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kam

1,146 karma · joined March 15, 2009

https://kevinmehall.net
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kam··on Chromium: Permit blocking of view-source: with URLBlocklist
Sounds like these students are learning more in the process of cheating than they'd learn from the multiple-choice quiz.
kam··on Spook: Side channel attack which could read the memory from password managers
Pasting a password into a phishing site because you don't have the browser checking the domain for you seems like a bigger risk than being exploited by something like this.
kam··on Postgres: Boundless `Text` and Back Again
What does string width have to do with SQL injection? You use parameterized queries, not just rely on your validation to reject quotes, right?
kam··on Rust for Linux redux
The default LLVM backend has supported MIPS since before 1.0 as well.
kam··on CaribouLite: Turn any 40-pin Raspberry-Pi into a Tx/Rx 6GHz SDR
They're using a transceiver that only operates in the 2.4GHz ISM band, and putting a mixer in front of it to upconvert/downconvert frequencies beyond that. These ranges are probably the gaps between what the AT86RF215 can handle on its own and the frequencies at which the mixer kicks in.
kam··on Using Rust Macros to exfiltrate secrets
This is why VSCode is adding Workspace Trust to prevent extensions from running untrusted code by merely opening a directory. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/120251#issuecomme...
kam··on Open letter from researchers involved in the “hypocrite commit” debacle
My understanding is that the "not found" messages were never archived, rather than deleted. Likely they were not CC'd to the list, and the replies added the list back to CC.
kam··on Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary
https://getpublii.com/, though it would be nicer if it were built on one of the more popular static site generators instead of reinventing that wheel.
kam··on Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software
Apache and Curl are not GPL or AGPL to start with.
kam··on How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars
No, it's not going to land anywhere near Opportunity.

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24729/map-of-nasas-mars-land...

kam··on Licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana
Are there any known instances where a company offering Mongo or another SSPL-licensed app as a service has complied with section 13 by releasing the “Service Source Code” of everything supporting the service?

If not, that basically confirms the OSI's rejection of the SSPL as an open source license -- If that provision is too onerous to be followed, it might as well say "you can't offer this as a service".

kam··on Microsoft Refuses to Open Source VSCode Python Language Server
Pylance is built on their open source Pyright library, which is also available as a VSCode extension. I'm just using Pyright instead and don't seem to be missing out on anything important.

https://github.com/microsoft/pyright

kam··on SparkFun À La Carte
They list Artemis and SAMD51 as microcontroller options, which are both ARM Cortex-M4.
kam··on Current use of Linux in spacecraft flight software (2017)
Two more recent ones beyond Earth orbit:

The MarCO cubesats that flew past Mars in 2018 used Linux and Python with an off-the-shelf single board computer and camera: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2016-2491

The Mars 2020 rover launching next month carries a helicopter that contains a phone SoC running Linux: https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publications/files/Balaram_A...

kam··on Permanent.org – Nonprofit, secure cloud storage
Their IRS form 990 names three directors, an exec director, a CTO, and an engineer as of 2018. https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/473017917_201812_990_...

Only one of those people, Dean Drako, is also listed on permanent.org: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Drako

The address on the permanent.org contact page and the Form 990 matches one of his other companies.

kam··on Dictionary union (PEP 584) is merged
The PEP document describing the feature: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0584/
kam··on Understand JWT in 3 Minutes
For sessions? A random token and a key-value store.
kam··on Developing open-source FPGA tools
It's worth pointing out that OpenSCAD was started by Clifford Wolf, who went on to develop Yosys, the synthesis tool used in these open FPGA workflows.
kam··on Messages via JSON
Also the example PHP code doesn't validate the age of the passed timestamp so you could just replay a "signature" indefinitely...

Given that, you might as well just use an unchanging token or Basic Auth. Assuming https, that wouldn't be terrible for this kind of use case. But put it in an Authorization header, not in a query parameter, so it doesn't end up in logs.

kam··on How to not rewrite it in Rust
That would be correct if the bytes were a string encoded in utf-8, but that's probably not the case for the output of a hash function.
kam··on My transition to an Ubuntu workstation
For 1, Xournal can open PDFs, insert text, images, and annotations, and export back to PDF.
kam··on My favorite Rust function
Try https://docs.rs/once_cell/
kam··on My favorite Rust function
> you can't initialize some const x: SomeStruct with a function call.

You can if it's a `const fn`. The set of features you can use in `const` is small but growing.

kam··on Mozilla takes action to protect users in Kazakhstan
When issuing the certificate, the CA submits a pre-certificate to the CT logs, and the final certificate includes a cryptographic proof that the certificate was included in the log. The browser can check that proof without needing to query a 3rd party.
kam··on How Rust optimizes async/await
Mostly, with the caveat that in single threaded usage, you're paying for the unnecessary overhead of atomic ops on the reference count.

Rust has `Rc`, which is not atomic but `!Send` so the type system ensures that it stays within a thread, as well as the atomic `Arc`.

kam··on Simple Dockerfile examples are often broken by default
And `python:3.7@sha256:35ff9f44818f8850f1d318aa69c2e7ba61d85e3b93283078c10e56e7d864c183` is even better.
kam··on Security Advisory for the Standard Library
Imagine if there were a CVE number for every API in the C++ standard library that could segfault if blatantly misused.
kam··on Estimating Number of Jupyter Notebooks on Github
GitHub and nbviewer don't actually execute the notebooks, they simply render the markdown, code, and saved output to HTML.
kam··on Firefox 66.0.4 is out, fixes disabled add-ons
It's a signing certificate that is built into the browser to verify add-ons, not a normal TLS certificate that they can just update on a web server.

The change basically just imports the new certificate into the database: https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-release/rev/848b1502...

kam··on All extensions disabled due to expiration of intermediate signing cert
All three of my devices on three different operating systems still have their add-ons (for now), so it's definitely not universal.
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