today's leftovers
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Data Swamp ☛ A Stateless Workstation
I always had an interest for practical security on computers, being workstations or servers. Many kinds of threats exist for users and system administrators, it's up to them to define a threat model to know what is acceptable or not. Nowadays, we have choice in the operating system land to pick what works best for that threat model: OpenBSD with its continuous security mechanisms, Linux with hardened flags (too bad grsec isn't free anymore), Qubes OS to keep everything separated, immutable operating system like Silverblue or MicroOS (in my opinion they don't bring much to the security table though) etc...
My threat model always had been the following: some exploit on my workstation remaining unnoticed almost forever, stealing data and capturing keyboard continuously. This one would be particularly bad because I have access to many servers through SSH, like OpenBSD servers. Protecting against that is particularly complicated, the best mitigations I found so far is to use Qubes OS with disposable VMs or restricting outbound network, but it's not practical.
My biggest grip with computers always have been "states". What is a state? It is something that distinguish a computer from another: installed software, configuration, data at rest (pictures, documents etc…). We use states because we don't want to lose work, and we want our computers to hold our preferences.
But what if I could go stateless? The best defense against data stealer is to own nothing, so let's go stateless!
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Instructables ☛ I-Cuckoo Clock Using an Arduino & Stepper Motor to Repair & Synchronize a Broken Cuckoo Clock : 21 Steps
Using an ESP32 WROOM 32D Microprocessor & Stepper Motor to Repair & NTP Time Synchronize a Worn Out Regula 25 Cuckoo Clock. This modification contains 3D printed parts but the parts could be faily easily made from wood/metal.
This project uses a Regula 25 Cuckoo Clock movement which are very common and worn out ones should be cheap and easy to find.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ A-BiRD uses Raspberry Pi to identify different species singing at the same time
A microphone array is hooked up to a Raspberry Pi which is programmed to listen to ambient sounds, record bird songs, and show audio curves. The Pi then sends that data to BirdNET Sound ID at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for analysis. Using the audio data, BirdNET Sound ID determines what kind of bird is present in a specific location.
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Openwashing
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Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Meta opens headset OS to third-party device makers
The move will allow partner companies to build their headsets using Meta Horizon OS, a rebranded operating system that brings capabilities like gesture recognition, passthrough, scene understanding and spatial anchors to the devices that run on it, the company said in a blog post.
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