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Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert
@FiloSottile
Cryptogopher / Go crypto maintainer / -knower / RC F'13, F2'17 / #BlackLivesMatter / he+him mkcert.dev / age-encryption.org / filippo.io/newsletter
@filippo@abyssdomain.expertfilippo.ioJoined June 2009

Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert’s posts

Data is not the new gold, data is the new uranium. Sometimes you can make money from it, but it can be radioactive, it's dangerous to store, has military uses, you generally don't want to concentrate it too much, and it's regulated. Why keep uranium you don't need?
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No one is paying the log4j2 maintainers!? There is a whole page on the responsibilities of a "Project Management Committee"... AND NO ONE IS PAYING THEM? apache.org/dev/pmc.html Open Source needs to grow the hell up. Yesterday.
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Log4j maintainers have been working sleeplessly on mitigation measures; fixes, docs, CVE, replies to inquiries, etc. Yet nothing is stopping people to bash us, for work we aren't paid for, for a feature we all dislike yet needed to keep due to backward compatibility concerns. twitter.com/shipilev/statu…
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Hiring engineering talent is hard. And yet, there is a large pool of engineering talent up for grabs by any company that can muster the courage to say: - remote policy is yes - SF/NY mid-market rate worldwide after taxes/benefits - unlimited immigration budget - four day weeks
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We all agree the status quo is unsustainable. Here are 1,000 words on how we could get the role of Open Source maintainer to graduate to a real, properly paid profession. The thing is, companies need it as much as maintainers do.
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StackOverflow question: “the police are making people on the street install spyware, how do I protect myself?” Top HN comment: “discussing authoritarianism is pointless, more importantly, why doesn’t the spyware use HTTPS?” I hate this soulless industry.
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I didn't really care about the macOS OCSP thing (I'm fine with Apple knowing what signed apps I run, and revocation is hard) until I realized those checks are over plaintext. Broadcasting what apps you launch to the network in plaintext should not have passed privacy review.
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Every time I touch Python packaging I encounter beautiful colorful output that tells me that something changed and nothing works anymore. It's the only time I just try random upvoted commands from GitHub issues until it works. How does anyone get any work done like this?
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The TSA first made flying a miserable experience, then made you pay a bribe to skip most of it with Pre. Now they mismanaged the bribed line too, and you can pay a bigger bribe to Clear to skip most of that. 💯🇺🇸🦅💵 As a bonus, a private company has your biometrics now. 👁
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The BUS DRIVERS are refusing to work for the police state, while software engineers, with the most leveraged profession of our time, still can't get their employers to stop working for ICE. Cowards. Disorganized and cowards. All of us. I'm ashamed.
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For when you want to figure out how to apply some macOS preference from the command line, without Googling for hours for out-of-date defaults commands: $ defaults read | pbcopy # make changes in System Preferences.‍app $ diff -u -F '^ "' <(pbpaste) <(defaults read)
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I am—or at least was in this picture—America's newest pilot! 🛩👨‍✈️ I passed my checkride today on this Piper. This was both a dream and a challenge like I haven't tackled in years. 48 hours, 35 days start to finish including weather days. It's been a ride 🍾
Myself smiling and leaning against a Piper Warrior single engine low-wing plane, white and green, parked on the wet tarmac. In the background a few other general aviation planes, a runway, and the beginning of a sunset.
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Folks, it works!! I am officially a full-time independent open-source maintainer! 🧑‍💻💼 That means I spend most of my time on open-source maintenance, and I offer retainers to companies that benefit from my work and from access to me. Full details 👉 words.filippo.io/full-time-main
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JWT is so bad that I find myself wondering what I was doing when it was being created and if I could have done something to stop it. Also, note that this HN thread is full of developers just now learning that JWTs only does signing. Except it can also do encryption. 🤷‍♂️
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There's some inane gatekeeping pushback on this absolutely mild take, so let me say it loud and clear: I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Google who works on cryptography and open source, and I find email-based patch submission a meaningful barrier.
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Here's one thing I think we'll find unacceptable in 50 years. The degree to which minors have no rights. They are basically non-people: no right to privacy (school and parent spyware), no right to freedom (go to your room!), can't even make their own medical decisions.
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YIKES. It's important to destigmatize therapy, but giving permanent therapy transcripts to a VC-backed engagement-optimized tech startup is TERRIFYING. Teletherapy should be ephemeral by law, and it should not be allowed to optimize for more therapy. YIKES. YIKES. YIKES.
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Replying to @kashhill
Talkspace, a text therapy app made famous by Michael Phelps ads, keeps transcripts for about 7 to 10 years because they're medical records—and data-mines them, of course. But all the other stuff going on there was WILD. nytimes.com/2020/08/07/tec
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This is my main objection to password-encrypted key files. If you get to read arbitrary files from my disk you can pull my pictures, messages, and cookies (including the AWS console ones). But at least not the SSH key? Yay? Who cares?
https://xkcd.com/1200/
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The GNU project has no time to waste on silly stuff like providing an inclusive environment, it's all about the hard technic... *taps earpiece*
"Please don’t use “win” as an abbreviation for Microsoft Windows in GNU software or documentation. In hacker terminology, calling something a “win” is a form of praise. You’re free to praise Microsoft Windows on your own if you want, but please don’t do so in GNU packages. Please write “Windows” in full, or abbreviate it to “w.” See System Portability."
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TIL that the gnu coding standards specify that you must not abbreviate "windows" as "win" because that's too positive and suggest standardizing on "woe", which is puerile even by the low bar I already had in mind for gnu gnu.ist.utl.pt/prep/standards
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Oh my. Apparently, AMD CPUs will sometimes return bad results from RDRAND after a suspend. That's bad, but if everyone has been following the cryptographer's advice and _just used getrandom()_ that's not a problem. ... nope! systemd of course didn't!
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PSA: don't rely on GnuTLS, please. [CVE-2020-13777] Whoops, for the past 10 releases most TLS 1.0–1.2 connection could be passively decrypted and most TLS 1.3 connections intercepted. Trivially. Also, TLS 1.2–1.0 session tickets are awful. blog.filippo.io/we-need-to-tal
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GnuTLS was using an all-zero key for encrypting TLS session tickets. Whoops. gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls/
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Linus is arguing against the whole secure-by-default philosophy in order to break the only correct randomness interface in Linux. (The one that works like all the BSDs.) I can't, I just can't. I'm actually giving up. Go will mitigate it if it happens, but that's it.
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I disagree with Linus on this issue. It’s the situation where you’re sure you really *don’t need* secure random numbers that represents the special case. Put your API flag there. lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wiG
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Wireguard is up there with Mosh in terms of not leaking the network semantics into the user experience: I've had a Mosh session and a Wireguard tunnel open to my home server for days from home, to plane WiFi, to Italian tethering. Other software, be more like Wireguard and Mosh.
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Strong disagree. As always, the problem with ProtonMail is not that they don't deliver an impossible product (secure email), but that they advertise it. It's a choice, they know it, they benefit from it, their users believe it, and they are responsible for it.
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So, @ProtonMail had to give out information about one of their users. Navigating what has happened is a bit tricky, and I'm not going to complain about the fact that Proton handed out the data. Why? Thread. twitter.com/tenacioustek/s…
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