renormalizer

@renormalizer@feddit.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I use a "proper" password manager instead of Firefox?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To get every password, you’d have to exploit the password manager process itself. The manager asks you to approve every single password it hands out and you would know something is wrong if the extension starts asking for lots of passwords.

  The separation keeps the memory where the passwords are stored away from the browser. No malicious code executing inside the browser can access it. Also, the protocol between the extension and the manager can be really simple and (hopefully) easy to get right without making exploitable mistakes.

  It’s the Swiss cheese principle. The attacker has to break out of the website sandbox, get into the extension to copy the secret keys that are needed to impersonate the extension in the connection to the password manager, and exploit the password manager through that connection in order to get to the passwords. If any step fails (the holes in the cheese slices don’t align), the attack doesn’t get through.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should I use a "proper" password manager instead of Firefox?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At least you’re limiting exposure with managers like KeePassXC. The manager runs in a separate process and communicates with the extension via a local connection. You have to approve every password given out by the manager. So a malicious actor can’t just ask for every password under the sun. They could still read the contents of the password field once the extension has filled it if they manage to circumvent the restrictions set by the browser. But that’s no different from when you enter the password manually.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Start-up idea⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The second buy can even be the nice one. If you’re unsure how much use the tool will get, buy cheap then upgrade after it breaks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lightbulbs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  10800 to 18000°Ra for the Americans

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨the next question when the teacher calls on you while you're asleep and you answer correctly⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a sequence of numbers where the next number is a fixed multiple of the previous one.

  1 2 4 8 16 32 … Is a sequence with a ratio of 2.

  96 48 24 12 6 3 … Is the sequence from the question with a ratio of 1/2. You see that elements 2 and 4 (counting from zero) sum to 30 and elements 3 and 5 sum to 15.

  In general, the sequence can be expressed as a_k = c r^k for some starting value c and the ratio r.