There's absolutely no way to account for humans, who can be tricked, or pressured, or just make human sized mistakes.

Again, of course there is.

Decades ago, I worked in a bank in an old building. The door had a card reader for access. You boop your card and the door opened. People would hold the door open for each other all the time out of politeness, even when they didn't know each other. Security told us not to do that, but it's hard to convince people to stop being polite.

I had a laptop stolen from my desk in a place like that once. (Not a bank - but similar door-card reader system). This guy came in in the middle of the day, wearing overalls. He confidently walked through the door after someone, like he belonged there. He walked up to my desk, swiped my laptop and just strolled out.

At the bank, they've replaced the door with mechanical gates and a security guard. The gates - physically - only let one person to walk through at a time. You can't hold a gate open any more. And the security guards stop anyone who tries.

Is it 100% foolproof? No. But it's way more secure. It would have stopped that laptop thief.

There's this pernicious, defeatist attitude that if you can't make a system 100% secure, so you shouldn't try. That's misguided. Most systems can be made orders of magnitude more secure than they are today. It just takes a bit of care and work.

As soon as you make something foolproof, the universe evolves a better fool

Fine. Make the universe work for it. The whole system becomes more resilient as a result.

Look at our immune system. Incredibly complex and clever, and able to keep us alive in the face of all sorts of pathogens. It exists because of this cat and mouse game, played over millions of years.

There's people in the highlands of PNG who regularly eat each other. Of course, many are thought to have died due to prion diseases. But now these tribespeople seem to have become largely immune to prion disease. Incredible.

The best way to make them work for it? Put it on paper.

Put what on paper? I don’t understand your comment.

Don’t store important and sensitive data in databases or computers at all. Put it on paper.

Computers make copying, processing, manipulating, and disseminating information easy. That is a bad thing for some kinds of information.

It explicitly mentions Kuru as "prion disease", it ignores that the mortuary practice of eating various parts of respected dead has long passed in time .. although the lingering effect on the woman and children that ate portions of the brain in the 1970s, early 1980s, is still residual in a very few.

From an evolutionary PoV a perfect defence is overkill - with two separate defences against prion diseases in that region it's only the rare variation that causes any issue - and that rarely occurs before a new generation is birthed - ie. 'perfect' from the PoV of the selfish genes.

The claim is that people in PNG are "largely immune" to these diseases, where kuru shows that they are not, and the "cure" was a stop in the practice, not some evolutionary upgrade

They are largely immune to Kuru - the number of people that could contract it (ie. the number who ate brain) was significantly larger than the number of people who actually did contract it.

The resistance came about via two separate "evolutionary upgrade"(s).

I cannot find any such claim in the literature.

It appears to me that, like BSE (aka Mad Cow disease) it really depends on exposure.

It was specifically endemic to the Fore, not so much to the Yate and Usurufa, and not particularly at all to other highland people in the general region.

There's a twofer that skittled the Fore, a ~1900 mutation that created a new form of infectious prion proteins, and a local variation that saw less uptake in the Fore of a resistant prion protein (alongside other resistant prion protein).

So, over the highlands region, there was general resistance thanks to several evolved variations, in one specific locale (the Fore) there was insufficient resistance to the mutation that hit a peak of 200 deaths / annum for about three years(?) in the late 50s.

I can't speak to "the literature", I just had a lot of conversations with the people on the ground (Mike Alpers, etc), on again / off again, since the mid 1960s.

Acshually a protective mutation was quickly being selected for (more precisely, the lack of it was strongly selected against).

Paper about Kuru and mutations referenced in comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719102

The paper relies on the fact that people who were dying did not have the gene, but those that didn't ... did

That's not really enough to say "We have found the gene" - it's just really good data to warrant further investigation

Also, the incubation period of the disease is up to 50 odd years, have there been follow up studies?

> millions of years of evolution are still not enough to build a perfect defence.

Who said anything about a perfect defence? And since when was that the bar?

The context is very clear - but, sure you can play word games, why not.

Just, you're doing it on your own.

What seems obvious to you doesn't seem obvious to me. I'm not a malicious or incompetent enemy. But you will need to explain your perspective for me to understand it.

This is the key truth that we keep forgetting

I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make, or how this relates to computer security.

Funny - now you're talking about context...

You seem mad about something I've said? I'd appreciate if you come out and say it instead of making vague insults, awesome_dude.

Then there's no such thing as security.

By the way, there are countless ways to account for humans. There are entire branches of engineering devoted to this. If you don't want someone to leave the bank with a pen customers use for signing checks, you just chain it to the desk. If you don't want the installer to forget to put the pen-chain in, make a photo of the chain part of the checklist required to get paid. If you want to... etc.

The idea is that you determine an acceptable level of risk, then secure to that level. Maybe the acceptable level of risk chosen by companies is wrong. Maybe we need to increase that risk exposure via heavier fines and regulations. Maybe the cost of reducing that risk is too high already. Maybe we need to fund that. Maybe it's too confusing and we need to research better standard practices. I dunno. But this is not some unsolvable problem.

> Then there's no such thing as security.

There really isn't

Ask anyone seriously involved in security - whether computer science related, or in general.

A thought experiment: Think about the most important secrets a country can have - now think how they are still discovered by competing countries, enemies, etc.

As long as there are humans in the loop there is a known weakness.

I'd love to see real stats on this.

We know about many famous cases of leaks - like the USSR stealing notes from the manhatten project. But I bet there are thousands of secrets which remain secret. We just don't actually know about them, because, y'know, they're kept secret.

This simply isn’t the case. There are plenty of secrets that every military keeps just fine. See how long we’ve gone without anyone ripping off the F-22? That’s not even a new airframe anymore.

This is EXACTLY what I was talking about. The tech that makes the F-22 an unmitigated terror of the skies is of utmost importance, so it’s still kept secret. The barriers around that information are obnoxious, but effective. What blood type a subsection of your military has is of much less importance. That’s why that data was stolen (See: OPM hack) and our best weapons remain secret.

In cryptography there are protocols that account for malicious actors

Um. how do you verify the contents? The history is for the contents you now have, not what might have been

The contents of the files don’t change, only the Merkle tree. You can verify that the content blobs all have the same sha1 by literally rehashing. Then you can verify that the contents of the clone are the same. That doesn’t stop history corruption, but it does prevent malicious injection into the current state of the tree before the migration.

Shallow clones and such would break but you could rehash the local history manually and compare the SHA256 hashes commit by commit, no?

Issue is it would be pretty slow so you'd want it to be a one time thing.

In the same way that a google search is .

LLMs are still playing word association - humans have something a little more complex going on where the word has meaning.

The easiest way to find that out is to TIAS

>socratic method exists. almost none follows it.

I have a hatred for people who think they can use this method.

If used incorrectly which it is a great percentage of the time it confuses the student. The person employing the socratic method must actually know the answer and where the student is in their mind. Failure on either account makes it pointless.

Ask anyone unfortunate enough to ask for help on IRC

> The person employing the socratic method must actually know the answer and where the student is in their mind.

The socratic method also has a much higher chance of revealing where the student is in their mind.

I sometimes ask more questions than utter new things when trying to explain something.

But that's because I'm trying to focus down and determine exactly where they're at before I just randomly make things worse by accident :-P.

I'm not sure if that's the actual socratic method. But people accuse me of using it. Either way, it does seem to work for me.

I agree that this notion that companies make these decisions is bad, bad on the grounds that it's people working for those companies that make the decisions, they hide themselves away, but the company itself isn't doing anything - is always a human making the decision

This is the load-bearing result

You're right to call it out.

pffft - 901 Bus to Broadmeadows station, then jump onto the train to Southern Cross

Total cost: $AU2.85

Takes FOREVER though :)

> Github is ripe for disruption and I hope it is disrupted soon.

It's an expensive, low revenue generating site.

There are, and have always been, competitors, including "host it all yourself" solutions, but nothing has really stuck.

How is it "ripe" for disruption?

They had $1b revenue in 2023 and now probably more than $2b in revenue... do you have cost figures showing what their expenses are?

> We have since added more than 3 million CPU cores, 120 petabytes of high-speed storage, and significant network capacity. We installed as much hardware as available power allowed in our existing data centers while accelerating our migration to Azure.

That can't be cheap.

A server box now has around 256 CPU cores. So that's about 12000 servers. If each one is $10k that's $120 million. Not a lot compared to Github's income.

$10,000 is only enough for CPU cost (2x AMD EPYC 9754). The rest of the servers (mainboard, RAM, storage, power supply, network card, rack, cooling, etc.) can easily triple or quadruple the cost.

Yup. Still, it's less than their annual income by several times.

Does that $10k server not need RAM?

If parent commenter is off by an order of magnitude in their costs, their point still stands.

$1.2 billion of costs on revenue of $1-$2b certainly seems like a big concern.

They do not throw away the servers every year..

But at this rate of growth, sounds like they'll need to buy around that amount every year just to keep up with current (not even taking into account future) growth.

Microsoft don't release the costs as you know, but

Compute and Storage for Free Tiers: Hosting code for over 150 million developers and processing over 2 billion GitHub Actions (CI/CD) workflows a month requires astronomical server power and data storage. The "Free" tier is a massive cost sink that Microsoft treats as a loss-leader marketing expense

Let me know when you understand how that's not free.