How Cloudflare responded to the “Copy Fail” Linux vulnerability

Posted by mobeigi 2 days ago

How Cloudflare responded to the “Copy Fail” Linux vulnerability(blog.cloudflare.com)

101 points | 82 commentspage 2

john_strinlai 2 days ago||

this is a techincal dive into how cloudflare responded, not a confirmation that they responded

for whatever reason, unknown to me, hn automatically strips "how" from the start of titles. i cant remember ever seeing a title where this was an improvement.

dang 1 day ago||

Of course you can't, because the cases it improves don't get noticed, while the ones that break stick out like sore thumbs.

john_strinlai 19 hours ago||

i mean... its pretty easy to tell in either direction because i read the article titles when i click on them. given the rule about matching the article title, any discrepancy is noticeable.

but its your world dang, we're just living in it. do whatever you want with the titles. you have previously made your position clear to me about receiving feedback on hn; im not under any illusions about the value of my opinion.

dang 18 hours ago||

> but its your world dang, we're just living in it. do whatever you want with the titles. you have previously made your position clear to me about receiving feedback on hn; im not under any illusions about the value of my opinion.

Is that how you felt about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47328465? I can't find any other post that you might be referring to.

john_strinlai 16 hours ago||

no, its how i felt from a few different emails i have sent, with one of the more recent ones having what i felt was a pretty off-putting reply. but there is really no need to hash it out. in the grand scheme, i understand the approach you take, despite feeling frustration over it. you've got thousands of people offering their opinions, all of them thinking they are correct. my last comment should have probably been one that i wrote in a notepad and erased afterwards, rather than one that i posted. sorry.

gamegoblin 2 days ago|||

I learned a few years ago that HN also editorializes by dropping "world's" from titles

Before: Teens break record for world's longest kickball game

After: Teens break record for longest kickball game

Velocifyer 2 days ago|||

I do actually agree with that change.

gamegoblin 2 days ago|||

It occasionally leads to kinda ambiguous headlines, e.g.

"China opens world's longest undersea tunnel"

"China opens longest undersea tunnel"

It's a little unclear if it's the longest undersea tunnel in the world, or just in China

jmalicki 2 days ago|||

It doesn't give enough recognition to the true longest game of space kickball.

buredoranna 2 days ago|||

... what a world.

varun_ch 2 days ago|||

I'm yet to see a good example of the title stripping, at least for "how" and "how to" (although perhaps this is survivorship bias).

dpoloncsak 2 days ago|||

Interestingly, there's a current post on the front page with "How" at the start of the title.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018715 "How do I inform Windows that I’m writing a binary file?"

I wonder if it ending in a '?' has anything to do with it?

edit: Upon review, at the time of posting it was actually on the 2nd page

john_strinlai 2 days ago|||

not sure about that specific case or if '?' has anything to do with it, but there is a short editing window where the submitter can re-add the "how" or whatever back in

GavinAnderegg 2 days ago|||

I’ve been hit by this when posting links. If you edit the post, you can re-add the stripped word and it will stay. “Why” is another that is often stripped.

trollbridge 2 days ago||

Starting a title with “How” is standard clickbait.

gilrain 2 days ago|||

Starting a sentence with “How” is standard English, too.

trollbridge 1 day ago|||

Much of clickbait is standard English. HN takes a policy of applying editorial discretion to headlines, which makes the site more valuable.

Goronmon 2 days ago|||

If we are taking that attitude why not go all the way?

Titles are standard clickbait.

miki123211 2 days ago||

With LLMs, you could actually do anti-clickbait titles. Extract the article text with something like r.jina.ai, and ask an LLM to generate a ~80-character summary that explains the main point of the article for people too busy to read it.

I do think this would genuinely be useful.

senko 2 days ago|||

You're absolutely right! (errm...oops....anyways...)

The fact that LLMs usually generate anodyne summaries is actualy a benefit here.

I used my website-to-markdown tool[0] to get the text, piped the output to claude -p and got a pretty decent "Patching Copy Fail at scale: how bpf-lsm bought us time before the kernel reboot" result.

[0] https://markshot.dev

john_strinlai 2 days ago|||

back in my day, people just used the thing that rattles around inside their skull for such tasks

senko 2 days ago||

To do that, you need to read the article first, which is the point of click-bait titles. The point of the defense is to avoid exposing your neurons to that stuff.

john_strinlai 2 days ago||

i would hope that people are reading articles first and submitting them to hn because they are interesting, rather than submitting articles to hn blindly.

senko 2 days ago||

I agree with you on that, but that just holds true (we hope) for the OP.

HN already editorializes the title, to help everyone other than the OP (not all people agree over what's interesting to them). Now we're just arguing over the degree.

cube00 2 days ago|

> At the time of the "Copy Fail" disclosure, the majority of our infrastructure was running the 6.12 LTS version

That could be as low as 50.1%, I wish they'd provide an actual percentage.