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rob-olmos

283 karma · joined November 16, 2011

Rob Olmos

https://twitter.com/RobOlmos

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robolmos

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rob-olmos··on Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained
One of my wild guesses could be Apple wants to mine the data. Blaming it on having to comply with court orders could be a useful limited hangout.
rob-olmos··on Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups
Can you link any docs for that? I believe a lifecycle is attached to an S3 bucket, and there's no bucket for EBS snapshots as they're tied to EC2.
rob-olmos··on Gandi loses data, customers told to use their own backups
How do you move your EBS snapshots to Glacier?
rob-olmos··on Two malicious Python libraries caught stealing SSH and GPG keys
Sandboxing in the language runtime is an interesting idea. I wonder if that could be offloaded to the OS/kernel instead so that every language doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. Eventually then hardware could handle it to reduce overhead.

Eg, declare parts of the compiled/interpreted code with specific privileges. Kind of like how memory regions can be NX.

rob-olmos··on The ominous opacity of the AWS bill – a cautionary tale
Found this issue with other SaaS-like providers too. Eg, a popular email relay/delivery service has a per-email price if you go over your rate plan, with no ability to set a hard limit for the account or per sub-user.

Compromised account or server? It'd be interesting for their spam filters to catch most of it. But an accidental loop or issue in your code? (like another commenter mentioned with a $30k bill). Yikes.

Incredible to lack such a basic feature to better protect an account especially when money is involved.

rob-olmos··on Amazon Launches Managed Cassandra Service
Could you provide a bit more specifics on what was being cleaned up please? Thanks
rob-olmos··on Twitter lets you use 2FA without a phone number
I wish I could understand why platforms are still only allowing one hardware key, especially a platform like Twitter with a sizable base of advanced users.
rob-olmos··on Build a WhatsApp Chatbot with Python, Flask and Twilio
Did Twilio or AT&T ever provide any response on the blocking numbers issue?
rob-olmos··on Cops are making fewer arrests since N.J. got rid of cash bail
I have doubts the algorithm would be a decision tree, or capable of being contained in one. I feel like at some point it would use or be an ML model.

Would a model also be open and transparent? It would at least be open & testable, but I'm not sure about transparent for easily identifying any biases.

rob-olmos··on Elephants Rarely Get Cancer, Now We Know Why (2015)
The article mentions possibly treating/curing cancer: "He believes there could be a drug that could mimic the effect of p53, or a way to deliver these genes to people at risk of developing cancer, or who already have it to treat or cure the disease."
rob-olmos··on Systemd needs official documentation on best practices
What was the solution for the SD card imaging?
rob-olmos··on Pharma companies continue to raise drug prices at rates well above inflation
Out of curiosity, why do you feel (a) is not the case? Are the profits going to salaries instead?
rob-olmos··on The 2002 mandate for internal communication systems at Amazon
Faxes, like in US health care. With staff to handle it at the endpoints.
rob-olmos··on Pain Points of Web Development with WordPress
Do you have a certain process or library to version control a WP code base/database? TIA
rob-olmos··on If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong
Yea, I'm looking for the SSH CA (certificate authority, the one that generates/signs the ssh certs for end users) to do more granular authorization. Or, something associated with the CA.

Eg, UserA only has been granted access to ServerB, so only show them ServerB as a target and reject all others.

rob-olmos··on If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong
Thanks for your reply and offer. I'll look into the product a bit more when I get some free time.

I think I was a bit vague about RBAC. I'm thinking that the user account creation isn't vital in this use case since the audit log holds who generated/access. It's more about controlling who can generate a cert for what.

Eg, I think Teleport's model has the RBAC config at or near the CA part, so the cert generation either happens if authorized or denied if not.

rob-olmos··on If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong
Is there a project for being the SSH CA that also includes RBAC for users without costing $hundreds/$thousand per month?

I've seen projects that'll do the SSH CA part, but unless I overlooked it I didn't see any RBAC or mapping ability to restrict users to specific servers.

rob-olmos··on 25 Years of PHP [video]
For mod_php, they'd run as the same httpd user account and could mess with other user's stuff if they were set to be httpd writeable.

Other isolation levels were needed, like an MPM that would run vhosts as their own user, or a vhost level chroot.

Alternatively, there was php-cgi via suexec, but it didn't have the persistent qualities of mod_php.

rob-olmos··on Demystifying Server-Side HTTP Requests for WordPress Developers
The comment that this post is referring to seems to be more thorough than the blog post seems to imply on my first read through.

I understand the issue, of what sounds like removing the core/theme signing, due to other issues like 32bit performance issues it seems, but it looks like the WP comment has plausible reasons for why.

It would be nice and more informative if the blog post took a point by point approach to the WP comment, IMO.

rob-olmos··on QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit in Ransomware Attack
That's a fascinating scenario. Even more malicious embedding shellcode in a series of tickers and prices kicked off with a few invalid tickers/prices.

I wonder how many other feeds/sources like that in which so many businesses rely on in at least some level of autonomous fashion.

Reminds of the story of Google wiping out all of their CDN servers by Diskerase because of a single detected value, IIRC.

rob-olmos··on QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit in Ransomware Attack
Would be nice if someone could build a site like https://twofactorauth.org/ for bringing more attention to this alarming and growing issue.

The goal to hopefully influence companies into providing such a fundamental ability.

rob-olmos··on QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit in Ransomware Attack
QuickBooks Online does not have a native backup or restore, at all, and it's pretty ridiculous. QBO told me they also can't do on-request restorations with their backups.

There's a third-party or two that can use the API to do a backup/restore, but also, still, not all of the QBO data has an API. Eg, IIRC, recurring transaction tasks.

Just a matter of time for ransomware to replace data via APIs.

rob-olmos··on Cloudflare outage caused by bad software deploy
For the size and importance of Cloudflare some insights to a couple questions would be nice:

1. Why are WAF rules not progressively deployed since there's already a system to do so?

2. Maybe there should also be a testing environment that receives a mirror of production traffic before deployments reach real users?

(I understand the WAF change was not set to take action, but a separate environment would be less likely to affect production)

rob-olmos··on Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number
For smaller towns (one I know of being a population of ~6k) callers speak with the dispatcher.
rob-olmos··on Wide Color Photos Are Coming to Android
2011 iMac display I can't see the logo, but if I drag the Chrome tab over to a connected ViewSonic VA2431wm monitor from years ago, the logo shows up. Interesting.
rob-olmos··on Improving privacy and security on the web
Is a SameSite=Strict cookie sent if VICTIM.COM does a redirect?

If so, it sounds like the next trick to follow would be a type of "redirect gadget" to get SameSite=Strict to be exploitable again. If so, maybe it's only the end of CSRFs without a gadget.

Eg of "redirect gadget", CSRF via VICTIM.COM/open-redirect?url=/update-password...

rob-olmos··on Storing files in the DB: story of an epic failure
Had to deal with this before. Really hampered things with bloated backups and extended restore times during restoration tests.

Also not a good plan for the database to no longer fit within RAM, especially if the storage engine is evicting cached pages for blob content, only to populate a CDN.

rob-olmos··on AMP pages displaying your own domain
Thanks. IIRC the site I saw was from a few years ago, before the spec was drafted. (I updated my post to be more clear). Pretty sure there was a few photographs on the page out in the flat grasslands.
rob-olmos··on Announcing AMP Real URL
Found this more lively page, apologies if cross-posting a comment is not allowed:

Semi-related, I think Web Packages and Signed Exchanges could have some usefulness outside of Google's caches. One of their spec examples was for verifiable web page archives. Another idea it could be used for a wifi "drop box" (drop station?) when there's no internet connection around. That isn't uncommon at some popular spots up river into the woods in the US.

The idea is that as people enter the area, they can update the drop station automatically for things like news or public posts with whatever they've cached recently.

I'm pretty sure I read about this idea before the spec was drafted but I couldn't find or remember the site, something like vehicle-transported data.

rob-olmos··on AMP pages displaying your own domain
Semi-related, I think Web Packages and Signed Exchanges could have some usefulness outside of Google's caches. One of their spec examples was for verifiable web page archives.

Another idea it could be used for a wifi "drop box" (drop station?) when there's no internet connection around. That isn't uncommon at some popular spots up river into the woods in the US.

The idea is that as people enter the area, they can update the drop station automatically for things like news or public posts with whatever they've cached recently.

I'm pretty sure I read about this idea before the spec was drafted but I couldn't find or remember the site, something like vehicle-transported data.

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