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I would open a new bug for each of those questions and say “we will evaluate this after the MVP is implemented”. Give the person credit in the bug description. That will usually satisfy their concerns. Set the priority on the bugs to low and I’ll never even have to look at them again, unless one of them actually becomes a problem.

It’s a 6 digit pin. Doesn’t seem worthwhile to hash. What are the best practices here? I’m not sure

There is never a need to store a pin in the database, store it in temporary storage like redis. Set the TTL to the expiration date. You can hash if needed, but I’m less concerned that someone hacks into your reds instance and steals your pins from the last 10 minutes, bc everything else is gone.

There should never be a need to return a pin to the client. You’ve already texted/emailed it to them. They are going to send it back to you. You will check against your temporary storage, verify/reject, and delete it immediately after.


Yeah, you can only delay attacks by a tiny little bit, but the search space of 10^6 is just too small. Salting it doesn't give you much more security.

The downside is that some services, such as video streaming, block access from VPNs.


That's where VPN obfuscation is the play, imo. A lot of people nowadays are leaving streaming platforms or watch YT on smart TVs, so it does have a place. You can always exclude a device from the VPN coverage too.


Obfuscation only protects you from your own ISP messing with VPN connections. Streaming services (etc.) can't see what protocol you're using between yourself and the VPN in any case, they just see the VPN's exit IP address. Which is likely on their list of known VPN IPs.


If you start countering geolocation blocking with vps rental and VLESS vray etc then its still good to obfuscate at the endpoint. Passing VPN traffic off as something else is good policy wherever your tunnel goes.


Imagine an alternate universe where Amazon has a similar interface. It would be the most amazing tool.


https://www.digitec.ch/en Digitec/Galaxus (Switzerland’s online shopping site) is FANTASTIC


Germans have https://geizhals.de


Having used both extensively, Geizhals doesn't hold a candle to McMaster. McMaster is, bar none, the single best e commerce website I've ever used (if you already know what you're looking for, and definitely still top shelf if you don't).

But McMaster and eg Amazon are optimizing for different things. McMaster knows its clientele isn't going shopping, they're solving problems. As such, McMaster focuses on helping your solve your problem and get back to work. Amazon, on the other hand, is focused on just selling you "as much 'anything' as possible" and wants you to spend as much time there as possible in the hopes that you'll stumble on an impulse buy.


Except for the annoying cookie popup. If only we had a simple browser setting/header that could answer this question without another click. Hmm


We do! It recognises the 'Do Not Track' sent, at least on FF for me. I get a very small popup telling me it's respecting this setting, and no request for accepting anything else:

> "Do not Track"-Modus erkannt! Es werden nur technisch notwendige Cookies verwended. [Datenschutzerkl"arung](...)

Lovely. If only the rest of the web looked like this.


Wow. SubC’s software engineering needs some work. They thought the camera’s file system was unencrypted, when it was encrypted. They didn’t know where the keys were to decrypt it. It turned out the key was written unencrypted to a UFS storage device. There was a file written to /mnt/nas/Stills, which indicates that the camera was to writing to a remote file system that wasn’t mounted.


They thought the camera’s file system was unencrypted, when it was encrypted.

Unfortunately this situation is likely to get more common in the future as the "security" crowd keep pushing for encryption-by-default with no regard to whether the user wants or is even aware of it.

Encryption is always a tradeoff; it trades the possibility of unauthorised access with the possibility of even the owner losing access permanently. IMHO this tradeoff needs careful consideration and not blind application.


This is why I always shake my head when the Reddit armchair security experts say "The data wasn't even encrypted!? Amateur hour!" in response to some PII leak.

Sure, sure buddy, I'll encrypt all of my PII data so nobody can access it... including the web application server.

Okay, fine, I'll decrypt it on the fly with a key in some API server... now the web server had unencrypted access to it, which sounds bad, but that's literally the only way that it can process and serve the data to users in a meaningful way! Now if someone hacks the web app server -- the common scenario -- then the attacker has unencrypted access!

I can encrypt the database, but at what layer? Storage? Cloud storage is already encrypted! Backups? Yeah, sure, but then what happens in a disaster? Who's got the keys? Are they contactable at 3am?

Etc, etc...

It's not only not as simple as ticking an "encrypted: yes" checkbox, it's maximally difficult, with a very direct tradeoff between accessibility and protection. The sole purpose of encrypting data is to prevent access!


I like the approach of mega.nz...

Server stores encrypted blobs. Server doesn't have the keys.

  Entire application is on the client, and just downloads and decrypts what it needs.

Obviously your entire application stack needs to be developed with that approach in mind, and some things like 'make a hyperlink to share this' get much more complex.


Re: encrypting data that would be served via web server: why would anyone bother to encrypt data meant to be shared externally worldwide? It makes no sense to begin with…


Nah bro, you just gotta use homomorphic encryption! /s

That said, encryption at rest is still good in terms of theft or mis-disposal.


This has already happened to Windows users when BitLocker disk encryption is enabled by default and they do something that causes the encryption key to be lost.

You can have the key saved in your Microsoft account.


You can have the key saved in your Microsoft account.

I find it very hard to believe that those who want their disk encrypted also want Microsoft to have the key.


Microsoft isn't going to release it without a warrant. But you have to trust their security not to leak it.


Unless the JeDI contract is up for renewal


What does that have to do with bitlocker?


> They thought the camera’s file system was unencrypted, when it was encrypted.

Willing to bet plenty of hn readers are unaware of encryption going on at lower layers of the tech stack than they're aware of.

For example most hard drives encrypt all data, even when not commanded to, as a way to do 'data whitening' (ie making sure there are even numbers of 0's and 1's in the data stream and not some pattern which might throw off tracking.)

The encryption key is simply stored elsewhere in the drive - or nvram or in the firmware.

But it means if you extract the physical magnetic surface and read it with the right microscope, you might well find the data encrypted with no available key.


Scrambling and encryption are two different things. Scrambling is very easy to do at line rates. Encryption not so much.

Ethernet is a good example. It has the same problem where long strings of 0's or 1's can cause clock recovery problems. The solution as clock rates have increased is to just run all the data through a scrambler driven by a simple Linear Feedback Shifter.


If you're talking about SED feature, no, it isn't widespread since it's regarded as an "enterprise" feature and only available in minority of drives (regardless of HDD or SSD). Client or OEM variants of same drives (otherwise identical) lack SED option most of the time and doesn't encrypt data by default.


The hardware is still there - they don't make a new asic for the consumer version


doesn't mean it's active.


"Active" with those systems just means the encryption key is now user-supplied instead of being stored on the controller/drive. The actual encryption is always active; which makes sense, if anything it means you have one less configuration to test.


If I learned one thing about SSD firmwares/controllers it's to be sure of nothing. Especially when the market is flooded with cheap controllers that can barely keep up with line speeds I'm very much doubtful that they're unconditionally encrypting at rest data.


To my knowledge, encoding avoids runs to avoid desynchronization in a way that isn’t encrypted.


This is line coding, often used on wired connections. But reading a hard drive trace isn't quite a wired connection, so the trade-offs are different.

Most notably with line coding when using positive and negative voltages it is quite important for the average voltage to be zero to avoid building up a charge difference. Whitening can often be used if the downside to an imbalance or long runs is much lower. Notably in RF this is often about avoid harmonics with a little bit of symbol timing advantage thrown in.

Whitening doesn't really require encryption though. Weak cypher streams xored into the data work fine. Even a repeated 256 bit string is quite alright.

Whitening using any non trivial encryption key seems weird to me. AES with a key equal to the current offset in ECB mode already feels over-engineerd.


> Whitening using any non trivial encryption key seems weird to me.

It's because there was an era when drives were expected to be able to do 'hardware' encryption with a user provided key, so reusing that hardware to also do whitening even if the user didn't provide a key was very convenient.

Plus you get all the other benefits - ie. a single scsi command can 'secure erase' the whole disk in milliseconds by simply changing the stored key.


This used to be done, but since ~2000, disks were expected to support on-device encryption, and by making encryption always-on no encoding is needed.


That is such a typical bug report to a large company. A user who spent a lot of time debugging and finding the root cause of an issue, and a few faceless peons at the large company spending a few minutes on it, realizing it’s not a priority, and abandoning it.


Ah, when "open source" means begging an advertisement company to bless your code changes...


It was a hack. An actual code change would be submitted via the gerrit and not buganizer.

https://android-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...


Yeah except nobody is going to put the effort in to do that because they know it will be ignored.

I tried back in the day.


Not really. There wasn’t a true patch attempt submitted, as far as I can see. There was some helpful info about how commenting out a couple lines could work around the issue, but doing a real engineering evaluation to check spec compliance and make sure it’s all covered in the Bluetooth testing infrastructure is a much bigger task.


And not a small bug either. This large an interoperability issue and it takes a nerd not in the employ of Google to fix their shit? This is why Apple's vertical integration makes it one of richest companies in the world. Google's only up there because of their success in that one business of theirs.


Funny, I was under the impression that Apple's stuff is closed source, so no one outside their employ even could fix a similar issue?


Bearing in mind that Apple does Open Source some stuff: https://opensource.apple.com/projects

They also Open Source the base OS layer pieces for macOS too:

* https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/

* https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

I don't keep any kind of close eye on this stuff though.


Apparently, android isn't fixing it either.


What does Apple being Apple have to do with Google not paying somebody to work on getting Airpods, which presumably should conform to some Bluetooth spec, in order to get Airpods to work on Android?


>>...due to a bug in the Android Bluetooth implementation.

The issue can be resolved because an android bug can be debugged by a contributor. A similar issue can't even be analyzed from the apple side by anyone but an apple employee.

We are assuming there are bugs in iOS, but their closed sourceness can mislead people to believe there aren't. Then, yes, their vertical integration makes them rich, which in this case is bad for users, in the guise of being good.


As Asimov predicted, robopsychology is becoming an important skill.


I still want one of those doors from Hitchhiker's Guide, the ones that open with pride and close with the satisfaction of a job well done.


We'll probably end up with the doors from Philip K. Dick's Ubik that charge you money to open and threaten to sue you if you try to force it open without paying.


Just wait Sam Altman will give us robots with people personalities and we’ll have Marvin. Elon will then give us psychotic Nazi internet edgelord personality and install it as the default in a OTA update to Teslas.


Given some of the more hilarious LLM transcripts I have seen, Gemini is Marvin


Doesn't Tesla already ship the edgelord mode?


an elevator that can see into the future… with fear


The killer application for me is that my wired Ethernet security cameras are on a VLAN that I firewall from the internet.


It’d be funny if he bought it then returned it to Mars.


That would make it even more valuable.


Gott in Himmel, to whom?

Who on Earth is in the set of peeps who's both wealthy enough to do so and lives in awe of Musk? Wouldn't such fool and said fool's money have been parted long ago?


I’m surprised that a “tech company” provides a Chromebook instead of a laptop.


Probably the most secure client system you can get these days. The purpose of the laptop is to ssh.


ChromeOS is more than enough for lots of roles. Even for devs (backend, web and android etc) it should be good enough if you have good enough CPU, RAM and storage.


Sure and water is enough for hydration so their cafeteria has no actual coffee or what.

If you'd force me (a dev used to work on a blazingly fast Linux machine) to use this I'd just be inclined to look for a job elsewhere. Not sure if that was in your interest as a corp.


Do you not consider a Chromebook to be a type of laptop? Is that because of the form factor or the OS?


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