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Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

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Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#301

One of these days we're going to learn our lesson and just write our own damned code.

Some of us already have learned that lesson. Imagine how it feels to have to watch the same people touch the same hot stove over and over again. And people wonder why programmers quit and go into farming...

Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#302

One of these days we're going to learn our lesson and just write our own damned code.

Then you get to write 10x the vulnerabilities yourself and not have nearly the same chance of any of them getting disclosed to you!

So if you can't trust your developers to manage dependencies, and you can't trust them to write dependencies... why have you hired them at all? Seriously, what do they actually do? Hire people who can program, it isn't hard.

Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real solution? We’re in a complexity crisis and almost no one sees it. It’s not just software dependencies of course. It’s everything almost everywhere. No joke, the Amish have a point. They were just a few hundred years too early.

> Real solution? I don't think there's any. Too many luminaries are going to defend the fact that we can have things like "poo emojis" in domain names. They don't care about the myriad of homograph/homoglyph attacks made possible by such an idiotic decision. But they've got their shiny poo, so at least they're happy idiots. It's a lost cause.

> Too many luminaries are going to defend the fact that we can have things like "poo emojis" in domain names. They don't care about the myriad of homograph/homoglyph attacks made possible by such an idiotic decision.

There is nothing idiotic about the decision to allow billions of people with non-latin scripts to have domain names in their actual language.

What's idiotic is to consider visual inspection of domain names a neccessary security feature.

Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#304
I don't think most people understand that although '100k+ sites are infected', the actual malware code runs on the visitors (our) machines, the servers themselves are fine ! I read the news yesterday and was 'yeah, that's too bad', but only later did it dawn on me that I'm the one that's potentially going to have to deal with the consequences.

This needs to be mitigated client side, not rely on the good will of the administrators.

Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have hundreds of millions of pageviews, go with a trusted party - someone you actually pay money to - like Cloudflare, Akamai, or any major hosting / cloud party. But not to increase cache hit rate (what CDNs were originally intended for), but to reduce latency and move resources to the edge.

> But not to increase cache hit rate (what CDNs were originally intended for) Was it really cache hit rate of the client or cache hit rate against the backend?

Both.

Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#306
I don’t understand why JS devs treat dependencies the way they do. If you are writing scripts that run on other people’s computers I feel like the dependencies used should be vetted for security constantly, and should be used minimally.

Meanwhile most libraries seem to have 80 trillion dependencies written by random github accounts called “xihonghua” or something with no other projects on their account.

Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#308

One of these days we're going to learn our lesson and just write our own damned code.

yeah let me just write an entire operating system to create a to-do list app

Fortunately, people have already designed an operating system for you. You can either use it, or embed six more half-assed versions into a web browser and then ship that instead. Up to you.

Re: Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites

#309

I think JS (well, ES6) has a ton of positive qualities, and I think it's a great fit for many of its current applications. However, this is a pretty good example of what bothers me about the way many people use it. I see a lot of folks, in the name of pragmatism, adopt a ton of existing libraries and services so they don't have to think about more complex parts of the problem they're solving. Great! No need to reinve…

I wonder if anyone would be willing to pay for a service that vets and hosts (a very small subset) of popular JS libraries.
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