When your bank offers zero automation and no API's, you can build it yourself using Firefly III, Google Drive and Docker. Check out dimai's solution over at GitHub!

github.com/orgs/firefly-iii/di…

Extending Firefly-iii with cron jobs in Docker · Discussion #6754 · firefly-iii

Firefly is an amazing piece of software and I am totally addicted to it. As of right now, the only inconvenience that I have is that I cannot auto-import my transactions as they take place (or soon...

^GitHub

This is a carbonized loaf of bread from Pompeii, 79 C.E. - preserved for thousands of years in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius. The baker left his stamp, which reads: “Celer, slave of Quintus Granius Verus." Celer is known to have survived the eruption, as his name later appears on a list of "freed men." Most bread at the time was baked in community ovens, so customized stamps were used to mark individual families’ and bakeries’ loaves.

#histodons #TIL #WeirdHistory #AncientHistory #DYK

KDE desperately needs a stopthemingmy.app equivalent for Plasma.

I opened Dolphin on stock GNOME in dark mode on Fedora (Fedora ships Adwaita-Qt theme). The first thing I see is this [see image].

This is not nice. All I wanted to do is test something in Dolphin. Now I can't use it due to styling issues.

Please ship applications the way developers intended to be used. If users want to break their system, then let them. But don't break it for them.

This is unacceptable.

I just spent most of christmas eve finishing up with flatpakking @AsahiLinux's Mesa fork.... and I think I've got it to the final stretch of being able to be used.

Big thanks to @refi64, especially for figuring out builds on x86_64 *and* aarch64, along with self-updating metadata.

and murry chrysler

github.com/orowith2os/mesa-asa…

Update Mesa options to be more similar to upstream Asahi (#5) · orowith2os/mesa-asahi-flatpak@c4deeaf

A WIP repository for testing the packaging of the asahi/mesa graphics library - Update Mesa options to be more similar to upstream Asahi (#5) · orowith2os/mesa-asahi-flatpak@c4deeaf

^GitHub

It's such a shame when cool projects are maintained by bigots.

I wanted to give Hyprland a try, since I love the (technical) direction it's going. Sadly, the maintainers are transphobic and will treat you like garbage if you are a trans person. @orowith2os, a great friend of mine, shared some screenshots about the bigotry on the Discord server that made me reconsider my decision.

#Trans #Transphobia #Bigotry #Hyprland #Linux #FOSS #OpenSource

Bromeliad flower (Aechmea fasciata).

Spiky and fractal.

Experts debate the risks of made-to-order DNA | Ars Technica

undark.org/2022/12/21/experts-…

Experts Debate the Risks of Made-to-Order DNA

Technical advances may be making it easier to build dangerous biological materials from scratch, with few regulations.

^{Michael Schulson (Undark Magazine)}

GitHub - Slackadays/Clipboard: 📋 Cut, copy, and paste anything, anywhere, all from the terminal.

github.com/Slackadays/Clipboar…

GitHub - Slackadays/Clipboard: 📋 Cut, copy, and paste anything, anywhere, all from the terminal.

📋 Cut, copy, and paste anything, anywhere, all from the terminal. - GitHub - Slackadays/Clipboard: 📋 Cut, copy, and paste anything, anywhere, all from the terminal.

^GitHub

🔓 Like good neocolonizers, #humanitarian organizations & #nonprofits, like militaries, also collect vast amounts of #biometric & other private information about people with reckless disregard for basic #privacy and #security concepts.

✊🏽 We must hold them accountable for the risks and damages their actions cause: it's unacceptable to allow society to continue this way.

Thanks to #CCC for helping expose the dangerous truth.

#SurevillanceCapitalism #infosec

web.archive.org/web/2022122712…

For Sale on eBay: A Military Database of Fingerprints and Iris Scans

German security researchers studying biometric capture devices popular with the U.S. military got more than they expected for $68 on eBay.

^{Kashmir Hill (The New York Times)}

NYT: Health experts say it’s time to wear masks again nytimes.com/2022/12/13/well/co…

Also the NYT: “The Last Holdouts,” framing people wearing masks as isolated oddballs nytimes.com/2022/12/26/us/covi…

I recently wrote a post detailing the recent #LastPass breach from a #password cracker's perspective, and for the most part it was well-received and widely boosted. However, a good number of people questioned why I recommend ditching LastPass and expressed concern with me recommending people jump ship simply because they suffered a breach. Even more are questioning why I recommend #Bitwarden and #1Password, what advantages they hold over LastPass, and why would I dare recommend yet another cloud-based password manager (because obviously the problem is the entire #cloud, not a particular company.)

So, here are my responses to all of these concerns!

Let me start by saying I used to support LastPass. I recommended it for years and defended it publicly in the media. If you search Google for "jeremi gosney" + "lastpass" you'll find hundreds of articles where I've defended and/or pimped LastPass (including in Consumer Reports magazine). I defended it even in the face of vulnerabilities and breaches, because it had superior UX and still seemed like the best option for the masses despite its glaring flaws. And it still has a somewhat special place in my heart, being the password manager that actually turned me on to password managers. It set the bar for what I required from a password manager, and for a while it was unrivaled.

But things change, and in recent years I found myself unable to defend LastPass. I can't recall if there was a particular straw that broke the camel's back, but I do know that I stopped recommending it in 2017 and fully migrated away from it in 2019. Below is an unordered list of the reasons why I lost all faith in LastPass:

- LastPass's claim of "zero knowledge" is a bald-faced lie. They have about as much knowledge as a password manager can possibly get away with. Every time you login to a site, an event is generated and sent to LastPass for the sole purpose of tracking what sites you are logging into. You can disable telemetry, except disabling it doesn't do anything - it still phones home to LastPass every time you authenticate somewhere. Moreover, nearly everything in your LastPass vault is unencrypted. I think most people envision their vault as a sort of encrypted database where the entire file is protected, but no -- with LastPass, your vault is a plaintext file and only a few select fields are encrypted. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass uses shit #encryption (or "encraption", as @sc00bz calls it). Padding oracle vulnerabilities, use of ECB mode (leaks information about password length and which passwords in the vault are similar/the same. recently switched to unauthenticated CBC, which isn't much better, plus old entries will still be encrypted with ECB mode), vault key uses AES256 but key is derived from only 128 bits of entropy, encryption key leaked through webui, silent KDF downgrade, KDF hash leaked in log files, they even roll their own version of AES - they essentially commit every "crypto 101" sin. All of these are trivial to identify (and fix!) by anyone with even basic familiarity with cryptography, and it's frankly appalling that an alleged security company whose product hinges on cryptography would have such glaring errors. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has terrible secrets management. Your vault encryption key always resident in memory and never wiped, and not only that, but the entire vault is decrypted once and stored entirely in memory. If that wasn't enough, the vault recovery key and dOTP are stored on each device in plain text and can be read without root/admin access, rendering the master password rather useless. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass's browser extensions are garbage. Just pure, unadulterated garbage. Tavis Ormandy went on a hunting spree a few years back and found just about every possible bug -- including credential theft and RCE -- present in LastPass's browser extensions. They also render your browser's sandbox mostly ineffective. Again, for an alleged security company, the sheer amount of high and critical severity bugs was beyond unconscionable. All easy to identify, all easy to fix. Their presence can only be explained by apathy and negligence. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass's API is also garbage. Server-can-attack-client vulns (server can request encryption key from the client, server can instruct client to inject any javascript it wants on every web page, including code to steal plaintext credentials), JWT issues, HTTP verb confusion, account recovery links can be easily forged, the list goes on. Most of these are possibly low-risk, except in the event that LastPass loses control of its servers. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has suffered 7 major #security breaches (malicious actors active on the internal network) in the last 10 years. I don't know what the threshold of "number of major breaches users should tolerate before they lose all faith in the service" is, but surely it's less than 7. So all those "this is only an issue if LastPass loses control of its servers" vulns are actually pretty damn plausible. The only thing that would be worse is if...

- LastPass has a history of ignoring security researchers and vuln reports, and does not participate in the infosec community nor the password cracking community. Vuln reports go unacknowledged and unresolved for months, if not years, if not ever. For a while, they even had an incorrect contact listed for their security team. Bugcrowd fields vulns for them now, and most if not all vuln reports are handled directly by Bugcrowd and not by LastPass. If you try to report a vulnerability to LastPass support, they will pretend they do not understand and will not escalate your ticket to the security team. Now, Tavis Ormandy has praised LastPass for their rapid response to vuln reports, but I have a feeling this is simply because it's Tavis / Project Zero reporting them as this is not the experience that most researchers have had.

You see, I'm not simply recommending that users bail on LastPass because of this latest breach. I'm recommending you run as far way as possible from LastPass due to its long history of incompetence, apathy, and negligence. It's abundantly clear that they do not care about their own security, and much less about your security.

So, why do I recommend Bitwarden and 1Password? It's quite simple:

- I personally know the people who architect 1Password and I can attest that not only are they extremely competent and very talented, but they also actively engage with the password cracking community and have a deep, *deep* desire to do everything in the most correct manner possible. Do they still get some things wrong? Sure. But they strive for continuous improvement and sincerely care about security. Also, their secret key feature ensures that if anyone does obtain a copy of your vault, they simply cannot access it with the master password alone, making it uncrackable.

- Bitwarden is 100% open source. I have not done a thorough code review, but I have taken a fairly long glance at the code and I am mostly pleased with what I've seen. I'm less thrilled about it being written in a garbage collected language and there are some tradeoffs that are made there, but overall Bitwarden is a solid product. I also prefer Bitwarden's UX. I've also considered crowdfunding a formal audit of Bitwarden, much in the way the Open Crypto Audit Project raised the funds to properly audit TrueCrypt. The community would greatly benefit from this.

Is the cloud the problem? No. The vast majority of issues LastPass has had have nothing to do with the fact that it is a cloud-based solution. Further, consider the fact that the threat model for a cloud-based password management solution should *start* with the vault being compromised. In fact, if password management is done correctly, I should be able to host my vault anywhere, even openly downloadable (open S3 bucket, unauthenticated HTTPS, etc.) without concern. I wouldn't do that, of course, but the point is the vault should be just that -- a vault, not a lockbox.

I hope this clarifies things! As always, if you found this useful, please boost for reach and give me a follow for more password insights!

Okay, so let's summarise 2022 in music. These were my Top 3 most-listened Female-fronted Symphonic Metal tracks of the year:

3. Blackbriar - Crimson Faces
youtube.com/watch?v=9zOVTkAMY9…

2. Battle Beast - Eye Of The Storm
youtube.com/watch?v=C7Z-IP2onY…

1. Visions Of Atlantis - Clocks / Melancholy Angel
youtube.com/watch?v=2ZBhE3HOwY…
youtube.com/watch?v=9RH8rVt4Z8…
#SymphonicMetal #Female-Fronted #music2022

Clocks

Provided to YouTube by The Orchard EnterprisesClocks · Visions of Atlantis · Clémentine Delauney · Siegfried Samer · Michele GuaitoliPirates℗ 2022 Napalm Rec...

^YouTube

LastPass users: Your info and password vault data are now in hackers’ hands

arstechnica.com/?p=1906575

Možnost podat žádost o voličský průkaz mě po 13 letech dotlačila ke zřízení datové schránky.

Jsem v šoku z toho, že zpráva v prostém textu o třech odstavcích je systémem přepracována do podoby PDF souboru, který by se ani nevešel na disketu.

Dopečeno jest 😁

Tak už jenom dvojí knedlík a medové zelí z domácího kysaného a budu si spokojeně debužírovat 😋

#zaseŽere

I don't think this is getting the coverage it needs. Scottish government to require passivhaus standard for all new build homes. This is big. Really big. Growing out of lessons from the 70's oil crisis. Passivhaus buildings use very little energy to heat, or to cool. We've known how to do this for decades. It's gross negligence from all western governments that the same is not true of all new builds in the developed world.

thenational.scot/news/23197204…