Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • The Radcliffe Wave formation is a bunch of gas that is apparently, wiggling, in incredibly huge time and distance scales, like a sinusoidal wave.

    So, imagine very, very long ago, before the Milky Way formed, you have a particular dense gaseous region/formation.

    Dense gaseous regions tend to give birth to new stars. This region did so, and then one of them supernova’d.

    Next, the Milky Way ended up forming in the void created by this supernova.

    Then, this dense gaseous region was basically incorporated into the Milky Way (seems like one of its spiral arms) over another absurdly long period of time.

    But, for some reason, it is wiggling, in a manner that dense gaseous regions have not been observed to behave in.

    Thats the best I can do here, I am not an astrophysicist, though I did take two quarters of intro level astronomy in college lol.

    Probably worthwhile to note that the article says that their data ‘suggests’ not ‘shows’ or ‘proves’ the bit about the supernova clearing the Milky Way void.

    To actually prove that would encompass, among many other things, running the clock backward on star orbits/trajectories over billions of years using extremely complicated models and mountains of data I am absolutely not qualified to comment on.

    Im just trying to very broadly explain the chain of events here if this supernova really did cause the void the Milky Way formed in.

    Anyway, other fun fact: Our Milky Way Galaxy is not actually a pure spiral Galaxy as it has so often been depicted for quite a long time.

    It is actually a barred spiral galaxy. Basically, instead of just swirly arms, there are actually short, more or less straight parts to the arms as they emanate out from the center, which then begin to curve into spirally arms.

    Basically, Milky Way looks less like this:

    And more like this:




  • This person asked if they can make PopOS secure via TPM.

    I am saying that while yes, you can, there isnt much point, because setting up LUKS to work with TPM is inconvenient, easy to fuck up, and basically offers no additional protection against all but extremely implausible security scenarios for basically everyone other than bladed server room admins worried about corporate espionage who are for some reason running bare metal PopOS on their server racks.

    Like the only actual use case I can see for this is /maybe/ having a LUKS encrypted portable backup drive, but even then you can still base the encryption key in the actual main pc’s harddrive without using tpm, though at /that and only that point/ are we approaching parity between the difficulty of using or not using tpm to accomplish this.


  • Oh ok so the use case here is if this casual linux user asking this question has only their harddrive stolen from their pc or their laptop in their home or apartment or workplace, not their whole pc.

    Mhm that seems likely.

    I guess this maybe makes sense if youre running like a server room, but chances are low thats the actual context of this question.

    Why would you run PopOS on a large operation’s servers?





  • Ok… so… if you have TPM… and LUKS…

    You still have a scenario where the encryption key is still on your physical device, LUKS with or without TPM, or … some kind of TPM based Linux encryption solution I have never heard of?

    Does Windows Secure Boot work on Linux via the TPM?

    No…

    Am I missing something?

    Theres no point in involving TPM in securing a linux computer.

    In a scenario where you’ve physically lost your computer, using TPM or not it wont matter if your pc gets into the hands of someone who can attempt to brute force the keys.

    If your pc is remotely compromised to the point it has something on it that can grab your keys, it also will not matter if you are using TPM in some way.

    The only practical use of full disk encryption is if your linux pc and or laptop gets stolen and falls into the hands of a non tech savvy person, and in that scenario, going through the trouble of correctly binding LUKS to TPM will have just been a waste of time.

    Thus, you should probably just use LUKS and not bother routing it through TPM.


  • Sure but you dont need to use TPM at all to use LUKS.

    You can store the encryption key on the harddrive, in the LUKS partition layer.

    Like thats the default of how LUKS works.

    Im really confused why people think TPM needs to be involved in anyway when using LUKS.

    Generally speaking you have to go out of your way to correctly cajole TPM v1 or v2 to actually correctly interface with LUKS.






  • Link to video of the dude’s body cam, from VICE:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTauF2NaZ1o

    Acorn hits what looks to be his cruiser, he screams shots fired, seemingly does a double (triple?) combat roll, comes up, fires a number of shots into a stationary car while exclaiming that the shots came from a car (presumably the one he is shooting at), as what appears to be his partner cop is standing right next to this car, as she asks “What, right there?”

    Then he cries out in pain, claims he was hit as he drops to the ground and basically does instinctive covering fire toward another car that could have been a likely place for someone to attempt to flank him from… had there been anyone there, or any one shooting at all. Empties the rest of his mag while on the ground.

    His partner asks him (Jesse, apparently) where the shots came from, he makes a kind of gutteral noise then wheezes out “In the car! He shot, through the car!” He then makes more pain noises as he crawls along I think hia cruiser.

    His partner asks him one more time “Where is he?” to which he replies “I don’t know.” The clip cuts shortly afterward with an off camera bystander screaming.

    Basically this chuckle fuck seems to have genuinely convinced himself he was shot and wounded, at least momentarily, due to an acorn hitting his cruiser next to him.

    I genuinely have no idea how one could possibly mistake an acorn hitting a car for either a gunshot or a bullet impact. I’m no ex or current cop or military, but I’ve been to gun ranges and shot a variety of guns. Its not even close.

    Just maybe, maybe he’s a a bit high strung, you know, to the point of emptying a magazine into a suburb where he easily could have injured or killed someone from the overpenetration of his rounds at such a close range.

    Jesus fucking Christ.

    EDIT: Ok, in fairness, I was a bit unfair, inaccurate.

    An acorn hitting a car does sound similar to a bullet hitting a car.

    But in this scenario that would only make sense from long distance ranges, with a shot heard after travelling a looong distance.

    In this scenario, at this range, the two cops seem to be investigating people either in a car or maybe they fled inside a house.

    So… you would expect a significantly louder gunshot from this close range to the point your brain wouldnt really even be able to notice or process the sound of the bullet impact.

    He starts shooting at the car maybe 100ish feet away when the only thing that could have caused just the sound of a bullet impacting the car would have been a sniper, as if theyd been led into an ambush.

    So… yeah.

    EDIT 2: Apparently this dingus reported that he thought he heard a suppressed weapon fire, and that he felt an impact and then his legs gave out.

    Uh… ok so basically /nevermind/ to all of my first Edit… a bullet impact/acorn impact on a car sound nooooothing like a suppressed weapon firing, subsonic/low caliber or supersonic/high caliber.

    Nothing alike, at all.

    What a goddamned joke.