echohack echohack

My Stripe Tax Story

I've been debating for weeks whether or not I was going to write any of this down. I'm a dad with two kids and a house to take care of and a business to run. Adding story-telling like this to my plate is exhausting.

Until yesterday, I had decided to forget about the whole thing, until I received the email that broke the camels back, as it were.

The best way I can describe why I'm writing this email is for the same reason why you might spend two hours dealing with an uncooperative mobile phone carrier to get them to remove that $5 charge on your bill that shouldn't be there. Some combination of the feeling of frustration and injustice that really pushes my proverbial buttons.

In this particular case, the "$5 charge on my phone bill" turned out to be literally hundreds of recurring subscription invoices that Stripe disabled collection for because, apparently, those subscriptions required "location inputs".

Generally speaking, I don't blog much anymore, and the last thing I wa

Learn Go in ~5mins

This is inspired by A half-hour to learn Rust and Zig in 30 minutes.

Basics

Your first Go program as a classical "Hello World" is pretty simple:

First we create a workspace for our project:

Exporting your 2FA tokens from Authy to transfer them into another 2FA application

IMPORTANT - Update regarding deprecation of Authy desktop apps

Past August 2024, Authy stopped supported the desktop version of their apps:
See Authy is shutting down its desktop app | The 2FA app Authy will only be available on Android and iOS starting in August for details.

And indeed, after a while, Authy changed something in their backend which now prevents the old desktop app from logging in. If you are already logged in, then you are in luck, and you can follow the instructions below to export your tokens.

If you are not logged in anymore, but can find a backup of the necessary files, then restore those files, and re-install Authy 2.2.3 following the instructions below, and it should work as expected.

ABOUT

about:config settings to harden the Firefox browser. Privacy and performance enhancements.
To change these settings type 'about:config' in the url bar. Then search the setting you would like to change and modify the value. Some settings may break certain websites from functioning and rendering normally. Some settings may also make firefox unstable. I am not liable for any damages/loss of data.

Not all these changes are necessary and will be dependent upon your usage and hardware. Do some research on settings if you don't understand what they do. These settings are best combined with your standard privacy extensions (~~HTTPS Everywhere~~ No longer required: Enable HTTPS-Only Mode, NoScript/Request Policy, uBlock origin, agent spoofing, ~~Privacy Badger~~ etc), and all plugins set to "Ask To Activate".

	#cloud-config

	# Enable automatic package updates and upgrades during cloud-init execution
	package_update: true
	package_upgrade: true

	packages:
	# Security and Hardening
	- ufw
	- fail2ban

	Mute these words in your settings here: https://twitter.com/settings/muted_keywords

	ActivityTweet
	generic_activity_highlights
	generic_activity_momentsbreaking
	RankedOrganicTweet
	suggest_activity
	suggest_activity_feed
	suggest_activity_highlights
	suggest_activity_tweet

	# Our .tmux.conf file

	# Setting the prefix from C-b to C-a
	# START:prefix
	set -g prefix C-a
	# END:prefix
	# Free the original Ctrl-b prefix keybinding
	# START:unbind
	unbind C-b
	# END:unbind

	# Run this from Powershell as Administrator with (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString("https://gist.github.com/damieng/881852e7112be7d97957/raw") \| powershell -command -
	Write-Output "Making Windows more developer oriented (Revision 26)..."
	Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

	if ([System.Environment]::OSVersion.Version.Major -ge 10) {
	Write-Output " * Detected Windows 10"

	Write-Output " * Removing Windows 10 bloatware"
	$apps = @(
	"Microsoft.3DBuilder"

	# Recurse into all subdirectories of the working directory.
	# Converts all flac into mp3 using ffmpeg
	find . -type f -name "*.flac" -print0 \| while read -d $'\0' a; do < /dev/null ffmpeg -i "$a" -qscale:a 0 "${a[@]/%flac/mp3}"
	done

	ohessten% security find-certificate -a /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychainc >osx_system_roots.pem
	ohessten% /path/to/homebrew/bin/openssl s_client -CAfile osx_system_roots.pem -verify 5 -connect sketchy.example.org:443