This is going to be a great time to be a lawyer… until the climate kills us all, of course.

Maybe he’s just waiting for Putin to approve which efforts he can resume.

Usually the asshole.

We’re all getting clones. You get a clone. And you get a clone. Every 23andMe customer gets a free* clone!

*Clones are provided at no cost, but are not free of their lifetime indentureship.

It’s you can modify the settings file you sure as hell can put the malware anywhere you want

True. (But in case it amuses you or others reading along:) But a code settings file still carries it’s own special risk, as an executable file, in a predictable place, that gets run regularly.

An executable settings file is particularly nice for the attacker, as it’s a great place to ensure that any injected code gets executed without much effort.

In particular, if an attacker can force a reboot, they know the settings file will get read reasonably early during the start-up process.

So a settings file that’s written in code can be useful for an attacker who can write to the disk (like through a poorly secured upload prompt), but doesn’t have full shell access yet.

They will typically upload a reverse shell, and use a line added to settings to ensure the reverse shell gets executed and starts listening for connections.

Edit (because it may also amuse anyone reading along): The same attack can be accomplished with a JSON or YAML settings file, but it relies on the JSON or YAML interpreter having a known critical security flaw. Thankfully most of them don’t usually have one, most of the time, if they’re kept up to date.

Then every question afterwards is just “who couldn’t get promoted even a single time during a years long mission in the Delta quadrant?”

Yeah. The “this got dumped on us and we’re doing the minimum until we can replace it” is a genuinely solid use case for vibe coding.

And honestly, that’s all I usually did with those before AI came along anyway. So I welcome better tools for it.

That sounds like a good approach. If you can get the posts into WordPress, there’s so many scripts out there that will export the WordPress database into other formats.

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This is perfect, because the Fediverse is better than Twitch and Dragon Warrior Monsters is better than Pokemon.

If you want better software, you have to give developers worse hardware to develop on, and more time to develop.

Shhh. There could be application development managers listening… (I’m joking… Mostly.)

Holy shit how did I not put it together when I thought that voice sounded familiar?

Apparently they sped up his voice to make it sound higher.

His story of how he got the job is really charming.

Per the Brony documentary, DeLancie’s granddaughters were fans of the show, and his wife verbally accepted the job for him before even telling him about it.

I like your idea, but hear me out:

A Python file for configuration is the best way to guarantee that any friendly code I write to help the user with config usually won’t execute. And I hate my users.

Yeah. Maybe .to_lower() is really expensive in their environment, lol.

Hey, that’s my username too. Or it was going to be, while the site was still up.

What a coincidence!

I guess I’ll wait for the site to come back, and see if it’s still available…

As I believe this is an Airplane! reference, and Trek indeed only has Sonic showers, I must conclude that Beverly has a drinking problem.

However, Microsoft seems to be abandoning local tools & recommending Azure-based management instead, like Intune.

Yeah. The stuff they can charge an annual subscription to. Lol

I’m not really mad, though. Azure and InTune seem to be genuinely also much better.

Today I learned the term Vibe Coding. I love it.

Edit: This article is a treasure.

The concept of vibe coding elaborates on Karpathy’s claim from 2023 that “the hottest new programming language is English”,

Claim from 2023?! Lol. I’ve heard (BASIC) that (COBOL) before (Ruby).

A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.[1] AI researcher Simon Willison said: “If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you’ve reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that’s not vibe coding in my book—that’s using an LLM as a typing assistant.”[1]

Did we make it from AI hype to AI dunk in the space of a single Wikipedia article? Lol.

research papers that require a strong background in mathematics and cryptography to understand and implement.

Lol. I guess that makes sense. Outside of school, we hope that all authentication will be implemented only cryptography experts anyway.

Could you maybe suggest some resources on this topic?

Not really, sorry. I’m not aware of anyone creating resources for your situation.

Or should I choose a simpler project?

For some context, cryptography isn’t even usually implemented “completely correctly” by experts. That’s part of why we have constant software security patches.

If I were in your shoes, I guess it would depend on my instructor and advisors.

If I felt like they have the skills to catch mistakes and no time to help correct mistakes, then I would just choose a simpler project. If they’re cool with awarding a good grade for a functional demo, I might just go for it.

I guess I would take this one to an advisor and get some feedback on practicality.

For anyone not reading between the lines, the US, Israeli, and a bunch of other governments are paying for software that can spy on your WhatsApp messages through a client side malware attack directly against the app.

The most surprising part, to me, is that this is evidence that WhatsApp may actually have unbroken end to end encryption (which I think they’ve claimed for awhile, but I didn’t believe them.)

Edit: But then, this is mostly based on statements released by Meta, so maybe I’m just a sucker for believing them when they say it differently.