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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 24th, 2023

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  • Perfect example of a (part of a) security vulnerability being fixed in a commit that doesn’t immediately seem security related and would never be back ported to a stablestale distro

    The code which parses the binary MaxMind database after decompression is well guarded as of 2024 but used to look different, potentially providing more attack surface. There is also an interesting commit where a contributor makes adjustments to the gzip::decompress() function which hints at a stack overflow, as the destination buffer was changed from static allocation on the stack to dynamic allocation on the heap, though it was not exploitable due to checks before it is written to









  • I think there’s a bit more to it than that.

    It’s very unfortunate that this came as a result of a baseless tantrum from Elon. And his arguments are contrary to free speech.

    That said… GARM is actually bad, and the world is a better place without it in my opinion. They are frequently involved in censoring legitimate journalism of violent events, anything that’s inappropriate from children, etc. You know how so many YouTubers have to carefully tiptoe around mention of controversial topics, even in non-controversial contexts, for fear of getting demonetized? I understand the POV of avoiding advertising near hate, but the fallout has real consequences when legitimate content is inevitably caught up.

    https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/09/jim-jordan-celebrates-successful-speech-suppression-as-a-claimed-win-for-free-speech/

    Another way to see it is that GARM is simply a trade organization by advertisers for advertisers, with one single goal: to maximize profits for the advertising industry. No corporation actually cares about ethics; it’s just that appearing to be ethical is often profitable, and in this case, advertisers believe that avoiding advertising near controversial content is better for their bottom line. If one believes that advertising is one of the most abusive industries in our modern society, it could be seen that anything to make it a little harder for advertisers to extract more profits is a win.