Back in my 2019 article “The Desktop Security Nightmare”, I noted that on most of our desktops, we don’t have good control of what data a program can access and when. I noted that we have things like AppArmor, which is something, but not the entire picture. SELinux is so extremely complicated that even Ted T’so had a comment about never getting some of his life back. I don’t like complexity, especially when it comes to security.| www.complete.org
Sometimes we want better-than-firewall security for things. For instance: An industrial control system for a municipal water-treatment plant should never have data come in or out Or, a variant of the industrial control system: it should only permit telemetry and monitoring data out, and nothing else in or out A system dedicated to keeping your GPG private keys secure should only have material to sign (or decrypt) come in, and signatures (or decrypted data) go out A system keeping your tax rec...| www.complete.org
Anything that uses encryption to keep content away from spying eyes. End-to-end encryption is the best, because there need be no trusted intermediary. Some software projects are always fully end-to-end encrypted. Examples include NNCP, Syncthing, Yggdrasil, and Gemini. For more on encryption, see: OpenPGP tools: GnuPG (GPG) Sequoia PGP Age (Encryption) signify (not encryption, but cryptographic authentication) Links to this note Encrypting Filespooler Jobs With Age Like the process described ...| www.complete.org
Asynchronous communication is communication between two endpoints that doesn’t have to happen in real time or near-real-time. Compared to synchronous communication, asynchronous communication lets you trade latency for reliability. Asynchronous communication is closely related to the concept of store-and-forward networking and delay/disruption-tolerant networking. In fact, most asynchronous implementations are also store-and-forward and delay-tolerant, so these terms are often used intercha...| www.complete.org
This was originally published as a post on my blog. This version is intended to be kept up-to-date with developments, and is edited from the original. There is a whole science to manipulating our attention. And because there is a lot of money to be made by doing this well, it means we all encounter attempts to manipulate what we pay attention to each day. What is this, and how is it harmful?| www.complete.org
This site is built for modern clients using Small Technology. It is served from static files, which are themselves small. It should make no references to any resources from other servers, which helps protect the Privacy of visitors. Each page on this site starts as an org-roam note. org-roam helps highlight, make, and maintain links between related concepts, and you will no doubt notice many, many links here. Since org-roam is a layer atop org-mode, the pages are, of course, in org-mode format.| www.complete.org
I am a programmer, manager, hobbyist, advocate, volunteer, dad, and nature lover. I live out on an old farmstead in rural Kansas that once belonged to my grandparents. The nearest paved road is about 3 miles away, and the nearest town (population 600) is 7 miles away. I have three incredible children, which I might occasionally mention on my blog. I am the manager of www.complete.org and quux.org. Social & Contacts I write a lot on my blog.| www.complete.org
Train travel is a modern, fun, and fast way to travel all across the United States and the world. Here you can learn all about it. This page links you to information all about the nation’s cross-country passenger railroad, Amtrak. Why Take the Train? Did you know that it can be faster than air travel in some areas, offers one-of-a-kind scenery in others, and is usually surprisingly inexpensive? Amtrak On-Board Experience The experience on the train: what you’ll see, dining options, types ...| www.complete.org
Amateur radio is a radio service in which people are allowed and encouraged to build their own radios, antennas, and so forth. It can be used to communicate all around the globe without any intervening infrastructure such as satellites or cables. Information for other hams If you’re a ham looking me up, this is relevant information: My callsign is KR0L and my name is John Goerzen I was initially licensed as KD0MJT, which was used from July to October 2010 Some information about me, includin...| www.complete.org
In my writing about dar, I recently made that point that dar is a filesystem differ and patcher. We can exploit this property to do something really cool: build an Asynchronous rsync. What does that mean? rsync is a tool that has been in may *nix admins’ toolboxes for years. Typically used over ssh, rsync will compare the state of a local directory tree (or file) to the state of a remote tree, and efficiently make the remote match the local (or vice-versa).| www.complete.org
Probably everyone is familiar with a regular VPN. The traditional use case is to connect to a corporate or home network from a remote location, and access services as if you were there. But these days, the notion of “corporate network” and “home network” are less based around physical location. For instance, a company may have no particular office at all, may have a number of offices plus a number of people working remotely, and so forth.| www.complete.org
This started as a post on my blog. This edited version is intended to be kept more up-to-date. In How the Attention Economy Hurts You Via Social Media Sites Like Facebook, I wrote about how the Attention Economy in use at big Social Media networks hurts you. In this post, I’m going to suggest what to do about it. Mastodon and the Fediverse When you use Email, you can send a message from an account at Google to one at Yahoo, Microsoft, or any of millions of businesses and organizations runni...| www.complete.org
Information on a wide range of topics by John Goerzen| www.complete.org
noun: A beautiful place of sunflowers, rolling hills, and amazing sunsets. A great place to go when you want to go to a place most other people don’t want to go to. Home of one of the country’s most boring highways (I-70) A place where people tend to be real. Links to this note Kansas Amateur Radio Amateur Radio in Kansas John Goerzen I am a programmer, manager, hobbyist, advocate, volunteer, dad, and nature lover.| www.complete.org
“OK,” you’re probably thinking. “John, you talk a lot about things like Gopher and personal radios, and now you want to talk about building a reliable network out of… USB drives?” Well, yes. In fact, I’ve already done it. What is sneakernet? Normally, “sneakernet” is a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to using disconnected storage to transport data or messages. By “disconnect storage” I mean anything like CD-ROMs, hard drives, SD cards, USB drives, and so forth.| www.complete.org