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gamegodon FortiGuard XOR Encryption in Multiple Fortinet Products

I wonder how much they paid to gag the researchers for the 17 months it took them to fix this.

gamegodon Linus Torvalds: Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder

Git was popular before GitHub was a thing. Git was taking over the open source world back when everybody was on SVN, and people were just hosting their Git repos themselves. GitHub made Git ubiquitous for all types of developers and accelerated that adoption further, giving us the near-monopoly we see today.

gamegodon Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era

Flash Lite worked perfectly fine on loads of ancient mobile phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite

gamegodon Atari VCS Lead Architect Quits, Claims Six Months of Design Work Went Unpaid

There's an 881 page thread of people ripping this "Atari" project to shreds on the AtariAge forums. People could smell the BS even back in 2017: https://atariage.com/forums/topic/266480-new-atari-console-t...

At some point in that thread around summer 2019, a photo of their "prototype" hardware was released, and it's just a stock embedded Ryzen dev board - not custom hardware at all. After 2 years, they had nothing done. It gets even better: They realized their original case design from 2017 was too costly and had to redesign it in Spring 2019: https://medium.com/@atarivcs/atari-vcs-structural-improvemen...

Even in 2019, all they had were renders of both their old and new case designs, and that blog post really goes to show how unprepared they were. Any moron with CAD experience could have told them their original design would have been a nightmare to manufacture/assemble.

gamegodon Looking Back at the Snowden Revelations

Yeah, we'll just go ahead and use x86 processors from AMD, another US company, which are surely not backdoored...

gamegodon Show HN: Rocket Streaming Audio Server

Hi all, author here. I built RSAS as a "drop-in Icecast replacement" after working with a handful of streaming radio companies, who were all impacted by Icecast bugs and missing features. I wanted an alternative with a better foundation, better out-of-the-box support for the modern web (eg. CORS, easy metadata access), and that was easier to integrate with.

As a drop-in replacement, it reads your existing Icecast config file, and writes logs in the same format as Icecast. It doesn't have every feature of Icecast, but all the major ones are implemented (relays, fallbacks, etc), and I've been using it to power my own audio CDN for the last year.

If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them!

gamegodon Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

Mattermost, IRC, etc.

gamegodon Slack’s Shares Plunge After It Predicts a Larger Loss

Gmail's a bad comparison because it never had to make money directly - it was just there to help Google build and maintain their search monopoly by acting as another data source and shutting out competitors. Slack, on the other hand, needs to make money because chat is their only product.

gamegodon Qt 5.13 Released

Graphics View is just a fancy widget for when you want to do loads of custom drawing of "items" on a canvas. "Qt provides [a] powerful graphics engine that supports easy visualization of items, with support for rotation and zooming. Additionally it provides an event propagation architecture for interaction." --> This is what QGraphicsView and QGraphicsScene accomplish for you.

See:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qgraphicsview.html

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qgraphicsscene.html

https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/examples-graphicsview.html

Take a look at the types of applications they used for the examples. It'd be a good solution for something like a CAD layout widget, or maybe a maps widget. You use it together with Qt Widgets or Qt Quick, not instead of it.

gamegodon Qt 5.13 Released

If you're building for mobile or want a "modern" UI, go with Qt Quick. If you're building for the desktop, and want a conventional UI, use Qt Widgets.

I'd go with Qt Widgets by default, unless I was building an app that needed very strong branding, a unique UI, and had design help, then I'd go with Qt Quick. Curious to hear what others think.

(I've built a handful of desktop apps with Qt, but they're all tools for music or radio, so a flashy flat UI never made sense, so I've always stuck with Qt Widgets. No regrets.)

gamegodon An update on Sunday’s service disruption

You're right, but I wanted to point out their poor wording. They shouldn't downplay the huge impact on GCP customers in one paragraph, and then gloat about YouTube being fine in the next.

It's undermines their GCP business in a big way too - It makes you think that if they had to choose, they would throw their GCP customers under the bus to preserve their own other services. The value proposition of GCP is greatly diminished then in comparison to a dedicated cloud provider like DigitalOcean, who has no other competing interests. This changed the way I view some of these cloud providers.

eg. If Google had to prioritize ad network traffic over GCP, there's no question the ad network would get priority. But why not just go with a different provider who doesn't have to make that compromise?

gamegodon An update on Sunday’s service disruption

The network became congested, and our networking systems correctly triaged the traffic overload and dropped larger, less latency-sensitive traffic in order to preserve smaller latency-sensitive traffic flows...

Overall, YouTube measured a 10% drop in global views during the incident...

So what I'm hearing is that while Google Cloud Pub/Sub was down for hours, crippling my SaaS business, Google was prioritizing traffic to cat videos.

It's good to know Google considers GCP traffic neither important, nor urgent.

gamegodon [dead]

GCP Pub/Sub is giving me a 502 Bad Gateway, as does the Google Cloud support/docs page... seems bad

gamegodon Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

IDEs - A proper work-grade IDE like Visual Studio will have some tools built into it that will save you tons of time. Features like "Edit & Continue" have saved my bacon many times by making intractably difficult bugs in algorithms much easier to understand because you can experiment with your code on the fly.

There's also some more common features in most IDEs like being able to jump between symbols that saves a lot of time day-to-day.

If I'm interviewing you and you say you don't like using an IDE or a debugger, that speaks to your work experience, your productivity, your self awareness about your productivity, and really puts an upper limit on the difficulty of the problems you've had to solve.

gamegodon I exploited TLS-SNI-01 issuing Let's Encrypt SSL-certs for any domain (2018)

They have updated, just `apt-get upgrade`.

gamegodon Fortnite dev launches Epic Games Store that takes 12% of revenue

I love that this is the same play that Valve used to launch Steam - They used the success of Counter-Strike and then Half-Life 2 to create a massive install-base for Steam.

gamegodon Signing Your Apps for Gatekeeper

Remember that time Apple messed up and decided to punish all their app developers by forcing them to resign their apps?

gamegodon Serverless Docker Beta

Finally, I can have left-pad as a service.

gamegodon For Static Sites, There’s No Excuse Not to Use a CDN

And HTTP/2 further reduces the benefit of a CDN for small assets (vs. no CDN), since requests are asynchronous and multiplexed, giving you better performance.

gamegodon Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

And what about software developers? Should we be suing the kernel developers for leaving that privilege escalation bug in for 9 years?

gamegodon Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

If GitHub and Twitter are struggling with this, what chance do the rest of us have?

gamegodon Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

> But it's the same 20 servers as a million other companies, so the chance of those servers being a target is much greater.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. I feel like my chances of being collateral damage on an attack against someone else is way higher in the cloud.

Even today with GitHub and other SaaS platforms going down, we were all affected.

gamegodon Internet Attack Spreads, Disrupting Major Websites

Irony alert:

> "But technology providers in the United States could suffer blowback. As Dyn fell under recurring attacks on Friday, Mr. York, the chief strategist, said such assaults were the reason so many companies are pushing at least parts of their infrastructure to cloud computing networks, to decentralize their systems and make them harder to attack."

Pushing your infrastructure to cloud computing is not decentralization - it's centralization, and we're all doing it. Imagine if an attack like this was against AWS... we'd all be screwed.

gamegodon No Man’s Sky – Procedural Content

Minecraft

gamegodon Kuhn's Paradox

It feels like open core is the new "embrace, extend, extinguish". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish )

On the other hand, the economy just doesn't incentivize open source communities to build the very best software for average users, compared to say, making a billion bucks with by building my new shiny walled garden social network. Anecdotal examples and lots of great FOSS project aside, cash is king and capitalism doesn't favour open source.

gamegodon Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file servers

There's probably a good case study to be made here on why so many people have had bad experiences with GlusterFS. If the problem is that it's too easy to set it up in a fragile way, then they need to fix that, because otherwise you're going to end up with a lot unhappy users (as you can see in the other comments).

Still, if I can't make it work well on a reasonably small scale, why would I expect it to work any better when I scale it up?

gamegodon Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file servers

You're living the dream then, and I'm glad to hear this is possible. :)

Do you mind sharing which GlusterFS version you're on, which kernel, and roughly what your load profile is? (eg. lots of small files, read-heavy, write-heavy, etc.) Also, are you using Red Hat Gluster Storage or the open source version?

gamegodon Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file servers

I didn't do the initial configuration myself but I wouldn't rule out this kind of gross, self-inflicted problem.

One has to wonder why the software even lets you run it with an unsafe number of nodes though... (Lots of distributed software is guilty of this...)

gamegodon Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file servers

I worked with a GlusterFS deployment in production about 2 years ago, and it was such a nightmare that I both feel compelled to write about it and never touch anything made by that team ever again.

It was the whole shebang: Kernel panics, inconsistent views, data loss, very slow performance, split-brain problems all the time. Our set up IIRC was very simple: two bricks in a replicated volume. It worked so poorly that we had to take it out of production. Some of our experience can be explained by GlusterFS performing poorly under network partitions, but nothing could justify kernel panics. It blew my mind that Redhat acquired that company and product.

Edit: I hope there's been a big improvement to the reliability and performance of GlusterFS. Can anyone with more recent experience running it in production comment?