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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Yeah the security angle gets parroted a lot, I’d call it more of a bad practice thing than a “omg you’ll definitely get haxxord”.

    Otoh USB C as a spec is sort of necessarily a nightmare. It’s not hard to end up with shitty devices that’ll gleefully provide 20V when the system expects 5V and even if it’s just USB A, it’s not that hard to end up with 120/240v going straight into your phone.

    At least with devices you own and control you know if they’re melting things and haven’t spent their lives being kicked/spilled on/cleaned with corrosive solvents or just generally old as hell and unmaintained.

    Personally I bring my own because it’s faster and more reliable, and I have trust issues.



  • The technical term is “dummy load”, most antennas are around 50ohm “impedance” which in an incredibly roundabout way means the antenna is indistinguishable from a 50ohm resistor at whatever frequency it’s tuned to…which means you can replace the antenna with a 50ohm resistor.

    This all assumes you care about leaving the radio functional (radio amplifiers will burn up if they can’t dissipate the energy they’re creating) and in most cases it’s probably fine to just cut the trace as close to the source chip as possible. That said, if the system is especially evil and well engineered it’ll throw errors in some cases so better to leave everything functional but unable to hear or transmit.


  • I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it when the file is at rest, it looks like zip uses AES 128 or 256 which are adequate if you have a very strong password for the encryption. Ideally the encryption would feature a computationally intensive algorithm to slow guessing attempts when attempting to decrypt so you probably don’t want to use a weak password.

    Usability won’t be great, you’ll be copy pasting constantly and that presents an opportunity for malware to spy on the paste buffer and steal your passwords but it’s a low to medium severity issue.

    If you want to keep everything local I’d recommend KeePass, it’s free, open source, and very strong. It’s kinda the same thing but with the ability to insert passwords directly in some cases and can do more to keep everything organized.

    If you want to use this in environments where you can’t install anything on the systems but don’t want anything online, this is probably acceptable though.