edelbitter

Some scientific endeavors can be paused and maybe later relaunched, if funding has not dried up and temporarily-worthless machinery has not been left to rot.

But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.

In case of plain HTTP over TCP, there is even a hint in the spec about why and how a server might want to avoid fully closing prematurely.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9112#section-9.6 (this was already in https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7230#section-6.6)

Cloudflare does not notice (until a customer complains) that they are sending broken responses at scale? I would have thought they would notice this from sampling and linting a few replies.. just in case they did something like Cloudbleed again.

I think this one has more to do with excessive dependencies, and lack of splitting into individually installable packages and/or static linking.

I have already avoided having to evaluate whether I am affected by some issue because I added patches at startup that crash before certain unused-yet-installed modules are to be loaded. Also, for those Python packages that still have a pure version that defers to stdlib and a separate muh-performance binary option with statically linked dependencies, I can generally just install the former and skip the version bumps for dependencies. The performance advantage may be negligible or negative outside of benchmarking 100k calls.. of code actually called 11 times a day, on a non-critical path.

This stuff has been brewing for years, but since technically you could fix all instances with minimal StackOverflow downtime [1] and a slightly different pattern, few people worked on either using engines with data structures less prone to the worst case or adding the generic workarounds for those that have them.

e.g. in cPython, until 3.11, there was no support for atomic grouping (roughly translation: "never backtrack inside of this expression"). There is little useful advice a linter can give, if there is no predictable-runtime way to express what you want within a single match step, because you really do want to unwind the stack and check for repeats (just without any of the exponential runtime stuff, please).

[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/328376/why-does-sta...

A German police officer was fatally shot in 2010 after failing to identify himself when his manipulation on the door had alerted the known-armed subject of a planned search. The shooter was (eventually) acquitted. Though the circumstances were rather unusual, the court noted that in that specific case, the inability to ascertain the nature & extent of the threat within available time made acting this way based on his assumptions excusable.

https://www.bundesgerichtshof.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/D...

Ah, the exploit is all done before that!

Since this can only underflow and some written bits are not attacker-chosen, does this not imply that the patchable part of the software could reliably detect this just in time and panic on suspected USB DMA corruption? Where is the catch?

>The original content doesn’t exactly disappear; it just becomes raw material that most people never touch directly.

It does disappear. There is already much less expert knowledge shared after the breakdown of those platforms that used to be so good at encouraging it. Both what the clankers can regurgitate and what humans can find themselves on the internet is increasingly stale and thinned. My GPU can generate fairly good content now.. 2023 content.

Do you have any company in mind (within the subset the argument refers to, so one that achieved >=15% monthly growth with sufficient consistency) without one or more worrying externalities?

> all these data come from nonhuman lab animals

Though what I have see so far is far from everything that could be learned from these surprisingly-humanlike mammals. Still need more research on timing. Maybe protein metabolism is not that different from the better studied methods of derailing glucose metabolism. Maybe the damage is set and done after any prolonged phase of inappropriate diet, and later minor adjustments in consumption have very little additional effect, after controlling for weight and caloric intake.

Maybe all humans need to do is watch their protein intake until puberty.. and then only 60 years later, as failing to retain muscle strength becomes more likely to kill them than any detrimental effect of excessive protein intake.

>the various ACME clients like acme.sh are run with elevated privileges

Its really not that difficult to not grant excessive privileges - at the very least for recurring ("cron") runs, once filesystem structure, cache invalidation triggers and web server configuration are in place. Its a shame this is still taught in the "just run as admin" style.

CT indeed worked out pretty well. At least until bots started hammering crt.sh making it unreliable, and those that want to be alerted to newly issued certificated appeared in the logs need to pay for some purpose-built service instead of just adding a relevant query to their feed reader.

The appendix lists what they were collecting, and the amount of samples needed for not just mathematically significant, but also practically useful distinguishing power implies collecting enough for a stable yet unique fingerprint. In that case you could just add a login form.. and still be less hostile than the increasing number of websites that will not let me browse (maybe my mouse movement does not match other humans in my region, idk).

But.. the task was never "detect this" but always "detect this within acceptable constraints".

Sure, once you collect enough bits, you can tell that its me. And if you know from other sources that I am human, that solves your immediate problem. But if you do that, you have still failed at the task of detecting certain kind of abusive behavior without harming my anonymity.

Is that not the commonly cited example for commodity trading, whereas meaningful comparison of fundamentals to market capitalization only started much later?

That particular alias is mildly interesting. The obsession is with finally making progress in understanding the "We kill people based on metadata" threat. Maybe we can please finally stop stuffing PII & timestamps into each "crash report" and every "telemetry ping" and get back to work towards 100% reproducible outputs. (Well, right after I "enable javascript and cookies" because Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai refuse to talk to me before they can grab a unique fingerprint..)

Should not set it to nonsense, but rather low-entropy. If its unique, someone with access to old (browser, probably) crash reports might be able to cross-reference. Plus, not too long ago browsers did not care to sanitize the path for input[type="file"], so some websites remembered your account name somewhere in their database.

Also coincides with the time I started seeing Juniors installing "recommended extensions" into GitHub-hosted Visual Studio environments.. because there was a popup that helpfully suggested doing so, based on the programming languages used in the checked out repository.

I continue to receive phishing via AWS pretending to be Amazon. And not even the Unicode-lookalike shenanigans that my spam filter refuses for excessive mixed scripts, no; literally claiming to be Amazon as in: the company that operates the relay.

Easier: Do not start with a "allow all" configuration in the first place.

Maybe all of those userspace-work-done-in-kernel-because-muh-performance features should be restricted to (the "real") CAP_NET_ADMIN, unless positively enumerated as free-for-all-containers. And then subtract from that free-for-all list every time you learn that some kernel module in its currently available version cannot be trusted to do its own memory shuffling.

e.g. for a two keyword search, Google & DDG return results containing a similar (but more at the moment, more popular, so I understand why they do this) keyword as the first one, and no relation whatsoever with the second. Any search that manages to actually show results related to both of my input terms get the "better" award from me.

I wonder if the same coverage as before is now more economically feasible. The internet has gotten .. smaller, lately.

/proc/cpuinfo shows whatever the hypervisor said, often simply "microcode : 0x1000065"

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/518e7b94817abed94be... https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/ac6721b88df944ade0048822b2...

What purpose does the "news" of finding another way to break "confidential computing" serve, other than proliferate the incorrect assumption that there even was a working concept beforehand?

If git in general would enforce pretending to not know about orphans, it would always need to know what you were meaning to consider the boundary, and/or you would end up waiting for useless duplicate network traffic. The fact that on GitHub, such references are visible irrespective of specified repo is not a bug, its a feature. Its the tools (including but not limited to: GitHub Actions) that cause dangerous misunderstanding in appearing to let you specify something they then never actually enforce.

specified: repo location, slightly-difficult-to-preimage hash

intended meaning: use this hash if and only if it is accessible from the default branch of that repo

actual meaning: use this hash. start looking at this location. I do not care whether it is accessible through that location by accident, by intent of merely its uploader, or by explicit and persisting intent of someone with write access to the location.

Not just shipping features - that part is little more than disk space, for features already neatly isolated into modules. I see potential in improved tooling to express "do not autoload anything below this tree" in a more reliable and manageable manner. I know my 15% (far below that, actually), and many more users could express theirs in some deploy config.. If only that did not incur the cost of watching upstream changing things for no reason, or for the recurring reason of kconfig being a fairly error-prone method of expressing & validating dependency trees.

Notoriously difficult to portray correctly in EU money-shuffling statistics. Some money not granted to the grand duchy still filed under "beneficiary country: Luxembourg" due to some program or institution being headquartered there. And it is essentially impossible to compare apples to apples what happens in actual EU budget and what happens in Kirchberg, home to EIB.

I found that reducing my "Linux" lines from ~21000 (including net-pf-16-proto-21) down to those ~3000 I might actually use (e.g. udp_tunnel) to be a fairly effective method of not having to care about each and every newly discovered memory safety hazard.

Then you have already have not been very present in the analytical data that these business decisions are based on.