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It's mechanical turks all the way down?

Not sure I buy this. In my mind, dissolving this state relationship would be renouncing your citizenship as an individual.

Then, it seems naive and problematic to think you can take a personal chunk of territory with you after renouncement. At the very least, I think this is akin to trying to unilaterally drop an easement from a property deed. These territories were committed in perpetuity, not loaned with an expiration or compensation clause.

Acting collectively, it is still just many people deciding to renounce. Why would the territory go with them either? This tension is what makes it a revolutionary act.


Yeah, I get use out of the SOCKS proxy mode in combination with a "split VPN" at work.

I need VPN to get into some internal resources via SSH, but there are lots of external/public/AWS resources I also need to access, and the full VPN adds too much overhead and fragility for those.

Using the available split VPN, I can point a browser instance at a localhost SOCKS proxy port to relay over SSH + VPN for other web resources I need to access internally.

Unfortunately, Firefox proxy config rules are sort of backwards for my needs. I want to say "only use proxy for these 3 domains" whereas it wants to use the proxy by default and only allow me to bypass specific domains.


In the past, I've used plugins to do just what you ask. FoxyProxy Standard did the trick (it looks like there's now at least another more standard "VPN" version, too). It looks like Firefox does have support for Native PAC files that'll also do the trick: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Pro...

I think the more modern ProxyJump rule is superior for this. Just let it manage the actual TCP forwarding for you automatically. It's just the normal "bastion host" concept.

Particularly, you can use name patterns to apply the same rule broadly, assuming you have some systematic naming scheme for your eventual target devices.


How would you use ProxyJump with Reverse Forwarding?

I always use keys in my SSH agent.

Because the jump mechanism works via use of TCP forwarding, each host authn step is talking "directly" to your client. Importantly, this means it still works without requiring "agent forwarding" for the connection you are making.


For me, this is always used via ProxyJump rules in my ~/.ssh/config

It is also nice that it works recursively, so I can logically structure my rules so that the one for my regular targets say to use bastion1, then the rule for bastion1 says to go via bastion 2, etc.

I find this easier to reason about and maintain rather than juggling a bunch of these multi-step rules.


I would make even stronger advice.

If you want to verify an email, send me a one-time code with several hours expiry that I have to resubmit through my logged in web identity at your site.

It drives me batty that a financial provider (retirement vendor from previous employer) won't seem to let my "paperless" setting remain active. Only because I don't ping their abusive email tracking pixels etc.

To me, paperless means I can log in and download my quarterly PDF statements and related documents, and they won't be left in a mailbox on the street. It doesn't mean I have to subject myself to reading your silly emails with a promiscuous client.


To me, paperless means they ATTACH MY STATEMENT TO THE EMAIL. Not signing up to any paperless until they do, none yet have met this bar. The statement is supposed to be a snapshot of the status of the account at a given moment, if you have to open their website to view it they could regenerate it from whatever crap data they have lying around at the given moment. If it can change every time you look at it, it's a quantum statement, it's not a snapshot, it's a vibe. This defeats the entire purpose of getting a statement, I don't know how anyone tolerates this.

I tolerate it when I get a fixed period statement and can download to review and archive. I don't treat the website as my archive, nor would I treat the email system as my archive. It's just the delivery mechanism.

And they are for the well-defined accounting periods, e.g. monthly or quarterly, not some sort of ephemeral "rollup to time of download". That would drive me mad if they had different periods depending on download timing.

I can't know for certain, but my gut tells me they are just generating PDFs at the same time they perform the general reporting run that also leads to printed statements. And then they have some limited retention history to limit the storage costs.


Unfortunately for quite a few people in non-Western states with whom I share my email, I now have their paystubs and insurance receipts and so on. They just sent me the email after someone either made an error in data entry or optimistically assumed they have first.last@gmail.com

Many places don't attach the statement because it has sensitive information. Add that with "email is not secure" which we've been yelling for years (well, me since 1996). Sending it via email is risk exposure for them.

It is long since time we made email secure. Or replaced it with something else that would allow us to send messages to people securely (in a decentralized way).

Having to log in to a half-maintained, slow web portal with terrible UI that is down 25% of the time is a really terrible way to get your sensitive and often important documents.


email can be read by any server in the chain between the sender & recipient. It's not secure. PGP doesn't fully fix this, it still leaks message content (subject) and metadata. So does S/MIME. That doesn't mean attachments are leaked, but it does mean email isn't compliant with any of the standards which require communicating securely.

Right. I'm saying this state of affairs is unacceptable for the dominant digital messaging system in 2026.

they send important (financial?) documents over email???? who tf does that what vendor is this

All of them.

My personal tax agent only accepts forms and sends them back via email. I had a conversation with him about using password protected zips and he just told me he won't accept them.

My hospital sent me a PDF that I was to fill in and email back with cleartext credit card information filled in to pay bills. Screenshot:

https://infosec.exchange/@jsmall/116745959468132388

I recently deal with an inheritance and the Super Fund would only accept legal documents by email. I could go on, this is normal.


I really wish you could provide a PGP public key to your bank and have them just email the damn pdf every month.

That'd be nice, but I'd even settle for the plain pdf attached to the email.

Unencrypted sensitive data in an email is a really bad idea. I hope they never do that.

Although what I would really like, and think is long overdue, is an extension to email that normalises encryption and sender verification. It's ridiculous that email can be spoofed like that. (The same is even more true for phone numbers.)


Indeed. We really either need email to get decent, user-friendly encryption and verification, or replace email with a new, ubiquitous, decentralized, system that has first class support for encryption.

I have a laundry list of other issues I'd like fixed in email, but I'd be happy just to get end to end encryption and sender verification.


Is it really? Who can read it today? Your email provider and theirs? Gmail won't deliver messages without TLS any more, so everyone supports it or they're effectively kicked out of email.

TLS just encrypts the IMAP / SMTP sessions, no guarantee it’s stored encrypted, let alone end to end

You didn't answer this question:

> Who can read it today?


Well, the email providers. And that could easily include Google without you even realising.

It's true that email isn't quite as insecure as it used to be (it was once compared to shouting your message at someone and expecting them to shout it in the right direction until it reached the intended recipient), but there are still many things missing compared to other forms of direct messaging, and there's good reason why many people and organisations don't want it used to send sensitive information.


For things like financial records, I would not want plain PDF in the email. I think it needs encryption for confidentiality.

I am geeky enough to use PGP or S/MIME if they had the option, but I can definitely see how vendors would see this as too fringe with retail customers. I would not like the typical "secure email" which is nothing more than a volatile link back into yet another website.


Hmm, yeah some people feel that plain emails are not secure for sensitive information. As a result, some banks provide a "secure email" box that's usually PITA to use.

It'd be great if there's a unified API for all financial institutes to provide sensitive info (statements, tax forms etc.) and you just need to run a software tool to download them once in a while or when you need it.


I get that, but I don't care.

I want the PDF (or CSV) emailed to me as an attachment because that's the workflow that doesn't suck.

Everything else sucks in one way or another, and much of it is security theater.


Not sure if this is regional or another sign that I'm old.

When I was in elementary school, we were already taught that we ride a bicycle in the street and follow traffic rules. That included things like traveling in the correct lane for the direction we are going and observing stop signs and traffic lights. Also, as we got older, using things like turn lanes just like a motorcycle should do.

We were also taught tp walk it on the sidewalk/crosswalks as a pedestrian when the conditions were too complex for us to safely ride with traffic.

Even ignoring the peril to actual pedestrians, I have seen so many near-accidents in more recent decades from people violating these rules. Riding on sidewalks and/or against traffic flow (wrong side of the road) so that they "come out of nowhere" into traffic, ignoring traffic control lights, etc. Adding the electric speed boosts has just made these reckless things wildly more dangerous.


I'm in the SF Bay Area and see small kids pre-adolescent or barely adolescent riding e-bikes with insane acceleration and speeds. The kind of performance, that in my youth, would come from a 250cc four-cycle motorcycle or 125cc 2-cycle motocross bike. And they are riding with absolutely no sense of traffic rules nor that they themselves are part of the same traffic. It's a really bad combination.

It doesn't matter what tiers there are when parents are negligently providing their kids with these kinds of "toys". I don't know if they are totally ignorant and think "it's just a bicycle" or if they know exactly what it can do and just can't see that their kid isn't ready for the responsibility.


The shorter connections could lead to faster rise times though, right? I.e. less capacitance or inductance interfering with getting the field gate charged up?

And the main loss with switching transistors is in the intermediate switching states where it has less than its "full" resistance.


> The shorter connections could lead to faster rise times though, right?

Not if you replace that length with more capacitors stacked on top of each other.


Hah, yeah.

I've been naively assuming they are now making high quality vias, so that circuit characteristics would be similar in either vertical or horizontal direction.


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