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bpeebles

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To be more exact (in an excessive way), it uses the BIOS's code to set the video mode (INT 10h) which is probably a few dozen bytes (at least?) although I have been remiss at not ever reading them. And it depends on DOS configuring the memory space to leave an INT 20h call (to terminate the program) at a place that's easy to RET to. But, yeah, very little extra. But I'm not being negative at all and this is pretty nice code and on the impressive side of 256 byte demos from the 80s and 90s (and onward).

It's still $5 but they say on the signup page they'll waive it if you ask because you can't afford it/can't send the money somehow. So it's still very accessible but very, very few spammers bother to do either (a few have in the past decade and a half, of course).

Probably not super relevant outside of the Washington, DC area (although maybe other regions have it), but a multiple localities formed a general commuter support program and one of their benefits you can sign up for is up to 6 times per year a free "guaranteed ride home" if they regularly do not drive to work but have occasional times when they can't get home their normal method.[0]

0. https://www.commuterconnections.org/guaranteed-ride-home/

The vast majority of filers have no additional income to report that isn't already reported with their SSN. And the current standard deduction is big enough, many people won't have additional deductions. And all of the "IRS does your taxes" plans actually have it set up so the IRS sends you/have available on their site a return populated with everything they know. So you can do nothing if it's correct or submit changes if you have additional income/deductions/credits.

I'd say its hard to start as a new Wikipedia editor if you only goal is to make article X or make huge changes to article Y that is somewhat controversial. On the other hand, if you start in Wikipedia by doing simple edits in non-controversial subjects (which does improve Wikipedia, and thus, the Internet given how many search engines just scrape Wikipedia for search results), start making making some new articles in notable things that are also not controversial, then you can start understanding how to get controversial (but correct) things added and changed. Yes, that takes longer and is more work, but at the same time, similar to open source software, you have to spend time learning how to code and how to make valuable and correct PRs to make major overhauls to heavily used software.

It's just as easy for a game developer to say "eh we're no longer using that blockchain for game assets" or otherwise make your "purchase" (which isn't really a purchase) unusable with a blockchain based solution as it is with current Steam/iOS-based systems. (Probably easier, really.)

It hasn't failed. I'm not sure the final outcome of the current debacle but there's still nothing that matches Heroku. I've been using it professionally for 6+ years now and it just works more than most other things I've used.

It has its weird limitations but it's... Good. (And I've gone pretty deep into aspects of the buildpacks, how it stores its git repos on S3, and more.)

The point is less visibility/criticism. Since this is confirming pretty bad news (the attackers had access to the environment variables.) The concept of a Friday night news dump is a fairly well-worn, but basically true, trope.

I had posted the most relevant paragraphs in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31255450 but it probably should be here too:

On April 7, 2022, a threat actor obtained access to a Heroku database and downloaded stored customer GitHub integration OAuth tokens. Access to the environment was gained by leveraging a compromised token for a Heroku machine account. According to GitHub, the threat actor began enumerating metadata about customer repositories with the downloaded OAuth tokens on April 8, 2022. On April 9, 2022, the attacker downloaded a subset of the Heroku private GitHub repositories from GitHub, containing some Heroku source code.

...

Separately, our investigation also revealed that the same compromised token was leveraged to gain access to a database and exfiltrate the hashed and salted passwords for customers’ user accounts. For this reason, Salesforce is ensuring all Heroku user passwords are reset and potentially affected credentials are refreshed. We have rotated internal Heroku credentials and put additional detections in place. We are continuing to investigate the source of the token compromise.

New update at https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413 as of MAY 5, 2022 02:21 UTC the core paragraphs are

On April 7, 2022, a threat actor obtained access to a Heroku database and downloaded stored customer GitHub integration OAuth tokens. Access to the environment was gained by leveraging a compromised token for a Heroku machine account. According to GitHub, the threat actor began enumerating metadata about customer repositories with the downloaded OAuth tokens on April 8, 2022. On April 9, 2022, the attacker downloaded a subset of the Heroku private GitHub repositories from GitHub, containing some Heroku source code.

...

Separately, our investigation also revealed that the same compromised token was leveraged to gain access to a database and exfiltrate the hashed and salted passwords for customers’ user accounts. For this reason, Salesforce is ensuring all Heroku user passwords are reset and potentially affected credentials are refreshed. We have rotated internal Heroku credentials and put additional detections in place. We are continuing to investigate the source of the token compromise.

Git.io deprecation 4 years ago

The read-only post from January said

Today, git.io is increasingly being used for malicious purposes.

So my guess is they observed an increase use of some number of existing git.io URLs (perhaps where the destination URL was squatted on) being actively used for "malicious" things.

Ah, I hadn't come across them. My feeling is still a minority of sites use Akamai's DNS for their public-facing names, so probably those sites would be affected that way. Although either way the site is down once the cache expires.

So far it seems to be an Akamai internal DNS look up problem. That is, it seems if they need to resolve the hostname of the origin to serve a page they front for, it fails but I haven't seen any actual DNS failures on my side or other places, just inside Akamai-served pages saying they failed to resolve with an Akamai reference code.

Even we cannot see your decision contents.

Reads to me it's impossible for you to see them, as if you used client-side encryption of some sort. It's good to hear it's well protected as is, but I'd reword it.

For the later messaging, I'm just trying to think about what situations one would be in that this would need to be immutable and verifiable in this way. Like something would have had to have gone very very wrong so having that be a big part of your sell feels vaguely blockchainy/scammy (to me). Keep it sure, but make it a smaller part of your pitch and focus on the common path of helping a long-lived team documenting and referencing decisions, which was what I was mostly looking for.

Thanks for the reply!