EBAF – eBPF Based Ad Firewall(github.com) |
EBAF – eBPF Based Ad Firewall(github.com) |
Also... who the hell tries to make changes to a user's sudoers file from their install script? This is an awful project.
So I investigated, lining up the real Spotify logo in GIMP - it doesn't match up, the details are different!
But then I checked the image metadata:
`Actions Software Agent Name : GPT-4o, OpenAI API`
Doh, I should've saved time and checked that first. TIL OpenAI explicitly watermarks their output images via metadata. It even has c2pa signatures (which I didn't bother trying to verify)
The ebaf executable checks the current directory by default, to look for the ebpf code to load[1].
So, running the install script this allows any ebpf code to be loaded into the kernel without a sudo password. You probably don't want this! (I'm pretty sure that'd be enough for a root LPE)
Further, the ebaf executable writes logs to a file named `/tmp/ebaf-stats.dat` [2]. An unprivileged user could put a symlink here, causing the destination file to get clobbered.
It also re-resolves all domain names every 600 seconds. Given that there are over a thousand domains listed, that's quite a lot of DNS traffic! [3]
Also, the "web dashboard" claims to listen on localhost, but it actually listens on INADDR_ANY [4]
[0] https://github.com/Kazedaa/eBAF/blob/8f88cefe0b5a837aa99f454...
[1] https://github.com/Kazedaa/eBAF/blob/8f88cefe0b5a837aa99f454...
[2] https://github.com/Kazedaa/eBAF/blob/8f88cefe0b5a837aa99f454...
[3] https://github.com/Kazedaa/eBAF/blob/8f88cefe0b5a837aa99f454...
[4] https://github.com/Kazedaa/eBAF/blob/8f88cefe0b5a837aa99f454...
What I find most interesting is that it apparently didn’t trigger their content filters which, at least previously, were also blocking piracy stuff.
I see that it all comes down to a blacklist of urls. Wouldn’t eBPF just make things more complicated?
If you buy a fancy network card from a company like Nvidia, you could run the eBPF program on the card itself and the kernel wouldn't even see the packet come in. This use case doesn't seem like it'd need that kind of performance tweak, though.
It's useful as a fun project to experiment with eBPF, though!
And because it uses eBPF, technically (it probably doesn't support this yet but it could) you could block requests at the application level, even if it uses TLS, before it ever even gets to a resolver or firewall.
Taking that fact even further, this means that not only well-behaved resolv.conf-reading applications are blocked, but programs that use their own DoH/DoT could be as well. Your browser wouldn't even need an ad-blocker extension. Your local resolver and your VPN-specific resolver both continue to work normally while also blocking what you want.
No means no, my computer my choice. sudo build a real product.
Then "opt out" by not using the product? No one has a right to use Spotify. If you don't like the terms, don't use the service.
I'll never get why people smart enough to build something technically impressive like this feel the need to throw these completely childish pseudo-rationalizations out there. Yeah, you are stealing actually.. Is it that big of a deal? Nope. But it still is what it is.
Do they think this kind of false-moralizing will protect them from DMCA takedowns or something?
But that literally applies to any online licensing check flow.
And extends to binaries that are on your disk. I can patch that conditional jump, it is on my hard drive.
While Spotify is obviously an immoral company, you, the person reading this, are not entitled to free 24/7 cloud-streamed music on demand. They are a business and they don’t owe that service to you on principle.
If you don’t like them as a company, there’s way to purchase the music directly (remember how we all used the iTunes Store back in the day) and there are other streaming services whose morals you might find more acceptable.
To be clear, I’m not making some grand “piracy is evil” argument, but I’m saying that to publish software enabling piracy with the justification that a business’ free service is not good enough value for you is a bit out there.
I thought TiVo settled that argument long ago.
Edit; maybe not TiVo leading the disruption here: https://modern-counsel.com/2016/tivo/
I took it anyway. I have a few terabytes of flac that I stream through Plex when I feel like it. I dare anyone to stop me. Pay hard drive manufacturers, not IP companies.
This applies to a lot of things, not Spotify in particular.
This jumble of sentences stuck out to me as logically incoherent, but not necessarily LLM-generated. I guess I need to update my mental model a bit to account for more things being being LLM-generated.
If their server sends you bits, why should you delete the bits? If you accidentally sent them the wrong bits, do you think they'd be nice enough to delete them? Pre-emptively before receiving any notification from you?
Terms are irrelevant and in most cases have no legal power at all. Fighting back with technical power (as YouTube has done) is fair game though.
The golden rule of capitalism is to do everything in your physical ability to improve your individual situation at the expense of others. Feel free to come to an agreement with Spotify, that neither of you will do capitalism against the other. Until then, you should probably play the game or you will lose by default. Spotify isn't that important but you should definitely get into the mindset of playing the hand you're dealt.
Mental models differ, it is what it is. Stealing from artists is of course always poor form, don't do that.
Or is just an arbitrary bar of convenience that you set case-by-case depending on how you want to feel about it?
> No one has a right to revenue or profit.
I certainly didn't imply anything this universal. But as a society we do have laws, and if you engage with Spotify's product, you agree to their terms, and in that very specific context they do have a legal right to see their terms held up.
Now.. will they go after you for bypassing their ads? Probably not. Will your actions have a negative impact on them? Again, nope.. I definitely agree with you that they'll be fine..
But then the people who make these products that facilitate this kind of activity should just have the conviction to stand by their actions and say "yep we're helping you steal from Spotify".
Just own it, especially if your justification is "it doesn't matter anyways".
Regardless, I don't necessarily think piracy is immoral. There's a lot of situations where it's the only viable option. However, we should acknowledge that most people are pirating because they are cheap. Which, to me, isn't a sustainable model for anyone. Pirates want music, too, and if they keep this up then they lose as well.
Capitalism is about everyone doing everything they can to improve their own personal situation. If you let companies do everything they can to improve their situation, while you also do everything you can to improve companies' situations, you're not doing very well at capitalism.
This forum post suggests the ConnextX-6 might work: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/connectx-6-dx-crypto-a...
However, details are very hard to come by. Maybe the "offload" they offer isn't actually offloading anything and I've just misunderstood them when I last heard about them (and kernel XDP really is that fast).
But, yeah, driver mode seems plenty fast enough and unless traffic goes up over 10x we’re fine for now.
Always good to have a plan, though …
Only to the extent you are running software you don't trust. If you're running a user agent (e.g. a browser), rather than an app, you can easily do full ad-blocking much more effectively.
Calling TLS and DoH a weapon because apps you don't trust can use them to maintain integrity of their connections is like calling secure coding practices a weapon because they make jailbreaking harder.
I'm not a little angry about surveillance capitalism, I'm start a war angry about it.
Eliminating buffer overruns across the entire industry will also make it harder to e.g. jailbreak game consoles or iOS devices. That doesn't make it bad to eliminate buffer overruns; the problem is with devices requiring jailbreaking in the first place, rather than serving their users.
If you believe that TLS and DoH do more harm than good, you may be in a bubble where e.g. things like pihole are common, rather than being obscure tools used by highly technical users who tolerate and debug breakage.
I pay for Spotify because I’m lazy and can afford it, but rip whatever I want from YouTube, for example. I own it, I do not care. Why would one care what random strangers think of them?
Spoken from a place of security, comfort and privilege no doubt.. All afforded by the laws of the land. ;-)
“Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.” is a fun quote on this. Laws don’t protect me, they protect those with property and capital, as well as large companies that have limited to no liability. I protect me.
Anyway, I block ads and don’t care.
I don't think there is any justification for shipping software with exploitable security problems on purpose, and it sounds like I maybe gave you the impression I do. I think all software should be as secure as it's feasible to make it.
But I don't think that security should ever operate against the person who bought the device and is sitting in front of it. I don't think anything on my device or anyone's should be able to phone home in a way that is secure from me: and so I am very happy with things like eBPF that make root mean root.
I think that there are certain things you do not do as a professional, as a moral person, as a person who wants to be proud of what you've done. And both TLS and DoH are now routinely used by vendors to do things that users don't know about, don't want, wouldn't consent to if they knew, and I think people should go to jail over it.
I worked in big consumer internet during the period when it was beloved, and during the period where it was starting to get sketchy, and at some point I walked away from millions in unvested stock because a line had been crossed.
Near as I can tell a lot of us with reservations left, and those that remain are those with few if any qualms of any kind.
I don't think that software, in general, should place the interests of the software author above the interests of the user.¹ I just don't think that's specific to TLS or DoH; it's a general problem of running software that doesn't operate in your best interests. And I feel like laying the blame for that on TLS or DoH, rather than on the software author working against the user's interests, has the net result of making it harder to make software more secure, because it contributes to pushback against those technologies in general.
¹ Modulo some reasonable caveats and subtleties like following standards, which place one interest of the user above another interest of the user.
I think TLS and DoH are net wins in the world, due to all the positive benefits they have, despite the fact that they (like many many other technologies) are also sometimes used for anti-user purposes.
And, of course, if you control a device that includes controlling the software running on the device, which includes arbitrarily debugging, intercepting, or modifying it. I'm glad to see people who legitimately control a device using whatever technologies they desire to prevent software from working against their interests. (Though I continue to believe the right solution there is to not run software that runs against your interests in the first place, whenever possible.)
my intention is to render your net win calculation irrelevant by letting users decide and educating them about the implications of trusting people like you.
This seems like a non-sequitur. DoH does not specify particular certificate authorities; it just uses a secure connection, rather than plaintext DNS.
Is your complaint specifically about certificate pinning in proprietary applications, as opposed to using the system CA store?
> twisty rhetorical maze
That is an excessively reductive description of an argument you disagree with.