Live data from Hacker News

Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS

arstechnica.com

1–10 of 276 posts

Re: Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS

#3
post #2

Can the link be updated to the one below? The link above goes directly to the comments section and collapses the article, ?comments=1 is the culprit. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/google-pushed-a-one-...

HN won't let me edit the URL. :/

Re: Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS

#4
post #2

Can the link be updated to the one below? The link above goes directly to the comments section and collapses the article, ?comments=1 is the culprit. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/google-pushed-a-one-...

HN won't let me edit the URL. :/

Dang or someone else will probably see it. I didn’t think you’d be able to do it yourself.

Re: Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS

#7

Wait so are the devices bricked or not? The title says bricked but as far as I can tell people just can't log in temporarily until the fix is rolled out.

It's a soft lock for sure, given it requires a software update to use you could likely consider this a soft brick too.

It's not a hard brick to your point.

Re: Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS

#9

Wait so are the devices bricked or not? The title says bricked but as far as I can tell people just can't log in temporarily until the fix is rolled out.

No, they are not bricked. The term has become ridiculously diluted in practice to mean "hard, breaking bug".

Re: Google broke a conditional statement that verifies passwords on Chrome OS

#10
post #8

I bet the post-mortem for this is going to be fun. How this wasn't covered by multiple unit tests, a code review and a roll out strategy is.... impressive.

Bitwise & versus logical && is a classic, right up there with an assignment in a comparison (when an equality check is intended), = for ==.

That this was missed is pretty surprising, given that it's Google and the stakes involved in the encryption/key management code in a secure platform device.

I wonder if we'll even get a postmortem, as this simply cannot happen unless several someones all Seriously Fucked Up simultaneously.

- code error (expected, humans are fallible)

- review error (less expected, this is the kind of thing code review exists for)

- static analysis / linting check failure

- integration test failure (interactive login no longer works on this build)

This is a massive, overlapping fuckup. Heads should probably roll here, especially given that when you opt in to ChromeOS as a user, Google now has "one job" (DFIU).

Post reply on HN