Pretty unlikely in my book. This runs OpenWRT out of the box. Given, there are still closed source binary blobs in these things, especially around WiFi 6 and frequently the customizations for the kernel isn't released, but those tend to be more expensive locations to place backdoors especially when the system is very open to inspection. These kind of devices are VERY frequently torn down by security researchers and used in WiFi shoot-outs leading to much higher potential increased detection of anything present.
A lot of this these "backdoor" style hypothesis' still need a motive justification for the cost. Who would they be targeting? What is the potential value of the backdoor?
Given the visibility and complex locations required for the firmware, this would be an expensive backdoor to put in place for any amount of time. The attack is completely untargeted, at best you may be able to say tech enthusiasts that travel. You probably can't count on executive targeting, this device requires a separate battery pack as well as per-site configuration as opposed to pairing to their iPhone and not carrying all that extra stuff.
What are the chances of an expensive, high-visibility backdoor showing up in a dirt cheap product line for a high-risk untargeted attack? Pretty low in my book but your threat model may vary.
Wow. It's as if you're completely unaware of how lucrative the market for malware in affordable IoT devices is.
It doesn't have to be targeted. The general demographic is a fantastic subject, and cheap affordable devices are a fantastic method. If one such trojan network device happen to end up in the home of an employee in a valuable position, or better yet in some office, an attacker has a chance to pivot further into a network.
I thought the reminder from GP was fair and I'm disappointed that it's downvoted as of this writing. One thing I've always appreciated about this community is that we can remind each other of the guidelines.
Yes it was just one word, and probably an accident—an accident I've made myself, and felt bad about afterwards—but the guideline is specific about "word or phrase", meaning single words are included. If GGP's single word doesn't apply, what does?
But again, if that is what the guideline is referring to, why does it say "If you want to emphasize a _word or phrase_". By my reading, it is quite explicitly including single words!
I’m saying that being pedantic on HN is a worse sin than capitalizing a single word. Being technically correct isn’t really relevant to how annoying people think you are being.
Imagine I capitalised a whole selection of specific words in this sentence for emphasis, how annoying that would be to read. I'll spare you. That is what the guideline is about, not one single instance.
I’m not the GP, but the reason I capitalize words instead of italicizing them is because the italics don’t look italic enough to convey emphasis. I get the feeling that that may be because HN wants to downplay emphasis in general, which if true is a bad goal that I oppose.
Also, those guidelines were written in the 2000s in a much different context and haven’t really evolved with the times. They seem out of date today, many of us just don’t consider them that relevant.
This is a false equivalency I'm surprised no one else has brought up. An archive of a site preserves attribution inherently, the scraping and training are not.
Is it? I thought it was ridiculous at first, but the more I think of it... both are scenarios where a corporation is scraping billions of webpages. We like the reason archive.is does it, but unless it's some kind of charity, I think it's a reasonable comparison.
archive.is is a charity no? Or at least they take donations, it seems the legal entity behind it is nebulous, but they don't have ads and have no paid product or offering.
They sure as shit do have ads. Have you ever accidentally followed a link using a browser profile that has no ad blocking enabled?
I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.
Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.
I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
Having a device enrolled in an MDM package does not make it a corporate device. Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping. If I install a productivity or developer tool on my personal phone or laptop for personal non-corporate use I would get mistaken as a corporate user by this process.
If you want to collect this information you should be clear about it and know and understand your edge cases before you start attempting enforcement actions based on it if that is the intent.
In general in my experience, personal tools are a VERY hard market to sell into for corporate environments (I took a peek at what the software on OPs site requires a commercial license to use). I would bet most if not all of what you're catching here is unauthorized installs in a corporate environment and you're more likely to loose interested users than sell more commercial licenses.
>Many corporations require personal devices be managed to support remote wiping.
Corporations cannot require you to have your personal devices be managed by them. If you're surrendering your own gear to a company, it stops being your own device.
But they can require things of devices connected to their wifi or being brought to their premises. You are welcome to leave the device at home if you don't want to consent.
Depends on the local laws. Where I live, they can either deal with it, or provide a secured storage space for the duration of the visit.
Either way, if a corporation wants their employees to use a device, they are obliged to make one available. Surrendering your private equipment to their management makes it not yours anymore.
Yeah you're 100% right that it's optional. It's usually only required to allow company data such as email, slack, file sharing etc on your personal device. If you're on-call it is VERY rare for an employee to win a fight on making the company provide a dedicated device for that purpose (which can inherently make it a condition of your job but that's an exception).
Most employees tend to not care about the why and are happy to just do it making "you" (the one bucking the trend) the oddball. The one not being the team player. It's not legally required, and you won't be fired for it, but its strongly socially encouraged and that makes it mandatory for anyone not willing to put up that fight.
On iOS there is the concept of "Managed Apps" that is appropriate for a BYOD scenario. They are info sandboxed and can't share information (either direction) with unmanaged apps. That would count as an MDM enrollment, if you are looking for it.
I haven't decided my opinion on this specific license, ones like it, or specifically around rights of training models on content... I think there is a legitimate argument this could apply in regards to making copies and making derivative works of source code and content when it comes to training models. It's still an open question legally as far as I know whether the weights of models are potentially a derivative work and production by models potentially a distribution of the original content. I'm not a lawyer here but it definitely seems like one of the open gray areas.
Another commenter mentioned that this is needed for consistently ordering events, to which I'd add:
The consistent ordering of events is important when you're working with more than one system. An un-synchronized clock can handle this fine with a single system, it only matters when you're trying to reconcile events with another system.
This is also a scale problem, when you receive one event per-second a granularity of 1 second may very well be sufficient. If you need to deterministically order 10^9 events across systems consistently you'll want better than nanosecond level precision if you're relying on timestamps for that ordering.
That is also what I came here to find out. Would love to hear from the creators of the project how it compares and contrasts to Talos. We've been running Talos for a few bare-metal and air-gapped cluster deployments with pretty good success but do have some pain-points.
It's an opinionated vertical platform; if you run into an edge case, bug, or functionality you don't like, you are have to open a discussion Github and wait for a new release to fix or change things. The devs are very responsive, but the same as any open source tool, it's their project.
It perhaps depends on how much customization you want to do - GPUs and drivers, custom CNI, very specific disk settings. I've had more trouble with bare metal systems with varied hardware vs their supported cloud platforms, which are approved and tested.
I'm pretty positive toward Talos but if you stray from the happy path, by choice or accident, it can become challenging technically. And then you have sunk costs around choosing this platform and how hard it would be to restart from scratch.
Not OP, but when we tested it out it was painful to handle usb disks. The reason being that if you have two they get named sda/sdb randomly. We managed to overwrite the usb we were using to install talos since that one was named sda one boot and sdb the next. This lead ut to develop the “pullout technique” when installing…
This mostly only happened because it was a test cluster where we used usb disks, probably not a problem when one properly provisions.
Otherwise it was great! But it does feel akward not booting into an environment where you have a terminal at first
This does sound like it could be solved with better installDiskSelectors[0]. Talos has done a fair bit of work in improving this and UserVolumeConfigs in the last couple of 1.x revisions.
Alternatively, network booting in some fashion is an option. [1]
It's very different from k3s. With k3s, you have a Linux installation like Debian or Fedora and you install k3s on it. You can SSH into the box, install any other Linux program not running in Kubernetes, etc. It also means that you need to run security updates and all the other stuff that goes along with administering a Linux box.
With Talos, it's just Kubernetes running on the box. There's no SSH or anything. Yes, it's a Linux kernel running, but you don't have a way of running stuff on the box outside of Kubernetes.
For me, Talos is great. If I'm setting up some boxes for K8s, I don't want to have to deal with admin'ing a Linux box. I don't want to login to the box and run some non-K8s service on it. I just want a K8s node and that's what Talos gives me. I think that's also the experience most people want. It's why people pay AWS, GCS, and Azure tons of money to get hosted K8s nodes rather than a Linux box they need to admin.
They might have meant lack of true 64bit pointers ..? IIRC the chrome wasm runtime used tagged pointers. That comes with an access cost of having to mask off the top bits. I always assumed that was the reason for the 32bit specification in v1
Actually it is. If you want to build a cheap sensor or actuator, than any additional component is getting expansive. Remember it is not only the external component, it is also the PCB space, is the production, and the testing after production. This adds up all to the costs.
When you use a µC to make it cheap, then you don't want to use additional components.
A lot of this these "backdoor" style hypothesis' still need a motive justification for the cost. Who would they be targeting? What is the potential value of the backdoor?
Given the visibility and complex locations required for the firmware, this would be an expensive backdoor to put in place for any amount of time. The attack is completely untargeted, at best you may be able to say tech enthusiasts that travel. You probably can't count on executive targeting, this device requires a separate battery pack as well as per-site configuration as opposed to pairing to their iPhone and not carrying all that extra stuff.
What are the chances of an expensive, high-visibility backdoor showing up in a dirt cheap product line for a high-risk untargeted attack? Pretty low in my book but your threat model may vary.
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