Matthew Garrett

Former biologist. Actual PhD in genetics. Security at https://aurora.tech, OS security teaching at https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu. Blog: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org. He/him.

Public Key

npub1aa0gpek8gwr77984c6ufq70j9d5y0hq5xegqrs8dvc4zp0vfzemsuuejrs

NIP-05 Address

mjg59_at_nondeterministic.computer@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsw7h5qumr58pl0zn6udwys08ezk6z8ms2rv5qpcrkkv23qhky3vactphs9g

Author Public Key

npub1aa0gpek8gwr77984c6ufq70j9d5y0hq5xegqrs8dvc4zp0vfzemsuuejrs

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Last Notes

2024-08-07 08:52:07

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@npub17wk…uzqr Oh no

2024-08-07 08:44:14

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Losing the "Matthew doesn't get arrested in the UK" challenge by not having the right passport despite having citizenship would be a hilarious outcome

2024-08-07 08:39:01

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@npub17wk…uzqr The nice thing about the online renewal as far as I can tell is that it just needs to match the biometric data from my existing one

2024-08-07 08:38:16

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If you're not familiar with Timatic then United has a convenient form at https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/travel/trip-planning/international-travel-requirements.html that you can fill in and it'll show you exactly what the checkin agents get shown about what paperwork you need for a flight and it's pretty fascinating (I've had the fun experience of violating these constraints with a letter issued by the US embassy in London and I do not recommend that experience)

2024-08-07 08:33:39

In the "I need to get a haircut so I can get my passport renewed" stage of planning a trip back to the UK (Timatic says that apparently my UK passport needs to be valid for me to get back into the UK but thankfully I have a valid Irish one that'll work if I fuck this up)

2024-07-28 05:44:44

Recently started dating someone from Sweden and oh shit I have bad news about how Blåhaj is supposed to be pronounced

2024-07-21 00:52:21

Do people who have strong familiarity with technical issues express hypotheses about what caused an issue before there's sufficient technical disclosure to know whether they're true or not? Of course! But they mostly do it in places where the audience understands that these are hypotheses rather than the truth, ie not in front of the general public

2024-07-20 00:35:20

"Linux would have prevented this!" literally true because my former colleague KP Singh wrote a kernel security module that lets EDR implementations load ebpf into the kernel to monitor and act on security hooks and Crowdstrike now uses that rather than requiring its own kernel module that would otherwise absolutely have allowed this to happen, so everyone please say thank you to him

2024-07-11 22:28:50

The 5 minute hack I wrote that has probably saved my coworkers the most aggregate time is a little tool that's run as an exec statement in .ssh/config and checks whether the user's SSH certificate has expired, printing a warning if so

2024-07-01 07:06:10

Secretly funding a "Memory safety is woke" campaign to ensure that just the worst fucking people keep getting hacked over and over again

2024-06-22 03:11:35

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Also need to replace a 30A circuit with a 50A one and stick in a tankless water heater because using electricity to keep a big tank of water hot is something that England might think makes sense but fuck that noise, and then I think the water project is complete and I can concentrate on setting up a wireless ISP instead (seriously did you know you can just… run LTE in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and nobody can tell you not to?)

2024-06-04 13:31:19

The "Recall can't record DRMed video content" thing is because DRMed video content is entirely invisible to the OS. The OS passes the encrypted content to your GPU and tells it where to draw it, and the GPU decrypts it and displays it there. It's not a policy decision on the Recall side, it's just how computers work.

2024-05-30 21:37:51

The Airwolf theme being performed on Tesla coils is certainly A Thing

2024-05-24 06:43:41

Getting to ride in a self-driving Waymo with the Phoenix Wright soundtrack is certainly an experience

2024-05-08 19:32:09

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@npub1y0e…mm9n No, once you're in SEV-land you're not really in a good place to do hardware passthrough

2024-05-08 19:10:14

My annual plea for a thing: I want a type 1 hypervisor that just has a small isolated VM and then passes through the rest of the hardware to the main VM which runs Linux. The small VM is intended to be used to run small pieces of code that the main OS should not be able to interfere with. Does such a thing exist? (Think Xen, but with a Dom0 that can't see into DomUs)

2024-03-14 09:13:21

Forging digital artifacts is difficult - there's a huge number of moving parts and they keep changing and it all leaves traces. So here's a description of discrepancies between claims around evidence submitted in a court of law and the data hidden in that evidence: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/69507.html

2023-12-30 10:50:29

Set of people who are all "We reverse engineered this CPU with an undocumented ISA and found a vulnerability that allowed us to flip a single bit in an HSE to obtain a key that allowed us to encrypt a payload that gave us arbitrary code execution on the ISS" and simultaneously also "It's literally impossible to prevent this single fucking guy from showing up at the event we run"

2023-12-29 22:43:02

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"But they might sue us if we kick them out!" for what? Just say that they're not welcome. There's no need to say why. You're not obliged to say anything that they could argue was defamatory. Refund them if you want to avoid an argument about that.
If people could easily win lawsuits over being kicked out of an event, every club on the planet that had barred someone for being an asshole would be out of business.

2023-10-21 01:36:04

PLEASE check your kids' Halloween candy. Just found an Okta admin access token in a Snickers bar.

2023-09-17 09:44:40

One of the things that defines a good leader is them spending time ensuring that a generation of new leaders exists to replace them and yes this is a criticism of Stallman

2023-08-31 08:48:47

KiwiFarms, which I do not support, should not be subject to punishment other than via the rule of US law, which I also do not support - an EFF opinion piece written by Glenn Greenwald

2023-08-31 07:36:52

ML models being trained on information they can scrape from the internet provides a perverse incentive - if knowledge is shared in ways that can't easily be scraped, that knowledge remains outside the scope of what the models can learn from. People working in fields that are currently poorly documented suddenly have a reason to stop writing blog posts, and instead engage in spoken presentations. A new kind of passing down of secrets from generation to generation.

2023-08-31 01:46:17

"Huh, that's interesting. I don't know what's going on here" is, it turns out, rather more concerning when it's coming from your ophthalmologist and the conversation isn't about software

2023-08-30 19:08:21

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@npub17lg…9uux Fulldump

2023-08-20 21:11:05

When someone asks a question here and you know the answer, click through to view their post on their instance rather than on yours just to make sure there aren't already 3000 identical answers that haven't made their way to your instance

2023-08-20 03:51:27

What level of plumbing are you on, my man
https://nondeterministic.computer/system/media_attachments/files/110/919/899/692/529/751/original/8bf3eda162410c54.jpg

2023-08-13 08:59:54

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@npub1erh…w6xs AOO's failure was obvious far longer than 2.5 years ago, and everyone on the board since the handover needs to accept responsibility for fucking up the value of the OpenOffice brand

2023-08-13 08:50:04

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@npub1erh…w6xs And continues to ruin the reputation of the Apache Foundation to this day

2023-08-12 18:19:41

Remember that free software licenses are irrevocable - even if a vendor changes a project to a non-free license, the older versions continue to exist as free software. So while we should absolutely criticise vendors who take the work of others and make it non-free, we should also bear in mind that they gifted us the earlier versions in the first place, and cannot take that away again.

2023-08-10 07:38:54

STOP DOING SPECULATIVE EXECUTION
INSTRUCTIONS WERE NOT MEANT TO HAVE REVERSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS

2023-08-10 01:01:02

Once again in a situation to tell people that IPMI passwords have a maximum length in bytes, not characters, and so many implementations will assign a 20 byte array, accept a 20 character password, and then set the last byte of the array to \0 and so silently truncate the password to 19 characters

2023-08-10 00:15:48

You: (implements secure boot)
Me: (jams screwdriver into NAND pins, receives u-boot prompt)

2023-08-08 09:11:47

Entirely normal well-adjusted individual
https://nondeterministic.computer/system/media_attachments/files/110/853/203/989/455/166/original/96f9caf8682268c2.png

2023-08-07 21:50:52

Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
Transaction test succeeded.
Running transaction
Good lord

2023-08-06 05:59:53

The Techrights guy has had someone trolling his IRC channel for the past year, has (incorrectly) concluded it's me, and has now decided to… report it to the police?