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One line password generator

September 7, 2023    Article    160 words    1 min read

Quick guide for people who want to have a quick way to generate a random password without unlocking their favorite password manager. The only requirement (if you want clipboard copy) is xclip which can be installed on your distro from its package manager.

$ < /dev/urandom tr -dc "A-Za-z0-9_+$?=/\@!%&#()-" | head -c 32

The above command takes output (redirects) from /dev/random, passes it through tr by filtering all characters except the ones explicitly defined and cuts the resulted string after 32 characters. If you want more/less than 32 characters, adjust that part.

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Splitting the Web

September 3, 2023    Bookmark    https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html

Something strange is happening: it’s not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I’m blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I’m also disappearing for them. I don’t see them and they don’t see me!

Think about it! That whole “MBA, designers and marketers web” is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don’t block analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel more disconnected from that part of the web.

[…]

It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

Lionel Dricot

From a Globalping probe to ... something else

September 2, 2023    Article    1275 words    6 mins read

Globalping

A friend who read my how to turn a Ripe.net probe into a OpenWRT router article gave me a Globalping hardware probe to play with, two conditions attached: don’t expose any private information that might be hardcoded into the probe and return it with the same firmware. Because of his request, I’ll do this the “paranoid” way (no boot logs, no SD card manufacturer shown, no default firmware upload, etc) so this will basically be a short tutorial of how to connect one device to another via serial console and various hardware information about the probe.

What is a Globalping hardware probe, you might be asking yourself right now. Well, it’s pretty simple:

Globalping is a platform that allows anyone to run networking commands such as ping, traceroute, dig, curl and mtr on probes distributed all around the world. Our goal is to provide a free and simple service for everyone out there to make the internet faster. You can use it to optimize your anycast network, monitor your latency, debug routing issues and even check for censorship in different countries. source

GLobalping hardware probe
Globalping is a service from jsDelivr and allows users to perform network tests (such as ping, mtr, dig, etc.) on probes all over the world through a simple HTTP RESTful API. It’s very similar to a much older RIPE Atlas hardware probe and people who know me would understand that I will not connect such a device to the Internet from my LAN unless heavily sedated (which is not the case right now) but it is what it is. It mostly likely doesn’t do anything nefarious but it definitely opens your local network to a whole new world of pain.
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Remnants

September 1, 2023    Photography
Remnants

Yesterday

August 31, 2023    Article    519 words    3 mins read

I no longer believe that I will get to live in the future I dreamed of when I was growing up.

I grew up in a low-to-middle class suburban area, just few kilometers outside my country’s capital city. On a warm summer night, if I listened hard enough, I could hear the city buzzing - a siren from a police car, an occasional motorcycle screaming down the street, a helicopter sometimes, an airplane if we were lucky. But that’s the city.

I grew up in a two story house that my father and my grandfather built themselves. We had a nice backyard where mother used to plant flowers, a garage for the family car. The whole street was like that. I was a kid. There were so many kids, I couldn’t even count them all.

Everyone took care of everyone.

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Captain Blackbeard Radio #18

August 28, 2023    Article    699 words    4 mins read

#18: Bet Yer Life, CaptainBlackbeard!

In this episode, we follow America’s number one game show host, Wink Payola. As we find out what America’s favorite son, does with the other twenty three hours of their day?

This episode is the most ambitious thing we have ever attempted. Bet Yer Life, CaptainBlackbeard is a hilarious, wild and darkly fascinating story that explores Media, Consumerism, Greed, Fame. And what it is to live on the dark side of the internet. The highs and lows that come from it. This story is also strongly about AI technology, how incredible it is and the consequences of how fast it’s progressing.

Bet Yer Life, CaptainBlackbeard was a whole lot of fun to make for ye! This story ties up a lot of different things in the CaptainBlackbeard Universe, and marks the beginning of a new era for CaptainBlackbeard Radio. It is challenge to create the right balance for ye, mates. When we come up with an idea for the show, it evolves into deeply rich universes that could span many hours to tell the full story of. However, we respect yer time and do not wish to Tommy and Pam ye. So we hope ye enjoy this wild and darkly hilarious story that we promise ye, everything works out in the end.

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