i feel safe to say i am not that much distracted by ads. (however open source projects and authors do get money from me on a monthly basis, where i want to support them, either direct lly sent from my bank account or indirect).

for me personally an ad just saying “you might like this” drives me away from that product, if it needs or wants an ad, i don’t want it, even more so the more it states how difficult and horrible my life would be without the product or how easy it’ll be with it, go away ad-needing products, get recommended personally by those who actually use it, not by those who want to sell it. period. there is no better ad than true recommendation and its also free, no marketing monkey needs to get payed for bs, only an actually good product is needed… and there we go what types of products actually need ads…

once in my life i discovered a product that i first explicitly not bought for a decade because of the awful ad for it, but bought it another decade later by an absentminded accident and found it to be a good product despite its awful ad. then they increased packaging/reduced the product within to cover up a price increase in trade of more waste production, so i abandoned that product again and found something cheaper more eco friendly instead, yes, the cheaper one is really not as good, but i feel better with it and especially less betrayed by the vendor, so the eco one is the better one alltogether. and also i think its better to buy products where you don’t see ads for cause this behaviour could actually fix this advertising storm in the long run, so in this way its the better choice to buy products that don’t have ads for it.

again:

An ad with an install button is always a trap, even more so when the real install follows a single misclick on it. il’d say it would be quite fair to downvote/zerostars an app for how foulish-sneaky it was positioned in the search results if it is shown like an actual result with a f’ing install button. as its advertising type is always also part of the brand and the product itself. maybe make a sports out of that, klick the clickbait install buttons only to downvote the app for beeing intrusive and deinstall it again without even starting the app once, just to train advertisers to do it right instead of wrong next time. maybe. but for security reasons better don’t do that (at least not with a device with sensitive data on it)

please do not blame users to fall for ads. advertising industry now had centuries to learn to trap users and literally thousands or millions of marketing guys, designers, psycologists, neurologists or whatever only to learn and establish new abusive ways to distract and trap users. but a user only has his own lifespan to counteract that and learn to avoid those manipulations, and he also has to do other important stuff in his life too.

please don’t blame users for beeing humans. blame the industry where they are intentionally abusive, inhumane and/or counterproductive.

What’s the alternative to ads, though? Not everyone wants to (or can afford to) pay for every site they use.

its not about paying for the site a user uses, its about paying those who run the site (and less to pay for someone only “managing” the site by doing actually nothing)

maybe these could be alternatives:

• patreon
• flattr
• micropayment in general
• donations (somafm runs on donations)
• link to shopping platforms (musicians on somafm mostly have links to the songs on amazon that you see while playing the song for free)
• communities, like FSF, local groups
• some small payed supporter part (like lwn.net) while the important stuff that makes the win-win of the site is free to use
• maybe the list from this page can help too: https://kinsta.com/de/blog/patreon-alternativen/ Kickstarter Indiegogo Podia Sellfy Buy Me a Coffee Memberful Hypage Ko-fi Substack Kajabi Gumroad WooCommerce Mighty Networks MemberPress Uscreen

maybe even a combination of multiple of those *whoa!!! mindblow!!! could be a good choice to allow usersvto choose how to contribute.

so really only choosing to offer exactly one option that also puts all users at a real risk of real attacks where they can get ripped off of all or lots of their real money and data for the sake if earning 0.003 ¢ per each putting them at high risk is not really what should be done, or do you personally profit from their users high risk and are thus completely okay with it? hope not.

if you have to earn money with your project or whatever, why not offer several options to choose from? why only one? and while we’re at it, offering an ad-free “membership” for 400 times the price of what they would earn by the same visitor with ads like they try here sometimes, does not make any platform look good, but the opposite.

there are many platforms that i would pay for monthly and i would spend much more money alltogether than now on that if their price would not be artificially pushed into astronomically heights per service…

there is one project where i do donate each month a little bit via recurring bank transfer since years. my transfer says the name of the project and “donation” thats pretty easy to setup for both sides, but too complicated for those who pay designers money so they can place the ad layers on top of the 400 other layers of spypixels and navigation controls… really ? lol*

if those you are talking about cannot afford to have a bank account for some reason, i guess they also cannot receive the revenue of ads on their webpages ;+)

saying there are no alternatives to ads is rather a candidate for the lamest excuse award ;-)

yeah! you beat me to it 👍

guess this instance is lost, lets restart the matrix!

https://youtu.be/rNdpvNH1yi8?si=GPLbzrNxnwKNCfHm

its not just ads and malware, and its not only about beeing sorry for them. ads are also manipulating how people think. not only the obvious things like “that product is good”, but also that products in general would help (with problems you didn’t have). and the format itself of ads (even without considering its contents) already has a changing effects on the minds of those who watch it. i am thinking of some parts of neil postmans thoughts about television back then and i guess there is plenty of possibilities to make a realistic conspiracy theory out of it why exactly the most poisonous parts of television are replicated to the internet with massive force even though everyone ignores ads in the net. i like theories

unfortunately, feeling sorry for them does not help society to stability. 😥

with a microscope

if it was at least a scanning tunneling one, then yes, good job 👍 🤪

well there is plenty of what is possible to try. but unless one had looked at the real cause i’ld suspect one of apples hardware backdoors to cause the crashes like if the backdoor doesn’t work, crash the kernel, so we never loose control over the sheeapple thing. or more realistic if you want:

First maybe just crappy hardware:

There is a reason why i suspect apple’s hardware, cause my shitty macbook at work should(!) go to something like hibernate, sleep, or its spyveillance-only mode when closing the lid, and it should also lock the screen when doing so, the actual results seem pure randomly choosen, sometimes the sleep mode survives the weekend with lots of accu left, sometimes its completely depleted and i even have to charge it for a while before it has enough power to show the charging logo. for security reasons i have to manually lock my screen, verify it and then close the lid, which is pure annoy. this could just be buggy hardware, a sensor so broken that reading its inputs directly could crash any OS that assumes i.e. no division by zero, pointers to nonexisting ram or whatever, and maybe apple just knows what faulty measurements mean what (but cannot make that stable too, only no crash occurs)

secondly with a hardware backdoor:

https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2023_kaspersky-discloses-iphone-hardware-feature-vital-in-operation-triangulation-case

“The discovered vulnerability is a hardware feature, possibly based on the principle of “security through obscurity,” and may have been intended for testing or debugging. Following the initial 0-click iMessage attack and subsequent privilege escalation, the attackers leveraged this hardware feature to bypass hardware-based security protections and manipulate the contents of protected memory regions.”

which is that (some/all?) iphones have at least one memory page where one only has to accidently or intentionally write something into it, that could trigger the backdoor feature to let you choose which memory address to overwrite with what bytes, bypassing every(!) security mechanism in hardware AND of course those made of software too. that is how i understood documentation and presentations about it. now apple said they “fixed” it in software, from what i remember that fix was just a “os preventing apps from writing to that memory backdoor page” thus not a fix but only a mitigation, while “fix” is more a lie than only misleading words to just pretend it wasn’t permanent and unfixable. let us assume that linux does not include hardware backdoor mitigations for apple devices AND that apple placed the very same backdoor memory page into macbooks as well but maybe at (an)other physical address(es). now the code that runs on closing the lid “might” just reside at or write to the very same memory page on every boot for a given exact same kernel, which might be a memory page that acts the same or similar like that iphone hardware backdoor, overwriting some other memory page depending on what is actually written to the backdoor page which immediately crashes the kernel. if that’s whats happening there, t2linux is not broken, but macbooks are just insecure costly (loss of money, time, security, trust, work performance, patents, stability, a.s.o. …) waste.

how to find out? (maybe)

• get the kernel code.
• deactivate every driver not needed to boot and run the lidclose stuff like i.e. the sensor, compile the kernel anew and try booting from it.

changin the kernel a lot by removing everything(!) not needed should in theory/hopefully also change the pages that would be affected when closing the lid. same effect: likely no backdoor. no effect: maybe something you deactivated, maybe yet another backdoor discovery.

it might also be solveable by sth like acpi settings or such, probably switchable from kernel boot cmdline , maybe change settings for hibernate / suspend to ram (does apple hardware even support such? i mean without the buggy behaviour i experience?)l

but you did notice that compilers can be manipulated to include backdoors into resulting binaries AND put the same manipulation into newly compiled compilers as well, right? then where did you get that compiler from? did you have a look at the binary output? then if so, did you look at it using the hexeditor of that same compiler? 😎 plz have a look … 💥 bzzzt … really you are lucky to be alive after a blast like that, especially you, have yourself checked out with ems before you leave!

you should definitely know what type of authentication you use (my opinion) !! the agent can hold the key forever, so if you are just not asked again when connecting once more, thats what the agent is for. however its only in ram, so stopping the process or rebooting ends that of course. if you didn’t reboot meanwhile maybe try unload all keys from it (ssh-add -D, ssh-add -L) and see what the next login is like.

btw: i use ControlMaster /ControlPath (with timeouts) to even reduce the number of passwordless logins and speed things up when running scripts or things like ansible, monitoring via ssh etc. then everything goes through the already open channel and no authentication is needed for the second thing any more, it gets really fast then.

isn’t a security feature. At most it can be a safety feature.

o,O

you already have an internet connected back door in your CPU.

unless you’re running your own gsm station and let your cpu’s safely connect to it, and use that connection for additional snmp monitoring data?

i would not trust hardware from a vendor that puts hardwired backdoors into physical memory… you’ld undermine any security the OS could give you.

not the home screem

if had to use windows at home i’ld screem too.

not too surprised they didn’t change that.

The whole point of ssh-agent is to remember your passphrase.

replace passphrase with private key and you’re very correct.

passphrases used to login to servers using PasswordAuthentication are not stored in the agent. i might be wrong with technical details on how the private key is actually stored in RAM by the agent, but in the context of ssh passphrases that could be directly used for login to servers, saying the agent stores passphrases is at least a bit misleading.

what you want is:

• use Key authentication, not passwords
• disable passwordauthentication on the server when you have setup and secured (some sort of backup) ssh access with keys instead of passwords.
• if you always want to provide a short password for login, then don’t use an agent, i.e. unset that environment variable and check ssh_config
• give your private key a password that fits your needs (average time it shoulf take attackers to guess that password vs your time you need overall to exchange the pubkey on all your servers)
• change the privatekey every time immediately after someone might have had access to the password protected privkey file
• do not give others access to your account on your pc to not have to change your private key too often.

also an idea:

• use a token that stores the private key AND is PIN protected as in it would lock itself upon a few tries with a wrong pin. this way the “password” needed to enter for logins can be minimal while at the same time protecting the private key from beeing copied. but even then one should not let others have access to the same machine (of course not as root) or account (as user, but better not at all) as an unlocked token could also possibly be used to place a second attacker provided key on the server you wanted to protect.

all depends on the level of security you want to achieve. additional TOTP could improve security too (but beware that some authenticator providers might have “sharing” features which could compromise the TOTP token even before its first use.

My theory is that you already have something providing ssh agent service

in the past some xserver environments started an ssh-agent for you just in case of, and for some reason i don’t remember that was annoying and i disabled it to start my agent in my shell environment as i wanted it.

also a possibility is tharlt there are other agents like the gpg-agent that afaik also handles ssh keys.

but i would also look into $HOME/.ssh/config if there was something configured that matches the hostname, ip, or with wildcards* parts of it, that could interfere with key selection as the .ssh/id_rsa key should IMHO always be tried if key auth is possible and no (matching) key is known to the ssh process, that is unless there already is something configured…

not sure if a system-wide /etc/ssh/ssh_config would interfere there too, maybe have a look there too. as this behaviour seems a bit unexpected if not configured specially to do so.

since bots are better at solving captchas and humanoid services exist that solve them, the only ones negatively affected by captchas are regular legitimate users. the bad guys use bots or services and are done. regular users have to endure while no security is added, and for the influx i guess it is much more like with the better lock on the front door: if your lock is a bit better than that of your neigbhour, theirs might be force-opened more likely than yours. it might help you, but its not a real but only relative and also very subjective feeling of 'security".

beeing slower than the wolves also isn’t as bad as long as you are not the slowest in your group (some people say)… so doing a bit more than others always is a good choice (just better don’t put that bar too low like using crowdsnakeoil for anything)