“When he reached the New World, Cortezh burned hish ships. Ash a reshult hish men were well motivated.” —Capt. Ramius, played by Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October

Mint is a good recommendation. I’ve used it for most of a decade because I just want my system to work.

Nobody is both that bored and that motivated. Unless paid.

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Emotionally? No. Linguistically, sure.

It’s seriously insane growing up on star trek and then seeing it come to life.

Still holding out for flying cars.

And warp drive!

This feels very “just found out about politics and damn” tbh.

Ok.

I think this would be of value for sharing with people that aren’t aware (my kid when she was younger).

Or is there a better resource to do this?

This is all I’ve run across on reverse engineering, so far but it is quite interesting.

https://bsky.app/profile/filippo.abyssdomain.expert/post/3kowjkx2njy2b

I have a feeling there are a lot of busy people trying to answer that question, now. Yikes.

Yeah it sounds pretty wild already with some kind of, like, door knock mechanism using certificates? So you can’t scan for it. And some reverse engineering countermeasures.

Like everyone else, I have to wonder what libraries have been compromised in a way that nobody has noticed yet.

Some of the trust comes from eyes on the project thanks to it being open source. This thing got discovered, after all. Not right away, sure, but before it spread everywhere. Same question of trust applies to commercial software too.

Ideally, PR reviews help with this but smaller projects esp with few contributors may not do much of that. I doubt anyone has spent time understanding the software supply chain (SSC) attack surface of their product but that seems like a good next step. Someone needs to write a tool that scans the SSC repos and flags certain measures like the # of maintainers.

PS: I have the worst allergies I’ve had in ages today and my brain is in a histamine fog so maybe I shouldn’t be trying to think about this stuff right now lol cough uuugh blows nose

Is there really anything they couldn’t collect?

Very annoying - the apparent author of the backdoor was in communication with me over several weeks trying to get xz 5.6.x added to Fedora 40 & 41 because of it’s “great new features”. We even worked with him to fix the valgrind issue (which it turns out now was caused by the backdoor he had added). We had to race last night to fix the problem after an inadvertent break of the embargo.

He has been part of the xz project for 2 years, adding all sorts of binary test files, and to be honest with this level of sophistication I would be suspicious of even older versions of xz until proven otherwise.

Damn. I would love to see a full post mortem on this compromise.

Well maybe they aren’t experienced info security professionals :)

The whole Colorado River water thing is a fucking complicated mess that I can’t begin to understand. All kinds of weird water rights laws between farmers, ranchers and whoever, not to mention the all the use in Arizona, and fuck knows what else. Every time I read an article about disputes and such my brain melts.

Let’s talk about cotton farming in Arizona, too.

Damn. That is no mean feat, I would imagine.

Although I don’t even know what I don’t know about video cards so it’s no doubt a monumental task. Especially for one guy.

I get where you’re coming from but is he managing his risk or not?

Does he understand the risk? If yes, good. No? Bad.

Is he ignoring the risk? If yes, bad. No? Good.

Is he weighing the risks against the benefits he receives of using these apps and taking appropriate steps to mitigate those risks? If yes, then good. No? Bad.

Cyber security isn’t “lock everything down at all costs”. Otherwise I would insist you throw your phone in an incinerator along with all your computers, live in a bunker reinforced against nuclear attack with a small army to guard you, never leave it, never talk to anyone… Etc.

It is enabling one to achieve their goals with a tolerable amount of risk. That level of tolerable risk is different for everyone.

“Lobsters on snowbanks in cute little mittens” would fit the theme and the meter better… Just sayin’

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