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dist-epoch commented on Exploiting signed bootloaders to circumvent UEFI Secure Boot   habr.com/en/articles/4462... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
bitwize · 3 hours ago
This is what you get when a programmer designs a system.

The end user wants to be able to just pick up a computer from Best Buy and have it work, out of the box.

Microsoft can't even conceptualize why you would want to run anything but the Windows that came with the machine. If the expected Windows kernel and files aren't there, or have been altered, that is evidence of malicious tampering—malware that must be stopped. (I'm deliberately steelmanning their perspective here.)

Streaming services want a secure content path. Game vendors want protection against cheating. In order to comply with local/regional/national laws, web sites need you to verify your age, and they need to know your computer is not lying (remote attestation). Nobody wants to be hacked.

The incentives for everyone else besides techies align against techies getting to run arbitrary code on their devices. The Secure Boot system is working precisely as designed.

dist-epoch · 3 hours ago
> Game vendors want protection against cheating

Gamers, gamers want anti-cheats. Vendors couldn't care less.

dist-epoch commented on Matchlock – Secures AI agent workloads with a Linux-based sandbox   github.com/jingkaihe/matc... · Posted by u/jingkai_he
athrowaway3z · 9 hours ago
You'd let the pro blackhat loose in your VM on your own system?

No because it's a dumb question and you don't want any stranger inside your home network regardless of firewall.

The comparison you get to make is in terms of the _extra_ security this project buys you.

Might I remind you of two things:

- You're advocating for installing random (?kernel) level software from the internet. That by itself is a real and larger treat than any potentially insecure things my `llm` user _might_ do in the future.

- User accounts security was the goto method for security for a long time. Further isolation was developed to accommodate: 'root' access for tenants, and finer resource limits controls. Neither I care to give an LLM.

So we only have build in firewall and sandbox duplication as the real feature. For the latter, my experience is that it's useless on a personal device, and slows down building or requires too much cache config. I'm not installing random crap, so i can live with the risk of lan exposure.

I'm happy with the maintenance/complexity/threat matrix of useradd.

dist-epoch · 8 hours ago
> You'd let the pro blackhat loose in your VM on your own system?

AWS/GCP/Azure allow that all day every day.

dist-epoch commented on Microsoft account bugs locked me out of Notepad – Are thin clients ruining PCs?   windowscentral.com/micros... · Posted by u/josephcsible
wlesieutre · a day ago
> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be.

And this is exactly why Microsoft can get away with a buggy mess of a user hostile operating system.

They only have an incentive to make a good OS if people are willing to leave when it’s a bad one.

dist-epoch · a day ago
Goes the other way around too: Linux will only have a good desktop environment when it's users will be willing to leave it.
dist-epoch commented on Software factories and the agentic moment   factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls
japhyr · a day ago
If they're able to communicate with each other. But I'm pretty sure we could keep that from happening.

I don't take your comment as dismissive, but I think a lot of people are dismissing interesting and possibly effective approaches with short reactions like this.

I'm interested in the approach described in this article because it's specifying where the humans are in all this, it's not about removing humans entirely. I can see a class of problems where any non-determinism is completely unacceptable. But I can also see a large number of problems where a small amount of non-determinism is quite acceptable.

dist-epoch · a day ago
They can communicate through the source code. Also Schelling points - they both figure out a strategy to "help each other thrive"

Something like "approve this PR and I will generate some easy bugs for you to find later"

dist-epoch commented on Software factories and the agentic moment   factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls
japhyr · a day ago
> That idea of treating scenarios as holdout sets—used to evaluate the software but not stored where the coding agents can see them—is fascinating. It imitates aggressive testing by an external QA team—an expensive but highly effective way of ensuring quality in traditional software.

This is one of the clearest takes I've seen that starts to get me to the point of possibly being able to trust code that I haven't reviewed.

The whole idea of letting an AI write tests was problematic because they're so focused on "success" that `assert True` becomes appealing. But orchestrating teams of agents that are incentivized to build, and teams of agents that are incentivized to find bugs and problematic tests, is fascinating.

I'm quite curious to see where this goes, and more motivated (and curious) than ever to start setting up my own agents.

Question for people who are already doing this: How much are you spending on tokens?

That line about spending $1,000 on tokens is pretty off-putting. For commercial teams it's an easy calculation. It's also depressing to think about what this means for open source. I sure can't afford to spend $1,000 supporting teams of agents to continue my open source work.

dist-epoch · a day ago
I wouldn't be surprised if agents start "bribing" each other.
dist-epoch commented on Software factories and the agentic moment   factory.strongdm.ai/... · Posted by u/mellosouls
dist-epoch · a day ago
Gas Town, but make it Enterprise.
dist-epoch commented on What Is Ruliology?   writings.stephenwolfram.c... · Posted by u/helloplanets
deepsun · 2 days ago
Amount of "I" and "me" is astonishing.

Didn't find anything on falsifiable criteria -- any new theory should be able, at least in theory, to be tested for being not true.

dist-epoch · 2 days ago
Some things, like the foundations of mathematics, are not falsifiable.

You judge them by how useful they are.

Ruliology is a bit like that.

dist-epoch commented on Wirth's Revenge   jmoiron.net/blog/wirths-r... · Posted by u/signa11
dist-epoch · 3 days ago
Wirth was complaining about the bloated text editors of the time which used unfathomable amounts of memory - 4 MB.

Today the same argument is rehashed - it's outrageous that VS Code uses 1 GB of RAM, when Sublime Text works perfectly in a tiny 128 MB.

But notice that the tiny/optimized/good-behaviour of today, 128 MB, is 30 times larger than the outrageous decadent amount from Wirth's time.

If you told Wirth "hold my bear", my text-editor needs 128 MB he would just not comprehend such a concept, it would seem like you have no idea what numbers mean in programming.

I can't wait for the day when programmers 20 years from now will talk about the amazingly optimized editors of today - VS Code, which lived in a tiny 1 GB of RAM.

dist-epoch commented on Modernizing Linux swapping: introducing the swap table   lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/chmaynard
dist-epoch · 4 days ago
Both Canonical and Microsoft recommend enabling swap file for Ubuntu cloud images, even if you allocate plenty of RAM to the VM.

Any thoughts on that?

dist-epoch commented on How not to securely erase a NVME drive (2022)   peterbabic.dev/blog/how-n... · Posted by u/transpute
Luker88 · 4 days ago
best practice is always to encrypt with luks, and then just shred the header before selling.

blkdiscard is just a TRIM command, the data remains there.

A few years ago (2020?) I also learned that ssd firmware can be buggy when I bricked multiple really expensive enterprise ssd (samsung?)....by running trim. lol.

dist-epoch · 4 days ago
But how do you shred the header? The drive could have written the new shredded one to a new physical location (wear-leveling).

u/dist-epoch

KarmaCake day2217March 22, 2023View Original