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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Why are we giving this person their stage again? How probable is it that the instance admins of the like 15 instances they have accounts on will all collectively ban him? It’s just your average nazi spammer on the internet. You’ve read that “bio” this person has. Even if they get banned, they’ll come back just on principle. Just block him like any sane person would do, leave him shadow banned like that with his nazi friends, and call it a day.


  • So, you mean using a proprietary vendor to operate something binds you to that vendor? Congratulations, you’ve just discovered vendor lock-in.

    “Obfuscating the environment” is also an absolutely unhinged claim, what even is that supposed to mean?

    And again, Automattic is NOT in the right. What Automattic did was break license terms, attempt to extort, steal code, and light their whole brand, company, ecosystem and community on fire. Matt spit in the faces of his open source community (and open source in general), and every single person dependent on WordPress losing their job because of the shift he’s causing will be blood on his hands personally. Even if WP Engine was questionably morally or ethically, they did play by the laws and the license terms. Matt went on a mental breakdown and additionally to his unethical behavior broke several laws on that journey, which is exactly why he is losing the lawsuit. Matt and Automattic are NOT in the right.





  • That whole blog post is so full of salt, that it really hurts to read.

    Still going on about the “imbalance of the contributions”, well that’s open source for you - you don’t get to control who contributes how much, all you can do is ask nicely, and provide a good experience for contributors. Acting like a lunatic does not do that.

    legal attacks started by WP Engine

    Of course they did after the witch-hunt and the absolutely illegal, unethical and plain ridiculous behavior of Automattic. The counter they did, the whole ACF takeover and the slandering are a lawsuit handed on a plate.

    The way “community” is quoted in that article for those who dared to disagree.

    This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health.

    Yeah, as a developer I also hate when lawsuits are stopping me from working. He had no problem letting go of nearly 10% of his staff with their “alignment offer” to get rid of people who again dared to disagree, but the legal action is diverting resources now.

    But the whole “Focused on the Future” paragraph is going full mask off:

    Before, they said that resources will be reallocated to “for-profit projects within Automattic”, and

    We will redirect our energy toward projects that can fortify WordPress for the long term

    It’s only a matter of time another hostile takeover will take place, and Matt will attempt to go full for-profit on WordPress itself.

    We’re excited to return to active contributions to WordPress core, Gutenberg, Playground, Openverse, and WordPress.org when the legal attacks have stopped.

    Full on extortion. Stop the lawsuit or we won’t contribute.

    Honestly, if I’d be dependent on WordPress for my work, I’d not sleep well and start going into something else right fucking now. How are people that stupid, childish and entitled getting into such positions.



  • 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.


  • How in the fuck are people actually defending signal for this, and with stupid arguments such as windows is compromised out of the box?

    You. Don’t. Store. Secrets. In. Plaintext.

    There is no circumstance where an app should store its secrets in plaintext, and there is no secret which should be stored in plaintext. Especially since this is not some random dudes random project, but a messenger claiming to be secure.

    Edit: “If you got malware then this is a problem anyway and not only for signal” - no, because if secure means to store secrets are used, than they are encrypted or not easily accessible to the malware, and require way more resources to obtain. In this case, someone would only need to start a process on your machine. No further exploits, no malicious signatures, no privilege escalations.

    “you need device access to exploit this” - There is no exploiting, just reading a file.