Hacker News: mjg59

New comment by mjg59 in "How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

mjg59 — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:08:53 +0000

Yes. The degree to which this presents a different experience is one I would not have found credible beforehand.

New comment by mjg59 in "How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

mjg59 — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:43:47 +0000

Saw it on Friday in Berkeley, and: yes, there was absolutely audience participation, and there were moments where I had to restrain myself from joining in.

New comment by mjg59 in "How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

mjg59 — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:42:01 +0000

They're incredibly different things telling different stories. One doesn't replace the other.

New comment by mjg59 in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

mjg59 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 08:10:52 +0000

In the US market, at least, the quality has improved dramatically over the past few years. Several established breweries now produce alcohol-removed versions of existing beers, with varying degrees of success - but in general my experience is that alcohol-free dark beers work better, the increased maltiness does a better job of hiding what's missing. IPAs and lagers can end up tasting somewhat thin compared to the normal version.

There's a few things I miss about the UK, and one of them is easy availability of beer that's less than 5%. Unfortunately that seems to have been creeping upwards - the shift to craft keg (rather than cask) beer seems to have been accompanied by moving more in the direction of US-style stronger beers. Several breweries do still produce milds that are in the <3% range, but it's increasingly hard to find them, even in pubs that used to be reliable suppliers. It's interesting how cultural this is.

New comment by mjg59 in "Virtio-nvgpu: Near-native Nvidia GPU access inside a KVM guest"

mjg59 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:51:47 +0000

Does "how it goes" include the guest being able to DMA over the host kernel?

New comment by mjg59 in "Virtio-nvgpu: Near-native Nvidia GPU access inside a KVM guest"

mjg59 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:19:21 +0000

Hrm, something of a lack of discussion about what level of access the card has to the host in the absence of IOMMU-restricted passthrough.

New comment by mjg59 in "PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)"

mjg59 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:13:13 +0000

Not quite the scenario described (it wasn't an academic paper), but https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/73317.html is my experience of dealing with a forged PDF. Part of the reason it's rare is that it's actually very hard to do it well!

New comment by mjg59 in "Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM"

mjg59 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:56:29 +0000

In the given case - you want to bind communication to a given confidential compute instance, which means you want to be able to ensure that the communication is coming from within the confidential compute instance, which means you want to be able to prove that the private key is only accessible from within that instance. An HSM buys you nothing more there.

New comment by mjg59 in "Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM"

mjg59 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:25:12 +0000

This feels like a somewhat odd design choice - you have a TEE, most TEEs (outside TPMs) are fast so there's little overhead in pushing your signing through there, why bother with short-lived credentials instead of just attesting to private key material ownership and having that be what the SPIFFE cert is issued to? Bearer token SVIDs are an awful thing that we should be getting as far away from as possible.

New comment by mjg59 in "Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM"

mjg59 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:22:24 +0000

I helped design the attestation framework for https://docs.cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance/docs/4.0/re... - the goal was to ensure that the device you're about to copy a bunch of sensitive information onto is actually the device you were shipped and is running the expected software. This is definitely used in the real world.

New comment by mjg59 in "Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM"

mjg59 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:20:38 +0000

A dedicated HSM will give you stronger trust that the private key material can't be extracted, but there's no real way to bind an HSM to a specific client and that's a very easy thing to do in the vTPM case.

New comment by mjg59 in "Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM"

mjg59 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:18:53 +0000

You didn't really go into actually verifying the machine identity - obviously if you have a trusted mechanism to do that in advance then that's easy enough, but otherwise you'd want something like https://github.com/google/go-attestation and then to use control plane APIs to identify the vTPM EK to tie the TPM to the VM.

New comment by mjg59 in "Signing TLS handshakes inside a TPM"

mjg59 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:57:41 +0000

The benchmarks are from GCP, where the vTPM is implemented in the hypervisor rather than on something that's plausibly an 8051[1]. Doing this on actual client hardware is going to be a bunch slower.

[1] Typically ARM these days, but most system vendors aren't picking TPM vendors based on performance

New comment by mjg59 in "Explain it to me like I'm ten"

mjg59 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 05:22:36 +0000

I teach OS security for a masters course. I don't know where my students are for any given semester - it's a mixture between experts who need a certification (I have taught someone who literally wrote the book on a major OS's security model) and people who have ended up on security entirely by accident. It is extremely hard to write something that lands for that entire range. "Finished highschool" is really not a precise determinator in the way "I am literally 5" is.

New comment by mjg59 in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

mjg59 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 02:32:13 +0000

I wholeheartedly agree. Making it more difficult to obtain GPLed source code than it was before is fundamentally a dick move.

New comment by mjg59 in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

mjg59 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:03:42 +0000

Oh, I agree there.

New comment by mjg59 in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

mjg59 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:16:42 +0000

They are, which is how they know how long it's taking.

New comment by mjg59 in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

mjg59 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:16:01 +0000

My personal website isn't customarily used for software interchange, but http is. I think getting into discussions about which websites are acceptable and which aren't feels like a bad place.

New comment by mjg59 in "Google replaced Git tags for certain source code with obtaining via Google Drive"

mjg59 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:39:37 +0000

But nobody has done this, which is why it's a problem for Graphene

New comment by mjg59 in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

mjg59 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:39:07 +0000

1) floppy disks are not customarily used for software interchange - where they are still used (aircraft software updates, bits of San Francisco's streetcar infrastructure) it's weird enough to be remarked upon. 2) the cost to Google of finding enough working floppies and paying someone to dump that much code onto them, then mailing them out, then having the other end just say "disk 323 was corrupted by USPS X rays, please send again" 20 times, would massively outweigh the benefits of making this awkward