In theory it is safe. When a Nix package is built it isn’t “installed”. Unless root is running/installing random packages out of the Nix store there is no problem. As long as the user’s aren’t added to the trusted-users option they shouldn’t be able to cause any problems for other users.

However like any multi-user system you are sharing a Linux kernel. A kernel is a very complex piece of software with a huge attack surface. Privileged escalation vulnerabilities are commonly found. (This also applies to the nix-daemon, but it is a bit smaller attack surface but vulnerabilities are still occasionally found.) So you shouldn’t assume strong security isolation. I would say that a setup like this is acceptable for mostly-trusted people like coworkers or friends that are not expected to actively exploit vulnerabilities but definitely wouldn’t let random unknown users use the system.

So if you want strong isolation use a VM or separate hardware, but then you won’t be able to share the builds and packages defeating the point in this case.

I understand that this is frustrating but it is arguably the right option. If the correct owner can recover the account without TOTP then the TOTP isn’t really protecting the account.

Of course there are various ways to authenticate and it can make sense to have authentication to be (username + password + OTP) OR (email verification) but for a lot of people that email verification is a weaker link. It is more secure to only allow the former.

What I wish is that more sites would document their account recovery procedure. Often times they ask for a phone number for verification or notifications and that silently becomes a backdoor into the account. Even better would be if users can select what authentication combos are supported on a per-account basis (there are a few companies with “lockdown” settings that are a simplified version of this).

Of course it then becomes important to make it clear to the user “if you ever loose you X your account is forever lost”. It shouldn’t be surprise.

No, the DRM wouldn’t work at higher levels so you would have the same requirements with regard to 4k.

Please be civil and polite. This type of aggressive comment insulting people because of the tools that they use isn’t welcome here.

Please be polite. If you don’t like a post you can downvote it. If you would like to comment please be more civil.

I’m also not familiar. But my understanding is that the package maintainers should prevent this situation. Because otherwise even if there are package version dependencies (I don’t actually know if pacman does this) it would just block the update which results in a partial update which isn’t supported. For example if your theoretical unmaintained Firefox blocks the update of libssl but Python requires new functionality you would be stuck in dependency hell. Leaving this problem to the users just makes this problem worse. So the package maintainers need to sort something out.

It is a huge pain when it happens but tends to be pretty rare in practice. Typically they can just wait for software to update or ship a small patch to fix it. But in the worst case you need to maintain two versions of the common dependency. In lots of distros very common dependencies tend to get different packages for different major version for this reason. For example libfoo1 and libfoo2. Then there can be a period where both are supported while packages slowly move from one to the other.

IF no dependency tries to update too. Off course in that case I would stop. Without pacman -Sy, I never do that anyway, only -Syu.

That’s all you need to know. As long as you always use pacman -Syu you will be fine. pacman -Sy is the real problem. The wiki page is pretty clear about the sequences of commands that are problematic https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported.

Right? What i don’t understand is, when I uninstall with pacman -Rs firefox, delete the cached firefox package (only that file), then the system is in the same state as before I installed it. Then -S firefox should be okay, right? And it even looks up the new version.

This isn’t correct. It won’t look up the new version. Assuming that the system was in a consistent state it will download the exact same package that you deleted. The system only ever “updates” when you run pacman -Sy. Until you use -y all packages are effectively pinned at a specific version. If the version that gets installed is different than the one you removed it probably means that you were breaking the partial update rule previously.

But that is my point. Just running pacman -S firefox is fine as long as you didn’t run pacman -Sy at some point earlier. It won’t update anything, even dependencies. It will just install the version that matches your current package list and system including the right version of any dependencies if they aren’t already installed.

But that means if you already have Firefox installed it will do nothing.

I think you are a little confused at the problem here. The issue is that partial updates are not supported. The reason for this is very simple, Arch ensures that any given package list works on its own, but not that packages from different versions of the package list work together. So if Firefox depends on libssl the new Firefox package may depend on a new libssl function. If you install that version of Firefox without updating libssl it will cause problems.

There is no way around this limitation. If you install that new Firefox without he new libssl you will have problems. No matter how you try to rules lawyer it. Now 99% of the time this works. Typically packages don’t depend on new library functions right away. But sometimes they do, and that is why as a rule this is unsupported. You are welcome to try it, but if it breaks don’t complain to the devs, they never promised it would work. But this isn’t some policy where you can find a loophole. It is a technical limitation. If you manage to find a loophole people aren’t going to say “oh, that should work, let’s fix it” it will break and you will be on your own to fix it.

Focusing on your commands. The thing is that pacman -S firefox is always fine on its own. If Firefox is already installed it will do nothing, if it isn’t it will install the version from the current package list. Both of those operations are supported. Also pacman -Rs firefox && pacman -S firefox is really no different than just pacman -S firefox (other than potentially causing problems if the package can’t be allowed to be removed due to dependencies). So your command isn’t accomplishing anything even if it did somehow magically work around the rules.

What is really the problem is pacman -Sy. This command updates the package list without actually updating any packages. This will enter you system into a precarious state where any new package installed or updated (example our pacman -S firefox command form earlier) will be a version that is mismatched with the rest of your system. This is unsupported and will occasionally cause problems. Generally speaking you shouldn’t run pacman -Sy, any time you are using -Sy you should also be passing -u. This ensures that the package list and your installed packages are updated together.

Of course nixpkgs has it. It was added a few years ago, I can’t vouch for if it is up to date or still working.

But your case is wrong anyways because i <= INT_MAX will always be true, by definition. By your argument < is actually better because it is consistent from < 0 to iterate 0 times to < INT_MAX to iterate the maximum number of times. INT_MAX + 1 is the problem, not < which is the standard to write for loops and the standard for a reason.

Actually I would pick GIMP.

1. Says what it is, an image editor.
2. No popups and random interruptions.
3. Not only AI editing examples which makes me thing the tool is AI only.
4. An overview of the variety of major features it has rather than just AI editing.
5. Links to helpful documentation rather than endless marketing pages that say nothing.

Really think only thing I would like to see is some screenshots and examples of using the tool, rather than just info on what it does. But the Photoshop page barely has this, just a few examples of the AI tools.

It would be nice if there was a shortcut to go “back to previous site”. Because on one hand using back to navigate around map moves is often very convenient, but sometimes I want to go to the site before the map. Having a two-level history with page and site would be super useful.

This is a case of the streetlight effect. Evaluating the skills needed to do the job is very difficult in an interview setting, so most of the focus going on evaluating skills that are easy to evaluate in an interview (such as people skills).

It isn’t wrong, as all else being equal it is still better to hire the person with better skills that you can measure but obviously is not a strong evaluation of candidate quality.

Closed-source software that sends home tons of information about your system without consent. All communication accessible to a VC funded company that has huge pressure to make as much money as possible.

I’ve been doing this from Firefox forever…

But “with audio” is actually a new feature. Previously I was manually sending the audio through my voice channel which worked pretty well but it would be nice to have a separate stream for the streaming audio.

Probably not enough for me to install the spyware though, I’ll keep using Discord via Firefox.

Yeah, I don’t think there are many benefits when keeping the key on the same drive. Other than a bit of obfuscation. It does still help with erasing, as you can wipe the keyslots (rendering the key useless) but with modern storage media deletion is fairly hard to ensure. But still better than unencrypted.

Only if they gain possession when the device is running with the drive decrypted and they keep it running the whole time. That is a lot higher bar then being able to turn the machine on at any time and then recover the key. For example if this is a laptop that you are flying with. Without auto-decryption you can simply turn it off and be very secure. With auto-decryption they can turn it on then extract the key from memory (not easy, but definitely possible and with auto-decryption they have as long as they need, including sending the device to whatever forensics lab is best equipped to extract the key).

1. Wiping the drive is a lot easier, just overwrite the root key a few times.
2. If you store the key on a different drive you can safely dispose of the drive just by separating the two. (I do on my home server, keeping the decryption key on a USB drive. If I need to ship the server or discard old hardware I can just hold onto the thumb drive and not worry about the data being read.)

Security is always about tradeoffs. On my home server unattended reboots are necessary so it needs to auto-decrypt. But using encryption means I don’t need to worry about discarding broken hardware or if I need to travel with the server were it may be inspected. For my laptop, desktop and phone where I don’t need unattended reboots I require the encryption key on bootup.

Depending on the attacker of course. If they can read your RAM after auto-decrypt they can just take the encryption key.