Hacker News Reader

startlingon Chromium is no longer supported for Chromecast

I've never seen that, but maybe I've never seen an answer by an actual google employee. :/

startlingon Investigating a malware sample which sometimes fails to behave maliciously

Manual analysis to mock out the anti-vm checks.

startlingon Bike manufacturer sees huge reduction in delivery damage by printing TV on box

My apartment door buzzer calls my phone. Generally they don't even attempt to buzz me, and then make me pick it up on the other side of the city.

startlingon Chromium is no longer supported for Chromecast

I think she may be a Google employee. Google's product / support forums are always like this, it's terrible.

startlingon August 2016 Lisp Game Jam Postmortem

The game jam is over, and so is dead.

startlingon A Digital Rumor Should Never Lead to a Police Raid

Maybe it helps to reword "this kind of evidence is unethical" as "taking action on this kind of evidence alone causes social harm"?

startlingon An Important Message About Yahoo User Security

"may have" = "is likely to have", "may not have" = "is not likely to have".

startlingon What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

Assuming Let's Encrypt knows more about its sustainability than you do, and given that they can also invest their money in index funds if they believe it's the right approach, isn't giving the money to them outright just better?

startlingon What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

If Let's Encrypt believes that's the best way to spend their money, they'll do that. Do you think you've thought more about their sustainability than they have?

startlingon Bash 4.4 released

I'm confused about this too. Maybe they believe systemd was adopted for performance, and JITing bash would mitigate performance concerns?

I really doubt that run-once startup scripts would benefit from JITing, though. And memory overhead might be a non-starter.

startlingon Bash 4.4 released

those things aren't equivalent, at all.

startlingon Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (2008)

Fortunately the only people who can read 1000-page documents are those who already have working PDF renderers, so the problem is self-limiting.

startlingon Chrome 55 to start highlighting Not Secure websites

If you're not using https, you have no idea if your ISP, or someone e.g. sitting in your cafe, is attacking you.

startlingon NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender

The second bit of the exploit chain, CVE-2016-4655, leads to disclosure of kernel memory addresses. Once a single memory address is known, you can calculate the random offset of the kernel, and then exploit the third part to overwrite the return address and return into specific chunks of kernel code ("Return Oriented Programming"), whose addresses you computed from the offset + a fixed code location. These can let you e.g. install your payload.

startlingon Hacked: Investigating an Intrusion on My Server

Sure, but you shouldn't continue using the system.

startlingon HackedThat: Breaking in to a hardened server via the back door

It's only marginally helpful: it doesn't actually prevent attackers from uploading code to your server.

Instead of having 'nc -l 8080 | bash' or whatever as your payload, an attacker can just run code instead. "pwd > /var/www/html/exfiltration.html". If they absolutely need a shell, they could e.g. alter nginx or its config files to run `bash` on POSTs to a hidden route.

This does make it a little trickier, and potentially a little easier to detect. But it certainly doesn't make it so that "they cannot download new code".

startlingon HackedThat: Breaking in to a hardened server via the back door

This is totally wrong. Once you have RCE, you can upload code the same way you're executing code.

startlingon NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender

(From the lookout paper): "In order to maintain its ability to run, communicate, and monitor its own status, the software disable's the phone's 'Deep Sleep' functionality."

startlingon NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender

There are. "(Kernel) address space layout randomization" is one of them. It was circumvented here; that's part of why this is impressive.

startlingon HoloLens secret sauce: A 28nm customized 24-core DSP engine built by TSMC

Error messages, for one.

startlingon Introducing the Qt Lite project – Qt for any platform, any thing, any size

Because you are designing hardware with certain requirements that may not be fully met by a consumer device.

startlingon Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No More Short-IDs

Find the fingerprint on their website / business card / Twitter / Keybase, download the full key from the keyserver.

Anyone can upload any key to a keyserver with any name.

startlingon Go’s march to low-latency GC

You don't need to be an expert in garbage collectors to get value from reading how your particular garbage collector works.

startlingon ThinkPwn: System Management Mode arbitrary code execution

You can reconstruct a lot of information with a keylogger but nowhere near all of it.

startlingon Felony – An open-source PGP keychain

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

> The Web site Serge had used (which has the word “subversion” in its name) as well as the location of its server (Germany) McSwain clearly found highly suspicious.

startlingon What happens when you try to publish a failure to replicate in 2015/2016

"There has been some promising research with alternative technique X, but that has shown to be unreliable. [1] Because of this and [other factors], we have decided on technique Y."

startlingon To Compete Better, States Are Trying to Curb Noncompete Pacts

You get golf on the beach when you leave no matter how long you stay at Intel (in this hypothetical scenario). Leaving now doesn't get you more golf on the beach.

startlingon More awful IoT stuff

Thanks for clarifying!

startlingon More awful IoT stuff

I believe you can still sue for an injunction (e.g. to compel them to distribute copies of code as per the GPL).

startlingon Teen hacks Pentagon websites, gets thanked for finding 'bugs'

> isn't exactly worthy of a job offer anyway.

1) XSS is game over for sites with authentication. What kind of vulnerabilities do you think are more important than XSS?

2) XSS is a result. There are a lot of complicated XSS bugs.