Centrist.

San Francisco
Joined November 2011
I don’t think good SDLC and patch-the-planet are mutually exclusive. But a great take on the importance of good security practices.
“Patch the planet, we can fix everything” is one of the most misleading, and harmful security initiatives I’ve seen. As if spending billions of dollars cooking the oceans to run swarms of agents spinning their wheels applying hourly? minutely? patches on every abandoned instance across the planet, racing against every incompetent sysadmin - no you will never catch up with human stupidity. And it’s completely the wrong direction. It’s this old school mentality that “I’ll stay in my IT lane, and just update every package and infra” as if this will ever amount to anything. As if this hasn’t been the strategy for half a century. Obviously you’re supposed to patch. But why be a hamster in a wheel spinning idly, while incompetent devs slop-cannon millions of lines of some of humanity’s most atrocious code ever conceived, bypassing every security recommendation, every known best-practice, to meet an arbitrary deadline set by their private equity overlords to ship some inane b2b saas that nobody is going to use, but will get everyone’s data leaked. You won’t patch everything. You won’t catch every bug. You know it’s stupid, it’s a helpless strategy because you don’t want to address the real root cause: making software that doesn’t suck ass. Engineering principles that aren’t guided by psychotic greedy men in suits that just want a return on their investment at the cost of everyone’s data. The problem is nobody gives a shit about breaches. “Cyber insurance covers this”, you send the breach notification, everyone shrugs as if it’s the accepted cost of living in society. So companies have no incentive to care. Some of the most incompetent passionless people become “engineering leaders” that “understand the business” of shipping atrocities, without an ounce of consideration or thought, pure monkey level poop-slinging. The worst code you’ve ever seen is production code, self-merged by the guy thinking increasing shareholder value is how you barely make it across the retirement line. “Move fast and break things” has been one of the most dangerous principles, and an embarrassing one to hold today. We have solutions. The dumbest dev can still ask a coding agent to find, explain, and address security issues in software architecture, and in implementation. And it does a better job than the majority of security engineers I’ve worked with. But they do the opposite. They go AROUND and bypass every security recommendation anyone or anything makes. I’ve seen Claude-generated comments in code saying “this is highly insecure but we have decided to accept the risk” for things with trivial fixes. God forbid, you’re going to have to work with devs. Teach them software design, architecture, planning how components and microservices interact, how to make safe code, how to keep it safe, ultimately just to be considerate. To care a little bit about your craft. “Patch the planet” is a waste of time. Invest in what we ship instead. It’s the ONLY way to make software resilient.
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“Patch the planet, we can fix everything” is one of the most misleading, and harmful security initiatives I’ve seen. As if spending billions of dollars cooking the oceans to run swarms of agents spinning their wheels applying hourly? minutely? patches on every abandoned instance across the planet, racing against every incompetent sysadmin - no you will never catch up with human stupidity. And it’s completely the wrong direction. It’s this old school mentality that “I’ll stay in my IT lane, and just update every package and infra” as if this will ever amount to anything. As if this hasn’t been the strategy for half a century. Obviously you’re supposed to patch. But why be a hamster in a wheel spinning idly, while incompetent devs slop-cannon millions of lines of some of humanity’s most atrocious code ever conceived, bypassing every security recommendation, every known best-practice, to meet an arbitrary deadline set by their private equity overlords to ship some inane b2b saas that nobody is going to use, but will get everyone’s data leaked. You won’t patch everything. You won’t catch every bug. You know it’s stupid, it’s a helpless strategy because you don’t want to address the real root cause: making software that doesn’t suck ass. Engineering principles that aren’t guided by psychotic greedy men in suits that just want a return on their investment at the cost of everyone’s data. The problem is nobody gives a shit about breaches. “Cyber insurance covers this”, you send the breach notification, everyone shrugs as if it’s the accepted cost of living in society. So companies have no incentive to care. Some of the most incompetent passionless people become “engineering leaders” that “understand the business” of shipping atrocities, without an ounce of consideration or thought, pure monkey level poop-slinging. The worst code you’ve ever seen is production code, self-merged by the guy thinking increasing shareholder value is how you barely make it across the retirement line. “Move fast and break things” has been one of the most dangerous principles, and an embarrassing one to hold today. We have solutions. The dumbest dev can still ask a coding agent to find, explain, and address security issues in software architecture, and in implementation. And it does a better job than the majority of security engineers I’ve worked with. But they do the opposite. They go AROUND and bypass every security recommendation anyone or anything makes. I’ve seen Claude-generated comments in code saying “this is highly insecure but we have decided to accept the risk” for things with trivial fixes. God forbid, you’re going to have to work with devs. Teach them software design, architecture, planning how components and microservices interact, how to make safe code, how to keep it safe, ultimately just to be considerate. To care a little bit about your craft. “Patch the planet” is a waste of time. Invest in what we ship instead. It’s the ONLY way to make software resilient.
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Daghan Altas retweeted
We’re still testing how exploitable the Node.js/Brotli bug is, but we’ve found that it’s surprisingly hard to tell whether you’re even affected. So @ToBScottA built a scanner that finds hidden copies of the decoder, even in stripped binaries. github.com/trailofbits/brotl…
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BREAKING: github is currently experiencing unplanned uptime
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Daghan Altas retweeted
If you're looking at an updated Node.js, and calling CVE-2026-111497 done? We have some bad news: We likely don't even know the true scale of "Node2Shell" yet. Node patched CVE-2026-111497 on Oct 21. But the CVE wasn't in Node, it was in Brotli. So our researchers Diptendu Kar and Kurt Boberg went looking for every other package that bundles the same vulnerable Brotli decoder. Here's what we found 433 package entries across 12 ecosystems not great but the absolute worse part: Many of them don't even have fixes available yet. Now are they all reachable and exploitable? Probably not, we're finding out. But the important part: Node isn't the only affected runtime or package, not even close. We're working through the list to manually verify each one but so far we're looking at a 71% no fix yet rate, of the fixes most are still in alpha/early releases. The problem is most implementations aren't even called "brotli." The decoder is compiled into other runtimes like Chromium. 38 entries bundle Brotli older than 1.0.3. Some of those copies date to 2016, and of course are vulnerable to more than just this CVE. And there's no easy well to tell if you're affected. For example, 19 are WebAssembly builds, where memory corruption exists, but stays inside the sandbox. Some require explicit configurations to enable Brotli compression and they aren't on by default. But it's not obvious unless you are looking for it and testing for it. We're going to keep validating (and producing rules), but it's going to be a rough weekend for incident responders.
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Yes
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It’s comforting to know that I’ll be protected from the vulnapocalypse by Panasonic for the next 3 hours. 🙏
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Daghan Altas retweeted
Just used LiteLLM to create my first PHP website. The AI even suggested getting a certificate from eMudhra for HTTPS to protect my login page. The future looks really bright 🥳
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Dr @drmarkhyman is vindicated (again!)
GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in making cholesterol. GPT-Rosalind suggested a possible explanation: cholesterol may not be reaching where neurons need it. That gives scientists a specific mechanism to test and, if confirmed, a direction for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders. With @perturbai_tx and @scrippsresearch, a team of thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents worked in parallel, connecting gene-expression results from millions of mouse brain cells with scientific literature in just 32 minutes. We’re now expanding this collaboration to identify new drug targets. openai.com/index/scaling-ai-…
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Daghan Altas retweeted
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- 4 -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
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Daghan Altas retweeted
Absolute legends! ♥️ Do not believe @wiz_io and their PR stunt. Credit where credit is due. 👏
Do you know who illustrated the comic on calif.io/php2shell? Her name is Stephanie Cortes. And her husband is the hacker who discovered php2shell: @lcfr_hax. This artist-hacker couple has the best story, stay tuned!
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“monster-in-the-middle (MITM)”
I read this and I'm terrified, the situation seems intractable. In the python ecosystem alone every cpython install, venv, UV is at risk. Don't get my started on npm, pnpm, yarn, go, rust. My current 2026 security posture: stay home and only connect to the internet from a trusted ISP. The winter is coming. discuss.python.org/t/informa…
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Why is Wiz taking any credit for this? Their blog post words it like they discovered it.
Let’s set the record straight: @lcfr_hax was the first to discover php2shell and develop a working exploit. See his August 5 tweet: xitter.cf/lcfr_hax/status/208503… His work convinced the PHP Foundation to invest in fixing this entire bug class. He then worked around the clock to review, test, and retest the patches.
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Daghan Altas retweeted
Technical moats are mostly over at this point. If you’re building something that is meant to be durable, the only moats now are: • Recursive Self Improvement • Decisive First Strike Capability • Temporal Pincer Movement
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Dear god it's inventing German from first principles
GPT-6.1-Sol reasoning traces totally legible, nothing to worry about
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Replying to @martin_casado
Q: it seems like you say a lot of stuff that doesn’t align with what you actually do and deliver and even if you line up all of what is said it isn’t particularly consistent a framework. A. It’s all very complicated. Here are some more words that further obfuscate all that we have said related to what we do. Conclusion. We’re telling a story about what we’re doing pretty much unrelated to what we are doing. But trust us.
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This is a very strong argument in favor of the simulation theory.
We placed the fruit fly brain inside Odyssey-3, a frontier world model. The lil’ guy is now flying around totally imagined, simulated worlds all by itself 🫶
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Daghan Altas retweeted
If @DanielLurie can issue an order to ban data centers in SF, why doesn’t he just issue a ban on fentanyl?
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This is still the case in Sacramento.
Before it became possible to get rich by creating wealth, the way to do it was to be on the winning side in a military or political dispute.
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