171–180 of 265 posts
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> Is "clown GCP Host" a technical term I am unaware of, or is the author just voicing their discontent? Clown is Rachel's word for (Big Tech's) cloud.
amusingly its a term used by my co-workers to describe anyone thats not them.
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No it's because lots of stuff is duct taped together and then you have tons of scripts or tooling that was someone's weekend project (to make their oncall burden easier) that they shared around. Usually there'll be a flag like --clowntown or --clowny-xyz when it's obvious to all parties involved that it's destined to destroy everything one day but YOLO (also a common one).
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Obligatory Bruce Scneier: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_...
Hehe, just reading that. > The poster described how she was able to retrieve her car after service just by giving the attendant her last name. Now any normal car owner would be happy about how easy it was to get her car back, but someone with a security mindset immediately thinks: “Can I really get a car just by knowing the last name of someone whose car is being serviced?” Just a couple of hours ago, I picked my car…
The likelihood of conmen stealing VW Golfs from repair shops is a really low risk/high impact event. So they could demand your passport and piss you off or have you leave a happy customer.
In the remote chance the con artist strikes, it’s a general liability covered by insurance.
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The (somewhat affordable) productized NASes all suffer from big tech diseases. I think a lot of people underestimate how easy a "NAS" can be made if you take a standard PC, install some form of desktop Linux, and hit "share" on a folder. Something like TrueNAS or one of its forks may also be an option if you're into that kind of stuff. If you want the fancy docker management web UI stuff with as little maintenance as…
The real trick, and the reason I don't build my own NAS, is standby power usage. How much wattage will a self built Linux box draw when it's not being used? It's not easy to figure out, and it's not easy to build a NAS optimized for this. Whereas Synology or other NAS manufacturers can tell me these numbers exactly and people have reviewed the hardware and tested it.
I can buy a NAS, whereby I pay money to enjoy someone else's previous work of figuring it out. I pay for this over and over again as my needs change and/or upgrades happen.
Or
I can build a NAS, whereby I spend time to figure it out myself. The gained knowledge that I retain in my notes and my tiny little pea brain gets to be used over and over again as needs change, and/or upgrades happen. And -- sometimes -- I even get paid to use this knowledge.
(I tend to choose the latter. YMMV.)
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You wanted a server and complain NAS is not just a server.
NAS is the primary function. But yes, I want full linux server that I can decide what to install and which protocol to use to upload and/or download files.
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Good read, but: > This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves ... I have to disagree in the strongest terms. It doesn't matter what it is, the only way to do a good job designing something is to imagine the ways in which things could go wrong. You have to poke holes in your own design and then fix them rather than leaving it to the real world to tear…
hmmm I am 50% with you. Imho to be an amazing engineer is to see a problem and find a good(whatever good means) solution. Beeing a good scientist is asking precise questions and finding experiments validating them. I think its more the nuanced difference between safety and security. Engineers build things so they run safe. For example building a roof that doesnt collapse is a safe roof. Is the roof secure? Maybe I ca…
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Good read, but: > This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves ... I have to disagree in the strongest terms. It doesn't matter what it is, the only way to do a good job designing something is to imagine the ways in which things could go wrong. You have to poke holes in your own design and then fix them rather than leaving it to the real world to tear…
hmmm I am 50% with you. Imho to be an amazing engineer is to see a problem and find a good(whatever good means) solution. Beeing a good scientist is asking precise questions and finding experiments validating them. I think its more the nuanced difference between safety and security. Engineers build things so they run safe. For example building a roof that doesnt collapse is a safe roof. Is the roof secure? Maybe I ca…
Security will have a wider scope by default (unlike natural phenomena, attacks are motivated and can get pretty creative after all) but there will still be some boundary outside of which "not my problem" applies. Regardless, it's the same fundamental thought pattern in use. Repeatedly asking "what did I overlook, what unintended assumptions did I make, how could this break".
That said, admittedly by the time you make it to the scale of Google or Microsoft and are seriously considering intelligence agencies as adversaries the sky is the limit. But then the same sort of "every last detail is always your problem" mentality also applies to the engineers and software developers building things that go to space (for example).
Only way I can think of protecting against this is to put a reverse proxy in front of it, like Nginx, and inject CSP headers to prevent cross site requests. Wouldn't block the NAS server side from making external calls, but would prevent your browser doing it for them as is the case here. Also would prevent stuff like Google Analytics if they have it. If you set up a proxy, you could also give it a local hostname lik…
Hostnames are not private information. There are too many ways how they get leaked to the outside world. It can be useful to hide a private service behind a URL that isn't easy to guess (less attack surfaces, because a lot of attackers can't find the service). But it needs to be inside the URL path, not the hostname. bad: my-hidden-fileservice-007-abc123.example.com/ good: fileservice.example.com/my-hidden-service-00…