Really? "There's a blown-down tree here"... "Someone ran into this lamp post"... "This traffic sign has been vandalized"... "There's someone parked on the grass"...
That's all without value?
50 karma · joined January 10, 2025
That's all without value?
"Bus driver" is not exactly a high-paying job, yet one that is important for social cohesion: passenger safety and informal surveillance of roads and neighborhoods sure are crucial!
When it comes to anything 'self-driving', the main goal should be to reduce road traffic and neighborhood pollution-by-parking-spaces. This does nothing for either purpose.
They'll then send out an email campaign with a From: address in the counterfeit domain (which will have valid SPF/DKIM/whatever), a subject like "Example.com: You've been invited to join a project!", quickly-come-see-this-secret-stuff body copy, and a call-to-action button linked to that URL.
The page hosted on the URL will have your branding and everything, and collect a bunch of personal information and/or access credentials for the scammers.
Taking down this stuff is tedious, but you can try -- least you can do for now is display a prominent 'this is not an authorized example.com domain' warning for inbound visits from these redirects, create a public Knowledge Base-like article warning about this abuse as well (making very clear this has nothing to do with you), and block the domains involved on your inbound mail server.
Silver lining: apparently your SaaS is successful enough to be used as a lure for scammers. Congrats?
Well, I have a pretty good idea, and the answer won't comfort you.
To further elaborate on this pointless saga: last December, I actually met a FB engineering executive while on holiday, happened to mention this issue in casual conversation (I know: sad!) and they were going to put me in touch with All The Right People who were going to Fix This Immediately.
Guess what? The "oh, if the remote rDNS ends with mail-mail.facebook.com, just don't advertise STARTTLS" 'fix' is still very much in place, and probably will be indefinitely, even if that enables the entire Internet to eavesdrop on potentially-exciting stuff like login recovery tokens.
And, yeah, the saddest part is that I could actually live-troubleshoot this issue with anyone at any time, providing PCAPs, updating the outgoing mail server behavior on demand, whatever. But that's just not the way the Internet (or, I guess, anything) works anymore, I'm afraid: 25 years-or-so ago I had, like, the pager number of the person running the national backbone, and we had many late-night conversations fixing subtle-but-annoying BGP/DNS/whatever issues, which was cool.
These days? Being ignored is the best you can hope for, which goes back to my original point that everything is awful. Depressing, really...
Nah, not really. I sincerely doubt that Facebook admitting "yeah, our outgoing mail servers did TLS cert verification improperly in some cases", or the Dutch National Railways saying "yeah, we make renting bikes easy, maybe too easy" would affect their valuation.
But: that does not mean that the underlying issues should not be addressed and/or that the reporter doesn't deserve a meaningful reply.
Have you ever tried to report a technical issue to a Big Tech company, like, at all? If so, 'silence' is the best you can expect, with 'a threatening letter' and 'a SWAT visit' being the runners-up.
Example of the first: if your mail server uses the default-Windows-2016-TLS stack, Facebook's mail servers will immediately disconnect after issuing a STARTTLS command and receiving your server certificate. Why? No idea, everyone else seems to be fine, but this has been ongoing for years.
Second example: you can steal any Dutch "OV bike" simply by impersonating the MiFare classic UID of any valid subscriber, without any rate limits on those attempts. I reported this issue to them in 2016, they tried to sue me and failed, then tried to talk me and failed to listen, and to this day this vulnerability exists.
Third example: phew, none (SWATs are not as eager to mobilize around here), but I would not be surprised, like, at all, if I were to get an early-morning wake-up call just for trying to correct someones SPF records via an advisory email...
I mean, it's pretty much everywhere already in pet food, where source-disclosures are not mandatory, but one event I recently attended and that was all about "lab meat" (as well as heavy on the wine pairings) definitely catered to humans as well.
And,for a basic cow, lamb or pig steak, science is pretty close to recreating a like-for-like experience! Of course, there are edge cases, such as rendering fat, but abandoning those ideals won't invalidate the basic premise.
And yeah, I know that the Tangerine Savior will now make Existing Livestock Last Forever, but for those of us living in reality, it's good to know there are sustainable alternatives.
Because that has always been a trope amongst HN commenters (a large subset of which is supposed to be future HN founders), and it bothers me. A lot.
Because, well, and bear with me here, if they did, they would have set a darn PIN?
Yeah, lovely trope, but I'm literally talking about organizations hosting their Git repos on a file share here.
And, by the time a '#githelp team' is formed, it's to address patterns to which there are known solutions.
One of the many problems with Git, is that these solutions depend very, very much on the structure of the repo and the common practices of its users.
So, instead of executing random commands from the Internet, just ask. Please! Or, if there's truly nobody going to be around, give in and recreate the repo. You'll save yourself so much pain in the long run...
I applaud you for your honesty, but... Really?
Any, and I mean any "in case of a Git problem, just do this" recipe is wrong, often in very subtle ways. So, my advice: in case of a Git problem, contact the help channel provided by the organization hosting your Git repository. They'll help you out! And if it's your personal-I-am-truly-the-only-human-using-this repository? Just recreate it, and save yourself the pain.
Source: I'm part of the team behind the #githelp channel in many $DAYJOBs, and we know how hard things are. You committed an unencrypted password file, or worse, your entire 'secret' MP4 collection to our monorepo? Sure, just let us know! Pushed your experimental branch to master/main/head/whatever? We'll fix it!
Just don't ever, for whatever reason, run that-chain-of-commands you found on the Internet, without understanding what they do! In most cases, your initial mistake can be undone pretty quickly (despite requiring nonstandard tooling), but once you're three levels deep and four days later, not so much...
I mean, the whole "this group and/or technology keeps me from having a proper job" discourse is so tired, yet remains so popular on HN and similar forums...
No? It's also about load balancing and draining compute/storage resources in preparation for maintenance.
Most pertinently: as long as your alternative doesn't cover any vMotion use-cases, customers will remain 'in talks' with Broadcom...
VMware used to go a bit further, in that they allowed your compute nodes to fail and/or your storage nodes to fail, without adverse effects.
If Oxide can do that, out-of-the-box, right-now, they'll be having a field day. Otherwise, my reservations about Oxide's business model remain...
-Large enterprises that previously purchased hardware-with-accompanying-VMware-licenses from OEMs like Dell-EMC: Broadcom refused to even honor pre-acquisition license keys from these sources, leaving many private data centers in the lurch, unless they paid a huge premium for a new Broadcom-originated annual subscription (whereas the original key was one-off)
-Service providers with an ongoing "small-percentage-of revenue per year, payable in arrears" agreement, that were suddenly forced into a "hard vCPU and vRAM limit" subscription, payable for at least 2 years upfront.
However, the magic word for both customer segments is "vMotion", i.e. live-migration of VMs across disparate storage. No OSS and/or commercial (including Hyper-V) solution is able to truly match what VMware could (and can, at the right price) do in that space...
So, let's take the next paragraph: "Before P4, vendors had total control over the functionality supported in the network (...) controlled the rollout of new features (e.g., VXLAN), and rollouts took years"
Anyone has a pointer to any actually available hardware capable of L2 and L3 packet processing where I could have implemented VXLAN in, say, weeks using P4? Again, as far as I can tell, it's all either killed-off-a-long-time-ago, "contact us" vaporware, or exotic 40/100-Gb-only Top-o-Rack gear, and even for those, there is nary an "add to cart" button in sight...
On clicking it, uBlock blocked my visit, but that may or may be not enough for you, in which case an additional plugin may be warranted.
Not saying you should, just that you could...
Yeah, problem with that is that, past 70, 80, 90 or so, everything is catastrophic...
For reference: where I live, we have what can be summarized as "Obamacare as originally envisioned by Romney", i.e. a functioning insurance marketplace without too many carve-outs.
And... It does not Work! As in: everyone ends up paying pretty much the same, ever-increasing, and hardly reasonable premiums. Because: whatever your national/regional healthcare budget is, 80+% goes to fixed costs for mostly elderly (but sometimes just really unlucky) residents that simply cannot remain alive otherwise.
So, I see two options here: -The extended nuclear family, where each takes care of their own. Potentially workable, but very unpopular, and not just for fiscal reasons: who wants to change the nappies of their parents? -Outright socialism, where elder-care is part of a social-conscription program. Also highly unpopular (mostly amongst young voters), but maybe the only viable option? You do your 2/3/4 years of nappies-changing, and get your student debt wiped out? (Not that I think that student debt should be a thing, but, yeah)
Thoughts?
So, while technically very interesting, and providing some value before it all comes inevitably (and literally -- see: space junk) crashing down, all that talent and money spent on Starlink would better be put to use elsewhere.
But unfortunately it's easier to get investment for space dreams than for running fiber, even though it's the latter that's mostly needed, and despite plenty of success stories.
That's very much not what the Starlink-proponents are, loudly, proclaiming. Because, satellite-peer-to-peer stuff, Elon-magic in general, and whatever.
Please note: I think that Starlink is mostly space pollution, and that offering meaningful Internet connectivity to Africa, or rural America, or anywhere mostly involves 'lots of fiber', some radio, and lots of cooperation.
But: "just get your Starlink dish and be done" is definitely an Internet Truth, and it's Wrong, and I think it's worth Pointing Out.
Creating an HTTP endpoint that publishes metrics in a Prometheus-scrape-able format? Easy! Some boolean/float key-value-pairs with appropriate annotations (basically: is this a counter or a gauge?), and done! And that lead (and leads!) to some very usable Grafana dashboards-created-by-actual-users and therefore much joy.
Then, I read up on how to do things The Proper Way, and was initially very much discouraged, but decided to ignore All that Noise due to the existing solutions working so well. No complaints so far!
That being said, it would be interesting to see what happened if all of, say, Lagos (fastest-growing city+suburbs in the world) suddenly started using Starlink exclusively.
"Good things" is not very high on my list...