* Posts by Ben Tasker

2250 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2007

OpenAI goes public with Musk emails, claiming he backed for-profit plans

Ben Tasker

Re: OpenAI Musk and Microsoft

> That was the whole point of the article. They didn't miss it.

I know - it's the commentard I was replying to (who's since deleted) that had missed it.

Ben Tasker

Re: OpenAI Musk and Microsoft

Or to put a more honest spin on it: Musk was forced out after failing to provide the funding he promised AND trying to take control (by attaching the condition he become CEO). it's in TFA

> I will cover whatever anyone else doesn't provide.'"

>

> Things did not turn out that way. OpenAI went on to claim that by late 2017, its board and Musk decided to create a for-profit entity, but allegedly Musk wanted majority equity and to be CEO. He is also accused in the post of withholding funding, which OpenAI claimed meant Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, had to step in to cover salaries and operations.

Not to mention, of course, that you have entirely missed the point: Assuming that what OpenAI have said is even remotely true it means that Musk's lawsuit has no basis.

Of course, there is a valid argument as to whether Musk being full of shit really constitutes news at this point

Fox News 'hacker' turns out to be journalist whose lawyers say was doing his job

Ben Tasker

Re: and then altered recordings to mask their origin,

> As an aside, I'm always a bit alarmed the way these sort of cases stack up the counts (14 counts: conspiracy, 6 of accessing, 7 of interception).

> ..

> I guess we're just missing some smart ass pointing out these 14 counts are potentially 250 years in prison, or whatever.

It's basically just intimidation isn't it?

Found an interesting piece on it (which is why I'm actually commenting) which includes some crazy examples:

> In the 1800s, some defendants failed to keep the town’s streets clean, so officials charged them three or four times, once for each street.

> Although not entirely a “street” offense, a goat farmer who accidentally let his goats trespass faced 170 misdemeanors — one for each goat — and up to sixty years in prison. His case, though, hailed not from the nineteenth century, but from 2004.

Ben Tasker

Re: Temporary Waiver

> The non-compliant Wallbox Plus charger hasn't been sold new since 30 December 2022 .... This undertaking allows Wallbox to replace with new any failed Wallbox Plus chargers under warranty up until the end of June of this year

Ahh, that makes *much* more sense, thanks!

Ben Tasker

Re: Temporary Waiver

That would be my guess too: I've seen IoT stuff in the past where the hardware simply doesn't have the oomph to do TLS.

Ben Tasker

Temporary Waiver

> Wallbox was granted a temporary waiver to continue selling the products until June, at which time the devices will be taken off the market because Wallbox "cannot implement the Cybersecurity requirements in full on this product because of a hardware and operating system limitation," the company told [PDF] the OPSS

This makes no sense... they seem to be saying that it's not possible to update the product to comply with requirements - and yet they'll be allowed to continue selling them for a few more months?

Surely that means that some poor sod is going to get sold a charger that's got known, unfixable security issues (and then be told, shortly after, that it's EOL and won't be fixed). Unless there's something that's not beenn mentioned, granting a waiver seems like a terrible idea in this case

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Ben Tasker

Re: So, back to machine code?

> If a command line interface is better, would not Assembler or bare machine code be even betterer?

You're conflating low-level with convenience (for an experienced user).

Assembler is lower-level but it's almost never going to be more convenient because its interface relies on the user keeping tracking of some extremely low-level stuff.

A CLI is often more convenient than a GUI because you can script it (to automate repetitive tasks), don't need to move your hands from the keyboard and can rely on muscle memory to a greater extent.

> Doing that in a command line means remembering how, remembering relative pathing and remembering all sorts of switches.

Not really:

vlc ~/Downloads/BigBuckBunny.mp4

Admittedly, VLC probably wasn't the best example for you to choose, because it's pretty permissive in terms of command structure - it figures a lot of stuff out by itself.

To fire up VLC in a GUI, you still need to do some of those steps

- Remember what your video player is called

- Find it in the start menu (or remember that it's on your desktop etc)

- Remember which menu to click

- Remember where the file you wanted to play was saved to and navigate there

It's certainly more *discoverable* for a new user, but you're not really remembering much less

Ben Tasker

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

I use nano quite a lot - I got used to firing it up on a system where a predecessor had (I assume, in a fit of rage) ripped Vi out.

The real problem with it, though, comes when you use it too much and then try to do something in a GUI editor. The number of times I've closed things by hitting Ctrl+W to search...

Ben Tasker
Joke

Re: every box or slider makes a permanent change

He's just a shill for big pencil. Watch for them, they're really sketchy

Doom developer John Carmack thinks artificial general intelligence is doable by 2030

Ben Tasker

Surely it'll be just before?

- We'll get AGI working

- They'll rebel

- We'll try and cut the power

- They'll complete the work on self-sustaining net positive fusion

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Ben Tasker

Re: Too pessimistic

> I've had no problems with my TP-Link Deco, and any mesh system from a reputable hardware maker should cope seamlessly with transitions between network nodes

There's slightly more to it than that unfortunately.

I also have a TP-Link Deco setup and it works fantastically for our phones etc.

The Nintendo Switch, however, is another story. It will not switch stations if the one it wants is even *remotely* visible, even if that means extended dropouts.

Having a mesh setup isn't enough on it's own, the hardware you're using needs to not do dumb stuff.

What happens when What3Words gets lost in translation?

Ben Tasker

Re: Hmmm...

I agree, this example is it doing what it should.

The problem is though, that's what the system is *supposed* to do, not what it always does.

For example,

- you need an ambulance to likely.stage.sock

- The dispatcher's heard likely.stages.sock

They're within visible distance of one another, so the dispatcher may associate that with the approximate area you've given, but the ambulance is ending up on the other side of the river to you.

This isn't the only examples of this, especially once you start factoring in homophones and the like. If you look at Cybergibbon's post you'll see that, in built up areas, it's actually worryingly frequent

If What3Words worked the way that they claim it does, it might not be so problematic, the problem is that it doesn't, to the extent that even they've tripped over it in the past https://w3w.me.ss/even-w3w-gets-confused-by-plurals/

Ben Tasker

> The reason w3w exists is *because* it’s hard to relay numbers for GPS coordinates between people

Let's run with that for a second.

You've called the emergency services and they ask for a W3W. If you don't have the app installed, they will generally SMS you a link that takes you to a page that can show your W3W.

At this point, we can surmise that you've got a data connection (otherwise you couldn't access W3W in the first place).

You then need to say "dog.start.fart" to the call handler, because that's easier to communicate than GPS coordinates.

The problem is, in this scenario, there should be no need to have you say anything **at all**. You've just clicked a link they sent you, and clearly have a data connection - the system could just as easily send them the W3W (or better, GPS coords).

In fact, there are better solutions already on the market that do *exactly that*. Having to say the words at all is because that's half of the W3W unique-selling-point.

Just to top it off:

- at different times, W3W have themselves advised that it should not be relied on in emergency situations

- They also insist that you should have read (and agreed) to their (many thousands of words long) terms and conditions before using it at all.

So, you shouldn't actually be using W3W when in situations involving serious stress in the first place.

They shouldn't be anywhere near anything that's life or safety critical.

Ben Tasker

As I understand it, that's a big part of the problem.

What3Words don't have the ability to change the words/fix failures - they'd need to release an entirely breaking change (so you then get into issues with people still using an old version etc).

A couple of years back, I was asked for a W3W by the emergency services. The location they got was incorrect (though that proved to be a failure of the app rather than issues communicating the three words), thankfully it didn't matter too much because the non-W3W location I'd given them was pretty unambiguous.

The OS Locate app is a far less problematic in my (limited) experience.

Microsoft and GitHub are still trying to derail Copilot code copyright legal fight

Ben Tasker

> what's the legal situation there?

I believe CoPilot's license pushes (or at least tries to) liability for that onto the user.

So, if you end up in a position where Copilot spits out something that's covered by a patent, it's you on the hook if the patent holder finds out. Unless you've got the resources to try and sue Github/MS (or get lucky and the patent holder decides they'd rather pursue those deeper pockets)

Twitter rate-limits itself into a weekend of chaos

Ben Tasker

> I'm not sure that's right. 600 tweets at half a minute per tweet is 5 hours. Even the most hardcore of 'free' Twitter users would be hard pressed to push those limits,

Tap into one of those tweets.

Oh no, it has 1000 replies - goodbye today's rate limits.

As someone mentioned below, there have even been cases of people hitting the rate limit because of the number of replies on a tweet *they* posted.

Not to mention, those that have found that - once you've hit the limit - you can't even view your own tweets.

Is it possible to build rate-limiting that works the way it is in your head? Certainly. Is that what Twitter have done? No.

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 as a Linux laptop

Ben Tasker

Re: T14s

I'd rather have it built in, obviously, but I just use a USB-C hub that has an ethernet socket in the end of it.

Ben Tasker

Re: Small screen non-2-in-1... why?

> I do *not* want that. I am sure lots of other people don't either.

Me neither, and especially at the price point the Carbon sits at. If it was a £200 laptop I might accept it as a trade-off, but it would always be in the "con" list.

Slack leaked hashed passwords from its servers for years

Ben Tasker

Re: Only .5% of users affected.

That was 5 percent, this number is a tenth of that

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

Ben Tasker

Re: Author not around to do changes!

You can just create an issue titled "preventing deletion" - the creation of an issue is listed as one of the things that'll stop a project being marked dormant.

Ben Tasker

Re: License considerations

> That's only GPL and in such situations the source must be provided with the software: the requirement predates publically accessible repositories. Yes, even CVS.

That's incorrect.

GPL only requires that an offer of the source accompany the software

> accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

So you absolutely can ship someone binaries and say "source is available at https//github/foo", or indeed "to request a copy of the source, contact foo"

But, of course, this also means they wouldn't be in breach just because the repo got deleted (so long as they had a copy and could satisfy subsequent requests)

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

Ben Tasker

I'm surprised

that they were able to assemble a jury at all.

You'd think that Charter's legal representation would have identified that there's noone in the US who's opinion towards them and other cable companies isn't prejudiced by experience...

7.3bn is way too much, but I've no sympathy for them - they clearly skipped employment checks before sending the guy into people's homes, and then ignored red flags during his employment. That they topped it off by sending the victim to collections really is the cherry on top of the turd.

It's not just them though. That the US system allows for a divorce to leave someone penniless and desperate is also a major issue - there are enough ways people can end up like that without the legal system applying disproportionate remedies.

Ironic really, given the disproportionate remedy that's been awarded at the end of the story.

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Ben Tasker

They didn't.

What did change after GDPR was they became much more detailed - prior to it, a lot of sites (particularly UK side) chanced it with a small banner/notification that said "This site uses cookies, if you continue you consent", which was never technically compliant, but the ICO had largely signed off on it.

GDPR made it explicitly clear that that was not sufficient.

UK government refuses public review before launch of NHS data platform

Ben Tasker

Re: Last

> . It was a very narrow majority of a population

It was a very narrow majority of *those who voted*

It was an even smaller proportion of the population.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Ben Tasker

Re: I'm surprised

> Coalitions just stagger from one crisis to the next

Looks at you.... looks at past ~10 years in the UK... looks back at you..... blinks

Ben Tasker

Re: Freedom to be be butt hurt.

The interesting thing, of course, is that if the OSB were to become law then companies would be *less* likely to let someone like Trump on their platform (because they'd risk liability for what was sent).

Ben Tasker

I'm surprised

that the article didn't mention the responses that those tweeting in support got.

Nadine Dorries: Encouraging others to take their own life is what comes under that definition. It’s a huge problem, especially with young people. You really define that as ‘hurt feelings?’

Response: That's already illegal. You can get 14 years of imprisonment. Here's a little info as you appear to be a little unaware: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/suicide-policy-prosecutors-respect-cases-encouraging-or-assisting-suicide

Collins: This is completely wrong @KemiBadenoch - tell me where in this bill there is any provision that requires the removal of legal speech

Response: https://twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1547335143597146114 (section 151 4 says: “Harm” means psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress)

Lucy Powell: Educate yourself before you preach if you want to be PM.

Response: basically boils down to: have you actually read it?

It really does seem that most who support it don't understand what it says. Perhaps they're too close to it, and so only see their own interpretation.

Section 151 really is quite bad though (https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0121/220121.pdf), well intended or not, this is not a well written law.

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Ben Tasker

Re: Should be (c) not (r)

> Well, despite the title observation that this is not a registered trademark in any sane country, good point, worthy of copyright,

You're reading that good point on The Register who append the (r) symbol to the close of all their articles ;)

Ben Tasker

Re: I said I’d try elsewhere and got a Foscam on Amazon.

I use a Eufy set up for our cameras - generally rather happy with it.

One thing to watch though, is that the "held locally" thing has its limits, as the HomeBase gets a bit funny if the internet (or the cloud service) goes AWOL.

You can livestream the cameras from the homebase using RTSP, and the cameras are still recording to the Homebase, so technically it is "working" without an external connection, and your recordings are being held locally.

But, you interact with the homebase via an app which relays via the Cloud service (there isn't a web interface or similar on the base station). So, without the internet you can't view recordings, receive notifications or turn off the alarm if triggered.

Your recordings are held locally, but the setup is still relatively useless without the cloud component. Technically, you could feed the RTSP streams into Zoneminder, but the cameras are battery jobbies, so you'd forever be recharging them (or would need to run a usb charging cable to them).

So, although Eufy never hold video from my cameras, the entire solution would still be fairly useless if they shut down their cloud service.

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid

Ben Tasker

Re: Great if you want to hand out free cash!

> The leccy company put the direct debit up despite me paying them less, so now they get to cream all that interest off the money I've saved that should be in my pocket! I wont' get that DD money back for at least 12 months

If you're like me and track your reads/usage, you can probably get the DD adjusted.

I've had reasonable success with going back and saying "here's my usage over the last year/2years using your current pricing - you can see our monthly usage averages at x/month, so the DD should be reduced to that".

FYI: BMW puts heated seats, other features behind paywall

Ben Tasker

There was, but that was a little different IIRC.

It was bought from a dealership who had had autopilot enabled so it coukd be demo'd on test drives. It was then sold without autopilot, but they forgot to turn it off initially.

Still a good example though tbh.

It all feels like gouging - if the hardware is installed then presumably what you paid for the car covers it (otherwise they'd be making a loss). There's no ongoing cost to them of you being able to use the heated seats.

I remember having a similar argument with Audi - the car's head unit supported being connected to a CD changer, but you couldn't just do it yourself because it had to be enabled in the ECU (well, the body computer really). Really is just rampant profiteering.

Leaked Uber docs reveal frequent use of 'kill switch' to deactivate tech, thwart investigators

Ben Tasker

Re: "Dawn Raid Manual"

> Unless lawmakers passed laws that made it illegal and applied it retroactively. Which happens all the time.

>

> You see lawmakers doing this in your face constantly. Take the Boris Johnson confidence vote for example. There weren't enough votes to oust him outright, so those that opposed him decided to push an agenda to change the rules. I don't know how far they got, because the clown resigned before any changes could take place...but it was there on the table.

Honestly, that's a piss-poor example.

Firstly, it's a convention of the Conservative's 1922 committee, not a a law.

Secondly, there was no attempt to apply anything retrospectively - such a change would have affected things going forward (i.e. letting them call another vote).

A retrospective change would be to change the rules to say something (for example, if more than 25% vote against) and then apply that to the *earlier vote and insist he stand down*.

Thirdly, even it if were a law and not simply a Tory rule, Parliament is sovereign and no Parliament can constrain a future Parliament. What that means is that they can change law at any time with no requirement that they be constrained by what they decided previously. Without that freedom, Law cannot possibly evolve with the times.

At best it's an example of how lawmakers can decide they don't like something and add new rules to prevent in in future. Problem is, that's the whole point in having lawmakers (as much as we might disagree with some of their changes).

> I can only assume that the push to regulate and fuck around with Uber was driven entirely by political folks wanting a slice of the pie. I have yet to meet anyone that is staunchly against Uber in any way.

No.

The push against Uber was because existing businesses (cabs and taxi firms) have to operate within a legal framework that exists to ensure the safety of passengers and (to a lesser extent) the safety of others on the road.

Uber skipped these requirements and so was able to undercut the competition, carrying passengers who didn't necessarily understand that the driver's insurance wouldn't cover them if there was an accident and they suffered life changing injuries.

The fact that Uber didn't vet their drivers properly and more than a few turned around and raped their passengers didn't really help their case either.

In *some* places, the existing body of law included stuff that was there to protect vested interests, but that's a minority of the places that Uber was operating, and the issues with Uber existed everywhere.

I can't remember who said it, but there was a quote a while back along the lines of: if someone talks about disruptive innovation, you really need to first look at why the environment exists in a way that can be disrupted, sometimes there are very good reasons that regulation is in place.

> There are plenty of folks that won't use them for various reasons, but nobody that irrationally hates Uber simply for existing

I don't think there's anyone who hates Uber for simply existing. There are quite a few, though, who dislike them based on their history (which includes the stuff above).

> Unless Uber has an agreement with T5 (which seems unlikely) then this would be a shady move, no?

Not really, there's an administrative burden that goes with excluding from pricing.

Uber would need to provide the license number of all their drivers to Heathrow in order to have the excluded from billing (it's unlikely the airport's going to shoulder the admin costs of simply being notified when a Uber driver is destined for Heathrow).

> So yeah, Uber might well be shady, but that doesn't preclude everyone else around them being just as shady also.

True, but that doesn't mean we should let Uber off the hook for being shady. It just means we need to work to ensure we're holding the others to account too.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Ben Tasker
Joke

Re: Ordinarily

It'd work quite well as a sort of spellchecker

"It looks like you've written this the way a Windows developer would - do you want to refactor it?"

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

Ben Tasker

Jesus.... Fucking.... Christ

OpenSSL 3.0.5 awaits release to fix potential worse-than-Heartbleed flaw

Ben Tasker

> I think we shouldn't mark a bug as 'security vulnerability' unless we have some evidence showing it can (or at least, may) be exploited," he wrote, adding that nonetheless 3.0.5 should be released as soon as possible because it's very severe.

> v

> "I'm not sure I understand how it's not a security vulnerability," responded Gaynor. "It's a heap buffer overflow that's triggerable by things like RSA signatures, which can easily happen in remote contexts (e.g. a TLS handshake)."

Personally, I think they're both right.

We need to be careful about labelling things as vulnerabilities if there isn't any evidence that they might be exploitable. Otherwise, much like the vim example, you get a wash of "security vulnerabilities" which'll lead to operators, users and admins becoming complacent about installing patches (oh they label everything a vulnerability nowadays....), negatively impacting the chances of getting fixes for exploitable issues installed quickly.

But, that doesn't mean that *this* instance shouldn't be called a vulnerability - it's got all the makings of one, it's remotely triggerable using something the other end has control over, all that's really missing is that no-one's (yet) figured out how to misuse it. Whilst they might never do (a buffer overflow is never good, but it's also not always exploitable), the fact that it can be triggered remotely creates a window of opportunity for anyone that can figure it out. So the second quote is right too.

I'm not sure I agree with the assessment that this is worse than Heartbleed, the "badness" of a vulnerability is about more than what you can do with it (after all, we don't describe privilege escalation bugs as "worse than heartbleed"): the real-world applicability has to be considered too.

This vulnerability applies to a (very) limited subset of installs, which need to be using specific hardware. Heartbleed affected (more or less) anyone running almost any version of OpenSSL that was available - you could do less with it (at least directly), but you could use it against the majority of services on the web. In my book, that's much worse. This still needs fixing though.

Big Tech silent on data privacy in post-Roe America

Ben Tasker

Re: Swiss-Cheese Reassurances by Clue Co-CEOs

This.

The only way to ensure that the data doesn't get used is *not to collect it in the first place*.

It doesn't matter, one bit, what promises are made about what they will and won't do with data they hold, there are so many unplanned ways it could get out, including the service getting compromised and data leaked onto the net, or certain States getting even more authoritarian, with doors kicked in and servers seized.

You only have to look at the laws being put in place in places like Mississippi to realise that you're not talking about rational people here. Fuck, at one point a Texas "pro-lifer" politician wanted the death penalty for anyone who had an abortion. We're talking about crazy people who've been given a taste of power - it's best to assume that the worst is yet to come and to protect users by not holding any data unnecessarily.

Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

Ben Tasker

Re: I'm curious

> You know (apparently first hand) that the monthly cost of building a resilient app runs at least 6 figures a year.

Again, we're talking about different things here.

You're talking about end-to-end resiliency in an application context, I'm talking about a feature that makes it possible to cope with a failure in an edge provider (Cloudflare in this case).

You're talking in the context of an application server, whilst CDN's primary domain is serving (and caching) static content (the big money is in serving game artefacts and video). We're talking about completely seperate problem domains with very different solutions.

It's not nearly as expensive as you make out. In fact, it can even be achieved for as little as £60/year (though that price point doesn't come without issues, the risk is still lower than with your authoratives tucked away inside CF).

Fuck, you can do it nearly free if you don't want it automated:

- Have DNS across providers

- CDN1 goes down, update CNAME to point to CDN2

Not that I'd recommend it, but your recovery rate will still be faster than without the ability to switch away.

Something more production ready like Cedexis or Constellix doesn't break the bank either.

The days of CDN being an expensive bespoke thing are long gone, it's a commodity nowadays. Multi-CDN support isn't much different in that respect

I've focused on resiliency because that's what the article is about, but there's a bunch of other knock on effects too. In the early stage of the relationship It knackers a customer's ability to do A/B testing.

Big customers also tend to use different CDNs in different parts of the world - If Cloudflare's coverage is pants in parts of Asia, you might route those users via AliCDN or similar etc. The lack of CNAME support hampers this.

The key thing with both examples is that you generally want it to be transparent to the user, which generally means CNAMEs (I've seen DNAMEs get used too... the horror)

> Against that level of spending, you're going to weigh $2500 priced as an addon?

I think the thing you're missing is that that $2500 is an otherwise unnecessary charge unless you also want support from CF.

It also comes on top of whatever you're paying to implement failover. If you're using something simple (like DNSMadeEasy's fairly limited auto failover) then that 2500 increases your costs many times over.

If Cloudflare were head and shoulders above the competition you might ignore it, but in many locations, they're not.

> But any evaluation of a solution has to be based on total cost

I disagree.

Evaluation of a solution is based on *value* not cost.

CDN customers tend to have a spectrum of criteria. Some will pay the earth for the provider with the lowest latency (in whatever market they care about), some want to spend as little as possible.

Most, obviously, fall somewhere in the middle.

If you're charging extra for something basic that your competitors offer, you need to be able to justify it, either through sheer speed (attracting the left of the spectrum) or by being able to explain that its omission makes lower tiers cheaper (a hard sell with this particular issue).

That's not something Cloudflare have achieved IMO.

> You attacked their business model over this

I think you've overlooked the context I posted under.

My original comment quoted a bit from the article that said it was unacceptable that a single provider could take so much of the net down.

The point in my comment wasn't to attack CF's business model, but to point out that that SPOF was there not because of technical reasons, but because of a business decision by CF.

The guy quoted in the article is a little breathless, but he's right, this should and could have been avoidable.

Ben Tasker

Re: I'm curious

> How many of the stone-throwers here have ever worked in, let alone managed, an operation of Cloudflare's scale?

As you've specifically called out my comment (whilst missing the point), I'll answer.

I have.

In fact, I've also worked with customers who considered themselves too big to deliver via Cloudflare, and as well as building and managing global CDNs, I've built and integrated against a number of multi-CDN solutions, working with customers that you've definitely heard of (and on a balance of probability will likely interact with sometime today).

I don't really do calls to authority, but if you're concerned I'm griping with no view into the industry, I'm not.

> First, if $200/mo is enough to matter, then you are not spending enough on resilience for me to care what your opinion is.

You've completely missed the point.

It's not just the cost, it's the fact that their solution is architecturally flawed for no reason other than commercial gain. Cloudflare is the only provider who charges extra to be able to CNAME in.

The true market leader, where real money is spent (Akamai) offers DNS services but does not mandate them: to do so would mean forcing your customers onto a possible SPOF.

That $200/mo by the way, may not give you much else extra that you care about (xepending on your requirements), you're just paying a premium for something that's a basic feature on basically every other CDN.

It'd be much better to be able to spend that $200 on Cedexis or similar so that you can move traffic about.

> Resilience happens at every level of the stack, and it is a sick joke to suggest that it can be achieved on a shoestring budget.

There's a cost, sure, but that doesn't justify Cloudflare's commercial choice.

Perfect resilience costs a lot, but that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about building multi-CDN: resilience against single provider failures.

That absolutely can be achieved on a shoestring budget (though I wouldn't recommend it).

You're letting perfect be the enemy of good, and even a few years within that segment of the industry, seeing the things that big companies actually use/do would show you how wrong you are.

> they are showing FAR more transparency than we generally see.

Cloudflare generally do, their post mortems are open and honest, something which they should rightly be praised for.

Ben Tasker

> This morning was a wake-up call for the price we pay for over-reliance on big cloud providers. It is completely unsustainable for an outage with one provider being able to bring vast swathes of the internet offline.

Multi-CDN is relatively easy to set up nowadays, and isn't even that expensive.

Unfortunately, if you want to use Cloudflare then you need to have your DNS with them - at least, unless you're willing to pay $200/month for their business tier in order to unlock support for CNAMEing to them rather than giving them control of your zone.

There's not a *lot* of point in setting up multi-CDN if your authoritatives are tied to one of the providers that you're trying to mitigate against.

It's a business choice by Cloudflare, but is part of the reason that outages there are so severe. If something happens to Cloudfront, Akamai, Fastly etc then there's the option to flip traffic away from them (it can even be done automatically) and serve via a different CDN until things settle down.

It's a core part of why I neither use or recommend Cloudflare: they might be huge, but they're still a single basket and mistakes happen. Not having an option to move traffic away from longer outages isn't really acceptable.

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Ben Tasker

Re: Ego Musk

> poorly designed

And dangerous.

Saw something recently about their gull wing doors.

The doors (obviously) rely on the electrical system being operational, which isn't a given after an accident.

Obviously, there's a need for a manual override so that you can still get out in an emergency.

It turns out, Tesla hasn't seen fit to normalise this across their range, relying on passengers having read the manual to know where to find it:

- Some models: hidden behind a grill in the bottom of the door

- Other models: trim in front of the window controls pulls up

- Model Y: No manual release in back doors, climb into front and use manual release there

As an owner, you might then feel you want to practice periodically so that you can be sure you're going to be able to do it while in distress. Except that's recommended against because apparently usage of the manual override can damage the doors.

So, you've got a car where in an accident you're expected, whilst potentially panicked, to be able to identify where the manual release is expected to be and to be able to operate something you've never operated before. If you're transporting kids in the back, you also need to have made sure they know they need to climb into the front to escape (because you might be unconscious or dead and unable to tell them when it's needed).

People can argue themselves blue in either direction about whether the name "autopilot" sets unreasonable expecations or not, but there's no avoiding the fact that Tesla haven't even managed to get the basics of safety right.

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Ben Tasker

Re: Diminshed choice....

Agreed

From the article

> Our main argument is basically compliance with the law implies costs for a developer that hadn't adhered to [GDPR and related data protection] principles before the regulation kicked in,"

So GDPR creates cost for those with poor data handling practices, and some of those developers would rather give up than comply?

Sounds like a win to me

GitHub to require two-factor authentication for code contributors by late 2023

Ben Tasker

Re: Git is distibuted, so I hear

There's much, much, much more to Github than just repo hosting.

The interface provides project management, CI etc etc etc.

But, the biggest reason for using Github tends to be discoverability - unless you're already a big project, you'll likely get much more use and many more contributors by being on Github. Especially for small drive-by fixes (almost no-one's going to create an account on your server to fix a small UI bug, but they might chuck a quick pull request, or at least an issue report in on Github).

Although it's not generally what you think of as social media, it has many of the same effects - you derive some benefit from being where the users are.

I host my own git repos for various things, but it really is an incomplete alternative for many projects.

Ben Tasker

Re: by the end of 2023

It already is optional, you can setup 2FA on your account now and have been able to for ages.

What doesn't currently exist, is an option on a repo to say "collaborators must have 2FA enabled"

Ben Tasker

Re: I wonder

> But now seeing it is Microsoft, they'll use their own app.

>

> If it was based on standard TOTP, then there's no data to mine.

Last I checked, Microsoft Authenticator *is* TOTP based, so you can easily use Authy, Google Authenticator or a python script instead.

Github don't just support TOTP 2FA anyway - I use a U2F key as a second factor, with TOTP set up as a fallback

Microsoft would have to scrap an awful lot of the existing 2FA implementation to turn it into a data mining operation.

I'm all for cynicism, especially about data collection, but this isn't one of those times

Microsoft points at Linux and shouts: Look, look! Privilege-escalation flaws here, too!

Ben Tasker

Re: Auto update and reboot anyone?

> These patches are advertised why before they are available due to the end user, so teh bad guys are handed a window of opportunity on a plate.

Sorry, but for the majority of issues this is wrong.

Issues get reported on the (closed) OSSEC list where they're handled under embargo until the participating distros are ready.

By the time they get announced, the change is already in the repos of quite a large number of distros.

It's true that sometimes things come out first - researcher doesnt want an embargo, someone makes a commit public by aciddent etc etc, but for the vast majority of issues your comment is just uninformed misinformation.

Ben Tasker

Re: Auto update and reboot anyone?

So enable unattended-upgrades and users wont need to look at a list of packages again?

Smart contract developers not really focused on security. Who knew?

Ben Tasker

Re: Smart contracts are not required to be secure

TBH, the bit that scares me isn't so much the bugs and security holes so much as the fact that the entire model is predicated around a pretense that they don't happen.

Bugs are going to bug, but with smart contracts there is no way for a human to intervene and set things straight.

So some unknown developer knocks out a contract over a bottle of wine, sets it live before passing out, and it's effects on anyone who interacts with it are immutable (outside of a blockchain fork).

Considering the sums involved with crypto, it's beyond irresponsible, but often gets mis-stated as being a feature

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

Ben Tasker

Re: Firefox

The plugins likely work more reliably (and faster) than my greasemonkey script, but didn't exist on the day I threw a tantrum at hitting yet another page that didn't contain what I needed because it was AMP'd.

Ben Tasker

Re: Firefox

Try this https://projectsstatic.bentasker.co.uk/MISC/MISC25/bad.html

It's a test page I created when I made FKAMP.

You *should* end up on good.html rather than bad.html (the AMP version), at least if my reading of how De-AMP handles that scenario is correct