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sneakerblack

133 karma · joined January 15, 2021

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sneakerblack··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
Do you want to be targeted? Then don't look Latino, black or foreign, work blue collar or service jobs or speak a language that is not English. There are plenty of examples of law abiding citizens getting illegally arrested or killed by ICE.

ICE is facing backlash because they are breaking the law and discriminating. Flock is facing backlash because they are enabling ICE and the general oppression of opposition to the current administration. Crimes should be investigated, but this falls outside of an immigration agency's responsibilities.

All this coming from a non-american by the way.

sneakerblack··on Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements
Man, you Americans are really playing with fire
sneakerblack··on Ubuntu's TPM encryption switches to snap kernel that blocks deb kernel packages
Skill issue

Jokes aside, I agree on the sense that this should be a solved problem. On the other hand, if the only implementation is a broken one, there's only one way to help yourself, and that is learning how to do it and helping yourself

sneakerblack··on OpenShell Kubernetes Operator
Being in Kubecon this week and now this project, I'm a bit surprised at how heavily some people lean into Operators. I've always been hesitant to deploy operators into my clusters unless they provide a significant advantage compared to just using argocd just because of how heavily they can hit the k8s API. Not sure if anyone has run into the same issues?
sneakerblack··on Anatomy of a Failed (Nation-State?) Attack
This all stinks of Lazarus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group

I've done incident responses for this exact type of attack multiple times. They've gotten much better organized lately and will often contact developers directly (over LinkedIn or WhatsApp) to run this type of attack. (Although, usually pretending to run a test for a job interview -- which is maybe why the author was confused about the code)

sneakerblack··on Checking if a JavaScript native function is monkey patched (2022)
I think this was posted because the of the recent Npm malware fiasco. The malware monkey-patched native JS functions to replace strings that matched crypto addresses in certain the fetch, and XMLHttpRequest functions:

https://www.aikido.dev/blog/npm-debug-and-chalk-packages-com...

Considering there's no way to check whether a function is monkey-patched, this just tells me the JavaScript ecosystem was not designed with malicious actors in mind

sneakerblack··on Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century
This was discovered last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0st_6sE7Bk

sneakerblack··on FMD Android: secure open source alternative to Google's Find My Device
I think the issue with this is that you'll never be able to have the deep integration current FMD implementations have (where you have Bluetooth beacons to track the phone even when it's "off") and also be able to use anything that requires a signed bootloader and OS (such as banking apps)
sneakerblack··on Jane Street's Sneaky Retention Tactic
Not OP and don't work at Jane Street, but I have a friend that does and yes, they do.
sneakerblack··on 'Golden Dome' plan has a major obstacle: Physics
I think this article sidesteps what this bill also means: a return to cold-war-era thinking of "passive" advancement of military capabilities for the "just in case" scenario
sneakerblack··on [dead]
I wonder if this was cyber sabotage....

Obviously just speculation but considering the escalating tensions between Russia, the EU and the US, I wouldn't be surprised if it were

sneakerblack··on Wiz's $32B GTM Playbook
I work in the security industry and use WIZ and while I do despise all of the buzzword acronyms this industry has come up with, CSPMs have been one of the few tools that have actually made my life significantly easier. Due to the nature of the industry I work in, there is a lot of regulation that we need to comply with, and CSPMs (and wiz in particular) gives us both observability and alerting for all of our resources in our cloud environments, including the configuration of the cloud environments themselves. I don't know how they managed to get a $32B offer so soon after coming out of stealth, but considering the amount of problems it solves for me and my team, I can see why they're doing well financially. We're definitely happy with the pain point the product fixes.

I can now say "I know for a fact we have x number of AWS/GCP/Azure accounts that are either not using our IdP or 2A, here's a list" without having to script across multiple cloud APIs

Similarly, I can say "here's a list of people that accessed x resource in the last y days". It really makes my life easier when I want to access metrics about my company's cloud environments

sneakerblack··on Ask HN: How did you replace Teleport?
Try JumpServer:

https://github.com/jumpserver/jumpserver

Its an open-source PAM solution

We're not using it in-house (we're actually using teleport), and I haven't tried it, but I've heard many good things about it

sneakerblack··on To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use
I'm not too familiar with the situation in Portland, but I have heard that programs which decriminalize drugs and provide care centers are not effective without existing social nets such as solid unemployment programmes and public health programmes that treated addicts can use to get themselves out of the socio-economic hole they got themselves into

Maybe the US is lacking in those programmes and is why the drug legalization programme is not effective in Portland?

sneakerblack··on Apple's Trademark Exploit
I think your accidentally misinterpreting the law

As explaine by the article, counterfeiting involves pretending to be a product it's not. For example, if you sell your hypothetical channel bags as genuine channel bags instead of as generic, no-brand bags, then that would be counterfeiting because you're pretending they're something that it's not. Using genuine apple parts in third-party screens is more comparable to putting channel bag straps (which, yes, have the channel logo on them) into fake bags and selling them as generic, non-channel bags. Similarly, if you don't label the third party screen as "genuine apple", you're not infringing copyright.

sneakerblack··on Tracking SQLite Database Changes in Git
We do the exact same thing to keep track of some credentials we use sops[1] and AWS KMS to separate credentials by sensitivity, then use the git differ to view the diffs between the encrypted secrets

Definitely not best practice security-wise, but it works well

[1] https://github.com/getsops/sops

sneakerblack··on Computers Use Numbers
The mathematical YouTube channel ThreeBlueOneBrown recently organized a competition for people to create the best math explainers they could (in video form or otherwise) and this article was one of the winning entries

If you'd like to see the conclusion to the competition, here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a1fLEToyvU&t=1331

sneakerblack··on Should I Haskell or OCaml?
Learn You a Haskell For Great Good! is also a really good resource:

https://learnyouahaskell.com/

sneakerblack··on Veilid, a New Decentralized Application Framework Unveiled at Defcon 31 [video]

  > Veilid is an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first networked application framework, with a flagship secure messaging application named VeilidChat. Veilid is conceptually similar to IPFS + Tor, but faster and designed from the ground-up to provide all services over a privately routed network. The network also enables development of distributed applications without a 'blockchain' or a 'transactional layer' at their base. Veilid can be included as part of user-facing applications or run as a standalone server for power users who wish to help build the network.
I thought HN would find this interesting :)
sneakerblack··on Yubikey Authenticator
Most likely they just mean that every time they register a new account, they get their backup yubikey out and add the account to it too

It's not possible to clone yubikeys

sneakerblack··on GNU Sends Cease and Desist to Libreboot Developer [video]
I find it kind of amusing that people still blindly follow their ideology without being pragmatic about things

If hardware doesn't (or barely) works with a free/libre implementation, why do they (gnuboot) refuse to use the proprietary binary blob and in the meantime start development on a better free version?

The lack of pragmatism astounds me

sneakerblack··on New version of Monica, codename Chandler, is available in beta
I use docker because it's very easy to deploy home-server style. I don't care about dependencies.
sneakerblack··on Ask HN: How would a US CBDC likely be implemented on a technical level?
The technological implementation aspect is not generally what stops new ideas. And, I think the technical aspect comes after deciding how a CBDC will look like, since it depends on what you want to achieve with a CBDC.

Looking at the different aspects of topics like Privacy, Auditability and how the CBDC relations to the government will give you vastly different implementations of CBDC.

For example:

1) Privacy: is every transaction in the blockchain completely public? Is it only accessible to certain authorized parties? Is it private by default and only accessible with a "view" key like with Litecoin or Monero? All of these questions depend on what the goal of the goal of the currency is. Having a more private currency will make it harder to audit, but you probably do not want to make it completely public in the same way that you'd probably not want to make all your bank transactions public.

2) Considering auditability: How can you make sure then money in a transactions didn't come from illegal gains? If all transactions are completely private (even to the central bank), how do you do KYC and comply with AML regulation? Currently, banks do KYCs on every customer, but if the blockchain for the CBDC doesn't have access restrictions, who will do the auditing? Additionally, how would a tax collection agency like the IRS confirm that you're actually telling the truth about your transactions? They'll need to be able to access those transactions at some point too for audit purposes.

3) Considering the relationship with governmental power: does the government have the power to view every transaction at any time? What powers do they have in the blockchain? Are they the ones that develop the code?

Considering all these questions, you can start to get a relatively good idea for what a CBDC would look like: 1. There are probably some access restrictions since someone needs to do KYC. 2. The blockchain needs to be private by default, but accessible by anyone auditing.

Considering privacy, you could set up a system where authorized transaction processors (such as regional or national banks) are permitted to create wallets for their clients after doing KYC. The transactions could be private by default but have a key to allow the KYC provider to audit transactions an comply with audit requests.

sneakerblack··on 432-Core RISC-V European Processor Designed for Use in Space Taped Out
> Occamy has a lightweight 32-bit CPU core that acts more as a control chip, and it is responsible for rerouting tasks to the AI cores, which are extensions to the instruction set architecture.

Seems like the latter

sneakerblack··on EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones
This is not how incentives work. Companies can and have creates inferior and dangerous products for the sake of profits. See the Phoebus cartel and the BMW emission scandal.
sneakerblack··on Twitter cuts off Substack embeds and starts suspending bots
Isn't this illegal?
sneakerblack··on Protect your homelab with mutual TLS, ACME device attestation, and a Yubikey
Really cool use of the protocol and yubikey though! I didn't know yubikeys could be used like that.

Personally I'd rather not expose anything at all from my home network since it's easier to not have to think about keeping my reverse proxy up to date so I don't get pwned by a 0-day. AFAIK you can also use cloudflare's tunnels or tailscale's new funnels to access your internal network without needing to have tailscale or cloudflare's daemon installed in anything but one of your servers, but that also moved the root of trust to a third-party (unless you self-host your own tailscale infra! But that's also way more work)

Really cool project overall. I might try it out I know the future when I have a fully developed homelab

sneakerblack··on Transitioning Away from Google Services
Personally? I don't like a single company knowing so much about me & prefer to spread my metadata among them

The author likely had some privacy concerns too

sneakerblack··on Chinese app included malware to gain competitive advantage
It got taken down by the owner
sneakerblack··on Chinese app included malware to gain competitive advantage
It got shut down by the owner: https://thehackernews.com/2023/03/breachforums-administrator...
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