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Anti-Fascist voting
  • The GOP was maybe mad, but more importantly to me the people who actually study voting systems for a living were "mad", and the people who hurt their favored candidate by voting for them were likely upset.

    Ignoring that the outcome was maybe what I would have wanted, it is definitely pathological that you can hurt a candidate by voting for them. Quoting the Wikipedia:

    The election was also a negative voting weight event, where a voter's ballot has the opposite of its intended effect (e.g. a candidate being disqualified for having "too many votes"). In this race, Begich lost as a result of 5,200 ballots ranking him ahead of Peltola; Peltola also would have lost if she had received more support from Palin voters.

    What do you find wrong with those other systems? RCV is also not "one person one vote". Approval voting is used in the UN and neither seem to have some of the pathologies of RCV.

    Bit of a late edit here, but isn't "one person one vote" basically the description of our current problem with voting? All of these systems are trying to solve that issue.

  • Trump sues CBS over Kamala Harris interview
  • Related and interesting podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/search-engine/id1614253637.

    According to what he found that is somewhat the way it works: two fake candidates and the one with more yard signs got way more votes. Doubt that generalizes to the US presidency though; especially with this election.

  • WhatsApp running through android-translation-layer (no container!) on Linux desktop
  • As long as it's installed on a device you control it's pretty easy to sniff TLS traffic from an Android application, even if they're pinning certs. I do this all the time for work. Frida makes it extremely easy, even giving you the ability to edit boringssl if something important is happening in native code. I've had to do this a couple times.

    If you don't have root you'll have to recompile the application though which could matter if you need the signature to not change, but that isn't a common requirement.

    It'd be nice to have a better way to test though; I've wanted to check out Waydroid. Some coworkers just use an emulator which works great if it doesn't need specific hardware.

  • Elon Musk Veers Into Clearly Illegal Vote Buying, Offering $1 Million Per Day Lottery Prize Only to Registered Voters
  • Did you read the article..? They're saying it is illegal to offer money to register to vote.

    Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal. See 52 U.S.C. 10307(c): “Whoever knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his name, address or period of residence in the voting district for the purpose of establishing his eligibility to register or vote, or conspires with another individual for the purpose of encouraging his false registration to vote or illegal voting, or pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…” (Emphasis added.)

  • Possible Linux Severe CVSS 9.9/10 Unauthenticated RCE Flaw
  • This is a real exploit chain in cups-browsed. The tl;dr is that it will add basically anything that knows the correct protocol to your list of available printers, and this can be exploited for RCE if you print to the malicious printer. The service listens on all interfaces by default on UDP 631.

    It is not as horrible as it was marketed, but it's real and not great. You may or may not have this service running by default; I didn't on Fedora.

    His full write-up is here: https://www.evilsocket.net/2024/09/26/Attacking-UNIX-systems-via-CUPS-Part-I/

  • Debian Orphans Bcachefs-Tools: "Impossible To Maintain In Debian Stable"
  • This doesn't seem to be a Rust problem, but a modern development trend appearing in a Rust tool shipped with Cargo. The issue appears to be the way things are versioned and (reading between the lines maybe?) vendoring and/or lockfiles. Lockfiles exist in a lot of modern languages and package managers: Go has go.sum, Rust has Cargo which has Cargo.lock, Python has pip which gives a few different ways to pin versions, JavaScript has npm and yarn with lock files. I'm sure there are tons of others. I'm actually surprised this doesn't happen all the time with newer projects. Maybe it does actually and this instance just gains traction because people get to say "look Rust bad Debian doesn't like it".

    This seems like a big issue if you want your code to be packaged by Debian, and it doesn't seem easy to resolve if you also want to use the modern packaging tools. I'm not actually sure how they resolve this? There are real benefits to pinning versions, but there are also real benefits to Debian's model (of controlling all the dependencies themselves, to some extent Debian is a lockfile implemented on the OS level). Seems like a tough problem and seems like it'll end up with a lot of newer tools just not being available in Debian (by that I mean just not packaged by Debian, they'll likely all run fine on Debian).

  • One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
  • I agree and think that should be helpful, but I hesitate to say how much easier that actually makes writing sound unsafe code. I'd think most experienced C developers also implicitly know when they're doing unsafe things, with or without an unsafe block in the language -- although I think the explicit unsafe should likely help code reviewers and tired developers.

    It is possible to write highly unsafe code in Rust while each individual unsafe block appears sound. As a simple example: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=6a1428d9cae5b9343b464709573648b4 [1] Run that on Debug and Release builds. Notice the output is different? Don't take that example as some sort of difficult case, you wouldn't write this code, but the concepts in it are a bit worrisome. That code is a silly example, but each individual unsafe block appears sound when trying to reason only within the block. There is unsafe behavior happening outside of the unsafe blocks (the do_some_things function should raise eyebrows), and the function we ultimately end up in has no idea something unsafe has happened.

    Unsafe code in Rust is not easy, and to some extent it breaks abstractions (maybe pointers in general break abstractions to some extent?). noaliases in that playground code rightly assumes you can't have a &ref and &mut ref to the same thing, that's undefined behavior in Rust. Yet to understand the cause of that bug you have to look at all function calls on the way, just as you would have to in C, and one of the biggest issues in the code exists outside of an unsafe block.

    [1]: If you don't want to click that link or it breaks, here is the code:

    fn uhoh() {
        let val = 9;
        let val_ptr: *const usize = &val;
        do_some_things(val_ptr);
        println!("{}", val);
    }
    
    fn do_some_things(val: *const usize) {
        let valref = unsafe { val.as_ref().unwrap() };
        let mut_ptr: *mut usize = val as *mut usize;
        do_some_other_things(mut_ptr, valref);
    }
    
    fn do_some_other_things(val: *mut usize, normalref: &usize) {
        let mutref = unsafe { val.as_mut().unwrap() };
        noaliases(normalref, mutref);
    }
    
    fn noaliases(input: &usize, output: &mut usize) {
        if *input < 10 {
            *output = 15;
        }
        if *input > 10 {
            *output = 5;
        }
    }
    
    fn main() {
        uhoh();
    }
    
  • One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
  • No intention of validating that behavior, it's uncalled for and childish, but I think there is another bit of "nontechnical nonsense" on the opposite side of this silly religious war: the RIIR crowd. Longstanding C projects (sometimes even projects written in dynamic languages...?) get people that know very little about the project, or at least have never contributed, asking for it to be rewritten or refactored in Rust, and that's likely just as tiring as the defensive C people when you want to include Rust in the kernel.

    People need to chill out on both sides of this weird religious war. A programming language is just a tool: its merits in a given situation should be discussed logically.

  • One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense"
  • They're being downvoted because it's a silly comment that is basically unrelated and also extremely unhelpful. Everyone can agree that C has footguns and isn't memory safe, but writing a kernel isn't memory safe. A kernel written in Rust will have tons of unsafe, just look at Redox: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aredox-os%2Fkernel unsafe&type=code That doesn't mean it isn't safer, even in kernel space, but the issues with introducing Rust into the kernel, which is already written in C and a massive project, are more nuanced than "C bad". The religious "C bad" and "C good" arguments are kinda exactly the issue on display in the OP.

    I say this as someone who writes mostly Rust instead of C and is in favor of Rust in the kernel.

  • Use a password manager
  • This is not true at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography good place to start if you're genuinely interested. Most password managers that are worth while will be using symmetric cryptography which just requires longer key lengths to survive in the quantum age. AES256 should be fine for the foreseeable future.

  • Use a password manager
  • Replying to this pretentious comment for the sake of others reading this:

    Run history | grep genpasswd for why this is not a good password storage solution. One must image skill issue.

    If you think the CLI is the cool kid way to go, use https://www.passwordstore.org/, but tbh I don't recommend that either.

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