To my mind, Ross Anderson was being pragmatic, when he insisted in his text "Security Engineering, 3e" that computer & information security models should more closely reflect underlying human trust relationships, and it could be said that capabilities models let one achieve that more readily, than the constant exercise of trying to close gaps exposed by security models rooted solely in Access Control Lists (ACLs), which amount to a form of fire-fighting; hence the HP Labs paper by Tyler Close, "ACLs Don't", which sadly got an IEEE reject.
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Dr. Bruce Simpson
@bms@mastodon.bsd.cafe
mastodon 4.7.3Cybersecurity & Internet researcher. Timeline:
1994: 1st Internet use: blueboxed onto CompuServe
1997: #phrack denizen; nfsshell'd exam paper
2001: Onsite cybersecurity at JP Morgan.
2003: FreeBSD Security Team; TCP-MD5; mentored pf(4).
2004: International Computer Science Institute fellowship.
2010: CRC Canada uses my MANET stack
2011: Every iPhone IPv6 connection invokes my code.
2016: Awarded PhD in Internet architecture.
Do I wish to join the Cult of the Superficially Viable Artifacts? No.
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Joined July 23, 2026
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aspe:keyoxide.org:EKRTLHAP4FI25N7RCI4VHUAGUQ
I'm looking into what it takes to fully Capsicumize a Python process in FreeBSD. It's not just about the file descriptor rights and filesystem visibility. There are distinct dependencies by Python modules on system calls which may not be CAPENABLED. I ground it out on subprocess for a start. Whist Python 3.12 os.execve() (and thus os.exec*()) shims to fexecve() and SHOULD work if $PATH is modified to be relative, there are no such guarantees for the subprocess module.
Please heed Dijkstra's wisdom nearly 50 years after he spoke the words: "...after careful consideration I concluded that the intellectual challenge presented by the programming task is, indeed, as unprecedented as the high-speed automatic computer itself. And it had caused in my mind a shift of attention from "how to discover the unexpected" towards "how to avoid unmastered complexity", towards "how to reduce the demands made on our quantitatively limited powers of reasoning". "You must take my word for it, that past experience has made me a firm believer that this newer aspect of thinking, i.e. how to avoid unmastered complexity, can indeed be taught. ... Among other things it can be done by the identification and subsequent description of the more productive "complexity generators"."
Those last two words keep looping around at the back of my mind every day now... and if you mine Dijkstra's secondary references, you'll find gold. The man was an expert at the very act of thinking, and he was well read to boot.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD480.html
Replying to
There are bugs for sure still, but manageable. I can kick start and nudge it along to do what I need. For now, there's CPack packaging, so I can make FreeBSD *.pkg binaries for amd64 available on request.
Motivation to do systems administration my own systems tonight: 0
AI FAIL
Profanity
LowEndBox author on "The Economics of AI and Why Cost-Conscious Companies Hate It"; basically, no demonstrable ROI, even when negative externalities are not taken into account.
https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-economics-of-ai-and-why-cost-conscious-companies-hate-it/
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@kimcrawley@zeroes.ca @davidgerard@circumstances.run Now if only someone could replace the online "mall cop" known as Clownflare
According to RIPE Labs, IPv6 prefixes enjoy a ~68% higher level of ROA signing amongst small-scale RPKI servers for BGP routing security, and of those ROAs, only ~1.2% do not validate.
https://labs.ripe.net/author/ties-dirksen/whos-running-all-those-tiny-rpki-servers/
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@mcc@mastodon.social @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange It is possible for some to opt out of Gemini training itself due to a UK CMA ruling enforceable by statutory instrument, which may have wider applicability due to how Google have been forced to implement it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fku2tzBTNnI
I do recommend not using ACME or TLS certificates issued in the CT chain if you want to evade bot discovery. I can't be 100% sure but circumstantial evidence points towards CT logs being used for scraper bot discovery. Shifting the trust root to DANE and using a different trust anchor might help this.
UK press can opt out of AI overviews, stay in searches
Layer 1 robustness: learning how to do Network UPS Tools (NUT) properly here with an Eaton 3S. 2nd BeagleBone Black, powered from a powered USB hub, plugged into the BBB itself. Thence, an FTDI serial cable plugged into the hub, to the primary FreeBSD dev system. The UPS itself, repatched to the BBB via the hub. So 3 things are on the 3 BS1363 mains sockets on the Eaton UPS: the FreeBSD box, the BBB via the hub, and the FS S3900 switch they're both connected to. https://www.eaton.com/gb/en-gb/catalog/backup-power-ups-surge-it-power-distribution/eaton-3s-ups-emea.html
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@atax1a@infosec.exchange "Drop down, integrate the Gaussian PDF, and give me 20, Marine!" /s
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@larsmb@mastodon.online @cstross@wandering.shop @jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net @davidgerard@circumstances.run "sealing ourselves in via Kessler Syndrome might be a kindness to the rest of the universe." Thus, the plot of Greg Egan's "Quarantine" is recapitulated. @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz
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@mcc@mastodon.social @lcamtuf@infosec.exchange Also, lctamtuf thank you for all your hard work on AFL over the years.
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@davidgerard@circumstances.run Every time I am forced to hear of Raymond Kurzweil's wank fantasy in public discourse becoming "strategy", I go running for the sick bag. (Been busy watching Adam Curtis' back catalogue including The Trap (2007) while I hack KDE related stuff)
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@bakachu@infosec.exchange I have found the process of distilling value from an otherwise dead and bitrotted code base boiled down to iteratively applying the dismantling of Chesteron's Fences. Some of the state beyond the code, design motivations and approaches and so forth, involved a person who is now sadly quite dead; he crashed his motorcycle just outside San Francisco over 10 years ago. Also the Don't Repeat Yourself principle from "The Pragmatic Programmer".
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@alexkidman@aus.social He will forever be remembered for funky gibboness and comic genius in "The Goodies", and the best misheard lyric of all time, from Madonna's "Erotica": "Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie, Put your hands all over my body."
So I switched daily browser this week from the least bad Chromium fork to the least bad Firefox fork, thinking that reduced CPU burst might reduce my exposure to my Acer [heavily patched for security and privacy] Win11 laptop's wonky power management behaviour now the battery has died (replacement on order, must chase up). The thing tends to die shortly after power-on, or if I open a browser, and hibernation doesn't work. It helped a little, not a lot.
Only to find I'd forgotten to migrate an essential uBlock Origin rule that @jef@mastodon.social probably pointed me at: the one which blocks the "Sign in with Google" popup, but for some strange reason (I'm normally using my default UK SOCKS5 proxy for web access), it keeps emitting it in German.
This thing is SO. FRICKEN. COMMON. Why does it keep showing up on sites where I'd least expect to deal with the Advertising Company's surveillance-pilled OAuth2 service?
Sort it out...
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@atax1a@infosec.exchange How is he measuring his productivity and did he apply e.g. SonarSource or McCabe metrics to it? That's a rhetorical question of course... because it sounds like this person has developed the symptoms of a habitual cocaine user?
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@atax1a@infosec.exchange It's just fascinating to me that these people make these burden-of-proof arguments about how productive their new appeal-to-novelty generative systems are, yet keep omitting evidence, and when you call them on it, they try to paint you as some kind of Anti-Christ. This is a recurring theme.
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@oatmeal@kolektiva.social I have completely removed Ubuntu from my infrastructure over the past week. Not without change cost, a key network modeling tool has gone kaput and I'm up against other vendor's functional regressions now but it's 90% dealt with. I use the key Firefox forks, never Firefox itself; one distro I installed this week was bundled with it. "Take what is useful. Destroy the rest." It got uninstalled pretty quickly.
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@pmb00cs@mastodon.online @alda@topspicy.social The concepts of process and domain knowledge are often lost on them, as they do not manage at that level. Consider the views of Alan Carter and Colston Sanger in "The Programmer's Stone" from ~1999 on these issues, as well as Ward Cunningham on Technical Debt, Fred Brooks on The Mythical Man Month, and Nik Suresh on the current recapitulation of "people managing stuff they just don't understand".
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@giacomo @riverpunk@defcon.social @akareilly@hachyderm.io @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange s/Adam Smith/Edsger Dijsktra/g s/market economy/computer science/g
Replying to on universeodon.com
@bellegraylane@universeodon.com @gvwilson@mastodon.social Axl screams "You Could Be Mine" -- 13 year old me would fire that up as a cassette single while blowing away Kraits in Amiga Elite with military lasers fitted to my Cobra Mk III