This is all I’ve run across on reverse engineering, so far but it is quite interesting.

https://bsky.app/profile/filippo.abyssdomain.expert/post/3kowjkx2njy2b

Well maybe they aren’t experienced info security professionals :)

I get where you’re coming from but is he managing his risk or not?

Does he understand the risk? If yes, good. No? Bad.

Is he ignoring the risk? If yes, bad. No? Good.

Is he weighing the risks against the benefits he receives of using these apps and taking appropriate steps to mitigate those risks? If yes, then good. No? Bad.

Cyber security isn’t “lock everything down at all costs”. Otherwise I would insist you throw your phone in an incinerator along with all your computers, live in a bunker reinforced against nuclear attack with a small army to guard you, never leave it, never talk to anyone… Etc.

It is enabling one to achieve their goals with a tolerable amount of risk. That level of tolerable risk is different for everyone.

Totally agree. Have been there and done that quite a few times too.

Hopefully people with more of a clue than me will chime in… Meanwhile, my best swag is the filesystem had issues and had to do an fsck? If that’s the case it would boot quickly next time assuming a clean shutdown.

Were there any errors during boot?

Fastboot enabled in BIOS or no? (Not sure if this has anything to do with anything I’m just trying to look useful)

PS: the weird active time could maybe somehow be related to the filesystem being borked needing fsck? I’m not sure.

Load average of 400???

You could install systat (or similar) and use output from sar to watch for thresholds and reboot if exceeded.

The upside of doing this is you may also be able to narrow down what is going on, exactly, when this happens, since sar records stats for CPU, memory, disk etc. So you can go back after the fact and you might be able to see if it is just a CPU thing or more than that. (Unless the problem happens instantly rather than gradually increasing).

PS: rather than using cron, you could run a script as a daemon that runs sar at 1 sec intervals.

Another thought is some kind of external watchdog. Curl webpage on server, if delay too long power cycle with smart home outlet? Idk. Just throwing crazy ideas out there.

Not op. I installed windows 10 on my custom built desktop and my kids custom built desktop, on VM, etc. Have not had a problem and it was pretty simple overall. I’m sure some folks do have issues, though. Shit happens. Is windows 11 shittier for install? I’ve never had the desire to try :)

I’ve also installed various Linux distros on the above and a few other computers (Mint, Nobara, Fedora). Aside from Mint not working with my AMD RX 6600, no problems there either, really. And these distros installed easily.

Again, ymmv. I knew Mint would probably fail because the 5.19 kernel does not seem to like my GPU. That’s why I switched to Nobara in the first place (iirc the 6.x kernel wasn’t available at the time)

Good to know. Well I have 16G now that should give me plenty to spare.

I will have to try that once my ram upgrade gets here.

I’m just finding out about this now lol. Imagine Kickstarter but with a 24h window…

Well, you’re not wrong. I was away from my desktop when I commented and forgot btop looked so fancy.

For now I still prefer htop because I can see at a glance the stuff I’m most interested in (mem & cpu and process sort).

I’ll have to play with some of the other suggestions in the post…

I also am starting to play around with cockpit a little more for remote monitoring.

If I was that memory- and cpu-constrained I would be using other tools such as memstat, iostat, and cpustat.

htop because pretty colors and graphs.

Or top because it’s like muscle memory now.

Canon doesn’t have to pay for hacked devices, though. And it costs money to develop and maintain a secure coding program. Companies want to cut costs not improve quality. And so here we are.

You and I know that, and IT people know that as you say, but to grandma that is a foreign language.

I just found the wording amusing imagining some people I know trying to parse it.

PS: and also wanted to bitch about companies churning out buggy shit. :)

set a private IP address for the products and create a network environment with a firewall or wired/Wi-Fi router that can restrict network access.

Ah yes, so simple a child could do it.

Good thing citizens are all well versed in networking and cyber security.

If only there were vast profits in writing secure code maybe we wouldn’t see the same thing over and over again.

I am clearly not paranoid enough. For a while I was running an open source router inline between the network AP and the fiber to Ethernet box and running nids but the goddamn thing kept crapping out every few days so i took it back out until I can find a more stable solution.

I have plans if I can ever get around to it. I want the smart TV, printer and other shitty things on a separate network from the more trusted devices. I don’t know how yet but I would like to set up 802.1X for the trusted stuff.

Well damn that’s clever. I will have to try that.

Idk if it is distro hopping because I have been trying distros on my main system and usually for months at a time. It’s messy but I have a separate filesystem for /home and hope my current rc files don’t bork up whatever I’m running next. The transition from Cinnamon to Gnome went poorly for a while.

I should probably automate the must have packages.

Some applications are not packaged so I install ~/.local, e.g. Arduino, Eagle, Minecraft, etc.

Packages… Hm. Direnv is all I can think of. I just use the system until something is missing, curse briefly, and install it.

Nothing wrong with Fedora Gnome. I’ve been using it for several months (well ok technically Nobara but I decided to try vanilla Fedora recently and it’s about the same). Prior to that I had been using Mint / Cinnamon for a decade and it’s a good choice too.

But truth be told the Gnome simplicity / minimalism has been growing on me. I wished it were more customizable but whatever.

Fedora is a very very mainstream distro, too, so help is easy to find if anything goes haywire.

PS: nobara is great for gaming but the big gotcha for me was that updating from the shell prompt requires a somewhat involved set of commands. If you use a simple dnf update you’ll break something like I did. Which is why I decided to give Fedora another go. If you choose Nobara, just use the (slow) GUI updater.

The other commenter who mentioned installing and using Gnome tweaks, etc. nailed it. Do that. :)