The Three Marks

Nibbāna

Annatā

Parsing NIS docs

NIS2 as Markdown

A pile of mastodung

Words have meanings

Exercise

Webserver setup + Git

⠠⠵ The Three Marks (of existence)

Anicca, Dukkha, and Annatā. I'm going to dive into Anicca and Dukkha, but for now I'm going with Anicca meaning "Impermanent", and Dukkha meaning "Unstable".

⠠⠵ Nibbāna

Nibbāna (Sanskrit: निर्वाण), often Nirvana. According to the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia, it probably wasn't used in the sense of "to blow out", but more likely "to extinguish" in the sense of taking away heat, fuel or air.

I’ve found some Interesting takes on the meaning of Nibbāna from a wide range of teachings.

From the Nibbāna Paṭisaṁyutta Sutta 1:

There is, bhikshus, that place where there is
no earth, no water, no fire, no wind;
no base of boundless space;
no base of boundless consciousness;
no base of nothingness;
no base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception;
neither this world nor other worlds;
with neither the moon nor the sun.
Therein, bhikshus, I say, there is
neither coming nor going nor standing;
neither dying nor arising;
neither the established nor the occurring;
nor even this sense-object.

Which is, I currently hypothesize, an awesome way for a meditator in a forest in ancient India to describe the feel of consciousness touching on its quantum superposition mechanics. For more on this, there is a good starter article in Forbes, pdf.

⠠⠵ Anattā

Anattā (Pali: 𑀅𑀦𑀢𑁆𑀢𑀸) or anātman (Sanskrit: अनात्मन्). For all I could find, the "An" part means something like "not", and supposedly Attā means "Self", so Not-Self. I say supposedly, because apparently Attā is more like "Soul", or "Essence", or at least something permanent, eternal, absolute, or unchanging. Not-Self was confusing for me, because I do feel like (I have) a self and although it is a trick my mind plays on itself for practical purposes, it is kinda handy.

So I now take Anattā to mean "I might kid myself that I am in any way constant or unchanging or a beautiful unique undying snowflake soul, but that is neither scientific reality, nor does it help my brain get out of survival mode".

Which is kinda long, so Anattā it is.

⠠⠵ Parsing NIS2 docs

I'm going to use pandoc and Python to parse all of the NIS2 docs correctly. I am still trying to understand why it is I want to do this, but this is how I've always done things: because I'd rather suffer and learn than accept defeat. On the upside, I've learned some absolutely unnecessary stuff over the years. So, to set things up:

    sudo apt install python3.11-venv
    python3 -m venv .venv
    source .venv/bin/activate
    # inside venv
    pip install pypandoc
    pip install requests
    pip install argparse
    pip install beautifulsoup4

⠠⠵ NIS2 as markdown

This is work in progress until I'm done. I've given up on trying to parse the NIS2 Directive (EU) 2022/2555 automatically. It should be doable, so maybe I'll spend some time in the future trying to whip together a Python script so I can do it for all languages. Until then, I have the current state of the English version, and I'll probably try to do the Dutch version too.

⠠⠵ A pile of Mastodung

pdf version

So, TruthSocial. Valued at ... $8bn. Yes, really. And what do people get for that? Well, allow me to show you. You can safely click on the links in this article, everything pointing to truthsocial[.]com is a snapshot on archive.org.

Open Sores

TruthSocial is running on Open Source. They shared the software they use on their website. The Mastodon file called mastodon-current.zip is from 2022-06-08, and the Soapbox called soapbox-current.zip is from 2022-05-13. Alex Gleason (then Head of Engineering) was keen on keeping things up to date. See this leftover page for another great flashback tot 2022!

Fire and Forget

First I had a look at the soapbox-current.zip file TruthSocial provided. Soapbox comes with documentation if you want to read along. In the .zip is a file called instance/soapbox.json with links to /mobile and /beta. It used to be the same online, but has since been removed. All still contain the line: 'copyright: "©2022 TRUTH Social"'. We will see that date turn up everywhere.

A funny aside, both the zipfile and the website contain a file called report.html which is part of soapbox. For an Open Source project it does make sense to have a map of every file of code of Soapbox. But to me it feels somewhat misplaced on a production website supposedly worth $8bn.

I ended up with the feeling TruthSocial's first "Head of Engineering" installed Mastodon, and nobody has done anything but cosmetic changes (and add advertisements!) since. Did I already mention the "Head of Engineering" left? I do wonder If they still have a Head of Engineering. Or even just the digital equivalent of a janitor.

Anyway, let's go dumpster-diving the TruthSocial website.

So transparent you can't see it

First up is the api/v1/instance endpoint. I went through the .zip of mastodon they provided. The code that creates that endpoint seems like a cobbled together app/serializers/rest/instance_serializer.rb, with certain parts from a Mastodon version newer than or equal to 3.4.2.

The exact part which could provide transparency about the number of users (user_count) and number of posts (status_count) has been disappeared since day one. If I was an investor in this dumpster-fire DJT, that's the two most important numbers I'd want to have. Make of that what you will.

def stats
    {
      instance_presenter.user_count,
      instance_presenter.status_count,
      [...]
    }

The original configuration showed it had a limit of 500 characters per post (excuse me: truth), and no support for advertisements yet. The source code shared in the zip also has a maximum of 500 characters and no ads support, so they've made changes since we can't discover looking at the .zip file.

On a throne of rusty cruft

Truth Social's Head of Engineering has a tendency to use old, old software. His current flagship product Soapbox requires a component (Erlang 24) from ... 2021. Luckily it is not End-Of-Life, like some other parts of TruthSocial. But we'll get to that later.

Anyway, Soapbox mentions a "route", instance/beta . The route is there, but there is nothing behind it, resulting in an error which exposes the nginx server/proxy used by TruthSocial: nginx/1.21.6. It shouldn't come as a surprise this version is also pretty old (2022-01-25), a number of versions behind, and coincidentally from around the time TruthSocial was set up.

The about.example page mentioned on the Soapbox docs is still there. So is an example configuration (copyright 2020!).

But this is just the supporting software. The core behind TruthSocial is Mastodon. To find out what is running behind the Soapbox facade, I fiddled a little with the TruthSocial website. Nothing even remotely like hacking, just poking around and posting (truthing) some messages.

First thing I discovered is that if you call an API url with an invalid path, TruthSocial will show an error page with a cute little Mastodon.

Inside the html code of that error page is a reference to a stylesheet.

<link rel="stylesheet" media="all" crossorigin="anonymous" href="/packs/css/common-6632dedd.css" integrity="sha256-aGjPsjGbYVFerGzqX5W/jc1MlRhL7G4+yFgS3DYjvlQ=" />

My curiosity got the better of me, so I grabbed the list of all the old instances and collected the 500.html page of 17316 of them. 50 had the same css file name, but not all were from the 3.4 branch. I have no idea what those four (4) people did to their installs! Anyway, as the table below shows, the 6632dedd version of common-blablabla-.css is most common in the 3.4 branch of mastodon. What is hopefully also apparent is there luckily aren't many 3.4's around anymore.

3.4 Count
3.4.0 4
3.4.1 16
3.4.3 1
3.4.4 9
3.4.6 10
3.4.7 2
>3.4  
3.5.19 2
4.2.7 1
4.2.8 1

What we currently know is that this css file is most common in (if not the default of) the 3.4 branch. What we also know is that, unless the people at TruthSocial bothered to manually change the code that shows the version number after they shared the source code, the Mastodon running on their website is indeed version 3.4.1. You can tell from the"version":"3.4.1 (compatible; TruthSocial 1.0.0)"part, which is created by the code in app/serializers/rest/instance_serializer.rb:

def version
    "#{Mastodon::Version} (compatible; TruthSocial 1.0.0)"
  end

Go fetch to proof

In normal installations of Mastodon version 3.4, when you create a post with a link, there is code that "fetches" the page to create that card view of the website. The official code that does this looks like this:

mastodon-3.4.1/app/services/fetch_link_card_service.rb

Request.new(, @url).add_headers('Accept' => 'text/html', 'User-Agent' => Mastodon::Version.user_agent + ' Bot').perform do |res|

Which returns entries like this:

46.4.156.213 - - [25/Mar/2024:00:46:16 +0100] "GET /truth.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 51 "-" "http.rb/5.1.1 (Mastodon/4.3.0-alpha.3+glitch; +https://infosec.exchange/) Bot"

But for TruthSocial, the app/services/fetch_link_card_service.rb looks like this:

Request.new(, @url).add_headers('Accept' => 'text/html', 'User-Agent' => "#{Mastodon::Version.user_agent} Bot").perform do |res|

Which creates log entries like this:

107.152.38.217 - - [24/Mar/2024:12:02:28 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1379 "-" "http.rb/4.4.1 Bot"
107.152.35.98 - - [24/Mar/2024:12:15:27 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 1379 "-" "http.rb/4.4.1 Bot"
104.192.5.44 - - [24/Mar/2024:12:17:31 +0100] "GET /truth.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 51 "-" "http.rb/4.4.1 Bot"
107.152.38.167 - - [24/Mar/2024:12:39:42 +0100] "GET /truth2.htm HTTP/1.1" 200 51 "-" "http.rb/4.4.1 Bot"
107.152.35.73 - - [24/Mar/2024:12:47:20 +0100] "GET /thruth.htm HTTP/1.1" 404 125 "-" "http.rb/4.4.1 Bot"

Notice that http.rb/4.4.1? It is ancient (2020-03-29) and has long since been replaced. The Mastodon 3.4 branch was the last to use http gem version 4.4:

mastodon-3.4.0/Gemfile:gem 'http', '~> 4.4'
mastodon-3.4.1/Gemfile:gem 'http', '~> 4.4'
mastodon-3.4.7/Gemfile:gem 'http', '~> 4.4'
mastodon-3.4.8/Gemfile:gem 'http', '~> 4.4'
mastodon-3.4.9/Gemfile:gem 'http', '~> 4.4'
mastodon-3.4.10/Gemfile:gem 'http', '~> 4.4'
mastodon-3.5.0/Gemfile:gem 'http', '~> 5.0'

Not sure why they changed this to #{Mastodon::Version.user_agent}, as this "interpolation" with the # sign is not in any of the other 3.4 versions and clearly breaks the User-Agent string. But maybe there are no mistakes, only happy little accidents? The upside of breaking the Mastodon version string in the User-Agent, consciously or not, is people can't immediately see TruthSocial is running on zombie-software.

Security

Below I'm simply listing the security issues for the 3.4 branch. Figuring out if security issues in more recent versions also existed in the v4.3.1 is left as an exercise for the reader. I have not verified or tested whether any of the security issues are patched, because that is shady territory. Please note there are plenty of other parties who are not held back by such considerations.

According to https://endoflife.date/mastodon, support for the 3.4 branch, specifically for version 3.4.10(!), ended 2022-11-06. So TruthSocial runs on software that has been out of support or security fixes for–and I'm working from a best-case scenario here– one year and a couple of months. Version 3.4.1 was released 2021-06-03.

v3.4.9

v3.4.8

v3.4.7

v3.4.6

v3.4.4

v3.4.2

Treasures from the dumpster-fire

Thank you for reading this far, and as a reward, here are two things I found google-dorking.

Tankie Trump

Ads Best Practices & Buyer Roadmap (CONFIDENTIAL, FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY, TMTG, ©2023)

I also found ocr/lang-data/eng.traineddata.gz, which is available without authentication, If you'd like to cause about 11MB of gratuitous bandwith cost.

⠠⠵ Words have meanings, but meanings change

I'm slowly working my way through a number of Pali words/concepts related to buddhism. Basic things, like nibbāna, Saṃsāra and such. I don't think these words were meant to mean what generations of people have been making them to mean. So, I'm just going to add to the confusion, and work my way through them, trying to make them make sense to me and my meditation experience.

⠠⠵ Exercise

I set the countdown timer to 15 minutes. The exercise is a Navy SEAL burpee, but when I come up, I do it from an airsquad, and I add two extra air squads, for a total of 99 pushup and 99 airsquad movements. I'm working harder/faster at the beginning, and I end it with a plank exercise for more core strength.

x  = one Navy SEAL burpee combo
-- = one minute plank exercise

|15 |14 |13 |12 |11 |10 |9  |8  |7  |6  |5  |4  |3  |2  |1  |0
 xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xx  xx  xx  xx  xx  xx  xx  xx  xx  --

⠠⠵ Webserver setup + git

I've created a git + hooks + webservice setup so I can edit from anywhere with an editor and access to git, using a howto called A web-focused Git workflow by Joe Maller. I needed to configure some global settings in the Main git to prevent is from yelling about merge handling, but that was it.