2:23 AM
8 hours later…
10:45 AM
0
I'm currently building a PC for a family member. I've assembled the parts like usual, but when I turn on the PSU, the LEDs of my motherboard blink red and I can't boot the PC. I've tried to connect the PWRBTN# to Ground and use the case button, but no response from the PC. I've also tried shortin...
1 hour later…
12:09 PM
12:52 PM
I have a lot of trouble figuring out how much anonymity I need online, nicknames vs real names, separation of concerns, OPSEC, you know. It's not even clear what the goal is, what the threat is. Because I grew up, like almost everyone else before the Facebook era, thinking that you should avoid using your real personal info online. And I'm still convinced of that.
The problems start when you want to stop being a random dude and want to become some kind of professional, that is, use what you know to make money.
5 hours later…
5:42 PM
@reed At the end of the day that's a question that you are going to have to decide for yourself. Different people have different concerns and different preferences for anonymity. As you might guess, I use my real name. Not only that but I have a unique name - as far as I know, I'm the only "Conor Mancone" in existence. So I'm very traceable. I chose to do this use my real name very intentionally, for one main reason.
Whether through data breach, APT, or simple OpSec mistakes, I take it as a given that staying anonymous on the internet is effectively impossible. If I were posting anonymously then I might suffer from the illusion that my words can't come back to bite me, and then when my identity leaked later I might have to eat my words. Therefore I use my real name for my sake.
By having my name and picture next to this little chat box, it reminds me that everything I say is ultimately attributable to me (which is true whether I realize it or not), and thus helps keep me polite and honest. That is good for me and the internet.
I'm not really the kind of person that tells someone to "F-off" anyway, but even still the reminder that I'm not anonymous has definitely kept more polite than I might be otherwise.
I still participate in political discussions here (it comes up here fairly regularly), but when I do I just make sure and keep things well-thought out and polite, even when my opinions are controversial. Although I'm a pretty open person anyway, so this is easy for me (it might be harder for some)
I actually do have another SE profile that I consider my "personal" profile. I only login there a couple times a month, typically because I have a question I want to ask on one of the non-programming related sites here. I don't do it to try to keep that stuff anonymous (my nickname still involves parts of my real name), but simply so this profile can be unambiguously "clean" for work-related stuff (basically no different than keeping all personal stuff off of a work computer).
But to go back to the start - that's how I roll, but it's perfectly reasonable to try to stay anonymous online. As long as you aren't doing anything illegal you probably can stay anonymous long term (if you're careful). I just prefer to assume that anonymity is impossible, because it is probably true, but either way it keeps me more polite and therefore makes the internet slightly nicer.
1 hour later…
7:15 PM
8:03 PM
3 hours later…
11:29 PM
I feel bad when I post about my own answers, but I'm not trying to promote my self here - I just like the conclusion I managed to draw. You can skip to the bottom of my answer (because both the question and my answer are long), but this dude thought that salting would make passwords weaker because for a static password you could just build a rainbow table for all salts
I decided to lookup actual lengths of salts, calculated how much storage space you would need to store a rainbow table of all hashes for all possible salts for bcrypt, and then calculated the weight of a gigantic pile of 128TB MicroSD cards that stored that entire rainbow table on them.
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