Posts by Martyn2014

Cloudflare broke itself – and a big chunk of the Internet – with a bad database query

Re: Bad Rust code was the problem...

It was originally PHP, then LuaJIT - CloudFlare were having to improve the LuaJIT compiler to keep it (thier business) running.

There was no re-write - the existing solution did not scale any further and they had significant internal experience in Rust so went with what they knew for v2.

v1 is still in the wild - it took suffered from this database issue, however it failed silently rather than taking out the process. This led to much higher traffic onto client services as bots were able to make it through.

Somehow their internal processes missed this obvious code smell - given the things rust does protect from, imagine the issues they might have had with the same level of due diligence applied to C code...

Re: Who watches the global kill switches? -- Rust is well named.

One observation - it's only people outside of the rust ecosystem who seem to think people inside the rust ecosystem believe it is magic.

Had this code been written in C the out of bounds error could have easily resulted in undefined behaviour. As it was the assignment of a value to the 201st element of a 200 element long vector producing an error, rather than blind adherence to pointer arithmetic.

The error was unhandled, it was an obvious error and easy to catch.

Redox OS version 0.8 is both strange and very familiar

Nearly as bad as assuming that all users of Rust believe writing it in Rust magically makes everything safe... each to their own high horse an all.

Anyhow - would you rather have a non-Posix-C compliant OS (i.e. remove strcpy()) or call out to an existing implementation because no improvement can be made when writing it in the language the rest of the library is being written in.

You could always RTFM, relibc is being written as part of redox-os because newlib wasn't doing it for them and there are probably safety improvements which could be made in some places.

GitHub's Copilot flies into its first open source copyright lawsuit

Re: We need more takedowns!

Unless public release binds the copyright owner to that licence eternally, then the copyright owner has the right to release their work under any licence they want.

So I will retract my use of the word 'trump' and state that regardless of the licence included in the code by uploading to GitHub copyright holders are exercising their right to licence their work in whichever way they want.

Re: We need more takedowns!

I mean, it is there in the terms of service...

"The “Service” refers to the applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub, including any Beta Previews."

Re: We need more takedowns!

But you do.. it's in their terms of service

"We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video."

You don't need to use their service, but if you do then you agree to their terms...

I would even go as far to say that if a copyright holder uploaded something to GitHub then this would trump any licence the copyright holder put on the code.

We need more takedowns!

Have to wonder if this is not going the way of DCMA takedowns...

So if I publish something GPLv3 to Gituhub and its deemed good enough for copilot to use and regurgitate, I can see I have some recourse to claim copyright on the created work - but not entirely sure what laws Github has broken. The person using copilot might be able to make a complaint to Github that their service lied and led to them getting sued (or a takedown notice or whatever).

But how about if I publish something GLPv3 to Github, and then someone copies it to another part of Github but miss-licenses it. They put it up as a no-licence, anyone can have it. When they create the repo they promise to Github that they will not break the law and that they have permissions to push the code they are storing. Github takes the promise as true and uses the code to train their AI.

At that point, is it not up to the copyright holder to enforce their license terms on the intermediary work?