The Doctor

What’s the difference anymore?

They genuinely do not care anymore. We lost, just like the cypherpunks lost.

The last three or four companies I’ve worked for did. Usually a month or so in HR would want to know why I didn’t tell them about my birbsite account. They also usually asked why I didn’t update my LinkedIn page to say I was working there now.

You mean, there are places that don’t monitor their employees’ social media accounts to compare against?

They said straight up, “I googled you and couldn’t find a Twitter or Facebook account. What are you hiding?” I had to teach them who Armand Jean du Plessis was.

Opting out of social media these days is considered inherently suspicious. It definitely came up the last time I had to undergo a background check for work.

Just defining the threat model of hardware addressing, as it stands.

I don’t agree with them sending more than the first half either.

A MAC address isn’t really unique. Each has six octets, of which three refer to the manufacturer. The other three octets have at most 16,777,216 possible values. That seems like a lot but it really isn’t; a MAC is supposed to be unique on a LAN, not globally. Rollovers during manufacturing happen, and collisions are rare but happen once in a while.

What do you mean, custom firmware? Are you trying to boot a different distro of Linux?

When you have the USB drive plugged in, how are you booting up? What’s the process you’re using?

The first three octets of a MAC specify the manufacturer of a NIC chipset. That could come in handy for driver debugging.

Manufacturers and firmware versions of storage devices? You can make the argument; perhaps it would have helped figure out the SSD firmware bugs years ago.

But stuff like whether or not you have video capture card or your current system temperature stats? Nah… that’s getting into “identifiable information as toxic waste” territory.

https://github.com/ProtonWallet/WebClients - “Monorepo hosting the proton web clients.”

License: GPLv3

https://github.com/ProtonWallet/andromeda - “The andromeda libraries aims to provide logical blocks to build a privacy-focused, cross-platform, self-custody Bitcoin and Lightning wallet, integrated in Proton’s ecosystem.”

License: GPLv3

https://github.com/ProtonWallet/flutter-app - “Proton Wallet application.”

I see no license here.

ICS manufacturers routinely ask some stupidly horrifying things of customers as part of their support contracts.

I don’t think it is.

That would make too much sense, something in short supply in companies these days.

I had intended that the dates on the edits would have suggested otherwise (the last was 20230422), but I also get how easy it is to miss them if you’re looking for something specific. I can’t change the publication datestamp because that’s part of the slug, and it would break links both internal and any that are external.

That’s entirely fair.

What’s your use case? Do you need the storage capacity and parity of RAID-5 or -6? The write performance?

My experience is based on running that btrfs array since 2019. It’s still running in production on my server, I still use it daily, and the data I keep on it is still accessed, processed, indexed, and backed up every day. It’s not an experiment for the sake of a blog post, it’s a thing that is part of my personal infrastructure. The reason I update that post periodically is because I learn something new, or something minor has changed and the text should be updated to reflect that. If using btrfs on a busy server every day is the experience of 2019, I don’t know what to say to that.

curl | sh…