Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | attack-surface's commentslogin

Once brought a laptop adorned with loads of techie stickers to a conference, and all people could ask me was the background story behind those stickers, aswell as asking specifically about the tech in question. 'Oh you have an EFF sticker, do you care about digital rights and freedom?'.

Turned me off adding stickers after that. Not that I don't like discussing them, it just perks people's interest at the worst moments, when I'm focused on preparing my next talk for example. (Or maybe I don't want to school people on digital rights)


I remember that Simpsons episode when Homer creates a website, which contained nothing controversial, and full of bells and whistles, yet thin on content. Then he wrote an article about something controversial, and his visitor numbers went through the roof.

This is content marketing 101. Discover something new, tell people about it, profit. The backlinks will happen naturally and organically. You may even have your article featured in some high profile website that gets 10,000x more traffic than your site, boosting your SEO in the process.


Came here to say this. I even tried with a VPN to see if the download speed wasn't throttled with it, but it's still ridiculously slow.

Thinking of switching to yt-dlp, but then how does yt-dlp get around the throttling? Does it emulate a browser to make it look like a normal viewing of a video?


Honest question: why do you care how? It does circumvent it quite efficiently.

But I've seen somebody here in this thread mentioning that yt-dlp emulates the YouTube Android client.


Sometimes when you know the "trick" you can better predict how long it will last, and how long you can rely on it continuing to work.


>Honest question: why do you care how?

Aren't you interested to find out? It sounds like it would be interesting to know how they did it.


Not one bit. I only care if it works and whether it works fast enough. I get that other devs might care, it's just that I personally don't.


You can encrypt your files with Cryptomator[1] if you don't want Google looking at your files. I'm not sure about their policy on that though? I mean if it's encrypted, then they can't scan for piracy / Christchurch videos and other contraband, right?

[1] https://cryptomator.org/


Noticed a flaw in my phone and other people's phones where the default browser was not honored (on Android) and SMS links open in `Samsung Internet` which barely gets updates and is a serious vector for attack.

On top of this, why should a link containing a malicious payload be able to speak to other parts of the system? Doesn't Android do a basic security measure called sandboxing and `principle of least privilege'[0]?

I am highly suspicious of every URL in my SMS messages app now thanks to these NSO revelations. I'm not especially interesting, so I doubt I had NSO-grade malware on my phone, but we need to protect the masses, not just those with a high profile threat model (Journalists, Dissidents, Activists, etc).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege


Everything is sandboxed, part of the complexity of exploitation is the circumvention of the sandbox.

The reason they create a virtual machine out of image operations is because they have not even got direct code execution at that point.


It's all configurable on a per URL level on Android, it's just hidden deep into settings - it's not so much that it wasn't honored, it's likely someone some time set Samsung Internet top open SMS links - you can go in the app settings/permissions/app defaults to try and reset it or set it to another app.


Why did you create a brand new account for the sole reason of posting a somewhat low information post.


Go easy on me, I'm new here. I plan to comment a lot more as time goes by. My comment is purely anecdotal. I'm not saying `everyone now has malware`, just stating that classes of attacks can be killed by doing basic security like principle of least privilege & sandboxing (Android and Apple probably already do it, but then how are these attacks possible?)


I think the part of the article that touches on this is:

"(...) iMessage calls the following method in the IMTranscoderAgent process (outside the "BlastDoor" sandbox), (...)"

Looks like they have been decoding GIFs outside of the sandbox, which has been addressed later:

"Apple inform us that they have restricted the available ImageIO formats reachable from IMTranscoderAgent starting in iOS 14.8.1 (26 October 2021), and completely removed the GIF code path from IMTranscoderAgent starting in iOS 15.0 (20 September 2021), with GIF decoding taking place entirely within BlastDoor."


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: