But do you want to Morty your life?

But I appreciate your comparison, it really is analagous to an overconfident jr dev code scenario. Anyone who actually knows understands he’s lucky it’s still intact and cringes at his ‘rated for cross-atlantic’ statement. But it’s been fine so far, so he feels super vindicated into extrapolating to how awesome it’s going to be if he managed to get the basics this in order.

I went in prepared to be unambiguously appreciative of the adventuresome spirit, but turned to dismay as he spoke on what he thought the boat was capable of and close to being. Good job on the adventure, but need to have a bit more humility or he’ll be in over his head, literally.

No no, he said “rated for atlantic crossing”, so it’s got to be good, right?

Technically over a decade, but feels like that’s an understatement.

In the 1940s some people called a machine to play NIM as “Artificial Intelligence”. People talked about opponent AI in checkers games before most of us were born.

Certainly by the 80s using “AI” to describe the manipulations of enemy characters was all-in.

there is no ballast, not even a dedicated bilge space, and with the shallow draft, I am uncertain how the boat in OOP isn’t too top-heavy to stay up-right. Forget the “Sovereign Living” bit at the end, I’mma need to see some solid design and build data before listening to another word from that guy.

Don’t worry, he said up front it is “rated for cross-atlantic” so it’s all good.

Frankly waiting for the news story where he gets killed “proving” his concept…

The first warning bell was “rated for cross-atlantic”… “rated” by whom?

Of course then there’s the latter part where he talks about the next one is going to be super amazingly polished autonomous vessel with everything up to and including a sauna from the solar… And of course the sovereign citizen take…

Cool doing a project like this, but it smells of overconfidence in what it currently is and how trivial it will be to get to something much much more…

Welcome… to rapture!

Note that could prove you have it, but failure to execute does not prove yourself secure.

For example, someone reported to me that their RHEL9 system was not vulnerable based on this result. But it was because python was 3.9 and didn’t have os.splice, so the demonstrator failed, but the actual issue was there.

Similarly, if ‘/usr/bin/su’ isn’t exactly there (maybe it’s in /bin/su, or in /sbin/su, or /usr/sbin/su, or not there at all), the demonstrator will fail, but the kernel may still have the vulnerability, you just have to select a different victim utility (or change the cache for some other data other than an executable for other effects).

Looking at the binary blob, it’s a payload to assume privileges as possible and exec sh. So replace su with that and the binary gets to use su’s filesystem privileges without needing access to actually write it.

The vulnerability part is when the door opens to replace any file’s read cache with arbitrary content. The binary payload is just an obvious example of the sort of payload that could do a ton of damage.

Note that this is a rather narrow view of the scope of things.

Yes, the demonstrator is a python script that opens up ‘su’ and uses splice+this vulnerability to change it to ‘just assume all privileges and become sh’.

However, it’s that any process in any namespace can leverage a certain socket type and splice to effectively modify any filesystem content they want. It’s easy to see how this could be part of a chained attack to, for example, replace a protected service that is firewalled off with a shell. An RCE in a service permits rewriting nginx in an entirely different container and replaces it with a shell backend of your choosing.

That ‘flatpak’ application on your single user system that is guarded from touching your files that aren’t related? That isolation doesn’t mean anything if this issue is in play.

In terms of shared systems, while it should be avoided if possible, practically speaking there’s a lot of shared resources.

I don’t get why I’ve seen so many people saying “ehh, no big deal, privilege escalation is just a fact of life”.

Zombie processes do not use resources, well, a little, it’s basically an entry describing how it exited.

The parent process is the thing keeping the zombie entry open. Killing it’s parent should work if they bother you.

Don’t have a Framework, but I think it’s due to the whole ‘modern standby’ approach where the firmware doesn’t implement ‘standby’ anymore and just let’s the OS put everything into as low power state as possible, component by component.

It doesn’t work well for Windows either, which is why a Windows laptop I have will ‘standby’ for maybe 15 minutes before shutting itself down for ‘hibernate’. I figure they decided that NVME means resume from hibernate is ‘good enough’ and modern standby is such a power hog that they can’t pull it off.

Problem in Linux is that they view SecureBoot as a promise they cannot keep if they resume from disk, so they block hibernate if SecureBoot is enabled, making it hard to bank on as a reliable recourse.

Oh I’m certainly in the ‘do both’ crowd, but particularly in summer I just wish the parking lots I had to go to were shaded more… Also in the rain…

Because it can be a pretty steep hit to power output/efficiency compared to angling them to face the sun.

Cost per watt is significantly higher this way compared to what you generally see. It allows more sharing of sun between other uses and solar, but it comes at the expense of not letting the solar get as much sun for the same panel cost.

I think it’s unreasonable to say it’s fossil fuel propaganda. I like having shade and coverage in a car parking lot.

It’s not that the solar covering is just for solar power, but it’s a convenient pitch to combine the use cases where sure, solar covering parking is more expensive than solar straight on the ground, and sure, a plain covering is cheaper than a solar covering, but right now the lots are uncovered bits of asphalt that could be better.

And this is how I find out that systemd lets a process running as a user get the crypted password of the user:

"privileged" : {
                "hashedPassword" : [
                        "$6$AY98/.dwdtU20LBM$L9fFhaH.E2xA6waYBVmHl/wS4HFSPn5v/JaIlrSW6wLOfKkV6H1Boqggj/109WO/uHXF1J/NkyXsK1BaCRKwx/"
                ]
        },

I mean, why the hell…

Of course I also see that the go spawns python and does stuff with that…

And there’s lots of other dubious issues that look like an odd mismash of intro level programming stuff with unfortunate performance implications, and a very strong vibe code smell, though the commit interval is a bit larger than I would have presumed with vibe coding, but the volume of changes seem AI sloppy…

Well, broadly it looks like slop, probably AI slop, but either way I wouldn’t go anywhere near this project…

It depends on the complexity of the operation. “I want to rename all my files to have underscores to spaces”, CLI will let you construct that easily. I want to move all mp4/mkv files to one folder, but all ‘.opus/.mp3’ files to another folder, CLI is a bit quicker. Or I want to take the audio tracks out of all these mp4/mkv and then name the result according to the basename of the original file and move the result, well, mkvextract and mv are quicker than trying to wrangle all the content in comparable GUIs.

But yes, if you are wanting to do an operation on a file or a range of files easily handled with shift-click to select, then GUI will be both approachable and quick.

I can appreciate the desire for “you know what I meant” CLI interaction, but shudder at the verbosity of natural language in a lot of these cases.

Retaining that much detail on tentacles takes some drive space

Linear density could also boost throughout. Multiple actuators also exist.