News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

80x25

Re:Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here? on Wednesday July 05, 2023 @04:42PM (#36606808)
https://www.mcnulty.blog/

Posts about the Web and the software that powers it. Light on content right now but will hopefully change that soon.

Re:Ask HN: Is the job market brutal? or is it just me? on Friday April 14, 2023 @09:42PM (#35576901)
Interesting idea. I signed up.

I noticed that the email confirmation links are using http:// vs. https://. Chrome has started to flag http:// links with a full-page speed bump, saying it is insecure. Perhaps those links should use https://?

I did try manually switching to https:// in the URL but Chrome didn't like the cert there either.

Re:Akamai wrestles with AWS S3 web cache poisoning bug on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @11:10AM (#34067881)
Here's the researcher's write-up of the issue with more details: https://spyclub.tech/2022/12/14/unusual-cache-poisoning-akam...

Interesting research and super useful write-up!

My observations:

- The characters that enable the Host header field forgery aren't unicode characters. They are a subset of separator characters from ASCII. My guess is that the Akamai parser is trimming the Host header field name and not enforcing the requirements from https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-5.4 after this trim, specifically:

   A server MUST respond with a 400 (Bad Request) status code to any
   HTTP/1.1 request message that lacks a Host header field and to any
   request message that contains more than one Host header field or a
   Host header field with an invalid field-value.
Even worse, the last Host header field appears to "win" and be the selected Host header field in the request forwarded to the origin.

- The OP does mention that Akamai intends to enable stricter header field parsing in 2023 but that response leaves a lot to be desired. They could probably provide a proactive analysis of a customer's traffic to inform them that they can turn on RFC compliant parsing without impact. Punting this decision to their customers requires their customers to be HTTP experts. If I were an Akamai customer, I would expect them to be my HTTP experts for me.

Re:The code that ChatGPT can't write on Wednesday December 07, 2022 @03:37PM (#33899883)
This is spot on. I'm very glad to see this post mention the "No Silver Bullet" essay. Despite being written in 1986, it continues to provide a relevant, skeptical view on the impact of these LMMs on software. It even has a section addressing whether AI can provide the "silver bullet", which is drawn upon by the OP.

My immediate response to all the rightly-deserved excitement for ChatGPT is to reread that essay and reflect on whether this new tool will provide me more than marginal gains in my productivity. Experimenting with it a bit over the last day, my initial answer is, no, this doesn't provide more than marginal gains outside toy examples.

These tools may very well factor into my workflow in the future, but I don't see them fundamentally changing the way I construct, support, debug, and maintain software.

Re:Learn to Read the Source, Luke (2012) on Friday October 28, 2022 @11:07AM (#33372322)
I find myself returning to this blog post about once a year. It think it has aged pretty well in the decade since it was written.

One thing that definitely did not pan out is being able to understand the source of a website/web app because it is written in JavaScript. Transpiling/minification/etc. without the corresponding source maps makes that near impossible for any app of a reasonable size.

Re:The many problems with implementing Single Sign-On on Tuesday September 13, 2022 @11:33AM (#32825649)
"Use OSS" is very close to if not the same as "Build".

To adopt an OSS approach for SSO, the startup still needs to dedicate resources to researching the OSS options, deploying the OSS, integrating it, and most importantly, operating it.

Once the startup gets into the weeds of integrating SSO functionality with customer's IdPs, in the limit, the cost of the effort will start to approach "Build".

Re:The many problems with implementing Single Sign-On on Monday September 12, 2022 @03:50PM (#32815887)
This post seems to suggest that a SaaS startup would consider creating their own SAML implementation. If a SaaS startup is considering creating a homebrew SAML implementation, they are doing it wrong.

When it comes to SSO, "buy" instead of "build", and focus on the core value proposition of the service with that saved time and resources.

Re:WebAssembly on Saturday February 27, 2021 @09:56PM (#26290253)
The rust+wasm story is quite nice these days. I've been working on a rust+wasm SPA for a few months and I have yet to run into issues with the tooling (wasm-pack, wasm-bindgen, etc).
Re:Modern C, Second Edition on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @07:33PM (#21011646)
Perhaps your comment was meant to be tongue in cheek, but it sounds like this data exchange is a replacement for the World Wide Web? It's not IPFS is it?
Re:When the bubble bursts on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @12:17AM (#17234955)
> This bubble is worsening unemployment.

By what measure?

Re:What Spectre and Meltdown Mean for WebKit on Monday January 08, 2018 @11:48PM (#16103685)
These mitigations feel like a half measure. To quote the Spectre paper:

"Even code that contains no conditional branches can potentially be at risk."

"long-term solutions will require that instruction set architectures be updated to include clear guidance about the security properties of the processor, and CPU implementations will need to be updated to conform."

It seems too early to declare Spectre class attacks mitigated by the mechanisms presented in the OP.

Re:Terraform Gotchas and How We Work Around Them on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @01:26PM (#14546611)
That's 200 resources per CF template. That's a massive CF template :)
Re:Terraform Gotchas and How We Work Around Them on Monday June 12, 2017 @10:04PM (#14542459)
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuid... Am I a missing something? Nothing in these docs about a 100 resource limit
Re:FindBugs project in its current form is dead on Sunday November 06, 2016 @12:03PM (#12885973)
PMD and FindBugs really complement each other:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4297014/what-are-the-diff...

Re:Curl 7.51.0 Released on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @08:20AM (#12853923)
tokio-curl uses libcurl internally
Re:RevDB, the Reverse Debugger for Python on Saturday September 10, 2016 @02:59PM (#12470457)
*db is common nomenclature for debuggers: gdb, lldb, cdb, pdb
Re:Chrome is warning users about insecure pages on Friday September 02, 2016 @12:30PM (#12414211)
The issue with that approach is that it allows man-in-the-middle attacks, because all of the characteristics you are suggesting the browser validate can be faked if the root is untrusted.

Older »