rainforest

Note that the smart feed "feature" is Taboola-provided adware[0] so it's par for the course. It's beyond comprehension Lenovo would trash the brand by shipping it on flagships.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/motorola/comments/1s61usi/edge_60_p...

I'm quite surprised to see the need to debug a live server here. I'm of the belief that the need to repro a problem locally and using a debugger lead to better understanding. SSHing into boxen feels like a cowboy behaviour on a modern stack - it shouldn't be necessary with competent observability and unit tests.

Does it worry you at all that meat is ultimately made of whatever food the animal eats and processed into a litany of chemicals?

I feel the UPF "debate" is just an appeal to nature, and calorie/nutrient density should be what we fixate on.

I had similar with my energy provider in the UK (Octopus). For one reason or another a regular payment bounced which automatically puts you on a "call daily until the debt is repaid" list.

These calls come in on an unrecognised number, from staff who say "I don't know" when you ask them to prove they are from Octopus, and generate no call notes so you can't find out why they rang if you use the main customer service number.

To top it off they ask you to key in your card info on the phone after asking for your personal information.

I complained and they offered to fob me off with £30 credit instead of talking to their CISO, but they did at least say they can add phone passwords to individual accounts.

I think Cloudflare WAF is a good product compared to other WAFs - by definition a WAF is intended to layer on validation that properly built applications should be doing, so it's sort of expected that it would reject valid potentially harmful content.

I think you can fairly criticise WAF products and the people who advocate for them (and created the need for them) but I don't think the CF team responsible can really be singled out.

Thanks, for the benefit of others the risk is that the devtools port has no Auth so is vulnerable to XSS.

I would surmise that this will stop being a problem if you switch to using a unix socket for the CDP.

Could you go into a bit more detail about this? Why is exposing devtools to the agent a problem? What's the attack vector? That the agent might do something malicious to exfil saved passwords?

For a while the /join page was blocked by cloudflare WAF yesterday - I wonder if this is why.

The NHS does this calculus routinely using Quality Adjusted Life Years. Treatments that get more are favoured which is also how NICE decides what drugs the NHS should offer. There's obviously some utilitarianism in the decision to use QALYs but to some (including me) it seems a reasonable proxy metric to maximise.

Ultimately a sacrifice must be chosen, but I am not sure a discussion about how that should be made is necessarily fit for HN (though I'd be interested in how you'd resolve your proposed scenario).

I would offer a counterpoint: most software in existence was written by not-software-professionals in Excel (most likely poorly).

Within reason I think there is a rational basis for not having to involve software engineers for every project - especially if the SMEs with understanding of their requirements are the ones building it.

This will probably fall over in the same space as Excel spreadsheets do though, when the domain complexity outgrows it, way before anyone is able to recognise that.

Yes, if the key isn't in the TPM then it can't be sniffed. Secure boot would need to be enabled to protect against the threat model bitlocker is only good for here. Alternatively using a PIN would mean the key is only exposed once the PIN is typed (still vulnerable to a hardware attack, but requires physical modification).

A cow is in a sense a factory producing various proteins, fats, and carbs from grass. Does putting it into something "natural" reset it? I would imagine that red meat isn't a UPF by definition as it's only been through one process, but would argue that the inconsistency with fake meat clearly feeling processed is definitely interesting. Also interesting is perhaps that red meat is presumably not UPF but is carcinogenic.

IIRC some of the Snowden leaks alleged that (at least at the time) domestic traffic couldn't be surveilled (but this was solved by mutual assistance across the Atlantic - the British would spy on US citizens and vice versa[1]).

VPNs seem useful to guarantee that your traffic is designated as foreign, so this might be a net gain for the intelligence services rather than a loss - the mandatory collection of ICRs only relates to IP addresses and time of access.

[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/edward-snowden-leaks-uk-o...

Most Kickstarter campaigns I get shown on FB are from third party services that just upload the Kickstarter breach list (my email is in it). Could that have happened to you?

The web extension honor system "security" model is broken because that extension that prints Hello at the top of the page might later be modified by a malicious actor to do something else [1].

[1] https://www.reviewgeek.com/45420/over-70-chrome-browser-exte...

Perhaps you don't have a change in the number of crackpots, but you have a decent chance the crackpots are now all saying the same thing. Misled voters in a democracy seems like a bad thing to me (this extends to the way mass media is currently used of course).

There's an obvious slippery slope in these discussions - ultimately it's reducible to who you give the right to vote to, and discomfort about measures to keep the undesirables from rallying ought not to be ignored.

Sure Audio makes an ADAU1701 set of boards that looks similar. Parts Express seems to carry Dayton Audio branded versions.

Can't say how well they work but a stack of IF board, DSP only, and Bluetooth programmer cost me around £50. Looks like the DAC resolution is better on the Beocreate though. No idea how good the amp is either - there are plenty of bad TPA3116 boards so sidestepping that problem might be worth the premium too.

Is there any potential for extending that limit? I work on a product that uses Fargate Spot as a kind-of lambda substitute to run longer-duration tasks consumed from SQS and being able to use lambda to do that would make life easier :)

I don't understand why an entire elementary statistics pseudo-textbook is bolted on at the end, forming the entire back half of the text

It's quite difficult to talk about empirical software engineering without discussing methods, after all papers like [1] were deemed necessary 20 years ago and still the occasional meta-paper is published about correct design of experiments or analyses. As someone who worked in the field it doesn't seem particularly surprising to see some treatment - there are a handful of papers in my former subfield that are oft-cited because they describe a statistical procedure/experiment design consideration, but they also bundle the explanatory stats "for free".

I would hazard a guess that the intent of these chapters is to equip the reader with enough background that they could replicate or run some of the experiments in the book to try to specify findings/experiments to their own organisations. I'd follow that with an assumption that the author felt that chapter 13 needed background, and recursed until they'd finished writing a textbook.

[1] Kitchenham et al. "Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering" 2001: http://www.ehealthinformation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/...

The permissions system seems to be granular with respect to whatever was selected - if you select a directory you have full access to everything in it. Theoretically the permission system requires explicit approval, but if you see the security system with the user I think it presents more risk to users than before.

Previously if you wanted filesystem control you had to trick a user into downloading something. With this API, it seems like it would be easier to con unsuspecting users into granting permissions they aren't aware they're granting.

It appears I could use this to ask a victim to "select your downloads folder" to save files to and then steal or overwrite any file in it.

Slack does this too. Slackbot sends you "getting started" tips by default, which led to me receiving an email to ensure I enable notifications. That email was sent out of office hours on a Friday evening too. I'm sure it wasn't intentional but it made it look like an insidious attempt to cram itself as deeply into my attention span as possible.

Yes, if there was a library that eval'd unsanitised input the damage potential is the same.

The practical difference is that it's a lot harder to assure code written in unsafe languages is free of defects like this since they manifest as benign operations (every write to a buffer is a potential vector) rather than obviously dangerous operations. Concretely, you could grep for eval and convince yourself that each use is OK (assuming it's rare - it ought to be) but you couldn't do that for common language constructs that could be exploitable like writes to arrays/pointers.

The exploit is against a vulnerable library (the actual input file is here: https://github.com/sola-st/wasm-binary-security/blob/master/...)

If you have a wasm application with vulnerabilities (e.g. in the libraries) there are no mitigations that native binaries provide, so simple buffer overflows give you RCEs again. It's still within the sandbox, but the threat is as severe as running eval on user supplied inputs as there might be useful stuff in that sandbox.

Gradle. I appreciate that it is a fast build system, and a lot of it does just work. When it doesn't just work it's a nightmare. The config language is completely opaque and undiscoverable (Kotlin might fix this, but I ran out of patience to understand how Gradle works a while ago) though.

In many respects I think the fact there's a commercial version of it is a sign that it's lacking in the UX area.

I think the only way to do so would be to deny themselves the ability to push software to customers (speculating that this is how it was attacked), which itself is an attack vector. It basically seems impossible to do securely if you can't trust the software on the phone, short of providing a separate device that decrypts and encrypts messages and shows them, but any software that device runs would be the attack surface.

That said, it's probably far more likely the crypto was done incorrectly from the off (and probable that other services have the same flaws) but the authorities needed a cheaper vulnerability to burn in public so as not to disrupt other investigations that are no doubt ongoing.

Spam seems to be a growing problem too. If you follow (or even listen to) an artist, all someone needs to do is credit them on a song (or just squat on their name) for it to be eligible for Release Radar.

There are weird pockets of the Spotify database for this (e.g. "lo-fi beats" artists that churn out hundreds of tracks with many artists) and no way to send any feedback (they shut down Line-In, their metadata feedback a few years ago). Disliking doesn't work because Spotify will only remember you don't like one of the artists, not all of them.

I suspect there's not much information in the individual blurred face, but I wonder if given enough examples you'd be able to determine if an unblurred face is the one in a sample of images with any level of confidence? You can do that with text (http://dheera.net/projects/blur).

How do you validate the predictions for the number of infected cases in May for scenarios that don't happen?

Move fast and break things has its downsides: work that influenced public policy/political debate was retracted after an error in the model was discovered [1], errors have been found in widely cited databases [2]. These are things that should be avoided I'm sure you'll agree.

Science has this additional problem that its memory is short - mistakes seem to be discovered when work is in the long tail of the citation curve, once it's out of the news. Even if you retract a paper, there is no easy way to trace the contagion to the work that uses it. That's before you consider mistakes that might be deliberate [3].

I have no doubts that more software/data rigour would make science more accurate, but the cost would be substantial, and it would no doubt slow down discovery until the benefit of open source kicked in.

[1] https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how... [2] : https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/mistaken-identiti... [3] : https://retractionwatch.com/2016/09/26/yes-power-pose-study-...