Sure, AI tools can do this. However, VS Code is the platform. Why aren't more people worried about running arbitrary VS Code extension that can do the same thing, AI or not?
It is a shame that the team never prioritized extension permission issues [0] despite their big boss said security is the top priority [1]. All they have is "workspace trust" and various other marginally useful security measures.
I don't install a VSCode extension unless it is either official or well known and audited and I have to use it. I keep most of them disabled by default unless I need something for a project. (Even if you don't care about security, it's good for VSCode performance. I'll save that story for another day.)
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/52116
[1] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-sec...
So I started uninstalling some icon themes and less used extensions that I installed on a whim years ago.
I implicitly trust extensions by Google, Microsoft and the like, but the less known published make me nervous.
Meanwhile random FOSS projects be like "please sudo curl bash to install the prebuilt binaries".
Of course, the one advantage of having source is that it is easier to run things like SAST tools against source, but how many people do that in practice? How integrated is that with package systems? And when package maintainers might provide hashes of what they ostensibly checked, you still need trust.
So we need a combination of static analysis tools that are integrated properly to produce trusted binaries, and you need earned trust and authority. Hyperindividualist self-reliance is, at the very minimum, impractical. And with authority, we know whose job it is to care for the quality of software and therefore whom to hang.
However commits tend to be much easier to trace at a later date than arbitrary binaries so attackers will be less inclined to go that route. Once committed it's there forever unless you can somehow get everyone to censor it from their own copies for an unrelated reason. Consider that the xz compromise involved downloading the payload later.
My policy is to either obtain binaries from a major distro or to build from a clean commit in a network isolated environment. If I can't go one of those routes it's almost always a hard pass for me.
curl -L "foo.sh" -o foo.sh && bash foo.sh
Why sudo though?
I honestly think it's stupidity. Most people really don't know you can build programs to the user and don't need system privileges. I think everyone is just so used to installing from package managers and doing `sudo make install` that they forgot programs only need to be in $PATH and not /usr/bin
Second off, you're not steaming into bash
Third, you gotta read between the lines a little. I used some convenience considering my audience is programmers. Don't use && or shove && `less foo.sh` in the middle. There's a million options here
That aside, it protects you from this gaping hole of an exploit mechanism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636792
But this is true about lots of code. We have this notion of "it works, therefore there's no problem" which is just bad engineering. Just because you don't know there's a problem doesn't mean there isn't. Just because it passes the tests doesn't mean you have test coverage.
In theory you can mix and match, but in practice most bureaucrats will insist on single-sourcing.
Also I’m not sure the tradeoffs of adding security to an editor are that big of a deal. Are we really seeing revolutionary stuff here? Every now and then I check out VS Code only to realize Vim is still 10x better.
I assume you could probably do the same with VSCode, but I suspect there's a cultural difference that pushes you to always update? Do things stop working because of churn?
They did the same with Chrome extensions.
I've used it to inject download links on sites, autoclose modals, etc. You can either write them yourself, or review other people before installing them.
It’s not a perfect solution, but at least it reduces the surface area to a single extension.
FYI: Just set Script Updates to Never.
I'm also skeptical that even a dark mode extension would be simple considering how varied web pages can be
Trusting other devs to not write malicious code has led to a surprisingly small number of incidents so far, but I don't think this will extrapolate into the future.
With more lines of code being auto-written without deliberate intent or review from an accountable author, things can only get worse!
They are (of course) not foolproof and very well may miss something, so people need to evaluate their own risk/reward tradeoff with these extensions, even after reviewing them with AI, but I think they are pretty useful.