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jsfitzsimmons

19 karma · joined February 10, 2017

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jsfitzsimmons··on What's Wrong with AI?
Yes, AI datacenters do actually use evaporative cooling. The water isn't destroyed obviously but it is made unavailable for other purposes (like keeping people, animals, and plants alive) and depletes water tables that can't be easily replenished
jsfitzsimmons··on Uber, Mired in Corporate Scandals, Sees Uptick in Bookings
The act of buying stock signals demand and reduces supply, which will effectively cause the price to rise. Indirectly, rising stock prices are a positive indicator for the health of the company. Directly, if the company chooses to sell stock, it will be able to sell it at the higher price.
jsfitzsimmons··on Reasons to Switch from Chrome to Firefox
Drag and drop a tab to another position on the tab bar while holding ctrl. (Might be command or whatever on Mac?). No idea why this functionality isn't exposed via a menu item.

I just tried it with this tab and not only did I get full back history but it also had my partially entered comment in this form.

Edit: holding ctrl while using back and refresh also duplicate a tab with predictable behaviour.

jsfitzsimmons··on KeePassXC 2.2.0 released with YubiKey and TOTP support
Your second point is a great point, and I believe that there should be a user prompt every time something tries to read from the password database over any API.

With that said, what's the threat model for the first point? Is localhost interception a serious risk?

jsfitzsimmons··on KeePassXC 2.2.0 released with YubiKey and TOTP support
I'm trying the snap package, but I don't think the cli is available this way. I can find the binary in /snap/keepassxc/current/bin, but it has library loading problems.
jsfitzsimmons··on Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly
Doesn't WASM need GC support before Go can be used? It'll need to be fully managed languages until then, I think.

With that said I'm just parroting some other comments I've seen on this topic in other contexts, so I'm asking the question genuinely.

jsfitzsimmons··on I was wrong, reflecting on the .NET design choices
It's not really that innocuous. It'll cause the program to crash as soon as it's discovered that there wasn't a value where you were expecting one.

In languages with exceptions, the program will crash as soon as you try to use that value (rather than when you try to unwrap it), e.g. the infamous null pointer exception. Copying bad sample code in this case might result in code that is difficult to debug because a null value might be handed off several times before something tries to dereference it.

In languages that expect but do not enforce that you check the validity of the value (like C) you'll just get undefined behaviour that will hopefully cause your program to segfault when you try to use the value, but who knows what will actually happen? Copying bad sample code in this case will cause a security vulnerability.

Copying "bad" sample rust code (using unwrap) will cause a safe crash with maximum locality, for simpler debugging.

jsfitzsimmons··on On Growing: Lessons from the Story of WeChat
Does it have end to end encryption though? That's kind of a killer feature.
jsfitzsimmons··on Crypto Tools for DevOps: Git-Crypt – Tozny
We ran into this problem with terraform and we needed a fix quickly. The problem is that they recommend you check in your .tfstate files, which does make sense; they do need to be synchronized between everyone who might be working on the repo. However, we learned later down the line that in some cases, the state files might contain secrets. So we rolled out git-crypt for all .tfstate files to future-proof ourself against accidental checkin of secrets.

Terraform does support a number of out of band state management backends that I would prefer to use, but none of those backends support encryption at rest. Hopefully hashicorp will roll out support for vault as a backend at some point...

jsfitzsimmons··on Intent to Deprecate and Remove: Trust in Existing Symantec-Issued Certificates
The implementation is open source. You can launch your own ACME server (valuable for testing), and use that. CAs implementing this technology obviously need to go through the same hoop-jumping in order to become trusted, but that's true of any strategy of starting a CA.

The technology is available for any CA, existing or new, to copycat.

And if they don't want to use the open source reference implementation, they can cleanroom an ACME server that works with all the existing clients that work with letsencrypt.

jsfitzsimmons··on Introducing Docker Secrets Management
What kind of stuff do you get from the integration? I mean, aside from the obvious stuff like a clustered storage backend and leader election?