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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 12th, 2024

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  • Yes, cloudflare will not tamper with your record because you are not important enough to be worth the reputation loss. Realistically, no harm will come to you from cloudflare.

    However! They are still the party that could theoretically cause the largest amount of damage to both you and your users.

    Cloudflare cannot track visitors of my website, the only malicious thing they can do is to tamper with my DNS record.

    They “cannot” only because they say so. Changing your DNS record allows them to read 100% of all incoming traffic even if it is TLS encrypted (because they can acquire a valid TLS certificate for your domain through a DNS challenge).


  • DNS is the most important foundational stone. Whoever controls your DNS can redirect all of your users to any address they want AND present a valid TLS cert through a DNS challenge. They can also redirect all E-Mails of the associates domain, and if any address was used to register an account, they can reset that accounts password. Trusting someone to handle your DNS is the highest trust you can put on someone on the internet. And that is both for a website povider trusting the registrar of their domain and for a end user with their DNS resolver.



  • With a tiny bit of offsec you can make pretty bulletproof setup.

    Work only exists inside of a Win11 VM. It never touches the underlying system! All files associated with that VM (most importantly the virtual disk) live on a separate partition, or better separate drive. That partition is not mounted in fstab. So under normal circumstances it should never be mounted. So any fuck up they do to their Linux system will leave that partition untouched. If worst comes to worst that can boot a live iso from USB and run their work VM from there.

    I would trust that setup infinitely more than having windows as a base system.





  • Infinities don’t care about the actual numbers in the set, but about the cardinality (size). Obviously the numbers between 0,1 and 1,2 are different but have the same size.

    But 0,1 and 0,2? Size is unintuitive for infinities because they are … infinite. So the trick is to look for the simplest mathematical formula that can produce a matching from every number of one set to every number in the second. And as somebody has said, every number in 0,2 can be achieves by multiplying a number in 0,1 by 2. So there is a 1 to 1 relation between 0,1 and 0,2. Ergo they are the same size.


  • I think the “men evil”, “woman good” is just worded to strongly but is generally true (not actually true, but people considered it to be true).

    Its more “men dangerous”, “men threatening” and not “evil”. A man in a women’s bathroom is a threat. A women in a mans bathroom is there because there was a line for the woman’s bathroom. The actual reason for those scenarios does not matter, the man will be seen as an invasion and a perpetrator. I have personally experienced examples of neutral situations as well (going to the woman’s bathroom as a man without negative reactions) but the general discourse about the topic is pretty clear.


  • You don’t get hacking protection from bots

    I disagree. I don’t know the details of cloudflares bot detecion, but there are many automated vulnerability scanners that this could protect against.

    I said that instead of crashing the system they should have something that takes an intentional decision and informs properly about what’s happening.

    I agree. Every crash is a failure by the designers. Instead it should be caught by the program and result in a useful error state. They probably have something like that but it didn’t work because the crash was to severe.

    What’s the point of your complaint if you do agree?

    I am not complaining. I am informing you that you are missing an angle in your consideration. You can never prevent every crash ever. So when designing your product you have to consider what should happen if every safeguard fails and you get an uncontrolled crash. In that case you have to design for “fail open” or “fail closed”. Cloudflare fucked up. The crash should not have happened and if it did it should have been caught. They didn’t. They fucked up. But, i agree with the result of the fuck up causing a fail closed state.


  • it shouldn’t crash the whole thing: if the bot detection module crahses, control it, fire an alert but accept the request until fixed.

    Fail open vs fail closed. Bot detection is a security feature. If the security feature fails, do you disable it and allow unchecked access to the client data? Or do you value Integrity over Availability

    Imagine the opposite: they disable the feature and during that timeframe some customers get hacked. The hacks could have been prevented by the Bot detection (that the customer is paying for).

    Yes, bot detection is not the most critical security feature and probably not the reason someone gets hacked but having “fail closed” as the default for all security features is absolutely a valid policy. Changing this policy should not be the lesson from this disasters.