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Brian Skinn

@btskinn@fosstodon.org
mastodon 4.7.3
  • Open on fosstodon.org
100 Followers
107 Following
13 Posts
Joined November 15, 2022
GitHub:
https://github.com/bskinn
Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 5mo ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@andrewnez/116544411882216906

Everyone involved with open source needs to read this. It's a deep, on-point analysis of the methodological and data source gaps in security, health, etc. evaluation of open source projects/tools.

There might not be anything most can do about it, but everyone should be aware of what they're seeing ... and, more importantly, *not* seeing ... when they look at these sorts of stats/metrics/rankings.

mastodon.social

Andrew Nesbitt: "The Mismeasure of Open Source: https://nesbitt.io…" - Mastodon

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 5mo ago

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@yossarian/116517318267533317

I never knew how much I should have been appreciating the comparative simplicity of Python on this until I was faced with the 'npm ls' and 'npm why' output from a substantial project for the first time. 😵‍💫

infosec.exchange

yossarian: "people somewhat frequently complain about Python …" - Infosec Exchange

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 3mo ago

A feature I'd like to see on LLM chat bots is toggles for color coding the text output based on underlying per-token inference metrics.

A heatmap of prediction confidence.

The weighting of RAG sources vs pretrain data vs raw speculative generation.

A metric of extent of extrapolation vs interpolation from pretrain/RAG corpus.

I bet only the first is actually technically feasible, though, and even so probably would just make the things burn money even faster...

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 4mo ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@distrowatch/116733694690857706

Oh, man. After all the thought and decisions I've put into my PyPI and NPM security over the last few months, just the past week or two I started wondering about vulns in Linux distro packaging systems. (Dockerhub images, too.)

Another paranoia proved justified. ☹️

mastodon.social

DistroWatch: "Today would be a good day to avoid installing new…" - Mastodon

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 4mo ago

Has anyone else had ChatGPT referencing malicious, forged, or other bad-actor web sources in its outputs recently?

Yesterday it answered a @pydantic@fosstodon.org question with a link to the genuine Pydantic docs sitting right next to a link to a copycat forgery of the Pydantic docs at pydantic[dot]com[dot]cn. The "ads" splashed everywhere really confused me, until I looked at the address bar and realized what had happened.

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 6mo ago

More good dev and maintainer security advice from Docker:

https://www.docker.com/blog/defending-your-software-supply-chain-what-every-engineering-team-should-do-now/

Defending Your Software Supply Chain: What Every Engineering Team Should Do Now | Docker
Docker

Defending Your Software Supply Chain: What Every Engineering Team Should Do Now | Docker

The latest supply chain attack wave is not a single incident to respond to. It is a permanent shift in the threat landscape. In this blog by the Docker CISO Mark Lechner, we share the recommended best practice we use to protect ourselves.

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 6mo ago
Replying to
For JS, I'm pretty much exclusively using npm and npx. For local npm installs, a simple broad-spectrum approach is putting "min-release-age=3" in ~/.npmrc. User-global, and easily overridden in individual cases where very new packages are needed. As best I can tell, this covers local use of npx as well.
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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 6mo ago
Replying to
A local ~/.npmrc doesn't help in CI, though. npm ci invocations *should* be working from a package-lock.json, so they're not at issue here. npx is a major gap here, though. I think the options boil down to either duplicating the min-release-age setting in each per-repository .npmrc, or remembering to do this every time in workflows: npx --min-release-age=3 I think I prefer the /.npmrc approach, because that's fewer times I need to remember to include the option.
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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 6mo ago
Replying to
For Python, I primarily use three tools: pip, pip-tools, and uv. I'll occasionally use pipx, too. No help from me on other Python tools. pip does support configuration files: https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/topics/configuration/#configuration-files But, the locations and names of these files are not consistent cross-platform, which makes them inconvenient to manage. So, my current preference is to use environment variables, at least on Linux and in Git Bash.
pip.pypa.io

Configuration - pip documentation v26.2.1

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 6mo ago

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@btskinn/116350143213090989

Might be interested in this, @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org - I'm interested in hearing about as many folks' approach to this as I can.

Fosstodon

Brian Skinn (@btskinn@fosstodon.org)

Some seriously bonkers supply chain attacks lately. Read @SocketSecurity's post on the axios compromise tonight: https://socket.dev/blog/hidden-blast-radius-of-the-axios-compromise Got me thinking about hardening (or, well... "firmening", at least) my dev and CI environments using the various "min-age" and "exclude-newer" type options that package managers/installers have implemented. Thread with what I've come up with so far for PyPI and npm ecosystems.

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 2mo ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ancoghlan/116921107334575788

I wonder if this is behind the spate of reports of AI PRs deleting CI config to make the pipelines pass.

mastodon.social

Alyssa Coghlan: "Is "bots will be bots" the new "boys will be boys…" - Mastodon

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Open post
Brian Skinn @btskinn@fosstodon.org
· 3mo ago

@jscalzi@threads.net I wonder where they got the notion from ... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/12/china-spy-turtles-spy-fish-monitor-waters-claims

‘Spy turtles’ and ‘spy fish’ being used to monitor Chinese waters, Beijing claims
the Guardian

‘Spy turtles’ and ‘spy fish’ being used to monitor Chinese waters, Beijing claims

Ministry says animals fitted with sensors by foreign agencies collect sensitive sea data, in ‘invisible secret war’

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