“When he reached the New World, Cortezh burned hish ships. Ash a reshult hish men were well motivated.” —Capt. Ramius, played by Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October

Mint is a good recommendation. I’ve used it for most of a decade because I just want my system to work.

Nobody is both that bored and that motivated. Unless paid.

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“if you want to tell me what to do put me on the fucking payroll!”

Great clip.

This feels very “just found out about politics and damn” tbh.

Ok.

I think this would be of value for sharing with people that aren’t aware (my kid when she was younger).

Or is there a better resource to do this?

This is all I’ve run across on reverse engineering, so far but it is quite interesting.

https://bsky.app/profile/filippo.abyssdomain.expert/post/3kowjkx2njy2b

I have a feeling there are a lot of busy people trying to answer that question, now. Yikes.

Yeah it sounds pretty wild already with some kind of, like, door knock mechanism using certificates? So you can’t scan for it. And some reverse engineering countermeasures.

Like everyone else, I have to wonder what libraries have been compromised in a way that nobody has noticed yet.

Some of the trust comes from eyes on the project thanks to it being open source. This thing got discovered, after all. Not right away, sure, but before it spread everywhere. Same question of trust applies to commercial software too.

Ideally, PR reviews help with this but smaller projects esp with few contributors may not do much of that. I doubt anyone has spent time understanding the software supply chain (SSC) attack surface of their product but that seems like a good next step. Someone needs to write a tool that scans the SSC repos and flags certain measures like the # of maintainers.

PS: I have the worst allergies I’ve had in ages today and my brain is in a histamine fog so maybe I shouldn’t be trying to think about this stuff right now lol cough uuugh blows nose

Is there really anything they couldn’t collect?

Very annoying - the apparent author of the backdoor was in communication with me over several weeks trying to get xz 5.6.x added to Fedora 40 & 41 because of it’s “great new features”. We even worked with him to fix the valgrind issue (which it turns out now was caused by the backdoor he had added). We had to race last night to fix the problem after an inadvertent break of the embargo.

He has been part of the xz project for 2 years, adding all sorts of binary test files, and to be honest with this level of sophistication I would be suspicious of even older versions of xz until proven otherwise.

Damn. I would love to see a full post mortem on this compromise.

Well maybe they aren’t experienced info security professionals :)

I think you win.

If you haven’t yet, give Lief Ove Andsnes’ rendition a try.

Everyone has their favorite interpretations, I guess. This is one of mine. From a pianist that impressed the hell out of me when I first heard him.

(The album Horizons if the link doesn’t work or you’re boycotting Spotify or whatever)

Dvorak Symphony No 9, Largo

God I am getting crazy goosebumps just listening to this again. I love the 9th symphony so much.

Oh wow that is amazing. Thank you!

I forgot how much I love this kind of choral music.

I get where you’re coming from but is he managing his risk or not?

Does he understand the risk? If yes, good. No? Bad.

Is he ignoring the risk? If yes, bad. No? Good.

Is he weighing the risks against the benefits he receives of using these apps and taking appropriate steps to mitigate those risks? If yes, then good. No? Bad.

Cyber security isn’t “lock everything down at all costs”. Otherwise I would insist you throw your phone in an incinerator along with all your computers, live in a bunker reinforced against nuclear attack with a small army to guard you, never leave it, never talk to anyone… Etc.

It is enabling one to achieve their goals with a tolerable amount of risk. That level of tolerable risk is different for everyone.

What are you trying to achieve?

Indeed. The message: you’re helpless. Just sit around and wait to be rescued. Any minute now…

Cheap numerous drones are the future of warfare, apparently. I shudder to think what they could do against civilian targets.