Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

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Wow that is naive. Geolocation by IP address is notoriously error-prone.

The most obvious is former Soviet republics, or any neighbour of a target nation, being mis-identified. That includes Ukraine itself, by the way, but also Finland and Poland. How about territory that is disputed? Or adjacent to enclaves like Kaliningrad? But it can also include friendly-nation assets that just happen to be currently inside Russia or Belarus, including government entities and journalists. It can affect folks simply relying on mobile networks near borders. Address blocks are routinely reallocated, reassigned, reused, misused, on a global basis and an address range announced in Korea last year can show up in Canada tomorrow.

Even geolocation by client-side request can be wrong, too. Not just because it's easy to lie, but major nations also fuck with the GPS, which is an issue currently affecting Baltic aviation¹. By the same token, IP geolocation databases are easily misled by self-reporting from mobile devices. Simple example: imagine someone using a dedicated VPS in the US as a personal VPN exit node for their devices when visiting mainland China (actually, we don't have to imagine: I did exactly this). Any IP-based location assumptions start out incorrect, since it's by VPN exit IP; but later on, thanks to mobile device reporting, that IP address can end up misclassified long-term as "Chinese".

None of this is hypothetical. I visited Jordan a few years ago and whilst visiting ruins near Umm Qais, up by the Sea of Galilee, my phone was switching to Israeli networks. I also know of an Australian startup that was mis-identified as Russian and lost access to a major partner API². That's since resolved, but the point is, forget what you see on police procedurals; identifying the political jurisdiction of a device, whether it's by IP address or any other means, remains an art, not a science, and it's incredibly easy to be wrong.

As for the suggestion that the rest of us remain unaffected; any malware incident in the node ecosystem requires immediate attention and audit from every security team, whether you were the intended target or not. This idiot has cost all of us time and energy.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/09/finland-gps-di...

[2] https://twitter.com/cyclytics/status/1503211938133966851

> As for the suggestion that the rest of us remain unaffected; any malware incident in the node ecosystem requires immediate attention and audit from every security team, whether you were the intended target or not. This idiot has cost all of us time and energy.

The truth is that you are the idiot if you only perform audits when someone else announces an incident. You’ve already lost at that point.

It’s nobody else’s fault but yours if you waste time because of your shit policies.

But go on, keep digging an ever deeper hole for yourself with pathetic attempts at shifting blame. It’s absolutely your security teams job to audit all incoming code, rather than blindly trusting stuff from NPM.

This is doubling down with more poorly considered assumptions and demonstrating an overwhelming lack of knowledge about security process, and with such vehement and pernicious language I could only laugh aloud at the remarks.

Because: we already do routine malware scanning and audit, and review of every changing dependency that we know of, and their transitive dependencies. The scale and frequency of change is one of the reasons to minimise exposure to the fragmented, chaotic shitshow of the node ecosystem.

When there's an incident - and this is most definitely an incident - we have to do more work to verify there was no inadvertent occurrence, that it did not slip through, etc etc.

What's more, one must necessarily download the shit to inspect it, which means you're potentially now holding an unexploded bomb sitting in your developer laptop, for which possibly the only mitigation is that it's sitting inside a container or virtual machine, and one must be careful not to trigger it.

Due to the destruction of trust, we'll also be making an additional effort to remove and replace this and any other package from the same author, and any repository to which they have contributed has to be considered potentially tainted and subject to additional review.

Since you didn't apparently know any of this, I don't think you have any standing to comment on security team procedures.

Nah, your processes are just terrible. They might be “industry standard”, but so was storing plaintext credit card information.

>This is doubling down with more poorly considered assumptions and demonstrating an overwhelming lack of knowledge about security process

Sorry, but no. I’ve worked in this field for two decades. What you’re describing is meaningless security theatre meant to appease the people paying your salaries.

Oh look, some more poorly informed personal invective! I had no idea it was possible to triple down on being a clueless dick, but you’ve successfully demonstrated that point. Alas, nothing else. Oh, and only two decades? It explains the rookie naïveté and flailing, ranting insecurities, I suppose. But I think you’ve got a fourth go in you, why stop now? I’m sure there’s a few more witless assumptions and unoriginal epithets left to fling around in vacuous defense of the indefensible.

No matter how many words we waste, you will still be the guy complaining about your job being a waste of time while simultaneously trying to defend the decisions causing you to waste your time.

And for what it’s worth, you started it with the insults and silly appeals to authority.

There we go! Moronic, childish, deluded nonsense, and you still haven’t added anything of substance since “you are the idiot”.

I’ve also just realised you’re the same nutter who was desperate to prove Bill Woodcock doesn’t have (and I quote) ”basic understanding of DNS”.

Ok, I’m done smacking this particular witless, flailing troll around. Be seeing you.

See, that’s all you’ve got. Empty appeals to authority.

Bill Woodcock got the technical details utterly wrong. His track record doesn’t matter when he’s spewing out bullshit, it’s still just that.

Just read your comments again https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30513375

You were trying to argue that pulling out root nameservers from Russia would be a bad thing because … Roskomnadzor can only restrict access to foreign DNS servers?

And you call me deluded.

Not sure what you mean by "appeals to authority".

Fairly sure you don't know what that phrase means. Whose authority, exactly? I'll appeal to my own, I suppose, but that is because I actually know what I'm talking about.

Definitely sure you don't have anything to say, but are committed to telling people they're stupid because ... you have little else to contribute, and are stuck in a muddy trench of incoherent rage you dug for yourself. Again.

> Not sure what you mean by "appeals to authority".

Read our previous conversation, your comments were about Woodcocks background up until you wanted to change the topic entirely to discuss Russian internet censorship. You were completely unable to come up with a coherent technical explanation as to why Bill wasn’t wrong when he said what he did.

> I suppose, but that is because I actually know what I'm talking about.

That’s it. You can’t supply any useful facts, everything that comes out of your mouth is supposed to be the truth because you are an expert.

Yet, your Linkedin makes it pretty clear that you are a nobody. Just a perpetual software developer and occasional low level manager without any real achievements in his life.

I tried very hard to dig a fact based argument out of you, but I think you know very well that you’re defending bad policy.

The idea that declaring an “incident” over something like this is actually necessary, rather than just a move to appease questions from management is completely frivolous. If you were serious about your security posture, you’d be prepared for these events in the first place.

Trusting NPM is inevitably going to get you hacked.

> are stuck in a muddy trench of incoherent rage you dug for yourself. Again.

Read your own comments, they’re the incoherent ramblings of a crackhead.

> Definitely sure you don't have anything to say, but are committed to telling people they're stupid because

Look in the mirror, you were the first person in this conversation to use words like “idiot”. I merely suggested that the word would be better applied to you.

flagged for stalking

I'm unfortunately very late to this thread, but it's not at all ok to dig up extraneous personal info about someone and bring it into HN as ammunition in an argument. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't do it again.

Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

The flamewar itself was bad on both your parts, and you definitely both broke the site guidelines repeatedly (not cool!), and you both should stop posting like that because we ban accounts that keep posting like that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hi. Please educate me. What technical details do I have wrong?

The thread https://twitter.com/woodyatpch/status/1498472865301098500

> 2) Shut down the root nameservers inside Russia. That would make connectivity spotty for many users inside Russia, but mostly regular folks, not government or military users.

That’s just not true. Shutting down root nameservers inside Russia would not make anyones connection spotty in any meaningful way.

How would that even work? It’s not like sending root NS queries abroad is a big deal, especially since most people will be using ISP nameservers and have those replies cached anyway.

Also

> In the short-term, this is a bad plan because it would cut the Russian man-on-the-street off from international news and perspectives, leaving them with only what the Russian government chooses to tell them. That's not a great way to decrease Russian public support for the war.

This wouldn’t be a consequence of any of the things you listed. International news don’t live on .ru TLD, they don’t depend on domestic root nameservers or Russian IP allocations either.

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