Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • 11 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Open source projects are particularly vulnerable here since anybody can just grab the source and throw an LLM at it to see if it can find exploits.

    On the other hand, this means that they should end up more secure. Open-source projects get far, far more vulnerability testing than closed-source projects. Security holes in closed-source systems can exist for years at a time, which is how things like the Pegasus malware work (undisclosed security holes).


  • Seemed expensive, $20-25 to go 1-1.5 miles, but I only needed two rides while there and used it both times so maybe that’s competitive or even a good deal compared to uber.

    As someone that lives in the Bay Area - Waymo are always more expensive than Uber and Lyft. Lyft is usually a bit cheaper than Uber. Waymo’s R&D costs are very high so they’re likely trying to recover some of that money. People are still willing to pay, at least at the moment, because it’s still a somewhat unique experience.

    You see them even in small suburban streets now, as they extended their service area quite a bit a few months ago. They’re available from San Francisco all the way to San Jose.


  • This is how all language package managers work, unfortunately

    npm does actually support signing and provenance (tracking how the package was built), so in some ways it can be more secure than other package managers. https://docs.npmjs.com/generating-provenance-statements

    If you use one of the CI/CD systems they support (currently Github Actions and Gitlab CI), it can attach a signed attestation to the package stating the commit hash that was used to build the package, along with the steps taken to build it. This is combined with trusted packaging using OpenID Connect with short-lived tokens that are only obtainable in the correct CI environment, rather than using access tokens or username and password.

    It only supports some CI systems because they have to guarantee that the connection between the CI system and npm is secure.

    Some of the recent issues have been attacks on the CI system, rather than npm itself. For example, a Github Action that’s only supposed to run for commits to the main branch, but unintentionally runs for some subset of pull requests too.

    Of course, all this stuff is optional, and pushing to npm directly from a developer’s computer still works and is still not verifiable at all.

    I think the best approach is what Flathub/Flatpak, F-Droid (Android) and Composer/Packagist (PHP) do. You provide your repository URL, and they build the code on their end. Packages are always guaranteed to be built from code in the repo.

    Debian Linux is also moving towards requiring repeatable builds, meaning that a package built from source should be byte-for-byte identical to the package in the repo.









  • Companies sometimes sell their own first-party data, but not nearly as often as people think. If a company has data that other companies don’t have, a lot of the time they’ll want to keep it for themselves, since it can give them a competitive advantage over other platforms.

    If Amazon knows what movies and TV shows you like, they’re going to use that data to improve ad performance on their own platforms - suggested content on Prime Video, product ads on Amazon, etc. They’re not going to give it to some other company to use.

    The one major exception to that are data brokers. These are companies that only exist to sell data. These are less well known companies. They often use public data and combine it with things like supermarket loyalty data and purchase history.





  • For a beginner, I’d probably stick to Github initially, just because there’s so many guides and tutorials on how to use it, and their free plan is still pretty generous.

    A lot of the knowledge is transferable though. If you do want to try something else, Codeberg is pretty good for open-source.

    To just learn about Git, you don’t even need a host like Github or Codeberg. You can have a Git repo just on your computer, and still get a bunch of the benefits of source control - a full history of everything, separate branches and worktrees so you can have multiple incomplete changes and switch between them, etc.














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