Val Town raises seed round.
I love the idea behind Val Town: it hosts serverless functions for simple APIs or scheduled tasks. I use it to scrape my local council’s waste collection page and return an …
Someone asked me if staying at a tech company a long time makes it harder to get a job elsewhere.
Not really. The real challenge is that a lot of your effectiveness as a long timer comes from knowing people & processes. You just can’t tell how much until after you leave. Was it 10% or 90% of your success? 🤷🏾♂️
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If you work in shell/terminal often enough, then over time the history will become your personal knowledge vault, documentation and command reference. ...
I decided to build a "clap" feature into my #IndieWeb blog, so visitors can show appreciation anonymously and easily, if they want!
I wrote a little about it here https://www.byjp.me/posts/easy-appreciation/; it uses https://val.town (I wish they had a Fediverse account, so I could tag them) and progressive enhancement to be useful and easy even for folks without Javascript browsers ☺️
Why the FUCK am I getting an ad on my TV from the NHS about measles being on the rise? It’s fucking 2024, never seen an ad like this in my life.
2021: 360 cases in England and Wales
2022: 735 cases
2023: 1603
VACCINATE your fucking kids you fucking selfish arseholes
Today was a lovely spring day, the sun was warm. I decided to open the doors to the garden and read a book. It was cold and windy and next doors cat came in and refused to leave, beat up my dog and destroyed some things. So not fully successful.
#Hashicorp sending their lawyers on #OpenTofu feels like the last chapter of what was once a great open source company. Oh well, the claims look baseless, and like pretty much any move Hahicorp made this past year, this will only hurt themselves.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/opentofuorg_opentofu-project-was-recently-made-aware-activity-7182147077496344576-jsDQ
get into computers, they told me when i was a kid, you'll have fun and possibly a rewarding career!
reality: my computers have been interdicted by intelligence agencies to install god knows what on them before i receive them, presumably in the hope of extricating my signing keys, i have to deal with something called "docker", and another thing called "kubernetes", there is a whole profession called DevOops and i have to deal with entitled pricks who say my projects are "dead" because i did not review their error-ridden patches fast enough for their liking
I love people who say “what is missing from society is support for opposing and dissenting points of view.” I then ask them, “did you schedule your pro-cancer rally this year?” Yeah! Go cancer! Those cells have every right to be unique and different and thrive! 🎉
@shanselman I think my biggest concern now is 'code review now comes with a rousing game of Among Us', but I'm still weighing that concern in a larger context.
Ten years ago today, a new app arrived to strip the "media" out of social media, reducing messaging to two little letters. It burned bright, but not for long.
I recently went through a job search, and I thought it would be good to do a mini retrospective on the whole experience. Overall, it was a better candidate experience than the last time I interviewed so I want to believe that the industry is making progress.
Just did a task that was open since Feb. 20th that will unblock six teammates doing full-time work starting this week. It took 5 minutes 35 seconds to finish. I will, again, learn nothing from this.
I really can only shitpost about the #xv debacle because the whole thing just makes me tired and sad. Anyone paying even a tiny bit of attention to the conversation about open source sustainability could have told you this was inevitable. And now we're watching people blame a volunteer trying to step back, and rehashing all the same old tired arguments we've been having literally for decades. It's just so tired and predicable and boring and sad.
My favorite Ren Faire story:
I knew a guy who kept a Starfleet insignia pinned to the inside of his garb. A few times per season, some folks would come to the Faire cosplaying as a Star Trek landing party, investigating a “primitive” world.
He would take them aside, show his insignia, and identify himself as a Starfleet officer on a cultural research mission. He’d call them out for breaking the Prime Directive and ruining his research. Then he’d demand to know what ship they’re from, and threaten to get them court martialed if they didn’t change into something less conspicuous.
Anyone who thinks commit signing is the answer to malicious actors, at a time when the web of trust has been killed by a lil green verified box, is foolish.
Like sure they verify that someone who can log into a particular GitHub account is the author of a commit, but that… don’t mean shit when the author is malicious 🙃
Originally a thread on Twitter about the xz/liblzma vulnerability, when I finished typing it, I realized I had a real world slice of Open Source interaction that deserved more attention.
You can absolutely push your development cycle to the limit, the fastest programmer with a completely comprehensive suite of tests, sure. Go for it.
You will still be fundamentally hamstrung by not-fit-for-purpose tooling (JIRA), overly bureaucratic release processes, and slow deployment mechanisms.
Yes, be the most efficient developer you can, work in small increments and iterate effectively, but it's just as important to remove systematic issues that hinder you and your team.
hey does anybody out there have any thoughts about the xz compromise or perhaps have you thought of a way to relate it to some axe you have been grinding for 20 years
The clocks went forward an hour in the UK today, which raises an important question: when they go back in October will there be a compensatory Trans Hour Of Visibility?
If you want many eyes on your open source project, you need to get rid of assholes.
Bad community management is a security risk.
Assholes bully sole maintainers.
Assholes gatekeep and keep maintainer numbers low.
Assholes waste time on the mailing list with petty bullshit.
If you fundraise, assholes are bullying your grant writers and community managers.
Some of the best security contributors don't write a single line of code. They yeet assholes.
I've been informed by the 11yo that his mother and I are the target of an antitrust lawsuit joined by at least 15 other children, that we have abused our power to maintain an illegal monopoly in the relevant market of "parenting decisions" specifically for preventing choice and putting in place limits regarding food, videogames, and other media, and have conspired to make it effectively impossible for them to switch to alternative parenting decision providers
My current take on the #xz situation, not having read the actual source backdoor commits yet (thanks a lot #Github for hiding the evidence at this point...) besides reading what others have written about it (cf. https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor for a good timeline):
1. This is going to be an excellent teaching example for advanced supply chain attacks that I will definitely be using in the future - after much more in-depth analysis.
2. It seems to have been a long game, executed with an impressive sequence of steps and preparation, including e.g. disabling OSSFuzz checks for the particular code path and pressuring the original maintainer into accepting the (malicious) contributions.
3. The potential impact could have been massive, and we got incredibly lucky that it was caught and reported (https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4) early. Don't count on such luck in the future.
4. Given the luck involved in this case, we need to assume a number of other, currently unknown supply chain backdoors that were successfully deployed with comparable sophistication and are probably active in the field.
5. Safe(r) languages like #rustlang for such central library dependencies would maybe (really big maybe) have made it a bit harder to push a backdoor like this because - if and only if the safety features are used idiomatically in an open source project - reasonably looking code is (a bit?) more limited in the sneaky behavior it could include. We should still very much use those languages over C/C++ for infrastructure code because the much larger class of unintentional bugs is significantly mitigated, but I believe (without data to back it up) that even such "bugdoor" type changes will be harder to execute. However, given the sophistication in this case, it may not have helped at all. The attacker(s) have shown to be clever enough.
6. Sandboxing library code may have helped - as the attacker(s) explicitly disabled e.g. landlock, that might already have had some impact. We should create better tooling to make it much easier to link to infrastructure libraries in a sandboxed way (although that will have performance implications in many cases).
7. Automatic reproducible builds verification would have mitigated this particular vector of backdoor distribution, and the Debian team seems to be using the reproducibility advances of the last decade to verify/rebuild the build servers. We should build library and infrastructure code in a fully reproducible manner *and* automatically verify it, e.g. with added transparency logs for both source and binary artefacts. In general, it does however not prevent this kind of supply chain attack that directly targets source code at the "leaf" projects in Git commits.
8. Verifying the real-life identity of contributors to open source projects is hard and a difficult trade-off. Something similar to the #Debian #OpenPGP #web-of-trust would potentially have mitigated this style of attack somewhat, but with a different trade-off. We might have to think much harder about trust in individual accounts, and for some projects requiring a link to a real-world country-issued ID document may be the right balance (for others it wouldn't work). That is neither an easy nor a quick path, though. Also note that sophisticated nation state attackers will probably not have a problem procuring "good" fake IDs. It might still raise the bar, though.
9. What happened here seems clearly criminal - at least under my IANAL naive understanding of EU criminal law. There was clear intent to cause harm, and that makes the specific method less important. The legal system should also be able to help in mitigating supply chain attacks; not in preventing them, but in making them more costly if attackers can be tracked down (this is difficult in itself, see point 8) and face risk of punishment after the fact.
H/T @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social @AndresFreundTec@mastodon.social @danderson@hachyderm.io @briankrebs @eloy@hsnl.social
@Gaelan@cathode.church @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk
You see, I saw your response and I *still* clicked anyway.
Social engineering will be the death of me.
This game came by at just the right time. Covid gave me the perfect excuse to play this game for hours on end without feeling guilty, and now I’ve finally achieved 5 stars!
🐶💩⛳️ I binned the bag in 4 throws, rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
https://vole.wtf/dog-poo-golf/
Jamie Tanna
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