The mod correctly removed my commentary from the story because, per the guidelines (which I missed), it should be in a separate comment. So in reference to your question I’m copying the removed comment here for context:

Some highlights:

• Tesla cars run on sketchy software that’s connected to the Internet 24/7
• Tesla power charging stations will blacklist you if a complicated algorithm decides you need to be blacklisted
• Employees can “ssh into” all cars
• China wants new cars to report their locations to government databases

I share this as a public service announcement — to those who are considering buying a Tesla, please consider purchasing something that isn’t connected to the Internet for your safety and the safety of others. If you are working for an auto manufacturer, please consider how many lives you are putting at risk by connecting a 1+ ton speeding vehicle to a centralized server where hackers, or you own employees, can command and control them.

As far as what cars you can buy, there are many cars, new and old, that don’t have an Internet connection. Shop around. I personally plan to stick to used petrol based cars until auto manufacturers are able to design an electric car that I actually like.

how many comments of yours do you think are policing what people post here? 10%, 20%? Before you respond with something along the lines of “eternal september” or “hacker news” just know I’ve lurked at HN for almost as long as its been around and I had a computer in the late 80s.

I agree. I did at least learn from your link that Arnnon Geshuri, Vice President of HR at Tesla, was a senior one at Google that some reports said was involved in the price fixing and abusive retention of labor here. That’s a great hire if your an honest visionary taking care of employees who enable your world-changing vision. ;)

The type of apps I used to run without delays on a Win98 Pentium 200+MHz w/ 64MB of RAM continues to be an illustration of how bloated today’s apps are.

Maybe someone on any of these threads has a Tesla, we have some pentesters on Lobsters, and maybe they let them see if a SSH response happens. That by itself would substantiate that claim with near-zero risk of damage. Well, there might some stuff to probe and crack to get to that part depending on implementation. And hacking a Tesla might void some warranty. ;)

EDIT: The thread friendlysock linked to had this quote that indicates it should be easy if source is a knowledgeable insider:

“99% of what i’m talking about is “public” anyway. tesla isn’t encrypting their firmware and it’s really easy to glean information from the vpn with a packet cap because nothing inside the vpn (was) encrypted. dumping tegra 3 model s and x is trivial and tesla’s cars are nowhere near as secure as they’d have you believe.”

Haha. That would apply to about everything here without a demo, though. (Pause.) Maybe your real goal is a product or demo with every comment. Hmmm.

suggested tag: wrong

The post’s main points are 1. not knowing why people use lightweight linux distros, 2. imagining that the only reason is performance, and then 3. dismissing that argument based on the author’s own laptop. It sounds like the author didn’t read about the distros, talk to the users, or otherwise extend the slightest bit of charity that thousands of people who have organized dozens of projects over the last 20 years to build and use these distros maybe have their own experiences and do things for reasons, even if he can’t guess at them and wouldn’t be motivated by them. It’s frustrating because when I realize I’m ignorant of a group that’s made totally different decisions about a familiar topic, I see an opportunity to get a deeper appreciation by incorporating a new perspective. It’s not just that this article fails an ideological turing test, it’s that it seems oblivious to the possibility of learning from others.

(And: what does the author think the word “laborious” means? Nothing in the article touches on anything like toil, industriousness, or painstaking care.)

Great summary. Also, given they were a 3 person startup I think they should have immediately reduced the candidate languages to the ones the author was already quite familiar with: Python and Common Lisp. Then out of those you think about how hard it would be to hire another engineer and get them up to speed without losing too much of your own velocity. Then you choose Python.

(And hopefully step back from disliking the GIL and realise it very rarely stopped anyone from running a website in the real world).

I’m not very familiar with the legal details, but I assume the distinction is general access to the internet being considered a utility, while access to platforms being considered something like a privilege. E.g. roads shouldn’t discriminate based on destination, but that doesn’t mean the destination has to let you in.

edit: As to why Americans don’t seem as concerned with it (which is realize I didn’t address): I think most people see it as a place, like a restaurant. You can be kicked out if you are violating policies or otherwise disrupting their business, which can include making other patrons uncomfortable. Of course there are limits which is why we have anti-discrimination laws.

The landmark case in the United States is throttling of Netflix by Comcast. Essentially, Comcast held Netflix customers hostage until Netflix paid (which they did).

It’s important to understand that many providers (Comcast, AT&T), also own the channels (NBC, CNN, respectively). They have an interest in charging less for their and their partners content, and more for their competitors content, while colluding to raise prices across the board (which they have done in the past with television and telephone service).

Collectively, they all have an interest in preventing new entrants to the market. The fear is that big players (Google, Amazon) will be able to negotiate deals (though they’d probably prefer not to), and new or free technologies (like PeerTube) will get choked out.

Net neutrality is somewhere where the American attitude towards corporations being able to do whatever to their customers conflicts with the American attitude that new companies and services must be able to compete in the marketplace.

You’re right to observe that individuals don’t really enter into it, except that lots of companies are pushing media campaigns to sway public opinion towards their own interests. You’re seeing those media campaigns leaking out.

Switching to the individual perspective.

I just don’t want to pay more for the same service. In living memory Americans have seen their gigantic monopolistic telecommunications company get broken up, and seen prices for services drop 100 fold; more or less as a direct consequence of that action.

As other posts have noted, the ISP situation in the US is already pretty dire unless you’re a business. Internet providers charge whatever they can get away with and have done an efficient job of ensuring customers don’t have alternatives. Telephone service got regulated, but internet service did not.

Re-reading your post after diving on this one… We’re not really concerned about the same gatekeepers. I don’t think any American would be overly upset to see players like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix go away and I wouldn’t be surprised to see one or more of those guys implode as long as they don’t get access to too much of the infrastructure.

Right-leaning US Citizen here. I’ll attempt to answer this as best as I can.

Net neutrality is being pushed by the media because it “fights discrimination”, and they blame the “fascist, nazi right” for it’s repeal (and they’re correct, except for the “fascist, nazi” bit). But without net neutrality, the ISPs still have an incentive to provide equal service, because otherwise they’ll lose customers (for obvious reasons).

I can’t speak to why open-source advocates are also pushing for net neutrality, because (in my opinion) the government shouldn’t be involved in how much internet costs. I do remember this article was moderately interesting, saying that the majority of root DNS servers are run by US companies. But, that doesn’t really faze me. As soon as people start censoring, that get backlash whether the media covers it or not

Side note, the reason you don’t see the protests against the “gatekeepers” is that most of the mainstream media isn’t accurately covering the reaction of the people to the censorship. I bet you didn’t know that InfoWars was the #1 news app with 5 stars on the Apple app store within a couple of weeks of them getting banned from Facebook, etc. I don’t really have any opinion about Alex Jones (lots of people on the right don’t agree with him), but you can bet I downloaded his app when I found out he got banned.

P.S. I assumed that InfoWars was what you were referring to when you said “removing some controversial users” P.P.S. I just checked the app store again, and it’s down to #20 in news, but still has 5 stars.

One part of it is that we already have net neutrality, and it’s easier to try to hang on to a regulation than to create a new one.

Matrix makes quite a fine IRC bridge though. Better mobile support, lets you see a list of when you were pinged, and image hosting. These days it has almost every feature I need to switch from telegram but the client is still too awkward to use.

and I’m still to see any real alternatives really take off

Slack. ;)

Sure - you’re welcome to refuse the EULA and take your processor back to the retailer, claiming it is faulty. When they refuse, file a claim in court.

Freedom!

I don’t really think that you should be allowed to ask the users the sign a new EULA for security patches.

A variation of this argument goes that security issues should be backported or patched without also including new features. It is not a new or resolved issue.

Patches only count if they come with the same EULA as the original hardware/software/product.

What is different here is that this microcode update also requires operating system patches and possibly firmware updates. Further not everyone considers the performance trade-off worth it: there are a class of users for whom this is not a security issue. Aggravating matters, there are OEMs that must be involved in order to patch or explicitly fail to patch this issue. Intel had to coordinate all of this, under embargo.

I think you have to be presented with the EULA before purchase for it to be valid anyway

Thank you! To answer your questions…

1. There’s no FDB analysis planned; they haven’t approached me, and since I just moved and took a couple months off, I really need to focus on taking paying gigs and rebuilding funds. My next client is all lined up though, and I should have more results to show in winter. :)

2. It’s hard to say! I get PRs from maybe 5 active orgs, and I know of… maybe a dozen orgs who use it independently? I’ve also trained… maybe 150 people in writing Jepsen tests, but I don’t necessarily know whether those folks went on to use Jepsen at their orgs internally, adapted the techniques to their own test suites, or moved on to other things. I think the techniques are more important than the tool itself, so even if folks aren’t using Jepsen itself, I’m happy that they’re doing more testing, fault injection, and generative testing!

3. I have sort of a “part of this balanced breakfast” take on Jepsen–it exists on a spectrum of correctness methods: normal proofs, machine-checked proofs, model checking, simulation testing, the usual unit & integration tests, Jepsen-style tests, internal self-checks, production telemetry, fault injection/chaos engineering, and user reports. In the early design phase, you want provable algorithms, but complexity might force you to give up on machine-checked proofs and move to model checking; model-checking covers weird parts of the state space but isn’t exhaustive, so it’ll miss some things. The map is never the territory, so we need simulations and tests for individual code components and the system as a whole, to verify that each piece and the abstraction boundaries between them hold up correctly. As you move to bigger tests, you cover more system interactions, but the state space generally explodes: larger tests explore less of the state space. Jepsen’s at the far end of that testing continuum, looking at all the interactions of a real production system, but only over short, experimentally accessible trajectories–a simulation test, like FDB does, is going to cover a lot more ground in the core algorithm, but may not catch bugs at the simulation layer itself or in untested components, e.g. a weird interaction between the filesystem and database which wouldn’t arise in an in-memory test. And Jepsen is specifically constrained to simple, testable workloads; it’s never gonna hit the data or request volumes, or query diversity, that real users will push at the system–that’s why we need user reports, telemetry from production, self-checks, etc.

There’s a lot of “formal methods” in Jepsen; every test encodes, more or less explicitly, an abstract model of the system being evaluated. We take a range of approaches for performance and coverage reasons, so some actually involve walking graphs of state spaces, and others are just checking for hand-proved invariants. Developing new and faster checkers is a great place to apply your formal methods knowledge, if you’re looking to contribute!

re FoundationDB. I wanted to see that, too. He had good reason for not doing it described here. In that thread, he said he hasn’t tested it because “their testing appears to be waaaay more rigorous than mine.” Still might be good for independent replication, though. Plenty of scientific papers look like they have a lot of rigor until you find that they missed this, used that incorrect algorithm, or just made stuff up for fame or fortune.

I say that as someone who was Wow’d by FoundationDB. Hopefully, Jepsen just confirms it was as good as it appeared. If not, people get to fix any problems he finds. It’s all-win scenario unless he finds a problem they can’t fix somehow.

I mean, have you seen the software the world runs on?

It’s difficult to accept that a whole industry could have been built on a such fragile basis…

See also car software.

For me, it was easy after seeing how much better older stuff was that they ignored for money. Intel did try to make their own better stuff which failed repeatedly. They tried three times with i432, i960, and Itanium. Each had good and bad (i960 my favorite) but Intel was punished hard for all of them. Customers did buy billions in x86’s based on performance (most important), cost, and watts. Predictably, Intel decided to keep doing what people paid billions for instead of what cost them billions. I blame the buyers as much as them given I’ve tried to sell lots of them on secure, usable products that were free or cost almost nothing. Usually unsuccessful due to some aspect of human nature.

Like in most other tech products. It was surprising to me that Intel’s products weren’t worse than they are. Well, maybe they were as the bugs keep coming in as those assessing them predicted. They weren’t designed for strong security since market doesn’t pay for that. So, they have a lot of security problems. The hackers ignored them way longer than I thought they would, though.

What shocks me most is how long we have been using these techniques without widespread awareness of these issues or the potential for this class of issues.

Some people predicted these problems, sure, but their concerns were mostly dismissed. So over the course of decades, we’ve seen other chip makers and architectures adopt the same techniques and thus enable these same bug classes.

For a young initiative like RISC-V, this is a great opportunity. They have not sunk years and years of development in features which may never be entirely safe to implement (speculative execution, hyperthreading, …) and are now able to take these new threats into account, quite early in their development. This could be a boon for industrial adoption, especially while many competitors are forced to rethink so many man-years of performance improvements.

The people paying for those laws are definitely doing that. The people not paying for laws rarely get to do so. They also keep voting for people that sell laws. So, things don’t change.

I agree. I think it comes down to the community being very selective about submitting CVEs. The ones that are worth it will either have a technical deep-dive that can be submitted here, or will be so important that we won’t mind a direct link.

Although I want to filter them, I agree this could invite more of them. Actually, that’s one of @friendlysock’s own warnings in other threads. The fact that the tags simultaneously are for highlighting and filtering, two contradictory things, might be a weakness of using them vs some alternative. It also might be fundamentally inescapable aspect of a good, design choice. I’m not sure. Probably worth some contemplation.

I completely agree with you. I enjoy reading great technical blog posts about people dissecting software and explaining what went wrong and how to mitigate. I want more of that.

I don’t enjoy ratings and CVSS scores. I’d rather not encourage people by blessing it with a tag.

Here is an archived email on the matter, from 1993. University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy:

First, in the case of gopher servers run by higher education or non-profit organizations offering information freely accessible to the Internet, there is no change. No fees. They just continue to use Gopher like they have always done. If you fall under this category, please stop and think about it. Nothing’s changed.

In the case where gopher servers are being used internally by commercial entities we think a license fee is right. We don’t know what amount of a fee is reasonable: so YOU have to tell us and we need to negotiate on a case by case basis. What is loose change for a large corporation may be prohibitive for a small business. We’d like some kind of sliding scale.

The paragraph just above these two did not age well:

Remember when UNIX was given away free? How many of you are using UNIX now? It is licensed.

Because people post CVE’s that teach me little no nothing about security. They’re like the security version of product updates. People that use the tech have places to look for release notes and security alerts. Entire sites and blogs are dedicated to it. Here, it’s just noise drowning out deeper submissions.

security talks about a general class of topics, whereas CVE would talk about a particular instance.

Same reason we have both programming and rust, or mathematics and visualization.

Personally I don’t think we should have them on the site at all, but we should do a community discussion first.

That’s strange but submission has many links. Mostly a positive. The only negative I had, which is dependent on my goal of industrial adoption, is that Z notation proved too hard to understand in a lot of projects for a lot of programmers. Alternatives, many coming later, also had a better story in automatic verification of code against the specs, generation of code from specs, prover integration, and so on. It’s still interesting for people studying various kinds of logic or historical use of formal methods. I keep Z papers in my collection just in case their work ever has ideas for solving a new problem.

Upvote for the discussion. “Company Makes Business Decision” is rarely on-topic for Lobsters and often goes off the Rails; I’ve upvoted because I appreciate that we’re not rehashing well-worn licensing arguments here, though this announcement was poorly written.

This is the second time Lobsters has censored my articles by merging them into tangentally related discussions.

Upvoting doesn’t necessarily have to be approval of the content of the post. (though it usually should be)