arafsheikh

It was just a guess :)

Would be interesting to see the RCA if/when it’s published.

Typical case of degraded mode of operation, I presume. That’s how well engineered systems should behave when they’re about to go down.

My guess is that this particular outage was caused due to a scaling constraint somewhere in the stack.

Congrats on successfully completing the internship! Looks like you made a significant contribution.

This is a well written summary as well. Reading it brought back memories from my internship at GS 3 years ago. :)

I also wrote a blog post about my experience going from an intern to FTE if you’re interested in checking it out: https://www.goldmansachs.com/what-we-do/transaction-banking/...

Good luck!

As Matt Levine likes to say - everything is securities fraud.

> contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...

A good number of comments here mention dealing with the GPU is going to be a major hurdle. What makes porting GPU drivers significantly more challenging than everything else?

Curious to know if AWS has ever hiked the price of any of its services.

Sounds like for some reason the monitor is running at 30Hz. You can confirm that using an app like EasyRes.

> This is only likely to make it slightly harder to track the small fraction of users already taking strong measures to prevent being tracked.

This statement isn't correct. That small fraction of the user would've already turned off IDFA tracking. With this move Apple is merely prompting the user before turning the tracking on. I'd say FB is worried about the larger fraction of the users who aren't privacy conscious.

Compute + DB should cover a lot of use cases, but it’ll be great to have support for more AWS services. DNS (Route53) issues are a pain to deal with for example.

What do multiple monitors have to do with having a dev env on EC2?

But on a similar note, I use VS Code's Remote SSH plugin to connect to an EC2 on one monitor and terminal + browser on the other. It's not my primary dev env, but it's great for experiments and side projects.

That makes sense. So given that the attacker is technically sophisticated in this case, what are the tangible benefits of publishing the fingerprints?

I guess one benefit might be to push the development of new detection techniques to detect the underlying implementation of these tools.

Not sure about PubSub, but Kafka doesn’t store messages on disk forever by default. So hydrating the state from a message bus may not be a good idea depending on what you’re doing. I’d say DB is the way to go here.

Don’t have any resources though. I’m only speaking from experience.

If I understand your comment correctly - even though the fingerprints are published, the attacker can still reverse eng the implementation from the tools and bypass antivirus systems at least in the near future?

From their official blog post:

> Based on my 25 years in cyber security and responding to incidents, I’ve concluded we are witnessing an attack by a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities.

I wonder what nations possess “top-tier offensive capabilities” today. USA, China, Russia, Israel come to mind. Who else? Is there a list or metric to measure a nation’s cyber attack capabilities?

Official blog post (no info on how the attack was performed though): https://www.fireeye.com/blog/products-and-services/2020/12/f...

They’ve also released signatures to detect the use of the compromised tools: https://github.com/fireeye/red_team_tool_countermeasures

I don’t understand why people like the spatial audio feature. How often do you move your head relative to your iDevice while watching a movie? The field of view is too narrow for it to make any sense.

If you ignore the above then the only trick that’s left is the fake 3D effect; which isn’t novel or even desirable for someone who cares about authentic sound.

It doesn’t make sense to compare these to the wired Sennheiser cans. These are targeted towards a completely different market. I’d be surprised if the sound quality comes anywhere close to HD660S.

Persisting message offsets in DB has its own challenges. The apps become tightly coupled with a specific Kafka cluster and that makes it difficult to swap clusters in case of a failover event.

If you expect apps to persist offsets then it’s important to have a mechanism/process to safely reset the app state in DB when the stored offset doesn’t make sense.

Not OP, but I feel Wikipedia “has a soul”. The design doesn’t get in the way, is consistent and the information density is just right.

> Do you think having a set of opt-out functions/decorators for sensitive variables would be comforting?

Opt-out is risky and I’d not want to use it in sensitive applications.

Instead, opt-in would be as good as deliberately logging variables but without the additional log/print statements and try/catch blocks.

Neat idea but it doesn’t look like something I’d be comfortable using in production. A useful feature to have would be to selectively tag the variables I want to track (in the decorator perhaps?). This way one can prevent printing sensitive info or potentially large variables in the logs.

Here’s the source code encoded as two images: https://twitter.com/galacticfurball/status/13197659867911577...

I’ve been there. The best I could do is to buy glasses with thin stem that are a perfect fit and sit flush with my head.

My 2017 13" is riddled with hardware issues all of which are due to the subpar thermals:

1. The haptic feedback on the trackpad stops working when the machine gets hot.

2. Once the upper part of the chassis becomes hot enough, part of the screen gets black lines and ghosting which gets worse as I continue to use it until it goes completely black (this is because the T-CON board is very close to the heatsink).

3. The SSD conveniently failed 1 month after the warranty ended. The official repair cost was about 50% of the cost of the machine. Luckily this was the last Macbook to have non-soldered SSD, and I got a replacement from AliExpress for $50.

Oddly, I've never run into the infamous keyboard issue.