Posts - Page 5

Telegram defaults to unencrypted chats, so your messages are stored in plaintext on their servers. If you don’t want them to read your messages, you have to manually enable Secret Chats — but these don’t work for groups and require users to be online at the same time. A 2017 usability study found that many users thought they were using secure, encrypted chats when they were in fact sending all their messages in plaintext.

ProtonMail is one of the most popular security-focused email providers. Because email is not a particularly secure protocol, things like end-to-end encryption have to be bolted on top. To ensure interoperatiblity, an email provider must be able to send unencrypted messages to recipients who haven’t dived into the painful world of PGP.

Several security-focused messaging apps give users the ability to choose between two modes: unencrypted chats, or end-to-end encrypted ones that might lack certain features. This is an anti-pattern when it comes to usable security, and it brings some risks that are rarely discussed.

So you just updated to Fedora 32, sat down to work, and realized that Docker wasn’t working. Maybe at this point you vaguely remembered hearing about something called CgroupsV2 being a thing in Fedora 32, and maybe also something about Docker not playing nice with CgroupsV2. You kick yourself for a moment but decide that this is a good opportunity to get to grips with Podman. You could just turn off CgroupsV2 but it seems like working with Podman might make your future Fedora life a bit simpler.

I’m not one of those people who constantly has their head buried in a book — one of those at heightened risk of falling down a manhole because they are reading while walking instead of looking in front of them. A part of the reason is that I tend to gravitate towards denser books — the type of book that feels Important, and that might prompt impressed nods when I bring it up to my philosopher friends. This is a bad habit. It means that I just end up doing something else that isn’t reading. One of my resolutions for the new year is to read for enjoyment rather than for some imagined book CV. In that spirit, I wanted to write up a list of some of the reads I enjoyed the most this year.