🔗 David Sommerseth

F/OSS hacker, mostly working on #OpenVPN
- speaks only for himself.
ex-Twitter account (now inaccessible): https://twitter.com/DavidSommerseth

"Don't aim to be someone. DO something."

#nobridge - because I believe in the real #fediverse, and I don't want my own views/data to be abused by yet another "closed-service which can do whatever it wants for profit".

If you want to follow me, you will now need to have some content on your profile where we have some common ground on interests. I will no longer accept random profiles wanting to follow with no toots or few other follows or followers in the same interest sphere.

Public Key

npub1puft30cctn4uhy2gufu4ynaa7vfzqx3lj4hkg545usdggtv8e9psdew2fu

NIP-05 Address

dazo_at_infosec.exchange@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsq7y4chuv9e67tj9ywy72jf77lxy3qrgle2mmy226wgx5y9krujscpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgh5mhgl

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

Author Public Key

npub1puft30cctn4uhy2gufu4ynaa7vfzqx3lj4hkg545usdggtv8e9psdew2fu

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Last Notes

2025-05-17 15:15:11

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@nprofile…kjrn So that he looks brighter....

2025-05-16 22:27:51

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@nprofile…naem
It seems obvious, I know. But how is Mark Zuckerberg able to market this insane idea at all then?
There's a relatively new book which he tried to kill off before getting widespread read. I've heard it can explain most of what he does to and with others in a simple sentence: «He simply doesn't care ... at all»
Which is just sad.

2025-05-16 12:48:08

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@nprofile…naem
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/08/13/stages/
I believe Mastodon is still in the "First they ignore you" step. Brace and prepare for the next steps.
Fun fact: this quote is found in Red Hat offices around the globe.(Or at least it was when I worked there)

2025-05-13 07:15:21

If an average person today would want to use today's public #AI #LLMs instances to build a house, this picture illustrates how a professional carpenter would evaluate the AI LLM result.
Inga Strümke said recently in an interview:
LLMs are created to write good sentences, not to research the reality
She also said:
It's a very critical that a lot of people believe they are using artificial intelligence when they in fact are only using ChatGPT.
Meaning: AI is so much more than the generative LLM which is overly hyped these days.
I'm really looking forward when this generative LLM hype bubble bursts. It will be painful for a lot of people, but it is sorely needed.
(Source for the quotes from Inga Strümke, in Norwegian: https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/folk-bruker-kunstig-intelligens-feil_-sier-forsker-inga-strumke-1.17398359)
#artificialintelligence #ingastrumke
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/114/499/276/404/447/802/original/ad7fa71ba073dfbc.png

2025-05-07 20:22:05

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@nprofile…2phg Lenovo is also providing laptops without OS or preinstalled with Linux as an alternative. I believe Dell is doing something similar.
@nprofile…8xaf and @nprofile…s37t has provided laptops for a long time with focus on Linux support as well.

2025-05-05 09:20:12

It's not often I need to use "office programs" such as #LibreOffice. But it happens, and I've been running Linux on my computers for over 25 years without looking back or really considering anything else (except when doing music stuff, which is a different story for another thread).
But are there any @nprofile…yh6f users around here on Mastodon who can share some experience with it? Is it more lightweight? How is the interoperability with other office applications? Is it functionally stable, compared against LibreOffice? How does it compare in regards to features?
#foss #oss #onlyoffice

2025-04-23 12:37:37

So @nprofile…3fj3 suddenly appeared in my timeline today ... which is cool.
But I see Beaver Notes is being reviewed in the same way as a lot of other open source projects are. I don't blame BN here, but it's a trend I'm seeing. And it feels quite odd.
First of all, BN is an application for writing text and making notes.
The reviewer states these two points first:
Privacy: All your data is stored on your device.
Offline mode: Allows you to create and edit notes without an internet connection.
I mean ... it's a text editor you install locally on your system. It's the typical functionality of any text editors.
Another thing which also appears in many open source apps is «we don't track you» or «no adds in this app»-
It just makes me sad ... because no tracking and no ads should be the normal situation for any application. And applications not needing to communicate with other services over a network shouldn't need to promote «no network access needed».
It is my strong opinion that applications tracking users, enforcing ads and requiring network access for whatever reason when not strictly needed should be forced to put a large sticker on their application of these unwanted «features». Not the other way around.
#opensource #foss #oss #privacy #tracking #ads #thoughts

2025-04-01 07:52:49

Yikes! @nprofile…kvf0 is open sourcing #Recall and will provide ready-to-install packages for all the popular #Linux distributions ... this is going to become a #privacy nightmare!

2025-03-16 20:05:26

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@nprofile…naem And don't forget to boost toots you like and believe others may like as well ...
Or if not like, at least if it made you think or ponder with some new perspectives.

2025-03-09 17:26:03

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@nprofile…4dwe But if Trump doesn't hold his side of the deal, does Ukraine need to keep their commitment to it?
That's should be the standard "101 Beginners guide to negotiations" topic .... «F*k your contract partner and you're going to get f*ked yourself»

2025-02-23 00:28:55

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@nprofile…jpfa It almost feels like this is a deepfake video ... I struggle to believe this really happened.

2024-12-21 12:52:33

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@nprofile…kxk4 yeah, I didn't mean the commit message should be elaborate. Just give enough insight that you know where to look further for more info.
In this case, I think something like this could have been enough: "This code has been experimental for long while and is not a feature we see value in for the foreseeable future. Removing it to reduce maintenance efforts."

2024-12-21 11:14:05

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@nprofile…kxk4 As an outsider, just following briefly due to curiosity ... I would suggest commit messages including a rationale for such huge changes. It helps people reading the commit log, especially those who might not follow out-of-tree discussions closely.
From the diff I understand what the feature was and that it was experimental with a heavy maintenance load. But going from there to why easily ends up into speculation.

2024-12-18 18:21:49

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@nprofile…xg92
Time to move to @codeberg?

2024-12-18 17:46:36

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@nprofile…tg6x
Yes. Makefile is equally horrendous when it comes to tabs/spaces. But Make is also much more than just a data container file format.
There are tons of text file formats which isn't user hostile and gives needed flexibility and readability. Which all are superior to the YAML and derivative variants.
The simplest alternatives are TOML (or the simpler INI) and JSON if you need the data more structured. Plus tools like jq making JSON data extraction quite easy to use in scripts.
I even find it easier to work with XML files over YAML files, despite the verbosity and quoting and tag traps it includes.

2024-12-18 13:45:08

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@nprofile…tg6x
Anything being even somewhat related to YAML (even by as little as a million miles distance) is failed format.
Any text based file format actually differentiating tabs and spaces and enforcing strict alignment based on the right space type should be banned for eternity.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/674/128/506/160/195/original/71555e8ee2e99e61.png

2024-12-18 07:34:30

Why on this lovely earth do #developers still voluntarily chose the #YAML format over basically any other format !??!
(Okay, except XML, of course - but that's a given anyhow)
#fileformat #programming

2024-12-17 23:03:33

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@nprofile…mdat @nprofile…kxk4 @nprofile…ydm9
Tempting to suggest that curl CVEs would default to a score of 11 ... Or an odd float value, just to hint about the issues related the CVSS scoring.
Unfortunately, most likely too many will not grasp the sarcasm of doing so.

2024-12-08 20:43:19

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@nprofile…naem @nprofile…2wc8
I have nothing against supporting projects enhancing pivacy.. But I've stopped donating to Signal myself after they seemed to not care about feedback from their users.
On one side, they seemed to try to make Signal become more like a lookalike to iMessage, removing useful features like different background colours in group chats. At some point they even had the same colour on the chat names being the same colour. And when colours on the chat names arrived it was mentioned as a group chat improvement. Yes, it was an improvement - but it's still way far behind what it used to be. The reason for removing the individual coloured background? It made the code simpler (while colours on the chat names seemed to not be a coding problem).
Then they removed SMS support on Android ... which resulted in all my non-privacy/non-tech contacts starting to send me SMSes instead of using Signal. Which means now I have two apps for handling messaging and my non-tech users are confused and just use SMS by default. The reason? SMS is insecure! Yes, it is - but opportunistic encryption will always help non-tech users. For all my non-tech contacts, this move ended up far worse in the real world.
Since I now have to use more apps anyhow, My closest contacts and I have moved over to @nprofile…nw9n instead. It's a very different architecture which is more redundant to Signal, with far better privacy coverage. And I barely use Signal these days.
And don't even get me started on the mobile payment with their own cryptocurrency implementation in a chat app.
I know #SimplexChat will most likely end up as a paid service in the future. But the developers there at least seems to want to listen to their users and interact with them. And when something is not going to happen or taking long time to happen, there are much more solid and real technical arguments to why. That makes it far more easy to contribute financially to SimplexChat.
But YMMV. We have all different experiences and needs.
The only thing which is for sure - #E2EE messaging will become a must in future. And politicians will struggle to accept that their policies won't work to control encrypted messages.
And we need to have apps helping users to use the right approach with as little knowledge about #E2EE as possible. It need to be as few apps as possible, and it need to do opportunistic encryption as much as possible. Upgrade automatically from unencrypted to encrypted communication.

2024-12-08 00:28:18

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@nprofile…z22s It is better. But it doesn't imply it is a good password 😉

2024-12-06 10:40:36

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@nprofile…tunn @nprofile…jpfa
Mastodon will indeed require far more efforts if your life goal is to end up as an influencer. You need to actually make real efforts to get people to follow you.
In contrast to "make something viral once and the algorithms might boost you to users not knowing you".
To me, that's an argument why the algorithmic approach has failed. You never really know what the algorithm might boost - and if what it boosts has real value to the SoMe users.

2024-12-06 10:36:28

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@nprofile…jpfa
nobody likes to do anything time consuming nowadays
Uhm ..... doomscrolling would like to have a say here .....

2024-12-01 19:53:18

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@nprofile…z22s @nprofile…5k2y I guess Airpods won't help as much .....

2024-11-29 19:48:44

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@nprofile…jpfa
The USA need to be flooded with this kind of shows, unfortunately. Hopefully more people there can then experience those "wait a minute?!" moments to reflect on their own rejection of systematic racism issues in the USA today.

2024-11-28 19:50:55

I must say I'm impressed by the work NIC.cz has done on the #Turris and #TurrisOS.
It has upgraded fully automated, switched from the iptables based firewall to nft, rebooted at night (which is what I configured it to do on upgrades) ... and everything is working as expected out-of-the-box.
That is just excellent engineering work!
#foss #oss #openhardware #opensource #excellence #network #networking

2024-11-13 13:45:57

Don't tell the Republicans about this C function ....
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/abort.3.html
#uspol #programming #sarcasm #computer

2024-11-05 21:09:59

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@npub1nyq…vvvs
What this tells me ... is that we will probably be empty of IPv6 address by the end of 2070 ....

2024-11-05 19:43:19

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@npub1ke6…z7av ... As a European, I can relate to that ...
Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst.
I actually remember the first week after Biden took office. Reading news was suddenly a calm and beautiful experience, as there was no concerns or worries if some random outburst from Trump could have done any damage since the day before.
We need to prepare ourselves for the worst. And hopefully, the worst case scenario will not last more than up to 4 years.
And if it goes the other direction ... well, then it will be an even purer joy.

2024-10-23 08:06:20

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@npub1nyq…vvvs Just put their logo in one of the corners .... the image is otherwise just perfect!

2024-10-21 20:47:17

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@npub1ke6…z7av RHEL desktop, Proton Mail ... I depend a lot on e-mail. And Bitwarden (I don't want Proton Pass to store my Proton credentials).
I wish Proton Drive could come with a proper Linux client (nope, rclone doesn't cut it for me). Then I could migrate completely out of Tresorit (and save me lots of money, as we need more users).
I suspect Proton Docs can become handy in the future too. Otherwise, there is cryptpad.fr as an alternative.
Why RHEL? A free developer "subscription" gives you 16 installations on your account. Since I do lots of Linux development and testing - that fits the bill. Plus you get security updates a bit faster than from the downstream clones. And RHEL is just rock solid. Seldom something unexpected happens there. Maybe a bit boring distro, but most newer and fancier packages are usually available as flatpaks out-of-the-box - which keeps the BaseOS clean and stable.

2024-08-13 08:57:50

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@npub1sg4…xslc
Check if your DNS is working as expected. I know DNS gets lots of wrong blame, but I've experienced too often that a sluggish DNS can often make Firefox get even more sluggish.

2024-04-03 22:01:55

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@npub1yck…ujmw Why cross the river to collect some water?
@npub1p45…89jz

2024-03-21 17:23:24

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@npub19la…hm4g @npub17zk…zwym
Ahh, okay. So D-Bus will not disappear? Just that varlink solves a different tasks simpler for those aspects not needing the full blown object hierarchy or signalling aspects?
Or to ask differently, do you think varlink would be suitable for NetworkManager, systemd-networkd or similar services needing to keep track of more devices/objects and their state during their lifetime?

2024-03-19 11:47:23

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@npub17zk…zwym @npub19la…hm4g
I've been basing OpenVPN 3 Linux on D-Bus, so such statements instantly hits a nerve 😉
Yes, D-Bus has challenges. And those challenges are also made even more challenging depending on the D-Bus library you use to integrate with. But it's also kinda a de-facto standard on Linux today.
So I wonder, if varlink can step up and become a D-Bus replacement ... how fast would that happen? And how quickly would Linux distributions pick up this?
I would love to make use of better alternatives. But I can't really start planning for it until it's becoming more widely used.
And that's kind a the crux of this ... when will we see this getting adopted into Linux distros?

2024-03-16 21:33:36

Hey @npub1wjw…ue5t; what's up with your website? ublock Origin and Privacy Badger is blocking a few things making your site inaccessible. Also seeing some trackers being blocked.

2024-03-11 16:26:43

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@npub1wjw…ue5t
How is the CalDAV Bridge going? Kinda lost without that.

2024-03-07 10:18:36

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@npub1zra…wazx @npub1p45…89jz
TL;DR: ... I fully understand that projects are ditching mbed TLS these days. It's generally not moving fast enough forward and lingering behind on important standards and even lacking support for features OpenSSL users takes for granted.
Longer read ...
We've just recently been through similar challenges in OpenVPN projects too. We've recently added support for mbedtls-3.0 and newer, which was held back due to licensing issues; Apache 2.0 and GPL has some challenges.
The TLS 1.3 support is at best not feature complete. They even state so themselves: https://github.com/Mbed-TLS/mbedtls/pull/4963
To my knowledge, not much has happened since this time.
Yes, mbed TLS development has improved over the last years. But it's essentially not moving fast enough; their backlog is just too overwhelming. Considering it even performs a lot worse than OpenSSL (especially on CPUs with accelerators available), the performance gap is just giving any reasons to look at mbed TLS any more. And it even has a general feature gap compared to what OpenSSL is capable of as well. Unfortunately.
PolarSSL (before it got acquired by ARM and the mbed organisation) had some progress and moved forward. And at that time, the OpenSSL was not properly funded.
Now OpenSSL is now properly funded, better organised and having paid staff managing and developing the project. So the table has turned. mbed TLS moves very slowly forward (feels understaffed) ... So OpenSSL seems now to be in a far better position than mbed TLS is.

2024-03-05 10:28:48

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@npub1p45…89jz
In the OpenVPN project, we had the man page as a nroff/groff formatted page which was insane to edit. Some years ago, we converted it into .rst files and generate the proper man-page using rst2man. We also split all the text into several .rst files being included from a "main file", so the result is the same single man page.
This move gave us a few advantages ... some not even intended.
A lot more people were able to correctly edit and fix the man page content.
Using more advanced groff formatting is handled far more easier (like tables, "code sections", indented "blobs" for warnings/notes, etc)
The restructuring allowed us to even split out a whole section into its own man page very easily (like example configurations)
A single source of truth, the .rst files - regardless of rendering approach (plain text, man/nroff/groff, web)
GitHub and GitLab renders the .rst files quite nicely, which makes it easier to read when supporting users, just by giving them a URL to the right area from the code repos ... which then is always kept up-to-date.
https://github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/tree/master/doc/man-sections/link-options.rst
https://gitlab.com/openvpn/openvpn/-/blob/master/doc/man-sections/link-options.rst
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/042/593/338/655/409/original/139298f03668681b.png

2024-02-24 21:05:05

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@npub1m34…njzz @npub1cmg…rzd2
The algorithm impact was the one thing I really noticed when I switched and left Twitter. It somehow took a few weeks to get used to it. But now it feels liberating.
I feel far less in a bubble on #mastodon. And the bubble twitter gave me was most of the time not the bubble I needed.

2024-02-24 21:05:05

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2024-02-19 15:28:55

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@npub1wjw…ue5t @npub1qm5…fgxw
Sauron and Saruman ... plotting the take-over of Middle-Earth? 🤪

2024-02-08 18:24:36

Hey @npub1wjw…ue5t @npub1nv9…gu4c !
When will you start implementing internal sharing in Proton Drive, with ACL (like read, write, share, admin privileges) per share?
That's essentially what's missing for several of my users, which means we could finally close Tresorit.

2024-01-20 10:05:59

Kjell & Co sender ut skrytemail om bærekraftige valg og at de har et "blått hjerte" ... For så å slenge med forslag til hva man kjøpe fra dem.
Hva med å bare skryte og IKKE slenge med forslag til hva man kan kjøpe fra dem. For det er vel ikke bærekraftig å foreta impulskjøp man kanskje egentlig ikke trenger men blir fristet fordi det er bærekraftige produkter?
Dobbeltmoral?
#allheimen #norge #bærekraft #shopping
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/111/787/691/436/963/268/original/5d5ca72f1ac1e299.jpg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/111/787/697/509/213/692/original/9f4a1815f433434e.jpg

2024-01-09 10:47:17

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@npub19la…hm4g @npub1cpm…uycf I agree that setuid executables are really troublesome and that sudo is far from the best approach to root privileges on a host.
The SSH approach is interesting, but at the same time using encryption over a local unix socket feels like a bit of not really needed overhead. But to base it on the the authentication aspect sounds good. And the possibility to require a hardware token to do privileged operations is a really good idea.
I'm just wondering how hardware tokens will work on a remote host configured like this. That is, you ssh into a remote host and use the "ssh-based-sudo" ... can that be prepared to also make use of hardware tokens as well?
And how could the management of "ssh-based-sudo" access be centrally managed? On hosts enrolled in FreeIPA, you can define sudo policies centrally. How could this be made to work with FreeIPA? I suspect it would be some extension to sss_ssh_authorizedkeys, which could add the needed public keys lines with the additional restrictions. But at the same time, this can end up being quite a lot of data needed to be processed on more detailed restrictions.

2024-01-05 18:30:43

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@npub1ywy…cksd That was a dark read. And I so much hope you're wrong in this being the end of Firefox.
Maybe it will be the end of the Mozilla corporation as we know it, that would be good. Greedy, money focused managers will struggle to properly manage any open source projects. Unfortunately, it seems the Mozilla corporation is failing to grasp this.
If I've understood it correctly, it is the Mozilla corporation which funds the Mozilla Foundation, which is the key driver of Firefox. So maybe that foundation need to reestablish itself.
The world need more web rendering engines to compete. Today, Chromium and Firefox seems to be the biggest ones. But Edge, Brave and Vivaldi has opted for the Chromium engine. IIRC, even Safari has its roots in WebKit, which is where Chromium also comes from - but Safari is also primarily available on macOS and iOS. Not that many other has chosen the Firefox engine, except the TorBrowser probably. You could probably include Thunderbird too, but that's still a bit different.
We need more rendering engines just to avoid the issues we got with IE dominating the market for quite a bit. That hurt all other platforms than Windows most of all. With Google dominating the browser market, there are more than enough possibilities to compare the situation with how IE grew to dominate. What is different this time is that Chromium is multiplatform by design.
I do hope there will be organisations and contributors willing to pick up and continue to work on the legacy of Firefox, if Mozilla collapses. But I do hope more the Mozilla Foundation survives and gets a better corporate management in their back, ensuring they can progress better.

2024-01-05 18:30:43

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