Arghblarg
-credit to nedroid for strange art
It does now, yeah. I started this project, AFAIK, before that was a thing (developement began circa Jan 2018). It was inspired by my frustration with experiments at extending openssh itself, at that time, to support new algorithms; despite having many years of experience in C and Linux/POSIX, the C codebase was, to me at least, obtuse due to its long history – so much so that I hit a wall in my efforts.
At the time I was learning Go, and given its very nice string/buffer handling with better bounds-checking and enforcement, plus very good crypto libraries and interfaces for easy addition of new algorithms, it occurred to me that it might be easier (and more fun!) to take a crack at my own remote shell implementation. Don’t get me wrong – I love (OK, love/hate) C, and have made my career in it, but Go in many ways is just a much nicer language in which to code, esp. security-related stuff.
I found the concept of another potential tool to fulfill the same ‘niche’ as ssh compelling; enough so to motivate me to write it. A monoculture is dangerous, IMHO – it’s a single point of attack/failure if everyone, everywhere, uses a single tool/protocol for a common task.
Another goal was to build into the protocol defenses against traffic analysis, via ‘chaffing’. The protocol supports sending bogus random data amongst the real session data in order to impede efforts to analyse the stream, whether interactive shell activity or file transfers.
On the wiki page there’s a link to the SLOC of this project, which demonstrates that xs is a lot less code to understand than openssh. Complexity is an enemy of security, so my thinking was/is that a smaller codebase would be a good thing …
My honest wish is that others would consider doing audits on the code and protocol, and suggest improvements. It’s definitely experimental, but useful enough that I use it as my remote access solution instead of ssh 99% of the time for my own servers.
Look into building a Linux or Windows (or Android TV box) ‘Kodi’ media server. Add a cheap external HDD to it and you’re good to go. Insofar as content …
My knowledge here may be out of date, but at one time Canada’s copyright laws were very different from the USA. We as Canadians did (and may still) pay taxes earmarked for compensating all copyright holders; it was at one point totally legal to download anything, it just wasn’t technically legal to upload that same content for others to download. A weird situation, but maybe the DMCA’s been extended since via treaties to make that illegal even in Canada now.
At least for the 1990s through the early-to-mid 20x0s, Canadians have always paid a copyright levy on any blank media (CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, hard drives and USB keys) that could conceivably be used to store copyrighted content. The media companies did their best to hide this from Canadians, but in effect, every Canadian was already paying SOCAN, ASCAP/BMI, Hollywood etc. for copyrighted content even if they never stored such content on their purchased storage media such as blank discs, hard drives or USB keys!
As for ‘torrent’ and ‘magnet’ files, broadband providers in Canada must forward DMCA notices to downloaders if the copyright holders send them, but last time I checked these notices were basically toothless in Canada, and nothing more than scare tactics.
Disclaimer: IANALNDIPOOTV (I Am Not A Lawyer, Nor Do I Play One On TV). Not legal advice. Sales Taxes Apply Where Required. Some Assembly Required. Contents May Settle During Shipping.
Appreciated if you do! It’s certainly still rough around the edges… if you have feedback please feel free to let me know. Be sure to read the notes on the main project page about file transfers though, it’s a bit different in the way it does file transfers, as it relies on ‘tarpipes’ under the hood.
Search for !gmecanada@lemmy.ca in your community Search and subscribe – let’s link new subscommunities across the lemmy-verse!
Awesome. I wish lemmy-verse had a bot API so we could port NFTbot. (Maybe there is? Need to research)
That would make a great t-shirt.
(and congrats on escaping reddit)
