The Doctor

I think I still have a copy of that book in a box somewhere. I know I have a scanned copy in my archive. Lots of fun.

They sure make the task of keeping an eye on the chuds easier. Their OPSEC eats donkey ass.

Why would they hide anymore? They figure they won. No sense in not taking advantage of everything that implies.

I keep a documentation page in my wiki for every thing I set up - how I did it, what I ran into, how I fixed it, and where everything is. Reason being, when it comes time to upgrade or I have to install it again someplace else, I remember how I did it. Basically, every completed step gets copy-and-pasted into a page along with notes about it.

As for watching the file system, I have AIDE on all of my boxen (configured to run daily, but not configured to copy the new AIDE database over the old one automatically). That way, I can look at the output of an AIDE run and see what new files were created where (which would correspond to when I installed the new thing).

This is a thing that folks have done in the past:

• http://kacangbawang.com/encrypting-stored-email-with-postfix/
• https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email and https://www.grepular.com/Automatically_Encrypting_all_Incoming_Email_Part_2
• https://jnphilipp.org/posts/auto-encrypt-all-incoming-email-with-postfix/
• https://www.mydreams.cz/en/hosting-wiki/9663-configuring-automatic-email-encryption-in-postfix-on-centos-7-using-gpg.html

The Great Game continues, same as it always has.

You can have them installed next to one another. Just like you can have Firefox and Links installed at the same time. Or twm and gnome3. It comes down to how much work you want for yourself.

Depends on your distro, I think.

If only for the sake of one’s CV. Making your bones by having a couple of 0-days under your belt helps a lot of folks find jobs these days.

It is. That’s why Wayland is being pushed so hard, it’s a codebase that’s actually maintainable, with hopefully some more modern design and engineering principles.

Agreed.

You can install more than one desktop environment at a time. Your login manager should let you pick which one you want to log into.

I’m running MATE on my laptop. It gives me what I need (a task bar, space for some instrumentation, the usual desktop functionality, a way to start applications) and nothing that I don’t care about (wobbling windows, compiz, stuff like that). My DE is a tool; I use tools that don’t get in my way because I have work to do.

I might give COSMIC a try in a few months, I haven’t decided yet.

It’s pretty nice. The REST API for running searches makes running SearxNG worth it, if nothing else.

When I could get away with it at work, I did.

In the last… I want to say six or seven years, issuing Macbooks to sysadmins has been a common thing in the sectors I work in. Rather than put up with us going rogue and messing up license tracking by rebuilding our stuff with a distro of choice, management just throws OSX at the problem (us, we’re the problem) because operationally it’s close enough for our purposes.

It’s not my choice or preference, but the money’s green.

The true final exam would be writing code on an airgapped system.

I’ve tested wifi calling on AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. How well it works (call quality, whether or not the call gets dropped, how often it gets dropped) has always been a crapshoot. Using a real VoIP client to connect to my Asterisk box? Significantly more stable and usable.

No. There are easier and more reliable ways to backdoor stuff that don’t run the risk of somebody’s fuzzer stumbling across it. Which, I hasten to add, can be installed in such a way that disabling it bricks the device (which means that nobody will bother).

Gee. What a surprise.

I usually don’t take the rewards - I like to pay it forward for the few times I really needed them.