DEV Community: Alice 🌈

Stop using MIT.

Alice 🌈 — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 06:26:29 +0000

MIT, ISC and other permissive licenses exist for the sole purpose to be simple and understandable. They permit pretty much everything - including creating a proprietary fork of your software.

And that proprietary fork can get much more powerful development and marketing, essentially killing off its predecessor - its no secret that proprietary software has much better funding than open source

So please, for the sake of FOSS, use GPL and other copyleft licenses that are made by design to prevent this kind of thing from happening. It will have little to no effect on the workflow or distribution, but it will protect the future of open source

My idea about hardening the cookie storage

Alice 🌈 — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 07:28:12 +0000

The thing about cookies is that they usually contain a lot of sensitive session keys which are basically temporary passwords to the websites you visit.

And if i recall correctly, cookies are stored in an sqlite database somewhere (at least for Firefox)

The thing is that an attacker could've just easily downloaded that file to their computer, and then extract the cookie data from the sqlite database.

Doesn't sound very good, huh? Welp, my idea is to apply a few measures in order to protect against this kind of attack.

Hash the site names with something like yescrypt, preferably with a browser-specific salt. Maybe use the fingerprint or the user agent as a salt? Although i despise fingerprints overall, this is a pretty good place to use them.
Encrypt the cookie content with the site's name.
Then preferably encrypt the whole database using the fingerprint or the user agent. Wouldn't really stop anyone smart, but i think its a good measure.

That's pretty much it. The whole idea. Perhaps the same principle would be applicable to local and session storages.

Personally, i think that it is infurious that since cookies are basically passwords (probably even more sensitive than passwords), they are stored in pretty much just a text file.

10 reasons why Linux is superior to Windows in every way possible

Alice 🌈 — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:18:54 +0000

The debate goes on and on for over 1.0 years between tens of people. Time to finally end it.

Disclaimer: this article contains a lot of half-baked jokes, sarcasm, stupid rage and a little of actual technical argument. If you take this seriously, then don't.

1. Drive letters

Seriously, did anyone actually ever put a letter on a drive? I, for one never thought something like "This is a good disk, I'll name it G.".

2. C Disk

Okay, let's assume that we live in a universe that you are a windows engineer and drive letters are a good ass idea, and you came to a conclusion that the main drive MUST have a C: letter.

The question is, what the hell was the thought process behind that? If its a main disk, why not name it A:? Seriously, its not DOS compatible anyway.

3. Abundance of syscalls

Windows has no syscalls a.k.a. "system calls". It has WINAPI, which consists of two or three dll libraries.

Therefore, you have no direct way to call the system. And since you can't call the system, there probably is no system at all.

4. Closed source

This is self explanatory. There is absolutely no reason for ANY software that is not a game or an AI to be closed source, other than for its users being fucked over and over by capitalist pigs.

5. Old architecture

Its no secret that MS-DOS was created over 40 years ago (somewhere in '80s), and so-called Windows NT (Windows - New Technology) inherited most of its architecture.

For those in the dark, Windows NT is based on old macOS, which was discounted in 2000s in favor of a UNIX-based OS, and every windows ~~distribution~~ version (aka Windows 7) is Windows NT with some extra bells and switches.

6. CMD

CMD.EXE is another tool from the 80s that is still used in "modern" windows. It has nor progressed, or received any updates over that time. Seriously, if you write a tool in pure .BAT (aka CMD scripting) using Windows 10, it is very likely to be compatible with MS-DOS.

7. Lack of customizability

You can't heavily customize Windows any further than shipped configuration without a lot of pain in the ass.

Lets imagine that you would need an extremely minimal windows-based ISO image that can run an HTTP server that could fit into a flash drive. Good luck making that.

Also the window decorations & shell customizations are basically nonexistant. At least not in that degree at which it exists in GNU/Linux.

8. Requires a mouse

There is a lot of situations where you would NOT have a mouse. For example, when your new shiny laptop's touchpad doesn't integrate with windows 11 at all (happened to me).

If you happen to be in one of those situations, you probably couldn't use your computer at all, at least not enough to solve a software-based mouse problem.

9. Funny logo

Come on, let's be real for this one. Windows logo straight up sucks in any way possible. No creativity, just 4 cubes because fuck you. Tux is kinda cute

10. The whole purpose of Windows v. Linux

Windows was created to monopolize the PC market share by Microsoft.

Linux was created by people, for people.

If you feel like using Windows even more, knowing that you empower an evil conglomerate that hates you but loves sucking your money, please tell your thought process in the comment section.

If you take this seriously, please don't. This is a rant article that is in no way technically accurate or based

An 18+ joke

Alice 🌈 — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 10:04:41 +0000