I love people who say “what is missing from society is support for opposing and dissenting points of view.” I then ask them, “did you schedule your pro-cancer rally this year?” Yeah! Go cancer! Those cells have every right to be unique and different and thrive! 🎉
@shanselman I think my biggest concern now is 'code review now comes with a rousing game of Among Us', but I'm still weighing that concern in a larger context.
Ten years ago today, a new app arrived to strip the "media" out of social media, reducing messaging to two little letters. It burned bright, but not for long.
I recently went through a job search, and I thought it would be good to do a mini retrospective on the whole experience. Overall, it was a better candidate experience than the last time I interviewed so I want to believe that the industry is making progress.
Just did a task that was open since Feb. 20th that will unblock six teammates doing full-time work starting this week. It took 5 minutes 35 seconds to finish. I will, again, learn nothing from this.
I really can only shitpost about the #xv debacle because the whole thing just makes me tired and sad. Anyone paying even a tiny bit of attention to the conversation about open source sustainability could have told you this was inevitable. And now we're watching people blame a volunteer trying to step back, and rehashing all the same old tired arguments we've been having literally for decades. It's just so tired and predicable and boring and sad.
My favorite Ren Faire story:
I knew a guy who kept a Starfleet insignia pinned to the inside of his garb. A few times per season, some folks would come to the Faire cosplaying as a Star Trek landing party, investigating a “primitive” world.
He would take them aside, show his insignia, and identify himself as a Starfleet officer on a cultural research mission. He’d call them out for breaking the Prime Directive and ruining his research. Then he’d demand to know what ship they’re from, and threaten to get them court martialed if they didn’t change into something less conspicuous.
Anyone who thinks commit signing is the answer to malicious actors, at a time when the web of trust has been killed by a lil green verified box, is foolish.
Like sure they verify that someone who can log into a particular GitHub account is the author of a commit, but that… don’t mean shit when the author is malicious 🙃
Originally a thread on Twitter about the xz/liblzma vulnerability, when I finished typing it, I realized I had a real world slice of Open Source interaction that deserved more attention.
You can absolutely push your development cycle to the limit, the fastest programmer with a completely comprehensive suite of tests, sure. Go for it.
You will still be fundamentally hamstrung by not-fit-for-purpose tooling (JIRA), overly bureaucratic release processes, and slow deployment mechanisms.
Yes, be the most efficient developer you can, work in small increments and iterate effectively, but it's just as important to remove systematic issues that hinder you and your team.
hey does anybody out there have any thoughts about the xz compromise or perhaps have you thought of a way to relate it to some axe you have been grinding for 20 years
The clocks went forward an hour in the UK today, which raises an important question: when they go back in October will there be a compensatory Trans Hour Of Visibility?
If you want many eyes on your open source project, you need to get rid of assholes.
Bad community management is a security risk.
Assholes bully sole maintainers.
Assholes gatekeep and keep maintainer numbers low.
Assholes waste time on the mailing list with petty bullshit.
If you fundraise, assholes are bullying your grant writers and community managers.
Some of the best security contributors don't write a single line of code. They yeet assholes.
I've been informed by the 11yo that his mother and I are the target of an antitrust lawsuit joined by at least 15 other children, that we have abused our power to maintain an illegal monopoly in the relevant market of "parenting decisions" specifically for preventing choice and putting in place limits regarding food, videogames, and other media, and have conspired to make it effectively impossible for them to switch to alternative parenting decision providers
My current take on the #xz situation, not having read the actual source backdoor commits yet (thanks a lot #Github for hiding the evidence at this point...) besides reading what others have written about it (cf. https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor for a good timeline):
1. This is going to be an excellent teaching example for advanced supply chain attacks that I will definitely be using in the future - after much more in-depth analysis.
2. It seems to have been a long game, executed with an impressive sequence of steps and preparation, including e.g. disabling OSSFuzz checks for the particular code path and pressuring the original maintainer into accepting the (malicious) contributions.
3. The potential impact could have been massive, and we got incredibly lucky that it was caught and reported (https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4) early. Don't count on such luck in the future.
4. Given the luck involved in this case, we need to assume a number of other, currently unknown supply chain backdoors that were successfully deployed with comparable sophistication and are probably active in the field.
5. Safe(r) languages like #rustlang for such central library dependencies would maybe (really big maybe) have made it a bit harder to push a backdoor like this because - if and only if the safety features are used idiomatically in an open source project - reasonably looking code is (a bit?) more limited in the sneaky behavior it could include. We should still very much use those languages over C/C++ for infrastructure code because the much larger class of unintentional bugs is significantly mitigated, but I believe (without data to back it up) that even such "bugdoor" type changes will be harder to execute. However, given the sophistication in this case, it may not have helped at all. The attacker(s) have shown to be clever enough.
6. Sandboxing library code may have helped - as the attacker(s) explicitly disabled e.g. landlock, that might already have had some impact. We should create better tooling to make it much easier to link to infrastructure libraries in a sandboxed way (although that will have performance implications in many cases).
7. Automatic reproducible builds verification would have mitigated this particular vector of backdoor distribution, and the Debian team seems to be using the reproducibility advances of the last decade to verify/rebuild the build servers. We should build library and infrastructure code in a fully reproducible manner *and* automatically verify it, e.g. with added transparency logs for both source and binary artefacts. In general, it does however not prevent this kind of supply chain attack that directly targets source code at the "leaf" projects in Git commits.
8. Verifying the real-life identity of contributors to open source projects is hard and a difficult trade-off. Something similar to the #Debian #OpenPGP #web-of-trust would potentially have mitigated this style of attack somewhat, but with a different trade-off. We might have to think much harder about trust in individual accounts, and for some projects requiring a link to a real-world country-issued ID document may be the right balance (for others it wouldn't work). That is neither an easy nor a quick path, though. Also note that sophisticated nation state attackers will probably not have a problem procuring "good" fake IDs. It might still raise the bar, though.
9. What happened here seems clearly criminal - at least under my IANAL naive understanding of EU criminal law. There was clear intent to cause harm, and that makes the specific method less important. The legal system should also be able to help in mitigating supply chain attacks; not in preventing them, but in making them more costly if attackers can be tracked down (this is difficult in itself, see point 8) and face risk of punishment after the fact.
H/T @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social @AndresFreundTec@mastodon.social @danderson@hachyderm.io @briankrebs @eloy@hsnl.social
@Gaelan@cathode.church @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk
You see, I saw your response and I *still* clicked anyway.
Social engineering will be the death of me.
This game came by at just the right time. Covid gave me the perfect excuse to play this game for hours on end without feeling guilty, and now I’ve finally achieved 5 stars!
🐶💩⛳️ I binned the bag in 4 throws, rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
https://vole.wtf/dog-poo-golf/
Big fan of oapi-codegen for building openapi specified, contract first Go based APIs, great to see a v2 release reduced module dependencies, and isolated examples in another module! Great pattern to learn and understand. #golang #openapi https://github.com/deepmap/oapi-codegen/releases/tag/v2.0.0
@steve@s.yelvington.com BREAKING: Old white guy tells marginalized groups there's nothing to worry about; they may actually be the fascists. More later tonight.
Found a whole new level of security incompetence.
Went to type in my 2FA code, but nothing appeared on screen.
They hadn't disabled pasting. Instead, they used JavaScript to ensure that only numbers could be typed in.
But only numbers from the number row of my keyboard.
I was using my NumPad which, as every good developer knows, uses different event codes!
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEvent/code
I made up a neat little pattern in Go the other day. It’s a way to represent a state change in a system by exposing different APIs for different states, while only holding state in a single underlying struct. I’m sure I’m not the first person to invent this, and it may already a name, so please let me know if you know of one. I’m going to show an instance of the pattern first and the motivation after.
Redis is no longer OSS, breaking its explicit commitment to remain under the BSD 3-Clause License forever. This has angered contributors who are now working to fork the software.
@Marcus@k8s.social Huh, I hadn't noticed they too changed their license. We're going to need tools to help avoid projects not hosted by a foundation in our supply chains if this keeps up. Maybe some Rego rules in @www.jvt.me@www.jvt.me 's DMD :)
https://dmd.tanna.dev/
Wondering what the world would look like if we implemented "Universal Basic Website".
Entitle everyone to their own domain, a few GB of space, the ability to run simple apps / blogs / etc.
What does the world look like if people aren't beholden to Flickr / Facebook / Google Photos to share their family albums?
#UBI
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social @Edent@mastodon.social Here’s an article about our pilot project in Ghent seven years ago (!!!) now. Unfortunately, a conservative local government took power and cancelled our funding.
https://www.demorgen.be/nieuws/gent-wil-burgers-eigen-stukje-internet-geven~b92ec1b4/
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social @Edent@mastodon.social My goal with the Small Web (Kitten, Domain, and Place) is to launch as a paid service so we can pay the mortgage and then, hopefully as people use it and maybe even as other orgs host Domain instances, to go to the EU, etc., and say “it works – now support this with our taxes.”
We’ll see how it goes. The fact that we have had €zero EU funding to date doesn’t exactly fill me with hope.
APPLICATION TO BE ON YOUR PODCAST
Personal statement:
hello there, i am james
Skills:
i turn my trauma into humor
british accent
References:
my girlfriend thinks i am funny and cute
I finally got round to implementing dark mode for this site (the cobbler’s children have no shoes and all that…)
Here’s all the CSS I had to add:
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { /* Invert all elements on the body while attempting to not alter the hue substantially. */ body { filter: invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg); } /* Workarounds and optical adjustments. */ /* Firefox workaround: Set the background colour for the html element separately because, unlike other browsers, Firefox doesn’t apply the filter to the root element’s background.
Attached: 1 image
Please don't do this.
We're in March, so I guess this content is not from 2024.
But I have no way to know if it's from 2023, 2022, or even older… 🤷♂️
https://hq.getmatter.com/updates
Jamie Tanna
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#politics.
