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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I had a programmer lead who rejected any and all code with comments “because I like clean code. If it’s not in the git log, it’s not a comment.”

    Pretty sure I would quit on the spot. Clearly doesn’t understand “clean” code, nor how people are going to interface with code, or git for that matter. Even if you write a book for each commit, that would be so hard to track down relevant info.



  • No, this does actually sound like a solution. But it’s a solution that should be scattered all throughout the process, and checked at multiple steps along the way. The fact that this wasn’t here to begin with is a bigger problem than the “client library failure” as it shows Wyze’s security practices are fucking garbage. And adding “one layer” is not enough. There should be several.

    To give a bit better context, which I can only be guessing at by reading between the lines of their vague descriptions and my first hand experience with these types of systems…

    Essentially your devices all have unique ids. And your account has an account/user ID. They’re essentially “random numbers” that are unique within each set, but there appear to be devices that have the same ID as a some user’s user ID.

    When the app wants to query for video feeds it’s going to ask the server “hey, get me the feed for devices A, B, and C. And my user ID is X”. The server should receive this, check if that user has access to those devices. But that server is just the first external facing step. It then likely delegates the request through multiple internal services which go look up the feed for those device IDs and return them.

    The problem that happened is somewhere in there, they had an “oopsie” and they passed along “get me device X, X, X for user ID X”. And for whatever reason, all the remaining steps were like “yup, device X for user X, here you go”. At MULTIPLE points along that chain, they should be rechecking this and saying “woah, user X only has access to devices A, B, and C, not X. Access denied.”

    The fact that they checked this ZERO times, and now adding “a layer” of verification is a huge issue imo. This should never have been running in production without multiple steps in the chain validating this. Otherwise, they’re prone to both bugs and hacks.

    But no, they clearly weren’t verified to view the events. Their description implies that somewhere in the chain they scrambled what was being requested and there were no further verifications after that point. Which is a massive issue.


  • It doesn’t even need to go that far. If some cache mixes up user ids and device ids, those user ids should go to request a video feed and the serving authority should be like “woah, YOU don’t have access to that device/user”. Even when you fucking mix these things up, there should be multiple places in the chain where this gets checked and denied. This is a systemic/architectural issue and not “one little oopsie in a library”. That oopsie simply exposed the problem.

    I don’t care if I was affected or how widespread this is. This just shows Wyze can’t be trusted with anything remotely “private”. This is a massive security failing.


  • Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it’s not searchable by search engines.

    Well gee, I hope you don’t use texting, phone calls, emails, private forums, social media DMs, or talk to anyone IRL, because those aren’t searchable either!

    This argument seems like reaching for something to complain about rather than having a legitimate problem with discord. If anything, you don’t like the “large group chat” paradigm, but that’s like hating a screwdriver because it’s not a hammer.


  • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldditch discord!
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    9 months ago

    I think discord is primarily just useful for voice chat, yes.

    But:

    It’s a closed ecosystem that locks what would otherwise be searchable knowledge on the web, with an unsearchable, proprietary lockdown of that information.

    Yeah, no. Proprietary, sure, but you can say that about almost communication mechanism that’s not a website with an API. It’s not like people would otherwise be posting these things somewhere else if discord didn’t exist. If it wasn’t discord it’d be slack or something. Discord is an entirely different medium and complaining that it isn’t a forum is just not a legitimate argument. They’re entirely different things.


  • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldditch discord!
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    9 months ago

    This whole comment/complaint is just the pros and cons of different types of communication. None of this is discord specific, it’s just complaints that real time chat isn’t indexed by search engines and isn’t organized into clear topics.

    Sure, some IRC chats were logged/posted, but that still has all the same searchability problems, and that process can still be used within discord search. It’s just not useful because real time chat doesn’t have any sort of topic organization.

    This whole thing is like complaining that signal is worse than email because it’s not as organized. It’s not worse, it’s just a different medium with different goals and purpose. And you’re not giving any specifics as to why signal/discord is bad, just that you don’t like direct messaging/chat rooms.





  • I don’t know that Microsoft has any business trying to make Windows support these devices better…

    Windows is entirely built around two pillars:

    1. Enterprise support for corporations, and team machine management
    2. Entirely open compatibility so they can run almost any hardware you put into it, plug into it, and backwards compatibility for all that for as long as possible.

    Portable game machines are not an enterprise product. Nor do you care about broad hardware support or upgradability. Nor do you care about plugging in your parallel port printer from 1985. Nor do you care about running your ancient vb6 code to run your production machines over some random firewire card.

    Windows’ goal is entirely oppositional to portable gaming devices. It makes almost no sense for them to try to support it, as it’d go against their entire model. For things like these, you want a thin, optimized-over-flexible, purpose built OS that does one thing: play games. Linux is already built to solve this problem way better than Windows.

    But, Microsoft will probably be stupid enough to try anyway.




  • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlalternative to trees
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    11 months ago

    I mean, sort of?

    We created a big problem by injecting a lot of shit where it shouldn’t be. If we stop that, some pieces will bounce back.

    Injecting more shit in another place means we have one big problem, that we haven’t stopped, and now a new problem that we don’t know the repurcussions of or how to reverse.

    So uh, yeah, I’ll stick with the one beast we know over one we know and also another we don’t.


  • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlalternative to trees
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    11 months ago

    But why not just like… Do that somewhere where the mass actually makes a difference? You’d be better off dumping acres full of this shit instead of regrowing a forest. Doing it in individual tanks, sparsely within a city, is both an inefficient use of resources and fucking ugly.

    Trees only purpose in a city is not to clean out CO2. It’s not even their primary purpose in a city. If it was, they’d be selecting specific species etc.


  • Source?

    I’ve read a lot on this and never saw any conclusive claim here.

    There were claims many years ago by Mozilla about this, and it had to do with slow APIs in Mozilla that YouTube was using…

    There’s also been many known performance issues in a lot of the APIs/libraries Google/YouTube use on Mozilla for many years. And Mozilla just hasn’t been able to keep up.

    I don’t see anything about this in recent history, because everything is just floods of people complaining about this round, with still no conclusive evidence that this is happening intentionally. YouTube is currently on a ad-block-blocker crusade and their code keeps changing and there’s nothing to conclusively indicate that this is malice and not just a bug in the way Mozilla performs.

    So as much as everyone seems happy to burn the witch because of poor performance, I’m not ready to jump to that conclusion until there’s actually evidence of this being intentional. Especially when this smells a lot like a long standing different problem. “Someone said they are” is not going to convince me. Especially if you can’t even point to that someone saying that thing.


  • Yeah, I don’t think people understand quite how astronomical an undertaking it is to replace this shit. People like to quote things like AWS, but AWS is a) expensive and b) general purpose. As such, it might be able to solve the problem, but not nearly as efficiently. It would cost you proportionally WAY MORE than Google is paying to keep YT alive, so that gives you an extra giant hurdle on top of the other complexity.

    Web hosting with low latency is hard. Huge data storage is hard. Transcodinf is hard. Constant uptime is hard. Search is hard. Recommendations are hard. Making it profitable is hard. Starting an ad service that isn’t googles is hard. Convincing content creators to move there is hard. Convincing consumers to look there is hard. Sure, any of these problems have remotely comparable analogs. But you have to solve all of them simultaneously to get anywhere near competing with YouTube. And since Google owns the whole “stack”, it’s much cheaper for them then it’ll be for you.

    Kick probably makes a decent comparison here. But they’re A) solving a subset of the problem B) fighting against a company that has extremely clear problems (arguably much worse than YouTube) C) is in a tech savvy-er demographic D) is funded by mega-casinos with tons of money and a vested interest in the product E) fighting in a market with less inertia so viewers and creators can move easier F) fighting twitch instead if YT which is smaller and younger.

    And they’re still not really all that much competition.