“you thought you did something there, didn’t you?”

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 25th, 2023

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  • If it wasn’t obvious that the Debian box is a parody, here’s what the Japanese Chinese text along the top reads on each box:

    Please read the instructions carefully and use it under the guidance of a physician. It is strictly prohibited to be used in food and feed processing.

    Please read the installation instructions carefully and use it under the guidance of the administrator. It is strictly prohibited to use for server installation.

    so yes, the title is correct-- this is not a coincidence, the Debian box was made explicitly for this joke

    edit: thanks for the correction folks, honestly thought it looked more like Japanese than Chinese at first glance and I am obviously not an expert in either. Appreciate the call-out, very deserved.



  • If I were to fully elaborate, I’d be typing for hours, so I’ll sum up:

    • pip - default behavior is to install to system-wide site packages. In a venv, it will try to upgrade/uninstall system packages without notice/consent unless you specify --require-virtualenv. Multiple things can fuck up your ENV to make the python binaries point to system-wide, while your terminal will still show you as in a venv. Also why TF would package metadata files need to be executable? Bad practice, -1/10
    • nix - they acknowledged years ago that they should probably have some kind of package signing and perhaps an SBOM or similar mechanism, but then did nothing to implement it and just said “oh well, guess we’re vulnerable to supply chain attacks, best not to think about it”
    • brew - installing packages parallel to your system packages manager, without containers. My chief complaint here is that brew is a secondary package manager that people might treat as a “set and forget” for some packages, rarely updating them. So what happens when a standard library used by a brew package is vuln? A naive Linux user might update their system packages but totally forget to update brew. And when updating brew, you can easily hit max_open_file_descriptors because kitchen sink

    From there, it’s all extremely nit-picky and paranoid-fueled-- basically, none of the package managers I mentioned are conducive, in my eyes at least, to a secure and intuitive compute environment.

    Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about it except bang pots and pans and throw maintainers under buses when the issue that has been present for years rears it’s ugly head. Because they are the only ones who can change this, and pressure is the only thing that might motivate them to.








  • I’m not a lawyer, but under the definition of “Infrastructure” on page 5, they state that they will construe WhatsApp Infrastructure and Partner Infrastructure accordingly, which to my untrained eye is prima facie evidence to their acknowledgement that these are separate systems, at least one (the Partner’s) of which is not under their custodianship and not named as subject of the first stipulation you quoted. In other words “do not make it so WhatsApp’s own infrastructure would run GPL material” and potentially “do not send GPL material through our systems”

    The second one I interpret to mean “nothing with licenses that apply that runtime operation is copy left”


  • I created a GitLab account long before they implemented this, but never used it. Went to post an issue related to self-hosted GitLab on their issue tracker, and it told me my account was banned. I wrote an email to support and they essentially said “an automated system identified your account as a bot and banned you during an account clean up some years ago to cut back on malicious users”. I informed them that this was not at all reasonable, as I’ve never even posted anything on any GitLab account, and that I would be advising my organization to never pay for any GitLab product or service unless legal writes up the contract terms, because I have no faith in them as a vendor.

    Seriously, fuck GitLab. And if anyone from that org wants to discuss this with me, they can pipe their email to /dev/null