Jerry on PieFed

Just a techie guy running feddit.online to allow people to communicate, make friends and acquaintances. Odd coming from a happy introvert, right? (https://jerry.hear-me.blog/about)

I also own these publicly available applications:
Mastodon: https://hear-me.social/
Alternative Mastodon UI: https://phanpy.hear-me.social/
Peertube: https://my-sunshine.video/
Friendica: https://my-place.social/
Matrix: https://element.secure-channel.net/
XMPP/Jabber: https://between-us.online/
Bluesky PDS: https://blue-ocean.social/ (jerry.blue-ocean.social) Mobilizon (Facebook Events Alt): https://my-group.events/
and more…

  • 20 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2024

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  • My understanding is that while the older Pixel phones had MTE capability, it was off by default and could only be enabled under the dev settings. Google did not enable it by default because Android depends heavily on vendor board support packages, proprietary SOC drivers, and HAL modules. Google felt that driver code quality from 3rd-parties is not clean enough to enable kernel-level MTE without risking bootloops and spontaneous reboots. Even worse for C++ apps, which often read slightly past their allocated memory blocks.

    Instead, Google rewrote critical core Android system daemons using Rust. Like the keystore, Bluetooth stack, DNS resolver, and others. I believe using Rust essentially makes MTE unnecessary.

    Also full synchronous MTE mode has high CPU/memory bus penalties (could be 5-10% under heavy memory loads).

    Google probably decided that since hardly anyone used MTE anyway on earlier Pixel devices, they could use the space in the chip for other uses.

    The point is that the post makes it sound like using a Pixel 11 under Android results in less security than before, but for most people there is no change since they never used MTE anyway.





  • I run an Ubuntu 24.04 desktop with an NVIDIA card, and “flatpak run app.vger.voyager” gives me a white window and the error “Failed to create GBM buffer of size 2400x1600: Invalid argument”

    If you run into the same problem, what worked for me is:
    flatpak run --env=WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 app.vger.voyager

    If you have this same problem and the above command works, you can make the fix permanently with:
    flatpak override --user --env=WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 app.vger.voyager

    Then “flatpak run app.vger.voyager” will work.





  • There are two answers to this depending on what the reason is for asking.

    If you are asking because you are concerned about scrapers reading your posts and violating your privacy and your rights, then understand that even if an instance is 100% effective at blocking them, the post is sent all over the place in clear text anyway. It doesn’t matter for them which of the federated servers your post is read from. They will read your post many times over. For this case, then, there is little incentive for a server owner to block bots if it’s just to protect your posts from ingestion.

    If you are asking because you are concerned about scrapers sucking the life out of a server because there are multiple different AI companies trying to read every single post in the database multiple times over for training, which ends up causing gateway timeout errors and poor performance, then admins, for this reason, should take action.

    On my PieFed server, feddit.online, as of yesterday, the firewall discarded 99K requests it deemed were for AI scraping while processing the remaining 300K requests. Those 99K requests would have been expensive requests, not just upvotes and such, but requests asking for huge amounts of text, and so the impact on the server and infrastructure would have been much more than a 25% tax on the system.

    And if the bots realize your server is not well protected, it gets worse. 3 months ago I peaked at 1.2 million requests in one day, of which over 700K were AI bots. Now it’s down to consistently under 100K from bots because many of them have given up, I like to believe.