Popper's Paradox

Popper’s paradox:

The paradox of tolerance was described by Karl Popper in 1945. The paradox states that if a society is tolerant without limit, their ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Popper came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.

I learned this one as part of a post about Alex Jones on Daring Fireball. It’s never been more relevant in my lifetime than now. With the cheeto-coloured American president and his ever-more-brave band of harpies causing just … tragedy across the globe.

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OpenSSL CA Trust Weirdness

I’ve been having problems since I installed my own build of OpenSSL - I wanted to be able to use SSL2/3 for testing and some weird ciphers, and the build on Ubuntu wasn’t playing nice. wget and ansible have been giving me grief about SSL trust, and I finally got annoyed enough to sort it out.

I knew wget --ca-certificate=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificate.crt https://yaleman.org worked, so it wasn’t the certificate store itself.

Searching the internet for “wget ssl trust” or “openssl ca trust” is just a waste of time - you might as well search for “cat pictures”.

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Splunk search head peering authentication issues

I was running up a new set of clustered search heads the other day and ran into some issues with one of the nodes talking to the indexer which stored the data.

Unable to distribute to peer named INDEXER.example.com at uri=INDEXER.example.com:8089 using the uri-scheme=https because peer has status="Down".

I proved that I could telnet from the search head to the index server on 8089 and could connect successfully, also searches at the same time from other nodes work fine, so it wasn’t actually a connectivity issue. 🤔

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This is why

… we should all support funding community broadcast organisations.

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Ubuntu 18 and Docker DNS

So I’ve reinstalled linux on my laptop and am running Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS - Kali was OK, but there was a lot of cruft and one of the more “desktop” distributions seemed more inviting. No, not Arch.

I ran into an issue today however, with DNS resolution failing in my docker containers because of how systemd messes with /etc/resolv.conf. It sets a 127.0.0.53 address, which is systemd-resolved, screwing with docker’s init scripts.

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School Camp Valentines

My mum and dad were cleaning out some stuff and in the boxes of my junk I found this… a weird shared valentine’s day card from a school camp I went to.

Valentines Card Front

Valentines Card Inside (Click to zoom in)

All I can remember of that camp was the following:

  • rope courses which were altogether too easy
  • an overzealous fake basketball dunk on some guttering that mysteriously fell off a few minutes later… :)
  • a very strange end-of-camp talent show
  • tents, but no shenanigans (well, on my part… it seems I missed out on poker)

A lot of these people have been lost to the mists of time, but it was entertaining to read.

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