ragona
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
edit: Well, let me argue with myself for a moment. I don't think offering an encrypted backup feature undoes the PQ story. But FS/PCS is weakened, sure, since we're talking about all types of shit happening, not just currently known (or strongly theorized) attacks.
What type of static key? If it's just a big symmetric key that isn't derived from an asymmetric handshake of some type then no, that's not our current understanding of the PQ threat model.
(Note: I didn't actually dig into the backup implementation, but my guess is that it's more of a KDF -> symmetric design, rather than the sorts of asymmetric negotiation you'd find in multi-party messaging.)
I believe the author was referring to the standard BugCrowd terms, which as far as I know are themselves fairly common across the various platforms. In my experience we are happy for researchers to publish their work within the normal guidelines you’d expect from a bounty program — it’s something I’ve worked with researchers on without incident.
I think this is an incredibly important lesson. Don't lie, _actually_ find something good to say. It's a goddamned super power, and it's also very good for your own mental health.
And heh yeah it was on my mind because I just spent a few years at a FinTech too — and a lot of that code is incredibly sensitive, and must contain all kinds of “ugly” condition handling that I don’t think is really low quality, it’s just a complicated problem space that requires a ton of attention to detail. And details can be less fun to read, I think we all can get seduced by code golfing and making things prettier, which is again not the same thing as better.
(Which is I think the point of the article — readability and prose is perhaps key in literature, but not always in software.)
I don't think that suddenly catapults the code into "bad" code, and in fact it's this kind of accumulated wisdom that makes full rewrites so famously expensive. The initial core of the idea might be able to be expressed in a simple and beautiful way, but over time it turns out that almost nothing is truly simple, and complexity accumulates. But it's good complexity, it's important to the business, and it doesn't mean that it's bad code.
It feels like this kind of layoff is part of an end of an era. Amazon used to NEVER cancel projects that customers were using. They just straight up Did. Not. Do. It. I once had to get approval from my VP's VP because we wanted to turn off a product with eleven daily users. 11. The number after ten.
A whole lot more than eleven people used DPReview, and they provided a service that I'm not sure is well replicated from other sources. A loss for the internet, and it makes me sad that these kinds of quasi-public-good projects are getting canned across the industry.
I get that big companies are not retirement homes for nerds but... with as much profit as the profit centers bring in, there was a little wiggle room for passion projects. Now it feels like that wiggle room is being squeezed right out of the industry as we all brace for the recession that hasn't quite shown up yet.