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John-Mark Gurney

@encthenet@flyovercountry.social
mastodon 4.5.18+glitch
  • Open on flyovercountry.social

FreeBSD developer, consultant.

Documentation!

crypto means cryptography.

tech is inherently political.

Do your part, encrypt the Net!

if something is bullshit, spell it (bullshit) out, don't sugar coat it.

Add alt text to images.

All alt text posts are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

For commercial use, license available upon request, $75/post (i.e. if the alt text takes 3 posts, it'll cost $225 to license), just send me a message w/ where I can send the invoice.

1025 Followers
1240 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 23, 2022
Pronouns:
he/they
Blog:
https://blog.funkthat.com/
FreeBSD:
https://people.freebsd.org/~jmg/
Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 3mo ago

As usual, a woman doing all the work that men should be doing.

(Note she's only worth $30b, just to put into perspective how little the men are doing, especially the ones who pledged to give half their fortunes away.)

https://flipboard.com/users/Independent/statuses/bn7IdHoaT2264Lqf9w5Niw:a:1855170754

flipboard.com
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 2w ago
Question, why an ai kill switch and not a company liability law? The entire exec and board of ai companies are liable for any actions taken by their ai? And for some real teeth, prison time for them if the action would cause a real person to go to prison. Seems like that'd shape up the companies real quick and force them to put in proper safe guards. (Yes, I know why, the monied don't want to be responsible for their own actions.)
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 2mo ago

Just someone using many to put words in other people's mouths that they don't say.

many in the BSD crowd, “freedom” means the freedom to make the software proprietary,

Just trying to say BSD people want all software to be proprietary which is definitely not the case for me.

I want people to be able to freely using software so they don't have to rewrite it and create new bugs making software shittier than it already is.

https://fossforce.com/2026/07/freebsd-16-cleans-house-no-gpl-left-in-the-base-system/

fossforce.com
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago

Just learned why I won't be using passkeys. Because it requires icloude keychain, and I definitely don't want apple having a copy of my passkeys.

Yes, I know they're supposedly e2ee and everything, but also, allowing the passkey to transit devices actually means that it isn't really 2FA anymore, especially if you keep any password in the same keychain.

It's pretty embarrassing how the security industry has managed to rebadge a not 2FA into 2FA.

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 1mo ago
Replying to
@chetwisniewski@securitycafe.ca Except that it's commonly accepted that emails written for the company are the company's property, otherwise they couldn't use it to conduct business. This is why you never use your company email for personal related items like company retirement plans and medical.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@seuros@mastodon.bsd.cafe Thanks for the work. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for FireWire. Did you test out dcons? To make sure it still works? #FreeBSD
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 3mo ago
Just realized that the only device I use regularly that doesn't have significant BSD code in it is my android phone. Devices I use regularly/interact dirdctly with [Free]BSD on them: ✅ macos ✅ PS5 ✅ Personal FreeBSD server And at work as well. Which of course entered the cursed thought of porting android over to FreeBSD. #FreeBSD
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 1mo ago
It's pretty funny how everyone knows what you're talking about, when you mention the nazi bar.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago

I've probably told this story before, but one of my favorite debugging stories is the time we conducted a seance on a core file.

At the time we were using the boehm garbage collector, but had processes not freeing memory. We had core files, but at the time, to get stats, you had to run code in a live process.

I had recently done work parsing sections of elf binaries, so I wrote a script (with the help of some coworkers) that would take a minimal program, run gdb on it, and then script gdb to open the core file, load cored process into memory at the correct locations. I forget how we handled the stack, but likely just loaded the registers from the core file as well.

With the core file restored, we could now tell gdb to print the stats.

My coworker used it to find that boehm was erroneously including the text segment as valid pointers, and with the process at 2gb (which was pretty large in 2004/2005 time frame), strings became valid pointers, preventing the freeing of memory. Changing to not include it fixed our out of memory issues.

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 2mo ago

At a previous work, I implemented a SAML login flow and once I found out how easy the back end is, it really made me wish that more websites would allow you to enter your own SAML provider instead of locking you into the big ones.

If you could, I'd likely run my own, but it also would mean that your password manager company could instead be your SSO provider because that's really what a password manager is. They use a normal local auth/master password unlock and approve it.

But I can say that none of the big corps want that because it'll add competition. They'd rather have a limited set of big corps that they can colude with to keep competition limited than service their users.

> @encthenet@flyovercountry.social

flyovercountry.social
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago

The idea that dnssec adds another failure mode neglects to mention that it also prevents other failure modes, like DNS cache poisoning or DNS spoofing/server take over.

Or bgp hijacking and doing selective/targeted redirection.

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 7mo ago

Ok, FreeBSD 14.4-R is now available via torrent/magnet links.

Magnet links and more information at: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Torrents

As always, it takes a while for the DHT to discover the torrents, and my client is verifying the last of the images.

Happy torrenting!

#FreeBSD #FreeBSDMagnet

wiki.freebsd.org
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@stiiin@infosec.space And unsurprisingly, all the bugs are logic bugs, but the other question is, when was the last time the cp or rm or mv had a segfault or memory safety bug? Those utilities aren't a major source of memory safety bugs. They're a source of logic bugs, and converting to rust doesn't magically fix logic bugs. Rewriting libjpeg or other file parsing libraries would be a more useful endeavor, less logic to get wrong, more likely to have memory safety issues in C.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago

Just looked through the security assessment on the rust rewrite of core utils, and this is why just rewriting everything in the last language is such a dangerous things. They literally threw out 20+ years of security fixes because they thought it was cool and would increase security.

At least a security assessment was done, but some of those failures are pretty bad, and very likely to have had serious security implications if they were deployed into any real world system. Setting mode bits incorrectly, TOCTOU, arbitrary file overwrites are just terrible.

Would I have likely introduced some of the bugs if I had done the work? Yes. Would I have done the work? No, I'm not that crazy.

I do wonder if they did white box or black box when they copied functionality. I'm suspecting black box because of some of the errors.

https://github.com/Zellic/publications/blob/master/uutils%20coreutils%20-%20Zellic%20Audit%20Report.pdf

github.com
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@benroyce We really need to get rank choice voting implemented more widely (I'm in Oakland which uses rcv for mayor and some other elections). I'm going to vote in the primary, but as things currently stand, the governor race could end up with two GOP on the main ballot because of too many Dems on the ballot. And the people who claim the rank choice voting is complicated are just lying to you. It's not hard to explain or to do. @courtcan
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago

A good reason to include urls as text even in html emails is that it makes it easier to see if it's a legit link or not, and also to make it easier to see when the corporate url protection rewrites the url to some nonsense that is hard to tell. But also including the full text of the url will force you to use urls that are of sane length and not some 1k+ long url.

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago

A couple go to Python debugging aids of mine, first is breaking into the debugger.

import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

The second is:
```
def printtb(fun):
import functools
@functools.wraps(fun)
def wrapper(*a, **kwa):
try:
return fun(*a, *kwa)
except:
import traceback; traceback.print_exc()
raise

return wrapper
```

Then any functions that is throwing an exception that I can't easily wrap elsewhere (or have no clue where it's being called from), I just throw this wrapper around it and I get the traceback I need.

#Python

flyovercountry.social
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago

Please, if you're training people on new modern tech that's supposed to be so impressive, make sure you are up to date in "old" modern tech.

The creditability of the new tech is weakened when you don't compare it to modern existing tech. It shows that either you're out of date, or the tech wasn't actually designed understand current state of the art.

Was watching training in Ultra Ethernet, and the training was talking about head of line blocking with tcp (solved to a certain degree with IETF QUIC, which wasn't mentioned) and also about tcp throwing out data when packets arrive out of order, completely ignoring SACK.

(I thought that SACK was newer than it was. Didn't realize SACK is 30 years old this year.)

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago

Has anyone made a self contained Time Machine backup server (that runs on FreeBSD)? It looks like the old ways of backing up over the network finally broke, and I can't fool MacOS anymore by using a sparse disk image like I have for years.

I don't want to have to configure and install samba, I just want something that works and is small and self contained.

#Apple #Backups #MacOS

flyovercountry.social
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@JensHannemann@mastodon.online Well, they might not have been intended to be 2FA, but most people talk of them this way, and I hear very zero about passkeys need a 2FA token in addition to them. But the whole 2FA thing failed once the token was merged to the phone and 2FA codes were saved to the same password manager that has all the passwords and allowed to access both from either the computer or your phone. I pointed this out years ago, but most people just shrugged and accepted the risk of not actually having 2FA anymore.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@Ashedryden Strange days, 1995.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@mwl@io.mwl.io @putney@universeodon.com Yeah, I'm annoyed that the old boot man page has gone away, and other manpages like loader.efi doesn't contain this info. I thought I had some fixes in my tree, but can't find them. I'll try to dig them up later.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@jonny@neuromatch.social I'll check it out. The above was used in debugging a python script running under gdb, so a little more tricky to debug than a simple script.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@brouhaha@mastodon.social What, we have both an x86 AND a sparc emulator in css? Or is someone just getting my hopes up. @dianea@lgbtqia.space @AmyZenunim@unstable.systems
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 3mo ago
Just a reminder that the IETF is broken: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2026-June/039613.html
metzdowd.com
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago

Ms: we need more people to use OneDrive.
Ms: I know, why don't we prevent people from downloading their email attachments directly from the web client and instead force them to save to one drive?

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@recursive@hachyderm.io And how for very early chips, the masks for each layer was hand made. https://virtualmuseum.intel.com/maskops/ @alicela1n@social.treehouse.systems
virtualmuseum.intel.com

Intel Museum | Mask Operations

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago

So very confused by git documentation. git(1) under Reset, restore and revert says that git-reset changes the commit history.

But everywhere I've read, including git-reset(1) implies that git reset doesn't modify commit history and is the correct way to unstage files.

Can we please be consistent with documentation on what things do? I have a feeling that it should be the git reset MAY modify commit history, but yet, the docs are confusing.

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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@glyph@mastodon.social Yeah, the upper layers were reporting the exception, but only the exception, so not that useful in the general case, but it makes sense for this since it's more end user facing, so dumping a long stack trace isn't that useful.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@glyph@mastodon.social Nope, I want print_exc. Otherwise I'd have to do except Exception as e: And use orint_exceptilon. print_stack would only help me find where I was being called from, not what the error was. Still useful but not what I was going for.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@diazona@techhub.social Yeah. My long time on python 2 is showing. 😛 (Also breakpoint is relatively new even in 3.) #Python
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@glyph I mean, maybe that's better than copilot being only for entertainment purposes?
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago

Yes, it's 2026 and device manufacturers are still hard coding root passwords.

> https://tantosec.com/blog/2026/04/route-to-root-in-4g-industrial-router/

tantosec.com
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@stiiin@infosec.space Yeah, probably not a record of how they prevented them in the future, but the point is that it's had a history compared to the new coreutils. The new product might be better or not. As with all new things, you get a new set of problems. Do you want an unknown set or a set that is decently known?
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@cwebber I'll second that. I'd like the software to be able to take stars/likes from an account as approval for posting the reply to the post. Definitely would use software if the deps were small enough.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@wdormann@infosec.exchange Also, maybe make the mouse icon reflect the rounded corner you're grabbing too. 🤡
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@david_chisnall @phessler could you check? Or maybe someone else? @hailey
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@mwl@io.mwl.io Hmm, looks like loader.efi(8) doesn't contain much help. I think you have to set an efi var because FreeBSD puts its loader in a non-standard location. I'll dry to dig up more info since I remember having to deal with this a few years ago. #FreeBSD
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@Alison@beige.party That image is likely doctored. This article has a similar image. https://www.ar15.com/forums/General/Meet-Jessica-Foster-The-viral-OnlyFans-AI-fooling-millions-of-MAGA-fans/5-2837986/ @jeffowski@mastodon.world
ar15.com
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@Epic_Null@infosec.exchange More like easier/better cert access to those who can't dynamically/programmatically change their DNS, for reasons like their DNS provider doesn't support it or their IT department refuses to allow it. @rysiek@mstdn.social
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 3mo ago
Replying to
@rsalz@ioc.exchange This isn't the only case. the Tcpenc group and what's happening with the tls pq draft being shoved through as additional examples.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 7mo ago

Does anyone have experience with replacing the SLA battery in a UPS with one of the LFP batteries out there? Did it work?

Or a dual replacement for a series 24V UPS?

#UPS

flyovercountry.social
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@rmogull@defcon.social Must not be very good at drowning since you're still posting. 🤪
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@Alison@beige.party It doesn't have the third boob like the image at the start of the thread does. @jeffowski@mastodon.world
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@putney@universeodon.com @mwl@io.mwl.io Check out: https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI That talks about using FAT16 instead of FAT32, and also using loader.efi.
wiki.freebsd.org
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@vees@jawns.club You aren't trusting a user to [tell you to trust a party to] attest that the user is who they say they are? Are you saying you do a full security review or all the SSO providers (if any) you do trust? Or are you just trusting by their names/how large they are? It actually gives the user control. E.g. passkeys are not 2FA, so with a SAML provider they can do real 2FA which they can't with passkeys. It also lets the user use real 2FA on services that continue to think that an SMS counts as effective 2FA.
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@oxidecomputer@hachyderm.io What processor is used in the sled adjacent to the switch?
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@emma While the real reason is that they don't want to allow progressive candidates the ability to have a chance, but instead force people to vote for their slightly less right wing candidate than the GOP to keep ratcheting politics to the right. @ohmu @courtcan
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 3mo ago
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange I'll have to look at this more. Are they actively keeping up with any of the main FreeBSD projects or is it just an old fork? And just bsd licensed?
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Open post
John-Mark Gurney @encthenet@flyovercountry.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to on vis.social
@infobeautiful@vis.social Now if they had only chosen a different projection than mercator that wouldn't have amplified the apparent largeness of the parts of Canada close to the pole making this map still very wrong.
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