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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • The Security Online article only cites Margitelli’s post on the matter. My assumption has been the article used the post as its single source. On one hand, watching MS fuck shit up for years, I want to believe Margitelli. On the other hand, researchers using weird tools and uninterested in reality are why curl is now a CNA.

    I’m personally frustrated with Margitelli’s post because it’s all about abandoning responsible disclosure globally rather than naming and shaming (Canonical? Red Hat? Both? Others? If it affects all GNU/Linux I’d expect every single distro maintainer to be named and shamed). Responsible disclosure is our best solution to make sure innocent bystanders don’t get caught in the crossfire. When specific entities don’t abide by responsible disclosure we lambast those specific entities not the entire process built to keep users safe.




  • thesmokingman@programming.devtoProgramming@programming.devSafe C++
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    20 days ago

    Right now, we have to compile the compiler for this ourselves. Pardon my skepticism; I’m not sure this is mature enough.

    Edit: I’m talking about the project not the idea. Sean Baxter has shown up everywhere for awhile talking about this. I think his idea has a ton of maturity. I don’t know that the project itself has enough maturity to mainline yet.



  • I have heard the same rhetoric about IDEs, autocomplete (Intellisense, Jedi, etc.), DevOps, and frameworks. The kernel of truth across all of them is the separation between a dev and good dev. It is getting easier and easier to have something built for you using AI in your IDE in a framework that abstracts all the things away dumped into a prebuilt pipeline that deploys your artifacts for you. A dev can do that. A good dev understands the tools and knows when to dig into things.

    I have yet to see a decrease in the number of good devs I meet even though IDEs slowly replaced text editors (and editors became strong enough to become IDEs). Frameworks have enabled more good devs to focus on business logic. DevOps provides solid guard rails for everything.

    I don’t know if there’s an increase in the number of superficial devs. I haven’t interviewed junior dev candidates in awhile. I do know the market is flooded right now so I’d argue there might be other factors.

    Also overall I do agree with the idea that letting copilot do everything for you means you don’t understand anything. Shit was the same way when cookbooks were common.



  • The most frustrating thing about this article is that it completely ignores that good movies targeted at kids still have to be good. Personal complaints aside, the new Mario movie was reasonably good for adults and great for kids. Pixar keeps churning out things that are fantastic on many levels. Bluey is an amazing show that can resonate with kids and parents. I don’t for a minute buy the elitist bullshit of “well you’re not a kid so you can’t comment.” Muppet Treasure Island holds the fuck up as an adult so this writer can fuck right off.



  • I mean anything is a good fit for future, science fiction AI if we imagine hard enough.

    What you describe as “blatant malicious code” is probably only things like very specific C&C domains or instruction sets. We already have very efficient string matching tools for those, though, and they don’t burn power at an atrocious rate.

    You’ve given us an example so PoC||GTFO. Major code AI tools like Copilot struggle to explain test files with a variety of styles, skips, and comments, so I think you have your work cut out for you.



  • There are competing interests here: normal consumers and script kiddies. If I build an API that follows good design, RFCs, pretty specs, all of that, my normal users have a very good time. Since script kiddies brute force off examples from those areas, so do they. If I return 200s for everything without a response body unless authenticated and doing something legit, I can defeat a huge majority of script kiddies (really leaving denial of service). When I worked in video games and healthcare, this was a very good idea to do because an educated API consumer and a sufficiently advanced attacker both have no trouble while the very small amount of gate keeping locks out a ton of annoying traffic. Outside of these high traffic domains, normal design is usually fine unless you catch someone’s attention.




  • Let’s assume you’re arguing in good faith here so we can understand why land deeds and URLs are completely different.

    Deeds are managed by a central authority. There is an agreed-upon way(s) to view and search those deeds. There is a single authority to update or remove deeds. The items the deed refers to also are controlled by a single authority and changing them has a single process.

    URLs are registered (loosely) with a central authority but the similarities end there. I can impersonate a URL on a network (even up to large chunks of the internet if I’m able to confuse DNS in a large enough attack). So just because you’ve bought the domain referenced in the blockchain and set up some name servers doesn’t mean any consumer of the blockchain or even the internet is guaranteed to hit your instance of the domain. All a URL is is a reference to something so let’s assume for a minute we can have a global reference. What’s behind it? Again, completely uncontrolled. For now it could be your NFT; what happens if I am your hosting provider and destroy your instance? Move your hardware? What’s to prevent you, the owner of the assumed global reference, to change what that uniform resource locator is actually locating?

    Land deeds and URLs are not analogous. Land and the content served at a URL are not analogous. Let’s look at NFTs quickly to see if we can actually do something about this!

    Since we have a single-write, read-only database, why not store the full thing in the DB? Well, first you have to agree on a representation. It has to be unchanging so we can’t use a URL. It can’t ever duplicate so realistically hashing is out (unless our hash provides a bijection which is just a fancy way of saying use the fucking object itself). Assuming we’re only talking about digital artifacts (attempting to digitize a physical asset is a form of hashing meaning we get collisions so you can’t prove ownership), we’re now in an arms race for you to register all of your assets and their serialization methods before I brute force everything. Oh and this needs to live everywhere so it can be public so you need peta-many petabyte drives. But wait! Now we’re burning the sun in power just to show you have ownership of 10 and I have ownership of 01. Fuck me that’s dumb.



  • There is literally no way to opt out of Google’s data collection if you are going to use their products. Using another frontend shifts the data profile but it still exists and provides value to them. It’s reasonable to say it’s a bad thing. It’s unreasonable to say there are no other ways. I grew up in a public library and I can still get most of the information I need from a public library without Google products (things I can’t get usually come through inter-library loan or direct connections with subject matter experts at, say, a maker space). This seems to be less of “I’m against invasive corporations” and more of a “I don’t like the solutions available to avoid invasive corporations.”