Posts by debater

South Korea’s nuclear research agency breached by North Korea-affiliated cyberattackers, says malware analyst group

Employ them?

I wonder if one possible strategy for tackling the---apparently talented---hackers who pull off these hacks is to offer to employ them? I suspect we (the NATO countries) could offer them more money than their current employers, as well as slightly better conditions of employment (e.g. a reduced threat of the loss of appendages for suspected disloyalty). Just a thought.

It's 2021 and a printf format string in a wireless network's name can break iPhone Wi-Fi

Anyone who makes WiFi low-level software

Anyone who makes WiFi low-level software: this is one to add to your automated test suites, please. Pretty please.

(Shameless plug: unless, of course, you use Ada to write your critical software :-)

(You know, the International Standard programming language that was _designed_ for writing safety-critical software.)

(And even then, of course, still add it to your automated test suites, since even Ada software has to call into stuff sometimes.)

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

Missing the Point Completely

I feel that headlines such as 'Fastly broke the internet' are a typical case of the media (El Reg excluded) firmly grasping completely the wrong end of the stick.

In this case what happened---tell me if I'm wrong---is that the CDN that Fastly runs went down for an hour, and that caused thousands of popular websites to fail. Now please go back and read that sentence again carefully. It caused **thousands of popular websites to fail**.

The fault is not with Fastly at all! The whole tacit deal with CDNs is, and always was, that they are not guaranteed to be up all the time. Some websites have the ability to fall back when fetching anything from a CDN: they fetch what they need from some other source if they can't get it from the CDN. The fault is **entirely** with all the thousands of websites that do not have a fallback mechanism. Presumably they still don't, and nobody is going to fix it.

Admittedly, HTML5 currently does not mandate any such mechanism to be provided by the browser built-in, and website developers therefore have to roll their own or use a JavaScript library. That is a serious failing of HTML5, but it doesn't excuse the publishers of major prestige websites.