NaibofTabr @ NaibofTabr @infosec.pub

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2 yr. ago

Do you want to help this person be better, or do you want to protect yourself from them?

The first will require that they are receptive in some way to being helped, so it may be impossible.

The second... well, you've described a deeply insecure person. The need to constantly remind other people how much better they are demonstrates a real fear of being found to be inadequate. If you can determine the source and/or subject of the insecurity you can potentially weaponize it against them. That's risky though, it may make you more of a target for retribution.

Remember, you can't fix someone else, they can only fix themselves. You can offer guidance, but that only works if they're open to being guided.

Perhaps the best course of action is more zen... let them learn their own lessons. Isolate yourself from damage as much as possible, and just wait for them to crash and burn. Make popcorn.

Amazon is basically glorified dropshipping

This premise is not correct. As I've described, Amazon's business is providing services to other businesses, many services, which make their platform attractive for sellers due to ease-of-use. Therefore...

Let's make an amazon alternative.

This objective is not really possible. An alternative that does not provide all of those services is not actually an alternative.

Sellers need to sell there to survive

Amazon is a service provider. Sellers sell there because Amazon provides product advertising (every product page is essentially an ad), order processing, payment processing, warehousing, order fulfillment (via the warehouse staff), shipping, dispute resolution, return processing (which is its own logistics nightmare), and even resale of returned/refurbished products in some cases, and all of it is coordinated through their data systems.

It is extremely convenient to sell a product on Amazon because they handle all of the customer-facing parts of selling, all you have to do is describe what you're selling, and arrange for Amazon to get the product somehow. It's the convenience that keeps sellers on their platform. It's the convenience that makes it worth the cost of doing business with Amazon.

Now yes, each individual service could be replaced, but splitting them out is going to cause coordination problems. It's going to slow down the order fulfillment, and it's basically shunting the operation cost (both time and money) back onto the seller. That's going to mean fewer sellers interested in using the alternative, because now they have to do for themselves what they could simply pay Amazon a percentage of their sale price to do. And because this alternative is slower and can't provide the same kind of return guarantees that Amazon can, fewer customers are going to want to use it.

The thing keeping people locked in amazon is amazon, nothing else.

So yes, you're right, but I don't think you're giving enough weight to what Amazon is as an organization. Amazon is a lot more than just the retail website. Having all of those services under one roof makes the operating costs lower, which is a big part of why the prices are so competitive. If the seller has to take on those costs then they have to raise the price of their products.

I think there's some misunderstanding here. Amazon is a massive logistics system. The retail storefront is a tiny part of what Amazon is today.

AWS exists because Amazon needed to solve an internal data handling problem in order to solve their logistics problems so that they could scale up. After building that system, they started selling it as a product to other businesses. The point being, Amazon's real success is based on providing business-to-business services. The retail website is the tiny public-facing bit, but it depends on the rest of the organization structure in order to operate properly.

What you're proposing is more like an eBay alternative, where the system is basically just the storefront, and the sellers listing products are responsible for their own logistics. eBay still provides dispute resolution for buyers though, and that's hard to achieve without some centralized control.

There's also the legal problems. At some point someone will use such a system as a silk road - probably sooner rather than later. Whoever is administrating and hosting it will be liable for criminal activity in the countries where the crime occurs. It will not end well.

That can be difficult to accomplish...

The problem with this is that the same argument (that people are too stupid and can't be trusted with voting) was made against the concept of democracy in the first place, and was also the justification for the electoral college. It's an inherently cynical argument in favor of authoritarianism and "divine right to rule" over representative government.

What we need is a new system

The transition from ALSA to Pulse never really fully happened and a lot of backend stuff is still dependent on ALSA. If you ever find that you have an audio channel that is just not working for no apparent reason (like audio input), run alsamixer and check if the channel is muted there.

I've found this multiple times on new Ubuntu-derivative installs, and the channel muting in ALSA is not reflected anywhere in the desktop GUI audio settings and can't be adjusted through them, but nothing is technically broken - you just have to raise the volume on that channel via alsamixer. It's a very annoying gotcha.

Until your WiFi driver stops getting updates.

ref: Linux's Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down

The worst sentence is the last sentence, when you really think about what it implies.

When you don't understand the tools, every possible solution that reaches your end goal seems equally valid, no matter how convoluted. Unfortunately, the design philosophy that attempts to make every tool as compatible as possible with every other tool enables this sort of Rube Goldberg-esque nonsense (and creates development hell and permanent legacy dependencies).

It's... difficult for someone who does understand the tools to even imagine being in the mental space of someone who doesn't, which is why IT people frequently come off as arrogant, judgy, even rude - they expect other people to understand things the way they do, when they've been taking computers apart since high school. What seems reasonable to you is perfectly opaque to them. Also... sometimes people who are technically literate are the hardest to pull out of their batshit processes (doctors are the worst patients).

When you are trying to help someone, always keep the XY Problem in mind. They've arrived at a solution which seems insane to you, not because they're unreasonable, but because they ran into an obstacle and bounced off of it in a path-of-least-resistance direction and they have shit they need to get done. Try to solve the real problem, not the problem that is presented.

Corporate IT is fun!

I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.

But I don't want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that's what the scanner does automatically.

But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.

But my company computer won't let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.

But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don't want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose "Print to PDF" and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.

I have a great custom workflow. I'm the most computer literate person in my office.

If nothing else, the list of customers who were interested enough to spend money on such a product might be valuable to them.

Hmm, I think the argument would be that if they're all using the same system or handful of systems for setting prices then there technically are only a small number of players.

What about price fixing?

ever since libraries have been a thing, the majority of developers have just used the libraries without really understanding what goes on inside them. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing — the entire point of abstraction is so that developers can focus on the stuff they need to get done while ignoring the already solved problems.

Nobody but nobody has time to know what's in every library they might need to use. Who among us truly understands their network stack, all 8 layers?

senior devs have to spend all their time doing code reviews and editing and refactoring codebases that nobody else understands.

That's OK we will just train AI to review and refactor for us! I'm sure everything will be fine.

Vulnerable code will be with us forever. The system will always be Swiss cheese. If you think you understand common mistakes, enough that you can review other peoples' code for them, there's work for you in infosec for sure.

"We do not break userspace." ~ Linus Torvalds

I would always argue that any distribution which does not prioritize this principle is a hobby project, not a serious distribution for end users.

Which is fine, hobby projects are good, but they should be labeled accordingly to properly set user expectations.

And now for something completely different: https://youtu.be/ahnfLZKwnTg