What an Oxide and Friends last night! @bcantrill and I were joined by the one and only @AndresFreundTec to talk about his discovery of the xz backdoor. It’s an incredible story… so great to get into the details with Andres. Definitely check it out (or on the pod tomorrow).
I was really pleased by this background image so wanted to talk about it briefly. The concept was (of course!) simple: the (in)famous xkcd graphic with the thankless Nebraskan removed https://xkcd.com/2347/
I should mention that we don't put a ton of time into Oxide and Friends (sorry!) so I try to bound these side-quests at least somewhat. Somewhat. I decided to find a physics simulator (like a lunatic) and SimPHY was the first one I stumbled onto that worked well enough. I roughed out the structure from the xkcd comic:
I threw it on the iPad that I "borrowed" from my older son and traced it in Procreate with his Apple Pencil. 100% it could have been better, but I already felt like a crazy person and wasn't sure it was going to work out
@gundersen@ahl Makes me wonder if someone could create a 3D game based on the dependency graph of packages.
Cyclic dependencies are going to be weird af, but packages rocketing up in the air because of those would be… quite real.
@bcantrill@AndresFreundTec We started by ranting about the coverage in the New York Times… coverage that explicitly refused to dig into the details. It’s all the more shocking because the big story here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack!
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