IBM's backup software TSM/Spectrum Protect messes this up as well.
If the machine has a UTF-8 encoding (like, say, every modern system), it will try to treat filenames as valid UTF-8 strings and fail to back up files which don't fulfill that assumption. The "solution" is to run the TSM software with a single-byte locale like en_US.
I've seen a number of shops that were silently missing files from backup from old systems because of this problem.
I don't think any backup software actually can do the right thing(tm). Some might preserve (or attempt so, anyway) binary representation, others attempt to preserve unicode codepoint-space representation...
... most do neither, but rather do ${complex thing emerging from combination of implementation details of runtime and backup tool, impossible to reproduce in any other runtime, likely platform- and environment dependent; the same backup likely restores in different ways on different machines, and the same source files create different backups on different machines; creating a backup on one machine and restoring it on another does not generally result in the same files; and I have not yet mentioned what might happen if you mount the same source file system from different platforms, because results might vary a lot; also, we are only talking about paths here, not any of the other plethora of things that can and will be different between any element in OSxFSxEnv}.
> I don't think any backup software actually can do the right thing(tm).
Sure it can. In this case, I'd say treating the filename as a bag of bytes is the correct way to go, as that's the way the OS treats them. Translating filenames between character sets should not be part of a backup systems job.
There are valid setups where different software on the same machine might be running with different character sets for legacy reasons. In that case there is no correct way to handle the filenames as text. But treating it as a bag-of-bytes will always work consistently.
Also, the one purpose of a backup system is to back up the files on the filesystem. If it can't back up some files that the OS considers valid, it's the backup software that failed.
> When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the feeling that I don’t want to read it. Sometimes I actually contemplate creating a filter for them so that they bypass my inbox entirely, but for now I sigh, unlock my key, start reading, and with a faint glimmer of hope am typically disappointed.
I wonder what proportion of his plaintext email from strangers is interesting. For me it's close to 0%, mostly spam or people demanding I do free work to fix issues in open source code. I really doubt this has much to do with GPG mails specifically.
To contrast this, in the last bug bounty page I set up I strongly suggested researchers gpg encrypt email to submit their findings. I really didn't want sensitive issues directly exposed to our entire support team.
As it turns out, the gpg encrypted emails which were only a small fraction of the ones we received, and made up the substantial majority of actionable issues we rewarded on.
If a security researcher is not capable of encrypting email to a public key, they probably are not bringing me anything worth my time to read.
I wonder if he has an especially onerous password? It doesn't seem like it should be that big of a burden to pop in the password for an email. I guess he has it set for ultra-paranoid mode where you have to enter the password every time you even think about touching the mail.
I do agree that GPG has been largely a failure. A tool too general and too vaguely defined for the average user. A powerful tool but only really usable by crypto nerds. What's worse, the key distribution problem was never really solved and that's the most critical component of the entire system. Even today there are scant few email clients that will query the keyservers for you.
Since my GPG subkeys are in my yubikey I literally just tap it to decrypt, ssh, or sign commits. I also plug my key into my phone and tap it to decrypt/sign email or decrypt passwords too.
I have sucessfuly migrated dozens of friends and engineering teams at 3 companies to daily use of gpg via this same non-intrusive setup.
GPG is fairly pain free (and far more secure) if you put in the one time effort to set up a security token.
It seems to be a workable option with PGP/GPG, but do you have to plug it in per use rather than leave it in as this post says (to use the onscreen keyboard)?
I'm not, primarily, an Android user so I wasn't aware of that option. Thanks. I have a USB-A yubikey and just got a laptop with USB-C ports and an adaptor so I guess I'll give this a go on my backup Android phone tonight.
Most of them do, however in multiple groups I have been part of we maintained a git repo containing all trusted public keys ready to batch import.
To make maintianing trust on this easy, all commits to this folder are made with commits signed by the owner of the respective key, and then a merge commit signed by a maintainer that verified it.
This makes it really easy for automation to have a source of trouth to check/validate commit signatures in other repos.
With GPG there are many more options: have internal keyserver, have "certification authority" key that signs new employee keys and everyone else trusts this authority (via trust signatures. For details see: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/pgp-web-of-trust-delega...
Too many options, honestly. I'd love to see a widely agreed "basic profile" for GPG, so that everyone writing tutorials etc. would be suggesting the same thing.
The cryptographical ideas behind GPG are not flawed in principle, but the usability is absolutely atrocious and it's easy to get things wrong.
I imagine that a good ux-designer or two could do wonders for it.
FRISK was bought by Israeli company Commtouch several years ago. They wound down operations in Iceland to the point that I doubt any real technical work goes on there.
I've been thinking I'd love to have a WARC archive of all my browsing. So many times sites I remember seeing have gone offline, and didn't get archived by the big services. Ideally this has to happen with browser cooperation, so it can save resources from complex dynamic pages, including responses to user action.
This must happen either in the browser or in a proxy like the linked warcprox, in order to catch everything. But the proxy solution is getting less practical every day with key pinning and HSTS.
Maybe a future firefox will have an option to export everything to WARC?
> I find that for many things in life where there are similar but not exact variants, one tends to prefer the variant one first tried despite both variants being potentially equivalent.
I grew up with pasteurized milk. As an adult, I tried unpasteurized milk. The taste is different, was a bit weird at first. After a couple of glasses, I much preferred it over the kind I grew up with (it's just so much better), and it's all I drink now. Normal pasteurized milk tastes like low-fat now (i.e., it tastes like drinking water from a glass that had a little milk in it already).
So I don't think it's quite so simple that everyone always prefers what they grew up with. But you're right that we often need to get used to new kinds of food before we accept it.
I was about to give some snarky response, but a quick Google reveals it's actually terrifyingly dangerous and there are good reasons never to drink raw milk. Thanks!
I think the risks are greatly overstated by the dairy lobby. My family drank raw milk from our own cows and goats for the better part of 10 years, and none of us ever got sick as a result.
Of course our animal accommodations and milking practices were much cleaner than what one might find at commercial scale. But that's not a problem inherent in raw milk, but rather the same unsanitary conditions that plague the industry at large.
It's important to look for actual statistics, milk is a leading cause of food born illness even with pasteurization. Abstractly the risk is not that high however food safty is a major issue: the overall annual estimate of the total burden of disease due to contaminated food consumed in the United States is 47.8 million illnesses, 127,839 hospitalizations, and 3,037 deaths.https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/questions-and-answers.ht...
Milk is a funny thing, being a rich medium for bacteria.
Take a pint of fresh-from-the-cow milk and a pint of your typical store-bought pasteurized milk and leave them open on the counter for 2 or 3 days at room temperature. The former will turn into a tart, pleasant smelling mix of curds and whey I'd be willing to taste and possibly consume while the latter will be a smelly, gag-inducing spoiled mess that will almost certainly make you ill.
I've witnessed this first-hand.
Raw milk is loaded with beneficial bacteria that can be naturally culture itself to various ends, more often then not out-competing environmental bad bacterial. Pasteurized milk, devoid of most bacteria to start, will (most often) be overrun by bacteria that will make people ill. I does not surprise me that our "normal" milk is a non-trivial vector of food-borne illness.
While I can understand the assumption Raw milk is far more likely to be associated with food born illness for exactly the reasons you mention. However while overall consumption well below 1% it's still responsible for a and much higher than expected fraction of illnesses and a few deaths.
Importantly, people are more likely to die from food that looks good but can kill them than they are to eat food that looks and tastes nasty.
I only use raw milk for making yogurt. As part of the process the milk is heated to near boiling point. And I process the raw milk into yogurt quickly, within a few hours of it leaving the cow (to avoid botulism). Living is fun!
While this doesn't necessarily mean it's safe. I've consumed raw milk that we 'grow' on our farm with happy, organically raised cows and haven't had any problems.
I'm sure it does, but every farmer I've ever met drank raw milk, so I'm not convinced it's so terribly unsafe.
For the record, I don't live in the US, and here they don't pump cattle full of antibacterials. I buy my raw milk at the grocery store, it's legal and vetted by the health authorities.
That's why restaurants have to call it "pasta ai quattro formaggi" because if they call it mac-and-cheese it's not going to taste what Mom (or Dad) used to make.
It's quite possible that exterior damage was covered by the insurance of the homeowners/building association. I'd love more information on this case to see if that's true.
If that's the case, it's another example of negative externalities from AirBNB being dumped on the neighbors of a host.
> Just as an FYI: Don't watch those videos if you like stuff like leather for example...I love the feeling of leather seats, but I'm looking for synthetic leather in my next car.
Genuinely curious: are animals slaughtered specifically for their leather? I always assumed that cattle raised for food would supply more than enough. If that's the case, buying leather in the current situation should not cause any extra suffering.
Some animals are raised just for their leather while the meat from them is an additional source of income (especially if you consider luxury cars - one that finally got me was the fact that Lexus does not like leather from animals that were raised in farms that had barbed wire....because it damages the skin and hence the leather. I felt that that animals were raised and looked upon as numbers and use instead of them being organisms with feelings for example).
It does because of the market. Leather increases the return of a single animal. So meat can be sold cheaper, which again increases the demand. (Lower price -> higher demand)
As a counter-anecdote, I know a mentally ill person (mostly functional, luckily, but he gets paranoid delusions during the worst times). His family pressed the doctors hard to have him involuntarily committed one time since he refused to go. From what I can tell, the primary effect of that is that he now has an intense distrust of doctors and those family members, and it would be a lot harder for doctors to help him now, even if they tried to approach him with more empathy.
The only people now who can sometimes talk him down when he's having problems are me and a couple of other family members that did not participate in pushing for involuntary committal.
Renaming the files to use NFKC normalization fixed it. In python, you could loop through the files and do something like:
EDIT: You'll probably need to do this on a non-Mac system, linux for example should work.