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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • This has nothing to do with licensing. […] If you’re going to run a business that depends on open-source software, there’s an expectation of contributing back or, at the very least, not exploiting the resources of a non-profit.

    Sorry, but you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. It’s absolutely and only a licensing issue, and as a user of open source software you are obligated to do what the license states. WordPress is licensed under GPL, which explicitly allows software being run for any purposes, explicitly including commercial purposes. The giving back part would come into play if WPE would use WordPress as part of their own software - which they don’t.

    WPE did what the license, and therefore Matt and Automattic allowed them to. Matt decided to try and literally extort money from them, before going on his fully fledged meltdown.

    Whether WPEs business model is morally questionable is irrelevant. They did play by the rules. Matt did not.

    And the situation is not new, as far as I remember redis was the last big player in that situation. But they also did play by the rules, they changed their license starting from a given version, made big hosters that made money by redis-as-a-service pay for using redis, and took the L like grown ups by losing their FOSS community and having valkey as a hard fork and direct competitor now. No drama, no meltdowns, no shit storms and no lawyers involved.


  • You also don’t get to randomly change license terms because you’re having a childish meltdown because someone earns money with an open source product while according to the terms of the license of the said product.

    You also don’t steal code from a user of your platform and maliciously redirect to your fork.

    This is not about WPE vs Matt’s lack of brain cells. This is also not about hardlining on what’s open source or not. But Matt needs to lose this fight, not only because of his decisions, but because if he wins, he not only successfully burned down WordPress, but the open source ecosystem as a whole.

    If you publish something with a license that allows people to earn money without paying a share to you, don’t be butthurt if people won’t do that. And if you don’t want that - change the license properly and carry the consequences.




  • NPM allows for code to be executed while you install the package which is different from maven or nuget and allows for easy exploitation paths

    This is the winner. Combine that with a vastly bigger group of inexperienced developers (and I’m willing to die on that hill), and you have a lot of people running node / npm as an admin / root user, who have close to zero idea what they are doing, hitting their project with third party dependencies left and right for no particular reason (left-pad, is-number, ansi console and similar useless crap), and then your dependency management allows for code execution. Also, from my personal feeling, it seems that npm simply cannot properly audit the packages due to the sheer mass. From a technical standpoint it’s close to trivial to put your malware onto npm, and then you just need to get someone to install your package, which is way simpler than in other package managers


  • The smallest footprint for an actual scripting probably will be posix sh - since you already have it ready.

    A slightly bigger footprint would be Python or Lua.

    If you can drop your requirement for actual scripting and are willing to add a compile step, Go and it’s ecosystem is pretty dang powerful and it’s really easy to learn for small automation tasks.

    Personally, with the requirement of not adding too much space for runtimes, I’d write it in go. You don’t need a runtime, you can compile it to a really small zero dependency lib and you have clean and readable code that you can extend, test and maintain easily.




  • I’m very interested to hear what went wrong.

    We’ll probably never know. Given the impact of this fuck up, the most that crowdstrike will probably publish is a lawyer-corpo-talk how they did an oopsie doopsie, how complicated, unforseen, and absolutely unavoidable this issue has been, and how they are absolutely not responsible for it, but because they are such a great company and such good guys, they will implement measures that this absolutely, never ever again will happen.

    If they admit any smallest wrongdoing whatsoever they will be piledrived by more lawyers than even they’d be able to handle. That’s a lot of CEO yachts in compensations if they will be held responsible.




  • The third option is to use the native secret vault. MacOS has its Keychain, Windows has DPAPI, Linux has has non-standardized options available depending on your distro and setup.

    Full disk encryption does not help you against data exfil, it only helps if an attacker gains physical access to your drive without your decryption key (e.g. stolen device or attempt to access it without your presence).

    Even assuming that your device is compromised by an attacker, using safer storage mechanisms at least gives you time to react to the attack.




  • Kinda expected the SSH key argument. The difference is the average user group.

    The average dude with a SSH key that’s used for more than their RPi knows a bit about security, encryption and opsec. They would have a passphrase and/or hardening mechanisms for their system and network in place. They know their risks and potential attack vectors.

    The average dude who downloads a desktop app for a messenger that advertises to be secure and E2EE encrypted probably won’t assume that any process might just wire tap their whole “encrypted” communications.

    Let’s not forget that the threat model has changed by a lot in the last years, and a lot of effort went into providing additional security measures and best practices. Using a secure credential store, additional encryption and not storing plaintext secrets are a few simple ones of those. And sure, on Linux the SSH key is still a plaintext file. But it’s a deliberate decision of you to keep it as plaintext. You can at least encrypt with a passphrase. You can use the actual working file permission model of Linux and SSH will refuse to use your key with loose permissions. You would do the same on Windows and Mac and use a credential store and an agent to securely store and use your keys.

    Just because your SSH key is a plaintext file and the presumption of a secure home dir, you still wouldn’t do a ~/passwords.txt.





  • Einige Dinge stehen noch nicht fest, wie: […]

    • technische Betreuung (deren Admins und unsere?), […] Lasst euch von den 1200€ Kosten pro Monat, die von der Foundation angegeben werden, nicht erschrecken, wir erwarten Kosten im niedrigen 3-stelligen Bereich, zumal ihre Technik die Größe eines kleinen Rechenzentrums hat. Sie lassen ihre Instanzen auf Kubernetes-Clustern laufen, die nicht proportional zum Traffic kosten, dafür aber nicht ausgelastet sind und so höhere Kosten als nötig haben. […] Was haltet ihr von alldem?

    Disclaimer: Ich habe keine Ahnung wie eure Absprachen konkret aussehen, und wer konkret mit welchem Skillset beteiligt ist. Ich arbeite selbst seit ~10 Jahren in der IT, und habe auch diverse Erfahrungen mit Kubernetes. Seht folgendes daher bitte nicht als Angriff, “Akchually” oder Klugscheißerei, sondern nur als food for thought. Wenn ihr diese Dinge bedacht habt, ist alles super.

    Die technische Betreuung solltet ihr auf jeden Fall klären, bevor ihr dort startet. Was ich so mitbekommen habe ist lemmy zu hosten nicht gerade trivial, mit der potentiellen Komplexität von Kubernetes könnt ihr euch schnell noch zusätzliche Probleme einhandeln - hier sollte auf jeden Fall jemand parat sein der zumindest den Cluster voll im Griff hat - gerade wenn man im Plural von mehreren Clustern und einem eigenen Rechenzentrum spricht.

    Auch beim Thema Kosten und eure Erwartung dazu, würde ich stark zur Vorsicht raten. Ressource Management ist eine der Komplexitäten von Kubernetes, und ist schon sehr vielen anderen zur Kostenfalle geworden. Hier wurde ich auch vor allem hellhörig das man 1.2k für nicht ausgelastete Cluster bezahlt, da hier auch die Stärke davon liegt, und ein pay-as-you-go Modell gut möglich und oft genutzt wird. Klar, das das auf einem eigenen Rechenzentrum nicht geht - klingt für mich aber dennoch ziemlich wild.

    Falls euch das bewusst ist, und ihr diese Risiken tragen könnt - coole Sache.

    Ansonsten Glückwunsch das es hier zu einer Kooperation und scheinbar einer deutlichen “Professionalisierung” kommt, und ich ziehe meinen Hut vor den Beteiligten die das alles aufgebaut haben.