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skarap

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Throw away code 6 years ago

Python isn't weakly-typed.

Over the years, I’ve used Perl a lot (that one doesn’t care if it’s int or string… no, correction, in Perl everything is a string, ints just don’t exist. Well, kind of). It’s probably the language designed for throw away coding. I’ve done some Python too (that’s like Perl, but with proper objects in it, and everything is a dictionary there).

The author has almost no real programming experience with Python. Perl experience seems to overlap with sysadmin-related work at least partially, where it's usually used as better Bash. All their repositories in GitHub are Rust. So almost all of "real" programming they did used Rust.

Why would anyone who know Rust way better than any other language prefer to do their prototypes using anything else?

Things break at random for reasons you can't understand and the only way to fix it is to find terminal commands from discussion forums, type them in and hope for the best.

Depends on whom you ask. There are people who use it exactly because when "things break at random" they absolutely can understand the reasons and actually fix it in contrast to some other OSes (or Linux from more recent years).

To repeat my comment from a previous discussion which brought a lot of downvotes: what happens when (not if) a self-driving car runs-over and kills someone (e.g. because of a software bug)? Do such cases cause criminal penalties? Who is penalized? Or will all cases of autonomous car accidents with deaths become civil cases? If so - do human drivers get the same new rules or if they kill someone by accident (because they got distracted) they still go to jail? Is that fair?

In this particular case I assume the operator will be thrown under the bus, which is also unfair.

One can read any amount of similar articles, but if they don't understand the data model behind all this, git will remain a complex and fragile beast for them. The feature-set is huge to be able to just remember all possible commands for all possible scenarios. If you don't know what index is or what a branch is, this all will look like a bunch of nonsense. On the other hand - your ruby code won't seem too logical either if you don't know the language.

So if git is the tool you use to get your job done - don't hesitate to spend a day or 2 on reading how it works and how you're supposed to use it.

Deciding to hire both, and then assigning them to the same team is clearly the wrong solution

Couldn't Microsoft also get into trouble by hiring just one of them (the other one could have a good case for being treated unfairly)? And what if they don't have 2 separate teams which need new members? Should they create a new team just to make sure they don't heart anybody's feelings?

Once a judge catches a lawyer in a lie the judge will question everything the lawyer says.

Not a lawyer, but isn't is taken for granted that lawyers (along with everybody else) are lying in courts and that it's the jurors and judge's job to find out who is lying?

`ip link set qlen 1000 dev tun0` (so it matches the eth0 queue, instead of being an order of magnitude smaller) on both ends of the tunnel, and you get 90% of direct connection speed from openvpn:

  $ iperf3 -c 10.1.0.2
  Connecting to host 10.1.0.2, port 5201
  [  4] local 10.1.0.1 port 38274 connected to 10.1.0.2 port 5201
  [ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
  [  4]   0.00-1.00   sec  3.12 MBytes  26.1 Mbits/sec    0    802 KBytes
  [  4]   1.00-2.00   sec  22.3 MBytes   187 Mbits/sec    0   2.24 MBytes
  [  4]   2.00-3.00   sec  21.4 MBytes   179 Mbits/sec    0   2.45 MBytes
  [  4]   3.00-4.00   sec  23.3 MBytes   196 Mbits/sec    0   2.39 MBytes
  [  4]   4.00-5.00   sec  23.4 MBytes   196 Mbits/sec    0   2.58 MBytes
  [  4]   5.00-6.00   sec  21.5 MBytes   180 Mbits/sec    0   2.70 MBytes
  [  4]   6.00-7.00   sec  23.5 MBytes   197 Mbits/sec    0   2.68 MBytes
  [  4]   7.00-8.00   sec  22.6 MBytes   189 Mbits/sec    0   2.78 MBytes
  [  4]   8.00-9.00   sec  22.4 MBytes   188 Mbits/sec    0   2.45 MBytes
  [  4]   9.00-10.00  sec  23.5 MBytes   197 Mbits/sec    0   2.69 MBytes
  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
  [ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
  [  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   207 MBytes   174 Mbits/sec    0             sender
  [  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   207 MBytes   174 Mbits/sec                  receiver

  iperf Done.

the only reason we used this at a previous company was to kind of handwave around hey we have this tool doing regular security checks

That's the only reason for most of their clients. "We get periodic security scans from a respected vendor, yes sir!".

I can't rule out that the scanners might work, but if the vendor isn't naive, they'd be optimizing for their real target audience.

They have a tendency of 541-ing mails for no apparent reason

There is a reason. It makes people switch from own email servers to gmail.

Interesting findings. Though I didn't get why the author concentrated so much on the security issues of the UI while the real issue is that the whole thing is snake oil. I mean - what if the UI was great, had https and there were no CSRF vulnerabilities? Would this be considered a secure product?

I don't think developers have anything to do here. There are two kinds of companies: those which don't care for quality, security, performance, good/evil and those which are bankrupt, because they were constrained by those ideas while their competitors were not.