skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a fairly simple Node project at work; it pulls in nine runtime dependencies, plus 13 development-time dependencies (most of those are babel or eslint-related).

Assuming none of those are pulling shenanigans like mentioned in the article (distributing different code than in their source repositories, or deliberately obfuscating malicious code), it's not completely unreasonable for me to go through and audit my direct dependencies. But, since the Javascript standard lib is crap, all of my direct dependencies have their own large pile of dependencies, which themselves depend on a bunch of stuff, and so on.

By the time it's all said and done, my "simple" Node project pulls in several hundred dependencies (I didn't go through and count, but my 'yarn.lock' on that project has ~4200 lines). I can't audit all of that code.

(This is particularly bad in Node and Javascript, but applies to other languages too. I don't think anyone's ever fully audited all of our Nuget dependencies, or Python dependencies... fortunately, those both tend to be more self-contained, so at least we know what we're getting there.)
No, I think the problem must be corruption, either legalized where a variety of non profits add administrative overhead, or downright illegal. For example about a mile from the first project mentioned in this article are luxury town homes for sale, that come with features such as granite counter tops, garages and solar panels. The developer is selling these luxury homes for about the same price as the affordable housing costs. I imagine the developer is also making some kind of profit. If the price was just land, you’d expect that a luxury unit would cost more than affordable unit, not the same.
> it's held back by all the gymnastics it needs to do to get over browser/www limitations,

I suppose, but I think it's the javascript "nature" ( dynamic typing along with the scripting style of wanting to be a "swiss knife" to solve all problems ). Javascript, like perl and even C, gives you a lot of rope to hang yourself. And like perl and C, javascript initially seems simple and easy and it deceives you into thinking novices know what they are doing.

> and an influx of low skill developers with no diploma.

That's true of all languages though. Plenty of incompetent developers at all levels and all languages. I don't think it's a javascript issue.
Not only is affordable housing a right, but affordable housing in a new construction building, with easy access to transportation, free gym membership, free parking, doorman service, etc. is a right too. Plus, the building must be built with inflated union wages, because it needs to be a “good jobs” program. And better get it LEED certified while we’re at it. We also need to make sure any affordable development doesn’t change the “character” of the neighborhood, because single family ranch style homes in America are so very rare and precious. Most importantly, it can’t create a shadow of any kind.
That has some advantages, but some really big drawbacks as well:

- Incredibly slow git operations unless you use the perfect options every time (good luck, new devs).

- Requires either very good discipline about updating just a few packages at a time (good luck when cascading dependencies that are shared at multiple levels of the tree update), or incredibly huge, confusing diffs to read.

- Actually understanding the diffs you read. Packages updated to do things like 'http.get("$evil_website", (r) => eval(r))' are only a tiny fraction of the malicious or dangerous code you'll see in package updates.
toga - sort of.
Intel ME drivers are not loaded into a VM, the devices are not exposed and the ME MSRs are also not exposed.
> there are many cities in the center of the country with lots of land where building basic housing would be cheap.

Because the places are either (or both) unattractive to live for environmental/geographic reasons or have an economy that can offers few (if any) additional decent paying jobs and can support few (if any) additional people without jobs.

Prices reflect the market’s assessment of value, and usually there is a reason for that assessment.
> almost everyone can use Signal today

Except that almost everyone does not. Yet everyone has an email address. I'd say you have to pick your fight. Trying to convert everyone to Signal, even though it will never replace email in what email broadly does and allows, or trying to add encryption to email.
Why do people need to be in so close? Because that’s where jobs and culture are. Imagine a train system that could get you from the center of any city to the center in another in the same time it takes someone from Richmond to get to SOMA in sf. People could live wherever they wanted, and still be able to participate in the economy. Yes there’s a cost to those systems but it’s how every major city deals with density. We have shit tons of land.
Your dimissive post boils down to “less than 100% perfect security is not ‘practicable’ so let’s leave a massively used, default communication platform utterly unsecure.”

At least three of your critiques of encrypted email could be made of HTTPS: it leaks metadata (what sites you visit and when), it is plaintext by default, and the archives of the secured material are persistent and searchable. Yet HTTPS is hugely valuable.

But the biggest issue with your critique is that it proposes treating secure messaging as a special case for which people should just use a special tool. The old, “just use Signal” nonsense. Guess what? People suck at knowing what communications need to be secure, and they suck at keeping mundane conversations from veering into sensitive territory, and they suck at moving conversations from one platform to another. As many systems as possible that they use need to be secured, so that WHEN they mess up — meaning, have the gall to say something potentially sensitive outside of infosec-land blessed tools — the consequences are mitigated.

Security professionals need to meet users where they are. And where they are, to a massive massive unstoppable undeniable extent, is on fucking email. Shitty, plaintext by default, metadata leaking email. Just crying out to be fixed.

And they’re on Twitter DMs and Facebook and god help us Slack. Which is why the people who made Signal put their crypto into WhatsApp. Not because it’s a GOOD IDEA to let Facebook (!!) broker your key exchange and see your metadata — yes, Signal protocol can’t keep metadata away from third parties either, not entirely — but because they had the chance to improve security in an imperfect but good way for millions of people.

The people behind autocrypt took a similarly honest stab at improving email security. If this sort of system were more widely deployed — and i know firsthand that gpg can work well when deployed to an entire workgroup — the security gains would be massive. A huge, imperfect gain. And an essential one even for people who use Signal et al — because every single one of them, dollars to donuts, uses email part of the time. It would be hugely wrong to just leave that on the table.
Does anyone have an idea why her albums aren't currently available?
The Idea about MVC A.k.a MVO
I think 'Affordable Housing' is one of the topics where people gloss over the basics.

* Affordable Housing returns are always below market-rate housing.
* Requiring a percentage of building to be affordable housing is a tax. Builders have an interest in avoiding taxes.
* Acquiring an affordable housing unit is a long term benefit. Those advocating for housing have an interest in acquiring benefits.
* Long term housing prices are driven by regional economics.
* Short term housing prices are can be manipulated. Solving manipulations like the simultaneous remodeling of large complexes; raising rates with too little notice to effectively move; or jumping rates by high percentages in a year have different solutions.

Thinking in these terms separates concerns of equity in society; the high cost of service workers in congested areas; the rise of empty buildings; the gouging of existing tenants; and subsidized housing for some workers.

Recognize this debate has been going for a while. On could argue that providing cheap housing for the Phoenician immigrants would make Athens better for Athenians, or that people like Plato need an affordable place to live to make our city-state great!
We can build affordable housing easily here in Florida; we rarely choose to.

We can build 800sq. ft. (75 sq. m.) apartments in 3 story buildings for about $40,000, not counting land.

But we don't. Because most Americans don't want to live in 800 sq. ft. and most builders want to cater to the middle standard deviations of the population. They make more money selling to people who make more money.
I find it so silly that this isn’t the default behaviour.
If your emails are encrypted on a vps, they might have access to it but they sure won't be able to decrypt them anyway.
I was expecting more to the article than I got. It doesn't really answer the question. I don't even think it asks the question well.

E.g., is the question really "why is affordable housing so expensive?" or is it "why is housing so expensive?" They hint that publicly funded housing might be more expensive, with a mealy-mouthed "the case has been made". But they give just one apples-to-oranges comparison, and, worse, one hypothetical comparison. Where's the statistical data?

It also doesn't look at all at why we need affordable housing. E.g., with rapidly spiking inequality (in the US generally, and especially in SF), demand for affordable housing is going up.

In talking like we can't afford it, it doesn't put numbers to that, either. For example, in 2015 the US spent $71 billion on the mortgage interest tax credit, 90% of which went to households making over $100k/year. If we stopped subsidizing the housing of rich people, could we afford to subsidize the housing of poor people? And might that giant subsidy be part of why housing is so expensive?

So A+ title, D+ content.
This can be a good strategy, it just trades one set of problems for another.

Bleeding-edge packages from possibly compromised hosts, or self-hosted old versions with potential bugs, security issues, and hard-to-find documentation.

Pick your poison, unless you're Red Hat and can spend the time to backport security/bug fixes and maintain a knowledge base for your old versions.
First, I think you'll be surprised to find how many people use Signal Protocol today, since it's been integrated into one of the world's most popular messaging applications.

Second, you suggested that we try to retrofit security into email because "it's a standard". My argument, which you haven't rebutted, is that that doesn't matter.
He published the business address and phone number of a lawyer. Calling publishing a screenshot of a threat sent voluntarily with that person's contact info as a signature "doxxing" is pretty weird.
Ok my mistake, edited the post to just "RAM".
It's unprofessional in circumstances such as this imo, but to each their own.
There shouldn't be any difference. When opening it in a web page, you're just running it in the browser's sandbox.

How did it come to this? It seems like the web browser is doing the operating system's job. Were OS vendors just asleep at the wheel?

My pet theory is that OS vendors didn't really need a good sandbox. They could just tell you to be careful what applications you run. But, nobody would accept web browser developers telling you to avoid browsing unknown websites, so they were forced to build a good sandbox.

But, I don't really know. I'm just really disappointed by OS security.
sudo pkg install drm-next-kmod

The command above should get you the required drivers and stuff. Then follow the directions that are displayed after running that command.

The USB wifi dongle is a TP-LINK TL-WN725N. I found it at my local Microcenter.
What's the wild-west model? Write it all yourself? "cp -r $dependency_location $install_location"? Genuinely curious.
Well for me, the first computer I used was a 486 when I was 5. So it's "ancient" enough for me :)
You're using hello.txt as both an input file and an output file, which seems like it's just asking for race-condition problems.

What about using sed -i to make changes to the file, and not doing any bash redirection?

Alternatively, if the real problem is more complex than that, try using a different name for the output file and rename after it's finished.
In America, the poor need to be spread into the surburbs, where costs are lower. It makes it harder for them to get assistance, but economic segregation is impossible to avoid in rich cities.

The city people are too rich to have to associate with the poor. They'll send their kids to private schools, etc. They eat at different restaurants, shop at different stores.
> remote work is so practical

Remote work isn't actually feasible for most people. It's feasible for software engineers, and some other high-paid jobs, that don't have much of a problem paying high rent prices.
I've seen you as the top commenter on almost every topic of email security, pitching the same arguments.

There is significant demand for content-encrypted asynchronous messaging for all routine purposes. Chat apps do not provide the appropriate platform for real world communication of substance, and security is and must be sought by less dismissive developers than you.
You seem to be relishing this takedown post. I don't want to harsh on that, since I enjoy writing a takedown as much as anyone, but I have to point out that you're attacking an argument I didn't make.

It's not my argument that people should use special secure messaging applications when they need security, and email at other times.

It's that we should stop using email pretty much altogether. Like I said: it's archaic. In the overwhelming majority of cases, a messaging application does a better job than store-and-forward email anyways. Which is why a lot of us look at our email inboxes these days and notice that most of what's in there is automated transactional stuff, with occasional cold inbound introductions that quickly transition off into some better medium.

The one thing we do still routinely use email for --- sending files to each other --- is an iredeemable security disaster that needs to end as soon as possible anyways.
> It's default-plaintext. We don't generally love the way websites ensure they're viewed securely, but email doesn't even have the basic mechanisms HTTP has to prevent secrets from accidentally being sent in the clear.

SMTP has the exact same mechanisms, as does IMAP. HTTPS does not protect data at rest, and it doesn't protect data from the service provider, it never promised to.

There is functionally no difference between the SMTP/IMAP and HTTPS security models.
I really recommend not using a face on that model. Pretty creep/distracting.
Well, we don't know what caused the issue yet, so we can't say for sure. But I suspect that whatever family of problem deleted the packages causing this trouble could just as easily apply to the deletion (and illegitimate reclamation) of usernames.
Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits (2016) [video]
Signal Protocol is designed for asynchronous messaging.
While it's true that it has a relatively simple user interface, I've found that it has every feature I've wanted and I'm generally a power user. I can set access schedules for my kids' devices. It even has a "porn" filter but I don't use that so I don't know if it's effective. I can prioritize certain devices so they get first dibs at bandwidth. I can reserve static IP addresses for some devices, and I can do port forwarding.

I feel like those features and probably a few more that I couldn't think of off the top of my head are going to cover 99.99% of all users' needs. I agree there are other devices, especially if you flash your own firmware, that will give you more fine tuned control. I just didn't want to leave anyone with the impression that it lacked the major features people will be looking for.

The only feature I personally would like to use that it doesn't have is the ability to configure the router as a VPN client.
I'm pretty sure I've read[1] that primality machines in normal computers rely on a heuristic to determine whether the factors produced are very, very likely to be prime, and that security focussed organisations subsequently use large amounts of computation (on the order of several days on a supercomputer) to verify that the factors are, in fact, prime. Or is there a class of super fast algorithms which guarantee primality as the author implies?

[1] Citation needed. This was years ago :/
There's an enormous difference, and it's not just the sandbox; it's also that the viewer application is:

* Written in a language other than C

* Doesn't have any access to your local system by design, not as a consequence of sandbox rules

* Is maintained serverside, so everyone gets patched instantly
> Second, you suggested that we try to retrofit security into email because "it's a standard". My argument, which you haven't rebutted, is that that doesn't matter.

It matters because you need to use email for about everything. Ever seen a bank asking you to register using your Signal account? Ever seen any government website relying on anything else than Email? It's pretty clear Email is the de facto standard and it matters because people have to use it anyway. So adding security to email is worthwhile no matter if it's not your only way to communicate.
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about Central's architecture, it's not fundamentally different from NPM in this regard, though signing appears a bit more feasible.

Which means that it's not a technical difference. Maybe Central has been compromised/had issues before, just long ago (it's certainly much older). Maybe there are things wrong with NPM-as-a-company even if NPM-as-a-technology is fine. Maybe it's just luck.

But "stays there until nuclear fire immolates the Earth" sounds a bit much like "this ship is completely unsinkable" for my liking.
No problem, I'm using a TP-LINK TL-WN725N. I found it at my local Microcenter for under $20. Otherwise look at this list of supported wifi NICS [1].

[1]: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/hardware.html#wlan
They wont be alive in 100 years, but by then it would be to late to archive data we destroy today.

I have no problem with embargoing these massive archives for to protect the privacy of those involved while still allowing future historians access. For instance, the US census records do not become publically available until 72 years after the census was conducted.

In the case where the data was publicly accessible in the first place (as I believe to be the case here), I do not see any reason (EDIT: except copyright) to do this.

If we are talking about something like Facebook shutting down (or this case if the Miiverse had private conversations), I would be arguing for a similar embargo on private data.
Great to see efforts like this trying to move the needle on the designer usability of “native” UI toolkits for Python/Go/Ruby/etc.

Any ideas for other ways designers can help improve/influence the UX of “native” toolkits?

It seems like native UI development (especially for PC or Linux embedded device displays) is stuck years behind the simplicity of layout for the web. And I’m not aware of anyone but Apple doing constraint-based layout (as with Interface Builder). With platforms like Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone increasing the accessibility of embedded Linux design it seems like there’s a need for designer-friendly UI toolkits that don’t require tons of dependencies or the complexity of running a web stack to render a UI, but do require responsiveness across devices and operating systems.
> The options and tools for configuring and tweaking relevancy between ES and PostgreSQL's FTS are surprisingly similar for many application use cases.

Maybe in very very limited scenarios, but in general, they aren't even close. PostgreSQL doesn't take corpus frequencies into account, which makes it pretty difficult to come anywhere near the relevance ranking quality of Elasticsearch (or any proper search engine).

In order to tell whether PG vs Elastic is appropriate for your use case, you need to do an evaluation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Retrieval_Conference
"The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
Things are definitely getting lost in the panic here. It's going to take several weeks for everyone to get their head on straight, but yes, PTI is only going to be justified in certain situations, and if you don't allow untrusted code to run on your system (most servers), you will probably be fine with just your host CPU patched because no one will get the chance to run the exploit.

Of course, if an attacker uses a remote execution vulnerability to get into the box with user-constrained permissions, this can be used to read guest memory without concern for user limitation, so in that way it's a long-term pernicious threat that will make local exploitation significantly easier, and security-conscious organizations will still opt to use it despite the fact that they don't run untrusted code. Also, since this would allow them to read all memory in the guest, if you have sensitive stuff like database credentials coming into memory, they could be sniffed without requiring further exploitation.

Also, consider that at present, PTI is disabled by default for AMD chips, based on AMD's assurances that Meltdown does not affect them. If you're running in the cloud and your host is AMD-based, you don't need PTI in either the guest or the host.
> It's that we should stop using email pretty much altogether. Like I said: it's archaic

Sorry but have you ever used Signal or any other IM to send anything longer than a few sentences? Email can be as long as you want, and it is totally appropriate when you want to write a longer document.
New York Stock Exchange Wants to List a Suite of 2x Bitcoin ETFs
I agree in general. In this particular case, though, a good fraction of the work was done by me and tglx. I'm independent. Tglx is sort of independent.

This is not to diminish the work done upstream by less independent people. Dave Hansen, in particular, is the one who actually got the code to function.
> And this is because the most captivating things on the internet are authentic in real time, and cannot be “budgeted” in a traditional sense.

I agree with your sentiment but I think there is a move to turn the internet into "TV and movie". There is a big movement by certain groups to push more censorship on the internet.

The raw, real and genuine internet is slowly giving way to corporate censored content.
OK, so implement a Double-Ratchet protocol for email clients and call it a day. Don't say that no engineering is possible on this problem, as if that isn't a farcical statement.
I’m pretty sure I want a big searchable archive, though. That doesn’t seem compatible with most of these security-oriented message schemes.
[0] https://www.shellcheck.net/
I am resisting the urge to make a Linode and ColdFusion joke.
If you want to reason about these things from first principles, then I recommend the IR book, which is free online: https://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/
Introducing non-Twitter contact details for someone you're having an argument with on Twitter is doxxing. The contact details were sent to Popehat, not to all Popehat's followers.

Pretending it shouldn't count in this case for some unspecified reason is weird.