by voidnap | 2025-12-22 00:36:45+00:00
It's cute that you truncated the most important part of the other commenter's message; "your security failure is that you use a package manager [that allows third-parties push arbitrary code into your product with no oversight]."

> I'd wager a large portion of people with `npm` don't actually realize they have `npm`.

Recklessness is not a defense.

> But the fact is that you can do something like `brew install foo` and foo has a dependency that has a dependency that has node as a dependency.

That's good to know. I've never looked at brew and wasn't planing on using it, but I will stay away from it in the future. It sounds like you learned your lesson though, right?

Because if you haven't, that sounds like negligence. You can't be unaccountable for your actions by admitting that you did not expect those outcomes when you did not do your due diligence. And if you don't hold yourself accountable, then you sure aren't about to hold others accountable either. So your whole ecosystem is screwed.

> Yes, this is victim blaming. Just in the same way people blame a rape victim for what they wear.

Not even remotely. I can say and it's bad for people to abuse exploits and they don't deserve that. At the same time, if I put my private key without a passphrase into the public, or commit secrets to git and share them with the public, I am being negligent.

You are leaving your car unlocked with the windows rolled down in a dodgy part of town overnight. And when it's gone/pilfered in the morning, it's completely fair to say that you did a stupid thing.

We can say that is negligent without saying that you deserved it or that it ought to have happened. And it's absolutely okay for me, or anybody else, to say that you should have known better, without you comparing me to a rape apologist.

> In the real world nobody can read all the lines of code. There's just too many lines of code!

I don't know why you went on that rant when you quoted me talking about "trust". I wouldn't need trust if I could fully understand everything about every machine I use and only rely on myself.

> So stop this bullshit rhetoric of "know what you're running" because it is ignoring the reality of the situation.

Naw, it isn't. I trust packages from my operating system's package manager. The issues we see with left-pad and shai-hulud, have never and will never happen to me using those packages because they simply do not accept the kinds of garbage people put up on npm, or brew apparently as you pointed out.

I avoid running stuff like on-my-zsh because I don't have the patience to audit that and I certainly don't want to run untrusted stuff in my shell as root. But it's a very popular package because people, like you, have a greater risk tolerance. And that's fine, as long as you accept the consequences of that risk tolerance. You aren't paying for support or liability, you aren't reading the code, you are putting trust in random sources and hoping that things work out.

If you want the luxury running untrusted code as root, or the luxury of leaving your car open in a dodgy part of town overnight, then maybe maybe what you want is a surveillance state, idk. There is a cost to that. A tradeoff. If that's what you want and that's your goal, then I can't stop you. But it's you could also just ... not do such risky things.