If the caddy service account has write access to the config and certs, isn’t that a weaker security posture than having them owned by root?

I’m much less worried about an attacker messing w/ my certs (that’s a pretty sophisticated attack) and more worried about privilege escalation where the attacker gets root access. Caddy is intended to be externally facing, so it’ll be getting the brunt of the attacks (like this one that attacks HTTP 1.1). If someone is able to find an exploit to allow remote code execution, being able to run commands with sudo is a pretty big deal.

That’s a big part of why I run my services in containers, and also why I’m switching from Docker to Podman. Docker runs everything as root by default, and it’s a pain to run things as non-root. Podman runs everything as an underprivileged user by default, which forces the admin to configure it properly. If an attacker is able to break out of Docker, it’ll have root access to the system, whereas if an attacker breaks out of Podman, they’ll just have whatever that user’s permission is.

If I’m going to expose something to the internet, I want to make sure it’s properly configured to reduce the chances of getting a rootkit or something.

Have you ever given an “under-the-table” payment for utilities?

Of course not, because I don’t live in an area that manipulates its currency, nor have I needed that level of privacy. I have, however, lived in an area where that type of thing was commonplace. I paid for rent, utilities, and groceries with cash, and you’d have to be incredibly naïve to believe that everyone paid taxes on that money. If I wanted to “go dark” there, I could’ve, all I’d need is a stash of cash.

If you want to live off the grid, you operate in untraceable arrangements, and that protects both you and the service provider.

My point here is that whether you can easily liquidate the medium of exchange isn’t nearly as important as the benefits that medium provides. If you need the protections that privacy coins provide, both sides of the transaction will find a way to make it work.

I won’t go into an in-depth discussion around how you would be tracked

I wish you would, because then we’d have something to discuss.

I assume you’re talking about the $5 wrench idea (i.e. this xkcd), as in get people to rat out the dissidents. Or maybe you’re talking about hacking users devices, or some other side-channel attack (i.e. packet snooping). None of that has nothing to do with the medium of exchange, and there are ways to mitigate that risk.

My point is that Monero has uses today, and it can be more useful if people actually start trying to use it. I see it as similar to Tor, the more people use it, the safer it is for the people who truly need it.

Storing power is expensive and many energy storage techniques require a lot of resources to produce. The more we move toward solar generation, the more we should plan on being opportunistic with energy when it is plentiful

For example, electrolysis isn’t the most efficient way to store power, but if energy is cheap, it may be better on net to do it opportunistically when there’s excess energy and use that hydrogen for things like producing artificial butter (and perhaps fuel mobile equipment like forklifts and delivery trucks).

Cows aren’t particularly efficient at turning biomass into human food. There’s a ton of waste in the process, and they need a lot of space. A factory doesn’t need to sustain life of an organism, it just needs to turn one set of compounds into another. Maybe it’s not there now, but getting it there will be a lot easier than genetically engineering a much better cow.

what better option is there than to limit scope of execution by doing pinhole actions with sudo?

For binding privileged ports like 80 and 443, use CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE. For access to protected directories, adjust permissions.

At no point should sudo be necessary, that’s how you get security vulnerabilities.

Yeah, Linux is definitely oversold.

I get where people are coming from, if you say it has a learning curve, fewer people will try it, and a lot of those people would’ve had a fine experience. But those that have a rough time will convince others to not bother.

I think it’s much better to undersell it and have people be pleasantly surprised.

That’s possible. Unsalted butter has pretty much no flavor, and salted butter is very mild. Butter’s role is to add richness to a dish, not to add much flavor itself.

Don’t require elevated permissions. Either grant the user it runs as permission to that dir, or instruct it to use a different dir that it has access to. Services should have the least permissions possible.

Yup, I want “unobtrusive, lightweight, compatible, and secure.” Basically, the best case for an OS is that I don’t notice it.

Yeah, that’s how bugs tend to go. If they’re hard to reproduce, they tend to get de-prioritized.

For the record, I’ve had similar issues w/ Chromium bugs, which have been really frustrating in our automated testing pipelines.

I haven’t run into any significant issues on Firefox (primary platforms are Linux, macOS, and Android), so I stick w/ it.

Who?

How? 😜

Methane is easy to produce. Basically, anything that rots produces methane.

They didn’t go into details, and I never took chemistry, but they may not even need methane. From my very basic understanding of chemical chains, triglycerides are made from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and methane is hydrogen and carbon. So you could theoretically convert methane to triglycerides by combining w/ oxygen, but you could also do the same by extracting carbon and oxygen from CO2 and oxygen and hydrogen from water.

Fertilizers are typically generated from natural gas (methane), but green ammonia exists and is produced from air and water and can replace the fossil fuels in fertilizer production. The same could absolutely make sense here.

Perhaps. But if we really go hard on green energy, we’ll likely have a lot of excess energy in the daytime, so it makes sense to look into alternatives to land and water intensive products (like dairy and beef) that are heavy on electricity. If it’s a more efficient use of land to have solar panels instead of cows eating grass (and solar panels work just as well on farmland as they do in the desert, unlike grass), then it makes a ton of sense even if it spikes electricity consumption.

The diet isn’t the issue here. The OP was saying they prefer animal-produced butter to this because… billionaires? Do they think billionaires don’t profit from the dairy industry?

The comment makes no sense. This artificially-created butter would have equivalent nutritional content to biologically-created butter, and there’s a decent chance it can mimic the flavor as well. So it absolutely makes sense to point out the silliness of the opposition, which seems to be based on Gates’ involvement, when Bill Gates isn’t really in business anymore, but more into philanthropy, so buying this is unlikely to enrich Gates by any meaningful amount.

Not w/ that attitude.

Yup, should be equivalent to biologically created butter.

Or butter.

How?

What do they do with Monero?

• buy other things with it
• exchange for cash through the black market

This exact same thing happens w/ a lot of other things, such as:

• US dollar (or perhaps Euro) transactions in countries that manipulate their currency
• drug smuggling - the drug dealer “launders” the money to whatever currency they want

Basically, the same thing that works for illicit transactions protects activists, political dissidents, etc in authoritarian regions. All privacy coins provide is a convenient digital medium of exchange, how that gets turned into another medium of exchange is up to the merchant.

For things like utilities, authoritarian regimes tend to be pretty corrupt, and they already do under-the-table transactions. Using Monera vs drugs, foreign currency, etc isn’t going to change that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if your transactions would be less private with monero than a bank payment (because of Monero’s unlicensed nature).

How so? Monero explicitly hides transaction details, so even if a large actor like the Russian, Chinese, or US government wanted, they can’t track transactions, even if they compromise one end of the transaction. The wallet ID you use when buying something is ephemeral, the protocol creates a ton of misleading transactions so tracking down the correct one is very difficult, and even if they did, they’d have to break the crypto to link two transactions from the same wallet. Transactions are also very inexpensive, generally costing under a penny, so even if you wallet gets compromised, you can inexpensively move it to a new wallet.

The only way Monero would be less private than a bank is if government regulations make it so and under-the-table transactions are blocked effectively. But that would require a heavy surveillance state, and the heavier the surveillance state is, the more attractive under-the-table transactions become.

Privacy coins get pushback from governments because they’re effective at protecting privacy. It turns out, governments like spying on transactions, and would get rid of cash if they could get away with it. They get used a lot for illicit transactions because they’re effective at it, and that’s why governments have started to restrict their use (i.e. banning Monero from exchanges).

I’m not a crypto fan boy by any stretch, and I don’t think anyone should “invest” in them because they don’t generate any form of value (I feel the same about precious metals). But I do think privacy coins have a place in society as a digital cash replacement, because I’d really rather not have my transaction details spied on by governments. If you want practical reasons for this, look no further than the Mastercard/Visa scandal w/ porn gaes on Steam and other platforms.

And:

• privacy friendly transactions

For example, think of:

• activists and political dissidents
• victims of domestic abuse
• people who don’t want banks and governments tracking their purchases

Bitcoin ain’t it, bit privacy coins like Monero exist and tend to not have as much fraud spam since they don’t have as many crazy spikes. I want Monero to be a thing because:

• low fees, and no foreign transaction fees
• privacy, so my bank can’t sell my transaction data to advertisers
• fast transactions

I wouldn’t use it for everything since it has no purchase protections, but I’d absolutely use it for a lot of small stuff if it was possible.