Spyke

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Adobe's Employees Are Just As Upset at the Company As Its Users: Report

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I was working at a company at one point that got a contract to build something I viewed equivalent to malware. Immediately I brought it up to several higher-ups that this was not something I was willing to do. One of them brought up the argument "If we don't do it someone else will."

This mentality scares the shit out of me, but it explains a lot of horrible things in the industry.

Believing in that mentality is worse than the reality of the situation. At least if you say no there's a chance it doesn't happen or it gets passed to someone worse than you. If you say yes then not only are you complicit, you are actively enforcing that gloomy mentality for other engineers. Just say no.

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Critical vulnerability affecting most Linux distros allows for bootkits

The most useful quote to those familiar with the linux boot process:

“An attacker would need to be able to coerce a system into booting from HTTP if it's not already doing so, and either be in a position to run the HTTP server in question or MITM traffic to it,” Matthew Garrett, a security developer and one of the original shim authors, wrote in an online interview. “An attacker (physically present or who has already compromised root on the system) could use this to subvert secure boot (add a new boot entry to a server they control, compromise shim, execute arbitrary code).”

If an attack needs root then it doesn't matter. Your box is toast anyway. If you're using http boot without verification then you should have seen a MITM attack coming.

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Anon discovers .NET

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Microsoft tried to lock a development feature behind a paywall by introducing an artificial dependency on Visual Studio.

This also happened to occur right around the time there were also licensing and hosting issues around open source libraries. The manipulation of the .NET foundation was the really concerning part. Made it clear that MS still doesn't give a damn about the wider community using their language.