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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I like this sentiment, but giving the US intelligence apparatus what amounts to a veto for elected/appointed officials feels like a recipe for disaster.

    The only way I see that being workable is if the clearance grantors are transparently beholden to elected officials or the people directly. Which are essentially what elections and the congressional confirmation process are supposed to be. But both of those processes feel like they’ve been subverted. (Elections by the two-party system and the fact that half the population seems intent on electing a dictator, and the other by the senators/representatives that come out of that electoral system).











  • Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is my favorite movie. It’s got great characters, including three played by the same actor, is well written with some very quotable lines, and the story is both absurd and believable (even now).

    I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not for everybody, but if you’re asking for movies to watch it’s probably for you. With movies I always recommend going in knowing nothing.

    I could quote the whole thing probably, but I’ll spare you and just say that the way the Russian ambassador says “fresh fish” is weirdly seared into my brain.





  • I at least had the cathartic experience of being told “hey we need to shut down EVERYTHING before 7pm because that’s when the email will turn off, so log into every service you know we use and delete it all.” And then I spent the next couple hours clicking every delete button I could.

    K8s clusters? Delete. Prod DB? Delete. Prod DB backups? Delete. S3 buckets? Delete. Cloudflare account? Delete.

    It was actually kinda fun.



  • In practice, I believe the private key should contain the public key (or at least sufficient data to recover it): https://superuser.com/questions/814409/gnupg-opengpg-recovering-public-key-from-private-key#814421

    I believe you only need your private key to sign files so, technically you only need to back up the private key, but you should test this to be sure it fits your use case.

    Depending on how you’re backing things up, and what your security goals are, remember that backing up a private key may involve putting that private key on somebody else’s computer - i.e. if you use a remote git repo, or cloud backup service, or even send the key to your own (different) machine over an insecure network. Make sure that you’ve got a way of securely backing up your private key, otherwise you may undermine the whole cryptography thing anyways :).

    As always, you should test by backing up your key(s) and then testing that you can actually restore them and successfully sign a file. Backups are only as good as the last time you tested restoring from them.