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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • The alert seems to indicate a compromised account, this can mean a lot more than “a bad IP”. Your account may have shown up in a “dump” and they took action to ensure your safety. Have you tried putting your email address into HaveIBeenPwned. While the normal recommendation would be to not put your email address in a random web form, this site is actually run by a well known security researcher and just lets you know if you have shown up in such a dump in the past.

    Another possibility would be that they have seen a major change in your IP geolocation in a short time. This is referred to as “improbable travel” and it’s something which many security departments take action on. If you login from an IP address which is associated with Paris, France and then an hour later are logging in from Dubai, UAE, this is going to be flagged. Sure, you might travel between those two locations, but you ain’t doing it in an hour. So, your account gets flagged as possibly compromised.

    even if it were a VPN, so what, your company literally runs a VPN

    Right, but they may not know that you are using another VPN. So, continuing the issue above of “improbably travel”. If you are on Proton’s VPN, they know all of their exit IP address and likely take them into account. But, if you are using a different company’s VPN, Proton likely doesn’t know all of that company’s exit IP addresses and so can’t account for them. Consider the situation from their perspective:

    1. You are using some other VPN and they force you to do a password reset.
    • Outcome - you’re a bit annoyed, but ultimately your mail account is safe.
    1. Some attacker has your password and tried to use it to access your mailbox, but Proton stopped the login and forced a password reset.
    • Outcome - you are a bit annoyed, but your mail account is safe.
    1. Some attacker has your password and tried to use it to access your mailbox, and Proton let them in.
    • Outcome - You get wrecked and are really unhappy.

    No matter what, Proton is going to lose out a bit to you being unhappy. However, if they force the password reset, the worst case is you being slightly annoyed about a password reset. By not taking action, they risk your account being fully compromised, which can be very, very bad for you. So, they are likely to be more proactive in forcing a password reset than you might like. This will be especially true if you do not have any sort of two-factor authentication setup. If the whole game is lost by one password being lost, any whiff of that password being compromised will result in a password reset.

    Ultimately, it is am annoyance but one which is actually positive for you. They take your email security seriously enough that, when their system detected something, they took action to keep you safe.



  • Fun fact, in some countries the 3.5" floppies were called “stiffy disks”. You know, because the outer casing was “stiff” as opposed to the floppy 5.25" disks. This discovery led to a lot of chuckling among the team I worked with when we opened a new product from one of those countries and read the manual. The instruction to “insert stiffy disk” still leads most of us to chuckling today.


  • ever had to worry whether you’d parked your hard drive’s heads before moving it, child…?

    Yes, also you parked it before shutting down the system every time. Once the hard drive was powered down, the heads would just crash into the platters. While not instantly fatal, it wasn’t good for the drive. So, you’d park the drive before flipping the power switch.





  • Yeah… you’re gonna run out of road with that, eventually.

    It’s called runway, and as long as the VC money keeps rolling in, you cam keep extending it. Once the VC money starts to dry up you either accept a buyout offer from one of the big players in the space; or, you declare bankruptcy, loot the company for as much money as possible and start writing the next pitch to the VC firms. They don’t care how badly you bungled this one, so long as you make a good sounding case for “The Next Big Thing”. (see: Theranos 2.0)



  • Yes, though depending on the media you are running the OS and game from, the performance could be worse than you would expect from an install on the main system media. For example, when I was testing moving over, I had Arch installed on a USB device and had some issues with I/O bandwidth. But, I also had a folder on my main storage drive to run Steam games from and this performed OK. It was formatted NTFS; so, there were some other oddities. But, it worked just fine and managed to convince me that I’d do OK under Linux. Took the plunge and I’ve been happy with the decision ever since.




  • Part of the mythology of Jesus is that he got better. So, the cross became a symbol of his sacrifice and suffering for the followers of his religion. It’s a constant reminder of “look what you made Jehovah do by being an evil sinner.” It is also a concise icon which can be used to identify the members of the religion. And, it’s been in use for a long time now and is well recognized as a Christian religious symbol, with the original usage of crosses as torture and execution devices being mostly ignored. Perhaps back 1500 to 2000 years ago, such confusion may have made sense. These days, it’s so far removed from that context that such confusion is usually a matter of being willfully obtuse.