33a · HackerTrans

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

If they made a low power/mobile version, this could be really huge for embedded electronics. Mass produced, highly efficient "good enough" but still sort of dumb ais could put intelligence in house hold devices like toasters, light switches, and toilets. Truly we could be entering into the golden age of curses.

33a

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

Goodheart's Law of college admissions

33a

6 месяцев назадdiscuss

plot.ly has been able to do WebGL scatter plots with > 10 million points for years. There's a lot of libraries that can do this I think?

https://plotly.com/python/performance/

33a

6 месяцев назадdiscuss

You can probably get any coding agent with this if you put these instructions in the README/CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md or whatever of your repo.

It's unclear to me if Bob is working as intended or how we should classify these types of bugs. Threat modeling this sort of prompt injection gets murky, but in general don't put untrusted markdown into your AI agents.

33a

8 месяцев назадdiscuss

A lot of security problems can be solved by moving slower.

33a

9 месяцев назадdiscuss

Pedestrians on phones, not drivers on phones.

33a

10 месяцев назадdiscuss

It's actually pretty easy to detect that something is obfuscated, but it's harder to prove that the obfuscated code is actually harmful. This is why we still have a team of humans review flagged packages before we try to get them taken down, otherwise you would end up with way too many false positives.

33a

10 месяцев назадdiscuss

When we find malware on any registry (npm, rubygems, pypi or otherwise), we immediately report it to the upstream registry and try to get it taken down. This helps reduce the blast radius from incidents like this and mitigates the damage done to the entire ecosystem.

You can call it ambulance chasing, but I think this is a good thing for the whole software ecosystem if people aren't accidentally bundling cryptostealers in their web apps.

And regarding not copying massive trees of untrusted dependencies: I am actually all for this! It's better to have fewer dependencies, but this is also not how software works today. Given the imperfect world we have, I think it's better to at least try to do something to detect and block malware than just complain about npm.

33a

10 месяцев назадdiscuss

We use a mix of static analysis and AI. Flagged packages are escalated to a human review team. If we catch a malicious package, we notify our users, block installation and report them to the upstream package registries. Suspected malicious packages that have not yet been reviewed by a human are blocked for our users, but we don't try to get them removed until after they have been triaged by a human.

In this incident, we detected the packages quickly, reported them, and they were taken down shortly after. Given how high profile the attack was we also published an analysis soon after, as did others in the ecosystem.

We try to be transparent with how Socket work. We've published the details of our systems in several papers, and I've also given a few talks on how our malware scanner works at various conferences:

* https://arxiv.org/html/2403.12196v2

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxJPiMwoIyY

33a

10 месяцев назадdiscuss

We also caught this right away at Socket,

https://socket.dev/blog/npm-author-qix-compromised-in-major-...

While it sucks that this happened, the good thing is that the ecosystem mobilized quickly. I think these sorts of incidents really show why package scanning is essential for securing open source package repositories.

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