Johnathan Corgan

FIPS v0.5.3 released, bug fixes and security hardening

GM ☕

I love the smell of freedom packets in the morning!

GM ☕

A full night's sleep is underrated. But why do I still need coffee?

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The other day I had to send a FAX, play voicemail phone tag, and deal with correspondence by postal mail.

Ah, to be young again 😏

GM ☕

It is a thoroughly satisfying feeling seeing the FIPS mesh networking software enable so many different use cases, especially ones I would never have thought of in the first place.

But it's not without a bit of anxiety--real world usage means real world consequences of screwing up. I put a lot of effort into specification, review, adversarial testing, and documentation, but that of course isn't always enough. Your bug reports, feature requests, and code contributions are the kind of "closed loop" feedback needed to keep things on track.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for deploying FIPS and helping make it better.

https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips-initramfs/releases/tag/v0.1.1

Bug fix release. Thanks

for the report and testing.

I was supposedly retired from open source but something happened.

Fallacies of distributed computing:

The network is reliable. Latency is zero. Bandwidth is infinite. The network is secure. Topology doesn't change. There is one administrator. Transport cost is zero. The network is homogeneous.

• L. Peter Deutsch, Sun Microsystems, 1994.

Learning Chinese geography, one distillery at a time.

https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips-initramfs/releases/tag/v0.1.0

fips-initramfs 0.1.0 is out.

Unlock a LUKS-encrypted server over a FIPS mesh, from anywhere. No static IP, no port forwarding, no inbound reachability at all. The machine dials out to its peers during early boot and comes up at the same mesh address every time. You record that address once at install, then unlock with a single ssh command.

Console passphrase entry always still works, so a failure leaves you at the normal prompt instead of stranded.

Tested end to end on Debian 12 and 13 and Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 and 26.04: real encrypted machines, booted and unlocked over a live mesh.

MIT licensed, .deb for amd64:

https://github.com/jmcorgan/fips-initramfs/releases/latest

#fips #linux #luks

The experience of Sovereign Engineering is transformative. It goes way beyond just "hacking on freedom tech". The combination of people, location, philosophy, and shared values is unlike anything I have been through before.

FIPS v0.5.0 released

running whitenoise

GM ☕

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

• Unknown maintainer, after his fifth unsolicited LLM security review

(Builders welcome)

GM ☕️

GM ☕ https://blossom.primal.net/176d59c4bc3c480bd2dbb0f7ef9d9cc03018f62dd7e5968d601244bff1efc2b4.png

GM 🍺 https://blossom.primal.net/d30b007bee43e6fdfa2edff479c1e87f402a4828abcbc1f0cb30d0461ce61a67.png

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GM ☕️🇪🇸🛫➡️🛬🇵🇹😎

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In spite of the somber mood surrounding recent events, I'm pretty excited to be traveling this week to join the second half of

eighth cohort. I have found my tribe again 😀

I kind of feel sorry for anyone who in their natural speech end up using one of the many Claude LLM verbal tics (load-bearing, belt-and-suspenders, worth sitting with, etc.)

It's quite amusing to have Claude pass judgement on code it wrote itself. I've taken to a workflow where after every step of a development plan, it immediately switches roles to a crusty old graybeard (ahem) and critiques the code and sends it back for improvement.

GM ☕

The recent news on EU chat control is unsurprising.

This is why we Nostr. This is why we Bitcoin. This is why we FIPS.

Don't fight the politicians; make them irrelevant.

FIPS 0.4.0 is out. Thanks everyone for contributions, testing, and especially stress testing the public mesh!

Dark mode is what separates us from the animals.

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. - Isaac Asimov

Source code is the new machine code.

Interesting to look at sometimes, out of curiosity, but something the c̶o̶m̶p̶i̶l̶e̶r̶ agent usually handles.

GM ☕

One door closes, another opens.

Everything changes. One season flows into the next, a year becomes another, the face in the mirror grows older and perhaps wiser, though we wonder who that stranger is.

And yet we persist. The same thread that ties back to memories of a world that no longer exists binds us to a future that is still ours to shape.

Carry on.

🎶 We've Only Just Begun 🎶

#FipsUserNotAffected

GM ☕

It's time to FIPS and send datagrams from npub to npub.

An idle GPU is a crime.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

GM ☕ https://blossom.primal.net/ddc38bf4e73d0b1d44e5569871417ee32ab4fb5f277426c70f7f6eec67e750e1.jpg

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What would you do, if you could just do things?

Post FIPS release therapy. https://blossom.primal.net/5b147d5d9661c85c838a56a5395afa4ae74c755bde32424645bd2a82ebcb9421.jpg

This was an intense couple of months, thanks everyone involved!

GM ☕ Claude code has been great to clear a huge backlog of technical debt in local devops and IT stuff. It has also been great at creating a whole new backlog of local devops and IT technical debt 😏

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GM ☕️ Three weeks on an island hacking on FIPS. So happy to be home so I can go back to hacking on FIPS.

GM ☕ 🇵🇹 🛫

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The FIPS public test mesh grew to 150 live nodes this week.

GM ☕️ to all my mesh buddies. I know that whoever and wherever you are, you’re just an npub away.

Engineering solutions to problems is mostly about assembling existing pieces into a new whole, more so than inventing a new wheel.

FIPS combines known, battle tested concepts going back decades in the fields of networking, cryptography, distributed computing, resilient communications, and operating systems, with full credit to those who came before.

GM ☕️

GM ☕

Mesh happens.

GM ☕ Turns out you can just

things.

🛩️🇵🇹 #39

The kids are alright.

GM 🤎 ✈️

GM ☕ I've learned way too much about Bluetooth in the last week, but FIPS nodes can now auto-discover each other and peer over BLE to create or join a FIPS mesh network. No IP needed 😏

Sometimes, all you can be is one of those small, newfangled, warm-blooded mammals just staying out of the way of those giant dinosaurs fighting among themselves until the meteor arrives.

GM ☕ It's good to be back working on open source after so many years away.