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ebfe1

258 karma · joined December 27, 2019

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ebfe1··on Incident with Github.com
It's DNS issue, i'm telling ya!
ebfe1··on Ask HN: Do you use your phone as hotel/free WiFi condom for laptops?
I will look into that, thanks for the recommendation!
ebfe1··on Ask HN: Do you use your phone as hotel/free WiFi condom for laptops?
TIL! Thank you!
ebfe1··on Shai-Hulud malware attack: Tinycolor and over 40 NPM packages compromised
Anyone know if there is a public events feed/firehouse for npm ecosystem system? Similar to GitHub public events feed?

We, at ClickHouse, love big data and it would be super cool download and analyse patterns of all these data & provide some tooling to help with combatting this wide spread issue.

ebfe1··on S1ngularity/nx attackers strike again
I found there are many links from stepsecuritiy, socket.dev but aikido seems to have the most up to date information about this ongoing npm hack.
ebfe1··on DuckDB NPM packages 1.3.3 and 1.29.2 compromised with malware
Is it just me who think this could have been prevented if npm admins put in some sort of cool off period to only allow new versions or packages to be downloaded after being published by "x" amount of hours? This way the npm maintainer would get notifications on their email and react immediately? And if it is urgent fix, perhaps there can be a process to allow npm admin to approve and bypass publication cool off period.

Disclaimer: I don't know enough of npm/nodejs community so I might be completely off the mark here

ebfe1··on Show HN: PinSend – Share text between devices using a PIN(P2P, no login)
I don't see mentioning of e2e encryption, that would be nice but I love the webrtc usage here!

Shameless plug: I built small file sharing tool with encryption in browser and added a "tunnel" feature to make it easier for sharing between personal devices : https://www.relaysecret.com/tunnel/

The aes256 key is derived from hashing the tunnel name but never sent back to backend as it is behind anchor tag and the tunnel name is derived from substring of this hash. It is quite fun to use and share files. The file never lives more than 10 days (bucket lifecycle) but user can reduce this to delete upon download and the code can easily be reviewed (back end is a single lambda function to generate signed url):)

ebfe1··on Texas secures $1.38B settlement with Google over data privacy
Honest question: So who gets this $1.38B? The user? Some company? The government/treasury?
ebfe1··on How to harden GitHub Actions
Yea hence it prompts for you to check the first time but once you verify the hash for particular version of action, it would automatically apply the hash to that same version of action everywhere. Also you can reuse the same config for all other repos so it is only tedious the first time but after that it is pretty quick to apply to the rest of the org :)

The tool is indeed meant for semi-auto flow to ensure human eye looked at the action being used.

ebfe1··on How to harden GitHub Actions
Yeap - that is exactly what it does ;)

Example:

uses: ncipollo/release-action@440c8c1cb0ed28b9f43e4d1d670870f059653174 #v1.16.0

And for anything that previously had @master, it becomes the following with the hash on the day it was pinned with "master-{date}" as comment:

uses: ravsamhq/notify-slack-action@b69ef6dd56ba780991d8d48b61d94682c5b92d45 #master-2025-04-04

ebfe1··on How to harden GitHub Actions
oh damn - that is a great point! thanks matey!
ebfe1··on How to harden GitHub Actions
After tj-actions hack, I put together a little tool to go through all of github actions in repository to replace them with commit hash of the version

https://github.com/santrancisco/pmw

It has a few "features" which allowed me to go through a repository quickly:

- It prompts user and recommend the hash, it also provides user the url to the current tag/action to double check the hash value matches and review the code if needed

- Once you accept a change, it will keep that in a json file so future exact vesion of the action will be pinned as well and won't be reprompted.

- It let you also ignore version tag for github actions coming from well-known, reputational organisation (like "actions" belong to github) - as you may want to keep updating them so you receive hotfix if something not backward compatible or security fixes.

This way i have full control of what to pin and what not and then this config file is stored in .github folder so i can go back, rerun it again and repin everything.

ebfe1··on Jury orders NSO to pay $167M for hacking WhatsApp users
Ok ....where is the form so as an ex-whatsapp user, I can get a piece of that 167M pie? Oh... there isnt one... :)
ebfe1··on Judge said Meta illegally used books to build its AI
And this is how Chinese model will win in long term, perhaps... They will be trained on everything and anything without consequences and we will all use it because these models are smarter (except for area like Chinese history and geography). I don't have the right answer on what can be done here to protect copyright or rather contributing back to authors of a paper without all these millions dollar wasted in lawsuits.
ebfe1··on On Not Carrying a Camera – Cultivating memories instead of snapshots
Like any tech nerds, I went through "camera phase" and carried canon 350d, 50d then 6d everywhere i go with my 50mm and 135mm ... but they were indeed bulky, it was a hassle to get people to pose for photos while i run 100m back so my 135mm can capture them perfectly... i couldn't enjoy the moment, i was that "camera friend" that would fly around everyone like fly, capturing them doing things and feeling proud that i got a good photo for them... But coming back from these trips, i realized i didnt spend enough time strolling the street with friends, talking about life, enjoying the moment so i stopped... especially now with kids.

If only people are not so against camera recording them, i think a rayban meta idea would have been cool but it needs to constantly recording like those car dash cam and when you just shared a perfect funny moment, you can immediately hit save to preserve that moment for later. So many times i wished i recorded the moment my childrens do things or being funny but it was too late.

I love taking photo with phone still and when my wife dress in her favourite coat and the setting is right, i would go back to being the "camera dude" using my best framing technique i learnt to capture the moment, at least the experience from those years did not go to waste.

Last but not least, one of the best purchase i ever done was the insta link wide bluetooth printer... it let me print, sign the date and gift my friends who visit something to take home and put on their fridge to remember the time we spent together.

ebfe1··on Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and share the results
Not exactly related but on the topic of finding target's location, A few years ago i used to run a little demo of capturing probe wifi ssid network on prefered network list of nearby devices and used https://wigle.net/ to identify places that people has visited... it was eye opening for some people in the audience for sure.
ebfe1··on Show HN: AGX – Open-Source Data Exploration for ClickHouse (The New Standard?)
Love the use of chdb for this!
ebfe1··on Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos
I wonder if they forked it to "experiment" with the workflow coinbase has and doesn't actually make any pull request toward them, perhaps to validate their hypothesis/attack. with that said, coinbase pulled the workflow that used tj-actions/changed-files immediately around this time so hopefully no harm was done https://github.com/coinbase/agentkit/pull/570/files
ebfe1··on Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos
It seems i forgot to cater for the quota applied to free "play" user in ClickHouse in my previous query... In fact, the threat actor did a lot more... this should give a better list of actions that was performed - Clearly showed he was testing his payload:

https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0ICogZnJvb...

ebfe1··on Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos
Note that these account seems to be deleted now - 2ft2dKo28UazTZ clearly did more than just changed-files and also seem to target coinbase/agentkit as well (Actually .. they might be targeted by the threat actor)
ebfe1··on Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos
Doing a bit of investigation with github_events in clickhouse, it is quite clear that the accounts used to perform the attack was "2ft2dKo28UazTZ", "mmvojwip" also seems suspicious:

https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0ICogZnJvb...

Actions taken by the threat actor at the time can be seen here:

https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0ICogZnJvb...

ebfe1··on Peer-to-peer file transfers in the browser
That is correct and s3 are in 3 different regions with object lifetime of maximum 10 days, it is backed by s3, the idea is to have the simplest code for anyone to review what it does (encrypt in browser and send encrypted blob to s3, key never leave browser)

Also no 3rd party JS, no tracking etc..

ebfe1··on Peer-to-peer file transfers in the browser
Oh i love the use of webrtc for this, thank you for sharing!

This was my half day covid project to share file... inspired by firefoxsend a while back...

https://www.relaysecret.com/

the infra is super lightweight and you can deploy yourself with aws account, it costed me nothing to run and quite useful when needed :)

ebfe1··on Exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history
AFAIK, Opensource Elasticsearch does not offer any form of authentication upon installation for many years but ClickHouse does and in fact I'm often surprised at how many authentication mechanisms were introduced over the years and can be easily configured:

- Password authentication (bcrypt, sha256 hashes) - Certificate authentication (Fantastic for server to server communication) - SSH key authentication (Personally, this is my favourite - every database should have this authentication mechanism to make it easy for Dev to work with)

Not very popular but LDAP and Http Authentication Server are also great options.

I also wonder how DeepSeek engineers deployed their ClickHouse instance. When I deployed using yum/apt install, the installation step literally ask you to input a default password.

And if you were to set it up manually with ClickHouse binary, the out-of-the-box config seal the instance from external network access and the default user is only exposed to localhost as explained by Alex here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42871371#42873446.

ebfe1··on Building Observability with ClickHouse
ClickHouse + Grafana is definitely a fantastic choice, here is another blog from ClickHouse talking about dogfooding their own technology and save millions:

https://clickhouse.com/blog/building-a-logging-platform-with...

(Full disclosure: I work for ClickHouse and love it here!)

ebfe1··on Backdoor attempt on Exolabs GitHub repo through an innocent looking PR
Note that if you have self-hosted runner and if some of the environment variable or state of execution are carried over between runs - you should not even reply or comment on any malicious PR.. The reason is - if they have pull_request_review_comment action workflow inside the fork...

well guess what? it bypasses even your "Require approval for all outside collaborators" flag in your repo setting and trigger it on your self-hosted runner anyway...

This was brought up in recent BlackHat24:

https://github.com/AdnaneKhan/ConferenceTalks/blob/main/Blac...

And yes - it's another "Github won't fix"

ebfe1··on Show HN: King Thirteen: 2048 with chess pieces, in under 13 KB
Scored 9876 and won it on first run but i did use the undo button! :) I stumbled the first half a bit but got the hang of it in the end and after finishing it I think i had more fun than original 2048. This is because this game requires you to carefully place the pieces each time while in original 2048, you could get to 1024 with just a lot of repeated movement (down+left for me) to group all biggest numbers to a corner
ebfe1··on Spambot is sharing malicious files in many GitHub issues
More stats - https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#c2VsZWN0IGFjdG9yX...

There were 18 accounts involved - 14 of them are now deleted/deactivated and 4 of them are still active(may have been compromised account)

It seems github did take action and these comments are disappearing :)

ebfe1··on Spambot is sharing malicious files in many GitHub issues
It seems github spambots are at it again... I'm surprised all these automations are not caught by github.. it is quite obvious something is up just looking at the time these issue comments are made in clickhouse playground database...
ebfe1··on Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise
clickhouse has pretty good github_events dataset on playground that folks can use to do some research - some info on the dataset https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/

Example of what this user JiaT75 did so far:

https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRlJPT...

pull requests mentioning xz, 5.6 without downgrade, cve being mentioned in the last 60 days:

https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIGNyZWF0Z...

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