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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • If you are building a static system, SELinux is amazing. You need a few lines of policy per application to label things appropriately, then you can see what accesses programs made and decide if you want to allow them or not.

    Taking a full Linux system and adding a locked down SELinux policy can be done in less than a week. If you are starting with an SELinux enabled system and just want to lock down your application, it can be done in less than a day.

    Once you know what you are doing, there is also a pretty powerful policy analysis tool that lets you see what a given domain can do; including transitive things like “domain sandbox_t can launch a program in Domain vim_t, which can write a file in Domain sshd_config_t, which can be read by domain sshd_t” which may indicate that your sandbox has a hole allowing it to compromise your sshd configuration. Although, to be fair, doing this level of analysis is not simple, even with the tooling. And you very quickly notice issues that are inherent in how Linux works.

    The problem with SELinux comes when you try applying it to general purpose systems, because you do not know ahead of time what the user will want to do. To be effective, policy needs to be written for the specific system it will be running on.

    An example I like to use is Android. Android makes great use of SELinux, and is a general purpose system. But the SELinux policy itself does not protect the general purpose Android system. It protects the special purpose system that is the Android runtime. All apps run with the same policy that says things like “cannot access the filesystem at all, unless given access by the Android runtime”, then the actual security policy users see is all implemented in use space by Android. SElinux is just a means of preventing apps from bypassing the Android permission system.


  • Also, AppArmor might not exist without SELinux.

    When the NSA first implemented SELinux, they did so directly, but were not able to get that merged into mainline because there was concern that SELinux was not the correct solution.

    What they ended up doing was creating the Linux Security Modules (LSM) framework, which is just a bunch of hooks in the kernel that a module can implement. SELinux was then rewritten as LSM module. This allowed other solutions like AppArmor to be implemented without any invasive work; they could just plug into the same system SELinux used.

    Some time later, the ability to run multiple LSMs at once was added.

    Incidentally, Linux capabilities are also implemented as an LSM.


  • He doesn’t. However, that is only according to this pesky technicality called “the law”. If the President does not want to follow the law, and appoints people who also do not care for following the law, then the law stops being a thing to look for for authority; and Musk can do this because Trump says he can.

    In the short term, expect this to be shut down by the courts. In the medium term, a bunch of these orders will end up in front of the Supreme Court that unironically said “if the president does it, it might be illegal, but he is absolutely immune from prosecution”. Even if the SC come down on the only legally defensible position, Trump could still say “them and what army”

    This is 100% a coup by Trump to centralize power in the executive. When staging a coup, “authority” is merely an inconvenience.





  • Mutual funds are a systemic risk by being dumb money. Normally this is talked about in the context of index investing. The more money blindly tracks an index, the more that index becomes detached from reality. This causes measurable inefficiencies in the market [0]. In practice, this isn’t that big of a deal, since “follow the index” essentially means “do what the smart money does”, so the distortion is not that great.

    In the context of voting, the analogous action would be abstaining (or voting with the majority of voting active shareholders). I suspect the reason this is not done is a combination of there not being enough active voting shareholders (as you say, that is why boards are a thing), and the risk of activist investors.

    On a much smaller scale, we have something similar happening in my local HOA. The county owns about a dozen units as part of it’s public housing program. Combined with the low turnout at HOA meetings, and the 1 property = 1 vote, this means that they could vote for essentially anything they want.

    In practice, their policy is to show up to all meetings but abstain from votes unless they are needed to make a quarum. If they are needed, they vote for whatever the consensus was among every else there.

    [0] See the index effect. Being added to an index increases a stock’s value, despite there being no change to the underlying fundamentals.




  • Reading the orders, the gender one is much more impactful.

    Canceling DEI programs cancels those programs, which just isn’t that impactful. Maybe it slows or reverse progress on equality at the population level. But an individual is not going to notice a difference (unless they were explicitly working in administering it). Further, those DEI programs were only for federal agencies, which are going to have a much bigger culture shift from the coming idealougical and loyalty purge. Minorities are still protected by strong anti discrimination laws and the 14th amendment.

    The anti trans order, in contrast, declares that trans people don’t exist. And the entirety of the federal government must act accordingly. This will have a direct effect on every openly trans person in the country. Further, the legal protections trans people have are based entirely on an interpretation of gender discrimination laws that the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to endorse; and which Trump has directed the Attorney General to not follow.


  • The electoral college was entirely a compromise to protect the interest of the slave holding states.

    The US has a separate mechanism to prevent run offs. If no one wins the election in the first round, the House of Representatives gets to ignore the election entirely and pick whoever they want as president. In another nod to slave states, this vote is done by state declaration, unlike every other vote the House conducts, where each individual member gets to vote.

    If they wanted to have a popular vote for the president, they could have easily done so within the logistical constraints of the time. States still send an electoral delegation to the capital to submit. However, instead of those delegations voting, they simply report their state’s election results. Then, the President of the Senate tallies all the state results and announces the result. If no one wins a majority, we fall back on our current stupid procedure in the House of Representatives.




  • The problem is that people cannot simply get out at scale. The homes themselves are not portable and represent a significant investment that most homeowners cannot afford to lose. An individual can sell, but that requires there being a buyer, so doesn’t actually solve the problem.

    What is needed here is a government funded relocation program. The government buys houses in eligible areas at market rate (locked in at the time the program starts, as market rate should collapse to 0). Then, the government does nothing, and saves money from not needing to subsidize the insurance market, and need needing to spend as much on disaster response and relief. Given that the disaster relief savings is largely born by the federal government, this program should receive federal funding as well.





  • Gaza’s Health Ministry casualty numbers have been stuck at around 40,000 for months. This is consistent, but not reliable. From the beginning, the GHM has only ever counted deaths directly attributable to the war who make it to a hospital (including those who are dead on arrival). Dead due to preventable caused like lack of food, water, sanitation, medicine or shelter? Not counted. Dead because a building blew up and your body is under a pile of rubble? Not counted unless someone dug up your body and took it to a hospital.

    Even developed and functioning countries take a long time after “small” disasters to get an accurate count of the dead. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, and their capability to count the dead has been declining the entire time.

    The GHM’s official numbers may be accurate for what they are. But what they are is a systemic undercount that is practically meaningless.