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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • PowerCrazy@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlA quick intro to pointers
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    8 days ago

    I “understood” on a basic level what pointers were when i was first learning programing as a 12-13year old. But I never understood HOW to use them, or manipulate them, or what functions you use to interact with them, or how to examine them, or how to declare them, etc etc. And since I was young I never got the opportunity to take an actual programming class that taught any of that throughout high school. By the time I got to college I went with Electrical Engineering instead of computer science and so my journey with pointers ended.

    Now I do python and never have to think about pointers.


  • This is fundamentally true. However it is possible to limit the bandwidth of data the employee can exfiltrate.

    Assuming a privileged employee suddenly becomes a bad actor. Private-keys/certs are compromised, any kind of shared password/login is compromised.

    In my case I have a legit access to my company’s web-certs as well as service account ssh-key’s, etc. If I were determined to undermine my company, I could absolutely get access to our HSM-stored software signing keys too. Or more accurately I’d be able to use that key to compile and sign an arbitrary binary at least once.

    But I couldn’t for example download our entire customer database, I could get a specific record, I could maybe social engineer access to all the records of a specific customer, but there is no way I’d be able to extract all of our customers via an analog loophole or any standard way. The data set is too big.

    I also wouldn’t be able to download our companies software source code in it’s entirety. Obviously I could intelligently pick a few key modules etc, but the whole thing would be impossible.

    And this is what you are trying to limit. If you trust your employees (some you have to), you can’t stop them from copying the keys to the kingdom, but you can limit the damage that they can do, and also ensure they can’t copy ALL the crown jewels.








  • The idea of “posthuman cyborgs” is so fanciful, that I don’t think you are connected enough to reality to even make an accurate judgement on “the possible.”

    We have the technology TODAY, RIGHT NOW to go to mars and make it back. There is no over-arching reason to do such a thing, but there are also no significant technological barriers preventing us from doing it. Human Cyborgs are 100% impossible today, and there are a myriad number of things preventing that kind of development. For example, we cannot today, keep a brain alive for any significant time, outside of it’s existing organic support body. Individual neurons? Sure, but a system of neurons at any comparable complexity as even a simple mouse brain? Nope. On the other-hand we have actually kept people alive in space for over a year, and we only need around 2years to get to mars and back. We also have the capability to send things to mars and bring them back, so combining those two things, and there ya go.