• 41 Posts
  • 1.49K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: March 19th, 2024
  • communism@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•How do you vet open source software if you don't know code well?
    6·
    16 hours ago

    If you can’t feasibly vet the code yourself (I think it is feasible for things like scripts and other small projects) and the star count is low/it’s not already well known and trusted, probably try running in a VM first and look out for signs of it doing things it shouldn’t, e.g. if it’s sending HTTP requests to the internet despite it being a program that should be completely offline. Using things like AppArmor and SELinux to prevent programs from doing things they shouldn’t need to do is also good practice.

    Also, the tool itself may be low star count, but is the developer known at all? Someone with any kind of a reputation wouldn’t risk putting malware on their profile.

    I suppose you could also look at the list of dependencies of the program. Is it using any libraries that don’t make sense? e.g. with the above, is there some kind of HTTP request library being used for a program that shouldn’t need to access the internet at all?

    I think generally the risk is quite low as the author would be hiding their malware in plain sight if the source code is available. They’d have to bet on literally nobody checking. Which is fine for very obscure projects, but if you want your malware to spread, you want a good number of people to use it, at which point someone would presumably look at the code and notice it’s malware.

  • communism@lemmy.mltonews@hexbear.net•American politician suggests $3 a meal plan for the poor to eat.English
    4·
    2 days ago

    I probably spend under 50 USD a month on food—not by choice, because I can’t afford to buy more. I’m not hungry but I do yearn for being able to eat with more variety and to eat more expensive foods as a treat from time to time. So yeah, I think this is just out of touch, although I’ve never been in the US and I understand the food is both more expensive there plus people have more money there, so maybe it’s less unreasonable in the US.

  • communism@lemmy.mltoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Mount an ISO in Linux?
    8·
    2 days ago

    Commands are normally not considered “code” on their own. Someone who just runs commands on their computer to get a few operations done will normally not learn any programming constructs or concepts. If you’re doing shell scripting that usually crosses the line into code as you’d be using if statements, for loops, etc, which you normally don’t use if you’re just moving files around or whatever in the shell.