HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

clwg

669 karma · joined February 23, 2014

submissionscomments
clwg··on Is regulated BGP security coming?
I agree in part — a lot of the attribution is extremely weak and based entirely on some correlation of previously weakly attributed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP in security parlance). Also, I think the effort in describing all these threats in this way is misplaced, but that's an entirely different rant.

The counter is North Korea in actually capable of pulling off these attacks because of just how bad things are on the internet and how little skill is actually required to pull off a devastating attack. Even in situations where there isn't active exploit development programs in-country, exploits and exploitation frameworks are available on GitHub or for purchase. We have no idea what sort of controls are in place to prevent someone like North Korea from getting access to Pegasus, Core Impact, or Canvas VulnDisco exploits, plus the support and tooling they receive from friendly countries like China.

clwg··on Slack AI Training with Customer Data
I'm the one who picked Slack over a decade ago for chat, so hopefully my opinion still holds weight on the matter.

One of the primary reasons Slack was chosen was because they were a chat company, not an ad company, and we were paying for the service. Under these parameters, what was appropriate to say and exchange on Slack was both informally and formally solidified in various processes.

With this change, beyond just my personal concerns, there are legitimate concerns at a business level that need to be addressed. At this point, it's hard to imagine anything but self-hosted as being a viable path forward. The fact that chat as a technology has devolved into its current form is absolutely maddening.

clwg··on Slack AI Training with Customer Data
Because they don't seem to make it easy. It doesn't seem as a individual user I have any say in how my data is used, I have to contact the Workspace Owner. When I do I'll be asking them to look at alternative platforms instead.

"Contact us to opt out. If you want to exclude your Customer Data from Slack global models, you can opt out. To opt out, please have your Org or Workspace Owners or Primary Owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com with your Workspace/Org URL and the subject line “Slack Global model opt-out request.” We will process your request and respond once the opt out has been completed."

clwg··on Andrew Huberman's Claims About Cannabis Annoy Drug Experts
I just saw the clip your mentioning[0], I don't think he understands statistics.

[0] https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1788605009535655951

clwg··on Microsoft PlayReady – Complete Client Identity Compromise
That sounds an awful lot like an Xbox, and I personally don't think we're too far off from those becoming general purpose cloud connected DRM computers coupled with recurring monthly subscriptions for all your app/game/content needs.
clwg··on OpenAI Is 'Exploring' How to Responsibly Generate AI Porn
I agree with you (I also think gaming has allot of potential with this stuff), but personally I wouldn't want to feed my preferences for this sort of content into a hosted service.

I'd also imagine that there needs to some consideration applied in a legal context. Just yesterday there was a massive child porn bust which also included AI generated content[0].

[0] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-provincial-police-arrest-...

clwg··on New UUID formats have been approved
I'm curious as to why they initially chose the Gregorian calendar for dates and then stuck with it for the v6 implementation.
clwg··on OpenVPN Is Open to VPN Fingerprinting
This was the case over a decade ago as well, at the time obfsproxy[0] was one of the more reliable methods for establishing and maintaining openvpn connections in the more censorship heavy countries.

[0]https://blog.torproject.org/obfsproxy-next-step-censorship-a...

clwg··on British Library cyber incident review [pdf]
I've known people who have worked in IT in national museum settings, and from what I heard it sounded like a mix of traditional IT support—ensuring the lights stayed on, printers could print, emails and phones worked, and a very simple website stayed online.

Some aspects sounded quite interesting, but these weren't places pushing the envelope in any aspect of technology. I'm sure they were running outdated software and configurations on everything, but IT was closing their tickets and meeting their SLAs. And with no disrespect, these people weren't necessarily disruptors looking to shake up and modernize the museums' infrastructure and take it into the future either, they just did their job to the best of their ability and went home at the end of the day.

To generalize I find that this usually holds true in a lot of non-tech industries, and IT is generally seen as a burdensome cost as opposed to enabler of business.

clwg··on British Library cyber incident review [pdf]
I suspect they don't have the forensic evidence to determine the root cause. Chances are there are probably too many ways it could have happened, and the evidence was encrypted or simply wasn't being captured.

At least they seem to have a plan moving forward that seems considered, though I think a lot of what they want to do is easier said than done effectively. I wish them the best of luck.

clwg··on Internal tools often make bad startup ideas
Being able to contextualize your security tooling to the code level is such an underrated capability of an effective security program/team.

It also allows you to leverage open-source tooling much more effectively.

The biggest problem is your setting a bar for capabilities that allot of infosec people don't have, so you need to consider the ability to manage a custom security code base into the future, which can cause issues if it's not considered properly for the environment your doing it in.

clwg··on Just one bad packet can bring down a vulnerable DNS server thanks to DNSSEC
> The academics who found this flaw – associated with the German National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity (ATHENE) in Darmstadt – claimed DNS server software makers briefed about the vulnerability described it as "the worst attack on DNS ever discovered."

This seems a bit hyperbolic, the txid[0] randomization bug found by Kaminsky was objectively worse as it would allow you to poison the cache and in the days before encryption was considered standard.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534823/dns-researcher...

clwg··on Memory and new controls for ChatGPT
I use an API that I threw together which provides a backend for custom ChatGPT bots. There are only a few routes and parameters to keep it simple, anything complicated like arrays in json can cause issues. ChatGPT can perform searches, retrieve documents by an ID, or POST output for long-term storage, and I've integrated SearxNG and a headless browser API endpoint as well and try to keep it a closed loop so that all information passing to chatGPT from the web flows through my API first. I made it turn on my lights once too, but that was kind of dumb.

When you start to pull in multiple large documents, especially all at once, things start to act weird, but pulling in documents one at a time seems to preserve context over multiple documents. There's a character limit of 100k per API request, so I'm assuming a 32k context window, but it's not totally clear what is going on in the background.

It's kind of clunky but works well enough for me. It's not something that I would be putting sensitive info into - but it's also much cheaper than using GPT-4 via the API and I maintain control of the data flow and storage.

clwg··on The three million toothbrush botnet story isn't true
At 3 million it would be the 8th largest botnet ever discovered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botn...
clwg··on Microsoft actions following attack by nation state actor Midnight Blizzard
They should look at upgrading their Entra ID plan to P2 in order to protect against these attacks.
clwg··on Htmx changes license to Zero-Clause BSD
bravo, what editor did you use to change the license file?
clwg··on Super Mario 64 on the Web
This is pretty awesome but I'm surprised Nintendo hasn't done anything about these online versions of their games, they're fairly aggressive about protecting their IP.
clwg··on Studies suggest that relying on will power to break habits is hopeless (2019)
I was a smoker for over 20 years, then I switched to Juul - I was content. Nicotine is by far my favorite drug. I could smell again, and my stamina and breathing were noticeably improved.

When they started to ban the stronger vapes, my options were to go back to cigarettes, suffer withdrawal from a less potent nicotine concentration, buy one of those contraptions and start a hobby, or quit entirely.

I quit entirely, and it sucked. Luckily, there was a pandemic going on, so I could contain the 'blast radius', but it was very much a self-hate process to get through it - hating myself for smoking in the first place as a teenager, hating that I was controlled by something like that, and hating that I didn't have agency over my own cravings, and just hating because Nicotine withdrawal sucks.

I don't think I could have done it with a positive attitude and inner strength. I still miss nicotine, and if they brought back the stronger Juul's, I'd probably start again.

clwg··on Web0 Manifesto
You could also self sign - It's going to be grating for users, but your still afforded the protections against any hop on the path.
clwg··on Web0 Manifesto
I like it, but I'd probably put that on 443 with TLS. The threat model and attacks developed since web 1.0 have increased in complexity and sophistication and better to be safe than sorry.
clwg··on US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi to Purge Army
Tim Cook also has a high opinion of China[0], and Apple products are extremely well manufactured, so your point stands.

I just think that there may be some fundamental gaps in China's capabilities, or just systemic corruption/bureaucracy (like water-filled missiles) that aren't necessarily evident at this point in time and won't be known until China is really tested in a military type conflict.

https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...

clwg··on US Intelligence Shows Flawed China Missiles Led Xi to Purge Army
I hope so too, because there's really only one way to find out.

That said some of the non-military stories that you hear out of China really make you wonder what their true capabilities are.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/01/18...

clwg··on What It's Like to Use Apple's Lockdown Mode
I enabled Lockdown mode mostly for restricting inbound messaging in iMessage as that seems to be the common entry point, and it's not something that's easy to stop from a end user's perspective.

Doing so broke my apple watch integration, which to me is a bad balance between security and functionality. I wish they gave fine grained control over what protection get's implemented and what it will break.

clwg··on 20 years later, the Y2K bug seems like a joke–because some took it seriously (2019)
I got my start in IT focusing on Y2K in the mid-90s. I had no business doing the work I was given at the time, but the greybeards of that era were something else. They mentored me in ways that I could never have gotten in school, it was a different time, pre-google. I was also very appreciative that my young age wasn't held against me :)
clwg··on Disney, Warner, Comcast, and Paramount are contemplating cuts, possible mergers
On the flip side, the old content is exactly what I want. I'm a big fan of Star Trek, including TNG, Voyager, DS9, and even Enterprise. If I play music while I work, I find myself getting distracted by it. So, I prefer to have Star Trek playing in the background since I've seen every episode multiple many times it's really just comforting background competence porn. Other than that, I don't really watch much TV but it's nice to have if I'm bored.

In the last year, I've had to switch streaming providers four times to access this catalogue. I've moved from Netflix to Paramount to Crave (I'm in Canada) and now I'm back on Netflix. For Christmas, I bought myself a Mini PC and a subscription to Proton VPN. At this point, I've spent enough money on Star Trek and a small amount of movies that I don't feel the moral issues I would if I were pirating indie games or something similar.

clwg··on Nvidia CEO: We bet the farm on AI and no one knew it
Once they changed the licensing on consumer gear in a DC it started to become clear they were executing on a strategy, I wouldn't be surprised if phasing out SLI was part of that strategy as well.
clwg··on At Least 15% of Reddit Content Is Corporate Trolls Manipulating Public Opinion
I can't shake the feeling that this is just people rediscovering this as an issue, this has been happening since the digg exodus hasn't it[0]? The frequency and sophistication has obviously increased, but I thought this was pretty much public knowledge.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p9a1v/im_woody_harrel...

clwg··on MongoDB security notice
I'm of a similar opinion. I experienced all the issues of MongoDB's infancy; it wasn't a good time, but the mmap functionality seemed worth it at the time if you had enough memory or constrained your access patterns appropriately.

Nowadays, PostgreSQL has JSON/JSONB types, a full suite of extensions like pgvector and PostGIS, and I can scale with Citus or use it in any of the big managed clouds.

From a functionality perspective, MS SQL Server makes a more compelling alternative to me simply by way of its native graph database support.

clwg··on Most companies using AI are 'lighting money on fire,' says Matthew Prince
I share your cynicism, but I think there’s worse ways for corporations to spend capital other than trying to innovate.
clwg··on Mouse – Official Early Gameplay Trailer [video]
Should be interesting once Steamboat Willy enters the public domain.
← PreviousPage 3 of 5Next →