BoppreH
Joined 16 years ago
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Mar 17
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Comment · 9 days ago
> Its infrastructure was not compromised and no data was breached.
The private key of your globally trusted CA is infrastructure data and it was breached.
> All physical and logical security controls remained intact.
No, because you promised the CA Program that those keys would be HSM generated, FIPS 140-2 level 3 compliant. Ain't no compliant HSM in the world that will generate "4" as a private key.
> There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA's.
I charitably read this as "revoking these weak CA didn't affect customers". But now your whole root is being revoked next week (which you forgot to mention). All your TLS customers get screwed.
Overall, good choice to give up, but lying on your way out is not a good look for a company with the tagline "Trust Delivered".
Comment · 9 days ago
How do they get around blocks? Residential proxies?
Comment · 9 days ago
My favorite PowerShell feature was barely mentioned: structured output!
Life is too short for parsing ad-hoc data formats from the 80s, and the "everything is a string" approach from *nix is a major contributor for the unreliability of shell scripts.
Comment · 10 days ago
I don't trust Claude as personal assistant yet because too many websites block it from reading their contents, leaving Claude to guess and rely on very indirect sources. Performing actions online is even worse, with CAPTCHAs and whatnot.
It has made enough mistakes in this area that I now have a standing instruction (the only one) to always loudly warn whenever the official source for something couldn't be fetched.
Comment · 10 days ago
You can't see how using "cotton-picking hands" as a negative term can cause backlash? If the phrase was something like "don't break anything in this cotton-picking rack", I would understand, but "keep your cotton-picking hands away"?
I'm not a native speaker, so I might have genuinely missed something here. Still, if I had this warning printed on my cubicle I would be fearing for my job everyday.
Comment · 10 days ago
This seems serious enough that I've contacted a few less-technical loved ones about it. I'm warning them of possible scams in the next days, perhaps even hosted on otherwise official pages.
Comment · 11 days ago
Man, I love the spirit of the blinkenlights warning, but the "cotten-pickenen hans" bit makes it hard to use the original for anything.
Comment · 12 days ago
I think you can do it in 5 weightings, because a 0 eliminates both balls. Worst case:
scale(1,2) = 0
scale(3,4) = 0
scale(5,6) = 0
scale(7,8) = -1 # If it was zero, the counterfeit would be ball #9.
scale(6,7) = 0 # Must compare to a known-good ball. Here #8 is counterfeit.Comment · 13 days ago
If you're on Python and your problem is too big for a single regex, but too small for a full-blown parser like in the article, I can recommend the built-in re.Scanner[0]. It's a regex-based tokenizer[1] (so no recursive parsing) in the `re` module, that for reasons is completely missing from any official documentation.
You give it a pattern for each token type, and a function to process each match, and you get back a list of processed tokens.
Importantly, it processes the list in one pass and ensures the matches are contiguous, where a naive `re.findall` with capture groups will ignore unmatched characters. You also get a reference to the running scanner, so you can record the location of the match for reporting errors.
import re
# Initialize the scanner.
scanner = re.Scanner([
(r"\d+", lambda scanner, token: ('COUNT', int(token))),
(r"\w+", lambda scanner, token: ('ANIMAL', token.removesuffix('s'))),
(r"[,. ]", None), # None -> skip token.
])
# Scan a sample string.
results, remainder = scanner.scan("45 pigeons, 23 cows, 11 spiders.")
# Ensure we parsed the whole thing.
assert not remainder
print(results)
# [('COUNT', 45),
# ('ANIMAL', 'pigeon'),
# ('COUNT', 23),
# ('ANIMAL', 'cow'),
# ('COUNT', 11),
# ('ANIMAL', 'spider')]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis#Tokenization
Comment · 14 days ago
Growing up, many apartment buildings had doormen sitting behind a desk in the lobby. Some of the functions they provided:
- Identifying suspicious people and situations.
- Helping people carry things through the lobby.
- Passing messages before cellphones.
- Receiving packages.
- Making sure people in the lobby behaved.
And probably more that I never realized as a child. Doorman doesn't necessarily mean "suited guy standing attention outside the building next to a door". The locks were also electronic, so they didn't even have to stand up to answer intercom buzzes.
Comment · 15 days ago
No, never. BST is defined as UTC + 1 hour. The leap seconds were making both UTC and BST jump around, and now neither will jump around anymore.
Comment · 15 days ago
The time zones are defined as UTC + some offset, so no. What UTC will diverge from is solar time (UT1 in the article), so that solar noon might not happen at 12:00 anymore.
But because the sun's trajectory changes throughout the year, and we live in very coarse timezones already, it was always a bit useless tracking this with seconds precision.
Comment · 16 days ago
Oops^2. I sent the email, thanks.
Comment · 16 days ago
My first interpretation of the title was that UTC was in danger of something that needed fixing. It didn't occur to me that "continuity" meant in the mathematical sense. But thanks for bringing this to our general attention! It's great news.
On a side note, I really like how the site formatted the reasoning. I'll be copying it to my technical writing.
Comment · 16 days ago
I'm well aware that HN doesn't have @ tags, but I would be surprised if dan doesn't have something listening for this specific string. And not a big enough deal to warrant an email in my opinion, but you're free to send one.