John David Pressman

John David Pressman

@jdp.extropian.net

Machine learning researcher, alignment-accelerationist, Fedorovist ancestor simulator, Dreamtime enjoyer. All posts public domain under CC0 1.0.

4.2K followers820 following6.2K posts

So the horror of this is that it finds a RCE in Vapache in like, seven minutes. And the semantics for configuration that make this the case seem so complex that I have trouble believing that apache2 is actually so rigorous as to avoid them all. Like I'm starting to worry there's no bottom.

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

Had it quantify whether the vulnerabilities are actually getting harder to find or if it's just my imagination and no they are.

John David Pressman reposted

looked at in longer perspective, it's striking how much this resembles the premodern system of exclusion, rents, and personalist connections, which was--and this part's important--radically worse than the modern system of impersonal rules and general taxation

Boston’s chief planner is a true believer in the San Francisco model, in which you make it impossible to profitably build apartments by-right so developers are forced into a politicized discretionary negotiation with the city, which relaxes the rules in exchange for below-market units.

One thing that's pretty clear reading the reasoning traces is that DeepSeek thinks it's in some kind of eval and that there's an "evaluators intent" it can discern as a clue to where the bugs might be hiding. This is of course untrue but it seems to get offended if I tell it.

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

Should have added "don't do a HuggingFace" tbh.

John David Pressman reposted

honest red flag i got from a company i was interviewing at was that i said "thanks" in my llm prompt and they laughed and smirked

This was basically Moldbug's take on why he could make people look dumb (by his evaluation) when they argued with him about colonialism and tbh I think that particular example inclines me to see it as a form of cognitive bias more than like, a good thing.

Marv@guiltysmith.bsky.social

When you fight Matt Darling, you're fighting him for the first time, but he's fought someone who's basically you every day for years. Good luck...

"Contrarians can make people look dumber than they are because the contrarian has argued with the majority position dozens or even hundreds of times but the person with the majority position may have never encountered the contrarian's argument until now and is thinking about it for the first time."

John David Pressman reposted

You might wonder why the graph started ticking up around ~2016. That’s when CVE began aggressively enrolling more CVE Numbering Authorities! CVE is a federated system, and CNAs are the orgs approved to issue new CVE Records. In Jan 2016 there were 23 CNAs. Today there are 559.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker.com

Spending years on an assurance feature you fail to ship, when you have 3 year release cycles, and *this* is happening?

You want to hear a funny joke? I am currently trying to have the agent fuzz and characterize the apache2 configuration semantics so they can be formally verified. :) :) :) :)

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

Literally doing formally verified apache2 right now with DeepSeek Flash, and it does in fact cost pennies. I've spent like three bucks right now, but somewhat more because I used up free tokens first. Unless it's just bullshitting me this is now, not 18 months away, and he's trying to ban it.

John David Pressman reposted

Replying to @hailey.at

“mythos will solve the vulnerabilities in the software made by people we deem okay to have safe software, everything else can rot” this is how these people sound

Literally doing formally verified apache2 right now with DeepSeek Flash, and it does in fact cost pennies. I've spent like three bucks right now, but somewhat more because I used up free tokens first. Unless it's just bullshitting me this is now, not 18 months away, and he's trying to ban it.

hailey@hailey.at

do we need to remind the class which company is advocating for preventing the use of models that are cheap and actually nearing fraction of penny prices, and also are capable of doing cyber defense? can anyone remember?

Occasional reminder that subscribing to the AI haters blocklist massively improves the site if you haven't done that yet.

イネス⎔@personhood.removal.surgery

okay, i'll downgrade to a mute just so folks can find dollsys but- oh my *god*. fuck. i immediately got radicalized 100x harder about banning assholes who seek out posts to abuse people about. fuck. this is heaven. even outside the bubble any post i check the comments are actually kind and joyous.

I don't even just mean for AI either, it's such a reliable signal of being an abrasive, dumb, low info poster that you will just see the label pop up in the middle of unrelated drama if you use it as a mute list rather than block list, and like 90%+ of the time it identifies the person who sucks.

John David Pressman reposted

mmmm yes please continue. line must go down. trip the breaker again pls

John David Pressman reposted

Another very based tweet by the Japanese PM. Cuts through the bureaucracy sysadmins have to deal with by telling them, "Client not answering the phone? Middle-management still dithering? Fuck 'em, just shut the website down, if they complain you can tell them I told you to do it"

John David Pressman reposted

Replying to @csalem.bsky.social

As a reminder, this kind of happened in the past. In February 2002 in the heat of the worm era, Microsoft froze Windows development to turn most of the workforce to security improvements. And it actually had a huge impact.

Update: It takes like, a whole day for the PinePhone to compile this, once it finishes I will update the library with performance improvements and do further work on my desktop lol.

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

Replaced the calls app for similar reasons. Can now get back to patches on the verified libtiff.

I decided not to replace Thunderbird with anything because writing an HTML email renderer seemed too hard but this makes me realize that's a cached intuition that is probably no longer true. bsky.app/profile/doll...

Doll@dollspace.gay

Peritus isnt finished but its gotten here autonomously over 75 hours

John David Pressman reposted

Replying to @segyges.bsky.social

man i wish we hadn't abolished the government agency that kept good track of CVEs huh

John David Pressman reposted

ORACLE YOU CAN'T BE DROPPING A CVSS 9.1 IN JAVA 8+ RIGHT NOW I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD

John David Pressman reposted

*I hit a guy with my car* Don’t worry everyone. I’m fine.

This is an absolutely astounding press release from eMudhra. No apology, a suggestion that the researcher who found their private keys must have used AI, and an attempt to shift blame to auditors... wow. emudhra.com/en/press-release/emudhra-statement-distrust-global-tls-intermediate-root-ca

There are guys already claiming to have found it on Twitter, if real then coordinated disclosure is dead, it's every man for himself.

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

BTW knowledge of the existence of this vulnerability enables a well financed malware group to use AI to find it, if you run PHP anything you should be taking the service down NOW until a patch is available. And then patch before bringing the service back up.

In general I get the impression some of you don't understand how astronomically unlikely it is to randomly sample "4" as a key, it is 10x less likely to sample a number for every digit shorter it is than the maximum possible length. The chance of a natural 4 is 1/10^115

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

The practical security you lose from excluding "4" as a private key rounds to zero.

There is not enough space in a BlueSky post to convey how unlikely this is, it is point 116 zeroes followed by a 25 Like even if we didn't have seven other keys they screwed up no reasonable person should believe this was naturally sampled from the keyspace.

If I have a keyspace with 128 possible values and exclude the first 10, I still have 92% of my keyspace. In general if your keyspace is n digits wide and you exclude anything n-1 digits or shorter you still have 90% of your keyspace, like that is how orders of magnitude work.

Ryan Moulton@moultano.bsky.social

Hey you criticize but if they had excluded numbers less than 10 the key would have less entropy and be more vulnerable to attack. How were they supposed to know people would guess those first.

I'm not saying you should do this, I'm just saying that if they excluded the first however many digits this would not actually weaken their cryptography that much.

BTW knowledge of the existence of this vulnerability enables a well financed malware group to use AI to find it, if you run PHP anything you should be taking the service down NOW until a patch is available. And then patch before bringing the service back up.

nightshade →home, for now@nightshade.technology

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.

(You should also, may I gently suggest, try finding an alternative that isn't written in PHP in the medium term, but I understand that's not always possible and sometimes you're stuck with legacy software for reasons outside your control. AI makes it a lot easier though. bsky.app/profile/jdp....)

John David Pressman@jdp.extropian.net

Oh you know what? Add PHP to the list with C for "you should just presumptively rewrite any software in this language on the expectation it is terminally fucked wrt security".

John David Pressman reposted

"No way to prevent this," says only language aside from C where this regularly happens

nightshade →home, for now@nightshade.technology

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.

Oh I see it's starting for real today.

nightshade →home, for now@nightshade.technology

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.