OpenBSD is a lot faster in some specialized areas though. Random number generation from `/dev/urandom`, for example. When I was at university (in 2010 or so), it was faster to read `/dev/urandom` on my OpenBSD laptop and pipe it over ethernet to a friend's Linux laptop than running `cat /dev/urandom > /dev/sda` directly on his.
Not by just a bit, but it was a difference between 10MB/s and 100MB/s.
I think you meant to say /dev/random, not /dev/urandom.
/dev/random, on linux used to stall waiting for entropy from sources of randomness like network jitter, mouse movement, keyboard typing. /dev/urandom has always been fast on Linux.
Today, linux /dev/random mainly uses an RNG after initial seeding. The BSDs always did this. On my laptop, I get over 500MB/s (kernel 6.12) .
IIRC, on modern linux kernels, /dev/urandom is now just an alias to /dev/random for backward compatibility.
There's no reason for normal userland code not part of the distribution itself ever to use /dev/random, and getrandom(2) with GRND_RANDOM unset is probably the right answer for everything.
Both Linux and BSD use a CSPRNG to satisfy /dev/{urandom,random} and getrandom, and, for future-secrecy/compromise-protection continually update their entropy pools with hashed high-entropy events (there's ~essentially no practical cryptographic reason a "seeded" CSPRNG ever needs to be rekeyed, but there are practical systems security reasons to do it).
OpenBSD switched their PRNG to arc4random in 2012 (and then ChaCha20 in 2014); depending on how accurate your time estimate is, that could well have been the cause. Linux switched to ChaCha20 in 2016.
Related, I stumbled down a rabbit hole of PRNGs last year when I discovered [0] that my Mac was way faster at generating UUIDs than my Linux server, even taking architecture and clock speed into account. Turns out glibc didn’t get arc4random until 2.36, and the version of Debian I had at the time didn’t have 2.36. In contrast, since MacOS is BSD-based, it’s had it for quite some time.
At one point probably 10 years ago I had linux vm guests refuse to generate gpg keys, gpg insisted it needed the stupid blocking random device, and because the vm guest was not getting any "entropy" the process went nowhere. As an openbsd user naturally I was disgusted, there are many sane solutions to this problem, but I used none of them. Instead I found rngd a service to accept "entropy" from a network source and blasted it with the /dev/random from a fresh obsd guest on the same vm host. Mainly out of spite. "look here you little shit, this is how you generate random numbers"
Qemu added support for VirtIO RNG in 2012 [0] so depending on how accurate that 10 year figure is, you also could have used that to make your VM able to use the host system's entropy.
Um... This conversation is about OpenBSD, making that objection incredibly funny. OpenBSD has a mostly-deserved reputation for doing the correct security thing first, in all cases.
But that's also why the rng stuff was so much faster. There was a long period of time where the Linux dev in charge of randomness believed a lot of voodoo instead of actual security practices, and chose nonsense slow systems instead of well-researched fast ones. Linux has finally moved into the modern era, but there was a long period where the randomness features were far inferior to systems built by people with a security background.
OpenBSD isn't meaningfully more secure than Linux. It probably was 20 years ago. Today it's more accurate to say that Linux and OpenBSD have pursued different security strategies --- there are meaningful differences, but they aren't on a simple one-dimensional spectrum of "good" to "bad".
(I was involved, somewhat peripherally, in OpenBSD security during the era of the big OpenBSD Security Audit).
Haven't they had some embarrassing RCEs in the not too distant past? It kind of calls into question the significance of that claim about holes "in the default install" - even Windows ships without any services exposed these days.
Ultimately, they suffer from a lack of developer resources.
Which is a shame because it's a wonderfully integrated system (as opposed to the tattered quilt that is every Linux distro). But I suspect it's the project leadership that keeps more people away.
I’ve found the OpenBSD community to have a bad/snobbish attitude which could just be a coincidence, no idea. I’ve always liked NetBSD which I never had that problem with.
Yeah read the docs like their years of invalidated articles, howtos, published books, and more when they decided to make bc breaks in pf.conf for anyone who trusted them to make a firewall that could be upgraded without a site visit.
I remember a discussion with an OpenBSD developer whose answer to the lack of a journaling file system was to simply have a UPS, like any normal computer user should have (there are hobby operating systems with journaling FS, but due to the antique development model, OpenBSD developers can't do significant work like a new file system).
> Two cells was probably selected for one of: Voltage to avoid boost converters, capacity to avoid having to do extensive power optimization to make it run the whole event, balance to make it hang even off your neck.
It's likely not voltage because they're connected in parallel.
So wait, if they resist the statement that they're a resistor, are they a resistor or not? I think they're a semiconductor. Maybe they work at a railway junction. :D
Others have already told you that talking to a lawyer is still a good idea. If I may offer a personal story that illustrates that that is _really_ a good idea:
While I did my Bachelor's in CS, I was employed by a university (not the one I attended, but one that the project I worked on moved to after the Prof in charge switched universities) as a "student worker" type deal. My job was essentially a Jr. SWE.
A friend of mine also worked on that project, but he was ahead a bit further in his studies, so he already had a BSc degree, while I hadn't. Universities being universities, this meant that his hourly pay was a tiny smidge more than mine (think 50 cents/hour or something like that). Neither of us was paid very well, we both came out to about 10-12 €/hour.
After 6 months my contract was up for renewal. Along with the renewal, they included a modest pay raise to my friend's level. I naively thought that that meant they appreciated my work or something like that. All went well until the _next_ renewal was up.
The HR person responsible for student workers noticed that my "raise" had been in error because they assumed I had gotten my degree as well. None of their paperwork that I signed originally mentioned that. As "proof" that I "should have known" that the raise was in error, they sent along a scanned copy of a copy of a copy of an internal "wage schedule" that I somehow should've been aware of.
Their solution was to hand me a "new" backdated contract with lower hourly wages and told me to sign that to "just quickly fix this error" and told me to just pay back what I had "erroneously" received (signed contract stating the contrary nonwithstanding).
I politely declined because that's not how I think employment works. As a response they said "ah well, don't worry, we'll just take it out of your next pay check", which they did (without me signing anything).
At that point I called my mom and told her the full story. She immediately went "Alright, how do you want to play this? Should we talk to them or do you want to pull out the big guns?". I was sufficiently pissed off that I told her I want the big guns, she told me the info for my families' "lawsuit insurance" (The German term is "Rechtsschutzversicherung", basically cheap-ish insurance to help you pay for a lawyer in cases like this) and called them after we talked.
I called up a lawyer in town that specialized in employment law, had an appointment with him to tell him the story, he went "I can see roughly 4 or 5 reasons that they can't take that money from you, let me write a letter to them and we'll see how it goes".
The end result was that the university in my next paycheck included the amount they had initially reduced my previous check by, my higher-wage contract was renewed, and we never spoke of any of that again. I didn't get an apology or anything from the HR admin who had clearly messed up my contract and was probably trying to cover her ass, but that's fine with me.
Point being: talk to a lawyer, even just to get some advice or to have them write out a nice letter as to why what they're doing is not OK.
"Alright ma'am, you claim this here device contains encrypted data? If you don't mind, we'll keep you here until you provide us with the password."
and meanwhile in an alternate universe
"So you say that this device just happens to contain a bunch of random data? That sounds mighty suspicious. We'll keep you here until our technicians have taken a look at it. Get comfy, it'll be a while."
So in the virtual tour, you're seeing 360 imagery from the cameras and a lower resolution version of the 3d capture data, optimized for web. The lower res mesh from the scanner is transparent in first-person view mode so users get cursor effects on top of the 360 image.
For film, PBS sent out a documentary crew, and they wanted me to render some footage of the full tunnel system, so I exported the e57 pointcloud data from Matterport and rendered the clips they needed in Unreal. It should be coming out soon with "In the Americas."
I have a CF-33 that I got used for about 600€ (plus something like 120€ for a replacement battery).
I use it as my "outdoor/garden/workshop" laptop that I can display CAD drawings on and stuff like that without worrying about getting wood splinters in it, or as a juke box/internet lookup-thing/spreadsheet when I work on a semi truck I sometimes drive (not for work though, purely for fun).
It does also double as my backup laptop in case the XPS13 I use for freelancing ever falls off the table or something, but I don't really see that happening anytime soon.
Granted, most of this I could just as well do with an old T-series Thinkpad, but there's something to having a carrying handle on the thing and being able to pull it off its keyboard base. Also, COM ports.
The Wine project apparently decided they wanted to keep alive an old version of a piece of software Microsoft has no interest in and Microsoft gave them the official repo instead of throwing it out.
Mostly interesting in that it is a token of goodwill from Microsoft to Wine something which is in line with the current Microsoft view of the OS market but would have been very surprising not that long ago.
Absolutely. They're a bit more maker than hacker focused but for me that's a good thing.
I just don't really like going to the UK anymore since Brexit. It just puts me off because the main driver of it was xenophobia. I've avoided it, I have not been there at all since Brexit. I probably won't ever go there again unless there's a serious change. Of course none of this is on the EMF community which is great, I've met many of them at other things.
As for the hacker camps I only really go to the Netherlands ones. The Congress is too expensive for me with the hotels around Christmas and with my lack of car it's hard to go camping in Germany so I've never been to the chaos camp either. Within Holland it's been easier because they've recently been at locations near me.
I mean, I'm pretty sure rats also have a theory of mind. My data point is exactly one of the little buggers who used to be my pet. Whenever he was running around my room, he'd peek around to see if I was looking at him before jumping on the couch. If he couldn't see me, he'd jump. If he could, he wouldn't.
Not by just a bit, but it was a difference between 10MB/s and 100MB/s.