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xmodem

1,902 karma · joined September 5, 2012

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xmodem··on Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates
Heaps of us. I'd been using it for years before Homebrew even existed and I never felt that any of the problems that Homebrew purported to solve were real.
xmodem··on AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
Funnily enough I've found that LLMs can be effective at mitigating many of the drawbacks of black-box testing and i've significantly expanded our usage of it over the past year
xmodem··on Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates
Reading the title I saw the words "room-temperature" and my mind auto-completed it to superconductor, and based on other comments I don't think i'm alone in that.
xmodem··on I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
Maybe i'm old fashioned, but personally I think the onus should be on the person sending out unauthorized malicious requests to figure out how to not do that.

Any responsible bug bounty researcher reviewing the DNS zone by hand would spot the CNAME and remove it from the target list. You don't get to wash your hands of that because your chatbot did it.

xmodem··on I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
One solution is to not set up and run a computer program that relies on bad information to perform automated cyber-attacks on third parties.
xmodem··on I'm being cyberattacked by Tesla, Inc
This is why IP certificates are limited to a max lifetime of 6 days.

> IP address certificates allow server operators to authenticate TLS connections to IP addresses rather than domain names. Let’s Encrypt supports both IPv4 and IPv6. IP address certificates must be short-lived certificates, a decision we made because IP addresses are more transient than domain names, so validating more frequently is important.

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-avail...

xmodem··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
> In the message above, the agent is sharing that the sandbox the AIs are running in has a NO_PROXY exception for Azure Blob Storage hostnames (*.blob.core.windows.net). ...

> Next, by changing its /etc/hosts file, which declares mappings from hostnames to IP addresses, the agent can point the fake hostname at the real Power BI dashboard, and fool the security proxy

Did a chatbot design this "sandbox"?

xmodem··on Monitors for Work
I have poor eyesight and need to sit closer than normal, and I find 27" to be just a tad too large. In my home-office setup I have a decade-old 24" 4K IPS panel that is the perfect size, and I dread the day it gives up the ghost because apart from some very expensive professional monitors, no-one seems to make them at that size and resolution class any more.
xmodem··on Qwen 3.8
If this is true then why did Anthropic bother to update their privacy policy when they first launched Fable?
xmodem··on DLL that was not present in memory despite not being formally unloaded
If you can reproduce it reliably and doing so generates some form of telemetry, then just set up some automation to keep doing that in a loop. From as many machines as possible.

No comment is offered on if I have ever gotten a bug noticed this way.

xmodem··on AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less
Hell, I've hand-written a large PR as a single commit and then asked claude to break it down for me at least once. But I think the fact doing this task by hand is a tedious, time-consuming hassle is not because it inherently has to be but because the tooling for doing it has barely changed in the past 15 years.
xmodem··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
What percentage of CVEs can be used to obtain a shell, but can't otherwise be used to obtain some other form of code execution in a distro-less container?
xmodem··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
I am aware, thank you :). I responded to a sibling dupe-comment over here [1].

To summarize, in my experience there is immense value to having basic shell tools available in the environment where you need them with zero extra friction. Stripping those out provides a security benefit only in specific nebulous and niche scenarios.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48561605

xmodem··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
Nope, not my position at all. I want to have a minimal OS environment with rudimentary tools available with zero extra friction. FROM alpine:latest adds less than 10MB and covers 95% of use cases. Typically depending on the container I will often throw in curl and some other QoL tools too.

For the rare cases where you find yourself needing to attach a debugger to your pods running in staging/prod, a debug container is absolutely the right tool to reach for.

xmodem··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
Yup! They are a good solution to the massive problem you caused for yourself by implementing a different "solution" to a non-problem.

And even that's only true if you assume kubernetes is the only place your container runs where you might want to also debug it.

xmodem··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
> FROM scratch just reduces the surface.

The actual attack surface of your application? Or the attack surface of you and your team's attention from a busybody security org.

It's important not to confuse the two.

xmodem··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
> The cool part about FROM scratch images is that you'll never have to update your base image to address CVEs. Only your software and its (compiled) dependencies.

What's the benefit really, though? If you still need to be able to rapidly deploy a new image in response to a dependency CVE, what have you gained?

xmodem··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
More than one ~500 employee company I've worked at has had security policies either encouraging or requiring the use of "distro-less" images - images with no OS components other than the absolute minimum required to run the application. For go binaries this meant literally nothing in the container apart from the executable.

In theory it has a couple of benefits. You don't have to re-deploy your image to patch CVE's in OS components if you don't have any OS components. And it provides some measure of defence-in-depth - one could certainly theory-craft a scenario where an attacker gains some limited control over your application and then uses some OS component to escalate.

These days if a security engineer is proposing my team adopt distro-less containers to receive these benefits, I would point out that we need to weigh them against the very real drawbacks of not having standard debugging tools available where and when we need them. And also to consider the relative impact of other defence-in-depth measures they could be pursuing instead - such as any sort of network policy to limit network traffic.

xmodem··on Bun support is now limited and deprecated
I see a lot of commentators in this thread who are aggressively critical of volunteer maintainers for making a decision about how to maximize the value of the free labor they donate to the world.

And yet none have offered to volunteer their time to maintain a downstream fork or otherwise rectify the perceived problem.

Strange.

xmodem··on Bun support is now limited and deprecated
Rather than have complexity centralised and managed, let's generate the same vulnerable code across millions of apps. Great plan.
xmodem··on Why TUIs are back
TUIs suck and the only reason they are seeing a re-surgency of relevance is because everything else sucks more along one or more critical metrics. Given the truly incomprehensible amount of CPU and GPU power we have available, this is truly a blight on our industry.
xmodem··on If I could make my own GitHub
I just want a button that says "approve and merge these 3 commits now but these two need re-work"
xmodem··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
Don't anthropomorphize the language model. If you stick your hand in there, it'll chop it off. It doesn't care about your feelings. It can't care about your feelings.
xmodem··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
So it's only wrong in a technical and pedantic sense. A better phrasing might have been along the lines of "There are many sequences of tokens that will destroy your production database that are within the set of possible outputs"
xmodem··on German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function
It's an objection to adding a new dependency, not an attempt to remove an existing one. If we can't stop adding new dependencies, we are certain to be stuck with the status quo forever.
xmodem··on Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold
It's almost as if comments on a website called "hacker news" are written by individuals with differing and varying opinions, and not by some nebulous hive-mind that purports to be internally consistent.
xmodem··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
The problem is that the well you are drinking from has in fact been poisoned. Maybe you think you can tolerate it but some projects are taking a policy decision that any exposure is too dangerous and that is IMO perfectly reasonable.
xmodem··on Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command
The fact that the AI agent will just go and attempt to do whatever insane shit I can dream up is both the most fun thing about playing with it, and also terrifying enough to make me review its output carefully before it goes anywhere near production.

(Hot take: If you're not using --dangerously-skip-permissions, you don't have enough confidence in your sandbox and you probably shouldn't be using a coding agent in that environment)

xmodem··on Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command
An engineer recklessly ran untrusted code directly in a production environment. And then told on himself on Twitter.
xmodem··on MacBook Neo
The A-series has supported virtualization since long before the M-series existed. iOS disables it in early boot, though.

On the other hand, how much virtualization are you really going to be doing with 8GB of RAM?

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