Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

eclecticlight.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 295 posts

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#71

Post by SanderSantema »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #11
sdfjkl wrote: post #6

Open source is where you don't have to apply guesswork to find out what a suspicious looking piece of software is doing on your computer.

Nope, instead you have to apply guesswork to figure out why an apt-get call accidentally uninstalled your desktop environment. :P

Although you could make this argument in this context I don’t think it is valid. I’m quite certain that someone who’s trying to figure out what some obscure service is doing on their machine would be able to use `apt-get` perfectly fine and wouldn’t ignore any all-caps warnings.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#72

Post by SanderSantema »

saagarjha wrote: post #48
sdfjkl wrote: post #6

Open source is where you don't have to apply guesswork to find out what a suspicious looking piece of software is doing on your computer.

You do know that you can peek at closed source binaries and figure out what they do? It’s not even all that hard in this case and it would quickly tell you what the software does, assuming it’s not intentionally trying to cloak its behavior, which it is not in this case.

Either way, it’s easier if you’ve got the source code as well.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#73

Post by charcircuit »

caslon wrote: post #53
AussieWog93 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, instead you have to apply guesswork to figure out why an apt-get call accidentally uninstalled your desktop environment. :P

"One distribution using one package manager is bad when piloted by an incompetent YouTuber who ignores multiple warnings. Therefore, all of free software is bad."

apt deciding it should yeet essential packages is not a new thing and has happened many times to many people.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#74

Post by account42 »

vetinari wrote: post #42
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just manually install the official Firefox linux release. I've always done this since the Debian Iceweasel days and it works without issue.

The distro-provided versions can be slightly different than the Mozilla build. For example, Fedora build is ruled by these principles: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1518 , while the Mozilla build is not.

Agreed, Mozilla has not exactly shown that they will put user interests first and it makes sense to have a third-party packager to double check their choices.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#75

Post by sneak »

skygazer wrote: post #9

I trust that Apple isn't doing anything nefarious here, but at the same time, I'm quite grateful that others aren't so trusting. I want the "white hat" suspicious and skeptical rooting through everything. In fact, I don't think I'd trust Apple so much if it weren't for those that don't trust them. Their constructive distrust enables my trust.

Why do you trust that? Apple has specifically admitted to having a nefarious plan to scan your local files without consent and further use your computer (also without consent) to report on you to law enforcement. This may well be that implementation.

The latest desktop and mobile OSes are quietly shipping code to enable this, despite the uproar that happened when Apple announced it. They let people believe they were stopping the project, but it nonetheless proceeds quietly.

Apple is not trustworthy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Monterey

(Edit for clarity: enable above is used in the "to support" sense. I do not know if such clientside scanning is enabled (in the activated sense) yet, only that Apple has explicitly stated at least twice that it will be. It appears imminent. Some or all of the code has already shipped and is on your machine(s).)

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#76

Post by sneak »

dannyw wrote: post #5

Remember when operating systems didn't have multi-gigabyte binary blobs performing cryptic actions with an extremely chatty online connection?

With Little Snitch (and thorough abandonment of iCloud, iMessage, Siri, FaceTime, and the App Store) you can have this once again.

There are about 30 Apple processes to which you need to deny all network access. Then a Mac is relatively quiet. (By default Apple stuff is whitelisted in Little Snitch, you have to go and manually uncheck built-in allow rules.)

Apple built something called the ContentFilterExclusionList that bypassed Little Snitch and VPNs for Apple apps, which was thankfully disabled rapidly (and without an announcement) after a big backlash. Hopefully it will not resurface.

If it does it will still be possible to alter the system boot security level setting and tamper with the signed system volume (and modify the exclusion plist) and the system will still work (and so will the firewall), but it will take some hacking. This (and the work by marcan and the Asahi team) is the sole reason why I just dropped eight large on that chonky mac mini with the twenty cores.

The escape hatch remains. For now. (You still can't buy them anonymously.)

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#77

Post by dangerface »

sdfjkl wrote: post #6

Open source is where you don't have to apply guesswork to find out what a suspicious looking piece of software is doing on your computer.

Linux package managers are great I haven't had to build a program from source in years.

But how do I know the source code I check is the binary my machine runs? Even if I build from source I could have a malicious gcc that takes clean source and outputs a malicious binary.

Unless you are running jit or something you can't really know what your computer is running even if you use open source.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#78

Post by dmitriid »

superasn wrote: post #52
sdfjkl wrote: post #6

Open source is where you don't have to apply guesswork to find out what a suspicious looking piece of software is doing on your computer.

Definitely right about that. Maybe some user can be unaware of what is happening with OSS, but the community as a whole will always have accurate information of what is what (unlike this case where everyone is guessing).

> but the community as a whole will always have accurate information of what is what

OpenSSL audit would like to have a word with this mythical community. log4j vulnerability, too.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#79

Post by bigDinosaur »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #61
caslon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One distribution using one package manager is bad when piloted by an incompetent YouTuber who ignores multiple warnings. Therefore, all of free software is bad."

It's more than just Linus's experience with Pop OS. So many (consumer-focused) FOSS products have huge, obtuse quirks in them that prevent their widespread adoption, and uber-tech-literate people tend to overlook this because they really want to believe that FOSS can succeed. In reality, a lot of these quirks come about because of the non-commercial nature of the projects[1]. When a business produces software, the ai…

While there's some truth here, you're underestimating the amount of great open source software that's easy to use. You just don't think of it, and it's likely heavily used by commercial companies.

Also, terrible obtuse quirks are certainly not unique to FOSS products. Go ask someone who deals with, I don't know, the software used to run hospitals and healthcare systems (electronic health records, or EHR's) as but one example.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#80

Post by Ensorceled »

bee_rider wrote: post #68
rosndo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the people who can do so are usually the same people who’d be perfectly capable of analyzing binaries directly. Besides, you’ll never know if the code you’re looking at abuses some compiler quirk without studying the binary.

Somebody should tell the folks designing high-level languages that their code is no easier to analyze than a binary, I guess.

The person you are responding to is specifically talking about looking for exploits that are hidden behind compiler bugs or obfuscated by language features. So you're missing the point, I guess.
Post reply on HN