Re: [9front] Enabling a service

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

On Tue, May 07, 2024 at 04:16:05PM -0700, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> And yet, the FQA recommends laptops.  

Laptops work great diskless.  We recommend them because they're readily
available and cheap, not because we're implying a fucking deployment
scenario involving mass transit.

> As for "half-assed network services", I assume that means security 
> concerns; ok so not enough faith in how secure the services are by 
> default (well that ought to be fixable eventually?), and not enough 
> faith in users not to realize that they should try experiments on a 
> local LAN before connecting the services to the Internet (which 
> usually involves some router work anyway, assuming the machine is 
> behind one)?  People who take excessive risks are mainly risking 
> their own files; they should know better, but they probably aren’t 
> going to have a lot of files on Plan 9 anyway.  What’s the worst 
> risk besides data theft?  A mail server getting used as a spam 
> relay or something like that?  I agree that setting up a mail server 
> should be more effort.

I have NO faith in users WHATSOEVER.  If users were worth having faith
in, my entire job category would not exist.  And a popped box anywhere
is a hazard everywhere.  It doesn't matter whether you set it up as a
mail service; it will become one despite your wishes shortly after
whoever breaks into it feels it worthwhile.  This "I'm only risking my
computer" shit went out the window in the 1980s.  Anyone who thinks that
hasn't been on the wrong end of a DDoS. 

And as for faith in the services:  there is no software that is so good
it is secure in the hands of an incompetent.

> But I have to learn enough about security before even trying, it seems.

Not just you.  I don't want people putting 9front systems online without
understanding them.  If that means you never get around to putting
9front systems online, it is no great loss, to you or anyone else.  The
barriers to what you want to do are extremely low, and instead of
learning to overcome them you are asking other people to change the
default installation of the entire distribution.  This is the kind of
shit that leads to "do not eat" warnings on silica packets.

Meanwhile, we start lowering the bar, and we get people in here mad that
their 9front doesn't act exactly like their ubuntu, or mad that someone
put a 9front on their hypervisor and it started bogarting cycles from
the other clients with the furious rate it was posting dick pill
advertisements on similarly low-barrier Wordpress installations someone
installed and forgot about.  

I just don't think "do it for me" is the clientele we should be pursuing
at this time.  That's Cloudron's target market.

khm