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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Forget your existing cloud. Your 2FA backup doesn’t need to be protected by 2FA; just encryption and a strong/unique passphrase. Your 2FA backup can’t be used to access any account on its own, without each password. Most OSS E2EE services allow you to create a free account; many without an email. Pick 2 for redundancy, create a NEW account, and set a NEW passphrase (like your 2nd “master” password). Before you transit upload your OTP backup to both of them.

    This approach is probably more secure than SMS to access 2FA, especially vs a closed source provider like Authy, and especially if your 2FA export is also encrypted with a different password. If you’re already using a password manager and unique passwords for everything, you’re already 95% more secure than everyone else, and removed the primary need for 2FA (password reuse and theft). If you’re doing everything else right, 2FA only makes you 5-10% more secure, and covers far less-likely threats (email takeover, MITM, etc). Sys admins have been raw dogging SSH and PGP keys every day without a 2nd factor, for decades.






  • Outlook is garbage. Everything Microsoft does is garbage and consumer hostile, except for visual studio code. Anyone who’s used Google business apps knows this. Teams is such an unproductive joke I refuse to work for any company that uses it. It’s evidence a company is cheap and values cost cutting more than efficiency.

    I had a family 365 account to backup my parent’s shit. Even though their PC’s were logged into their fucking Microsoft accounts, and backed up to OneDrive, Outlook displayed ads and couldn’t be linked to their subscription without changing their account emails. Ads were also re-inserted into their OS, even though I already ran multiple scripts to disable them all previously. Complete joke. Cancelled that shit.


  • The researchers were also perplexed by the incredibly small sizes of these systems, only a few hundred light years across, roughly 1,000 times smaller than our own Milky Way. The stars are approximately as numerous as in our own Milky Way galaxy—with somewhere between 10 billion and 1 trillion stars—but contained within a volume 1,000 times smaller than the Milky Way.

    That kinda self-explains why there’s a supermassive black hole at the center of this young galaxy (all galaxies) right? As in the early universe was small and lumpy, with the first matter so close together, that it rapidly formed supermassive stars and black holes — maybe the density was so high that the first stars had no time to supernova and distribute higher elements; with billions of stars colliding into black holes over hundreds/thousands of years, each collision jumping the event horizon to insta-absorb thousands more stars at the speed of gravity/light — the first black holes going through a rapid period of exponential growth, getting to 50+% of their current size within a fraction of their entire existence.



  • Custom domains mean that if the alias provider enshittifies, you can switch to any other provider near-instantly. As long as you never use the domains to host illegal or dodgy shit it’s extremely unlikely you’ll ever lose them — far less likely than losing a gmail or whatever.

    With SL you can avoid spam by using the “beta” (been beta for 3+ years lol) “auto create” option instead of a catch-all, meaning that you can direct emails to different inboxes (or do nothing) based on specific regex strings you control — up to 100 of them. I had a catch-all regex (.*) as my # 100 and it took 2 years to receive catch-all fishing spam. Then I removed it and now have only random strings (e.g. .*fgyu.*) so new emails must have them if they want to get somewhere. Everything else bounces. All previous emails continue to work until you disable them individually.

    I use a mix:

    • SL-domains: anything I don’t give a shit about.
    • Non-PII domain: anything I would want to persist if I changed provider, but don’t need my identity, or can give out a unique email in-person.
    • PII-domain: banks and all other services tied to my identity.
    • Top-Secret-PII-domain: critical services that could compromise all others (password manager, email/OS accounts, domain name registrar).