I haven’t got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You’ve given me a lot to think about. While I don’t quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they’re salient and framed extremely well.
Oh yes, I understand how they go about smoothing everything over.
But, given the details we know, don’t you think:
• one corporate resignation,
• one months-prior bureaucrat firing, and,
• one investigation into a former PM,
is pretty far removed from could be considered a proportional fallout?
This is the theme of almost all of the “toppling”. Mostly they’ve just… resigned. They probably keep all the perks, and then take up a corporate advisor position once there’s less heat.
Headlines like this make it sound like there’s been real impact beyond generating articles about a few of the more public figures. But reading article, it’s really just a few politicians and bureaucrats resigning. Mandelson’s firing was already months ago. The investigation into a former Norwegian PM sounds like that’s as harsh as it’s got so far for politicians this time. And nothing except one law firm board member resigning for private companies?
They’re all getting away with it, and all the victims get is a hundred headlines about Musk being named in the files, and having their lives endangered from the terrible Don-centric redaction.
It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?
I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.
Out of curiosity, what sort of customizations are you doing with it? I’m just a bit surprised that docker rebuild or a non-trivial fork would be needed, so I’m assuming they’re pretty big changes.
I’m not a spice merchant, and most exploits rarely involve a single step. This screenshot is just a system design red flag.
You’re free to examine the repo yourself and find your own spice, my 5 min look tells me that piefed needs to expend a significant amount of effort on infosec to maintain user trust in the longer term.
As others have pointed out, it does still require (with some caveats about the infra setup) the user to be an admin. But if someone manages to get in to the interface, or another person is granted admin access who shouldn’t have been, it makes it more risky than it needs to be. It also for me is a design choice that indicates other parts of the system should be carefully examined for how they’re handling and sanitizing input.
Any webserver you browse is possibly capable of ACE depending on the implementation. When it starts to hold user data is when that starts to be a big concern. The more points of entry, the more that needs to be secured.
I don’t have any experience with piefed admin, or any opinion on piefed itself, just too many years of web admin experience. And as soon as I see intentionally made doors that allow code input, I start to worry about how much experience the devs who made it have with web admin.
Well, just copy and pasted rather than written. I would have hoped that infra read-level permission, infra write-level permission and admin interface permissions were all separate to begin with, even if the person who spun up the instance obviously has all three.
You do need a level of trust in an admin, of course, but wide open text boxes for putting in code are a questionable system design choice, in my opinion. It adds an extra point of possible entry that then relies on the security of the overall admin interface instead of limiting it to what should require highest level infra admin permissions to access. And if it is something that would be limited to someone who has those, then what is the actual utility of having a textarea for it in the first place?
I get that many people are concerned about is scoring systems, but it seems a lot more worrying to me that it allows arbitrary code execution.
Nah, it’s 24.04 LTS
Maybe it thinks it has more memory available than it does, or the gc isn’t running efficiently, or it’s allocating to 100% without including a sensible safety gap, something like that. It’s a significantly low-level enough problem that I’m wary of tinkering with values I don’t fully understand even if I wanted to spend the probably large amount of time necessary to find root cause.
I have a few issues with substack, but truth be told, I dislike requiring handing over information to multiple services without seeing value upfront - and getting rid of obtrusive pop-ups does not qualify as value. Their willingness to platform Nazis just sealed my unwillingness into a conscious refusal.
In a similar vein, the corporate relationship adjustments you mentioned are also steps I’ve taken, but I’m inclined to agree with Naomi Klein’s perspective on consumer boycott being insufficient to address systemic problems. The general advice is to change what is within your power, but when you have close to zero power, does that advice then imply that you should try to do nothing or that you simply can affect nothing?
My substack qualms and the corporate relationship adjustments topics tie in quite nicely with a phrase from your substack that has been bothering me all weekend. It critiques my usual instincts for what to do as first steps, but it also articulates a problem I’ve struggled with for a while: “Documentation without transformation”.
Now I’m not of the opinion that we’ve ever truly been able to trust the information we consume as being objective truth, but AI has certainly suddenly increased the scarcity of reliable information.
The larger issue for me is that transformation is clearly necessary, but the scale of transformation required is so immense that it’s not something I’ve seen happen historically without also incurring immense suffering. This is not to say that the majority of humanity isn’t hugely suffering now, just that this kind of systemic change is one of those “this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better” type situations - in an acute way.
The usual trigger for change at this scale seems to be when realised losses of resource scarcity for too many exceeds the risk of setting what’s left on fire.
So we’re left with a situation where there’s potentially neither reliable documentation nor positive transformation. This does not spark joy.
I suppose my questions for you are then:
“I don’t know” is a totally valid answer to either too, in the spirit of acknowledging honest uncertainty.