Erroneous 'Spam' Flag Affected 102 npm Packages (npmjs.org)
There was some trouble last weekend at the world's largest package repository. An anonymous reader quotes the official npm blog:
On Saturday, January 6, 2018, we incorrectly removed the user floatdrop and blocked the discovery and download of all 102 of their packages on the public npm Registry. Some of those packages were highly depended on, such as require-from-string, and removal disrupted many users' installations... Within 60 seconds, it became clear that floatdrop was not a spammer -- and that their packages were in heavy use in the npm ecosystem. The staffer notified colleagues and we re-activated the user and began restoring the packages to circulation immediately. Most of the packages were restored quickly, because the restoration was a matter of unsetting the deleted tombstones in our database, while also restoring package data tarballs and package metadata documents. However, during the time between discovery and restoration, other npm users published a number of new packages that used the names of deleted packages. We locked this down once we discovered it, but cleaning up the overpublished packages and inspecting their contents took additional time...
In cases where the npm staff accepts a user's request to delete a package, we publish a replacement package by the same name -- a security placeholder. This both alerts those who had depended on it that the original package is no longer available and prevents others from publishing new code using that package name. At the time of Saturday's incident, however, we did not have a policy to publish placeholders for packages that were deleted if they were spam. This made it possible for other users to publish new versions of eleven of the removed packages. After a thorough examination of the replacement packages' contents, we have confirmed that none was malicious or harmful. Ten were exact replacements of the code that had just been removed, while the eleventh contained strings of text from the Bible -- and its publisher immediately contacted npm to advise us of its publication.
They're now implementing a 24-hour cooldown on republication of any deleted package names -- and are also updating their review process. "As a general rule, the npm Registry is and ought to be immutable, just like other package registries such as RubyGems and crates.io... However, there are legitimate cases for removing a package once it has been published. In a typical week, most of the npm support team's work is devoted to handling user requests for package deletion, which is more common than you might expect. Many people publish test packages then ask to have them deprecated or deleted. There also is a steady flow of requests to remove packages that contain contain private code that users have published inadvertently or inappropriately."
In cases where the npm staff accepts a user's request to delete a package, we publish a replacement package by the same name -- a security placeholder. This both alerts those who had depended on it that the original package is no longer available and prevents others from publishing new code using that package name. At the time of Saturday's incident, however, we did not have a policy to publish placeholders for packages that were deleted if they were spam. This made it possible for other users to publish new versions of eleven of the removed packages. After a thorough examination of the replacement packages' contents, we have confirmed that none was malicious or harmful. Ten were exact replacements of the code that had just been removed, while the eleventh contained strings of text from the Bible -- and its publisher immediately contacted npm to advise us of its publication.
They're now implementing a 24-hour cooldown on republication of any deleted package names -- and are also updating their review process. "As a general rule, the npm Registry is and ought to be immutable, just like other package registries such as RubyGems and crates.io... However, there are legitimate cases for removing a package once it has been published. In a typical week, most of the npm support team's work is devoted to handling user requests for package deletion, which is more common than you might expect. Many people publish test packages then ask to have them deprecated or deleted. There also is a steady flow of requests to remove packages that contain contain private code that users have published inadvertently or inappropriately."
They are a risk for both the site (they can just disappear or change without notice) and the user (malware, yet another library to manage in no-script).
Why expose yourself and your users to this? It is willful negligence and unethical if you ask me.
I use this guy's express-cocaine-service package a lot. This was terrible for me. I had to find another supplier but who knows what was in the package I received.
I have no idea what this block of text is telling me. What are npm packages? Who is floatdrop and why is he relevant?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
If you have an important project and it is dependent upon a remotely-published package, it's not an important enough project to you.
There is a certain appeal to letting someone else maintain code and do bug fixes for you, but you have to give up that dream when the project becomes more than a casual "thing" you play with for fun.
They're now implementing a 24-hour cooldown on republication of any deleted package names
So make attackers wait a whole day before uploading their compromised replacements for widely-used packages. Got it!
Seriously, NPM is a shithole. "As a general rule, the npm Registry is and ought to be immutable", you think? It's not a "general rule". It's "all the time, every" you freaking amateurs.
This right here is how you brought it upon yourself, and why I have zero sympathy for your self-imposed situation. If I contribute a package to Debian, you think they'll spend "most of their week" removing it just because I asked? That's not gonna happen. Here's how you fix this:
"Effective immediately, we no longer remove packages unless they cause a clear and imminent threat to their users. If you accidentally included your GitHub password, change it. That's your problem, not ours. Next time try not to do that, OK? Also, we no longer reuse package names, ever, for any reason. If you wanted it, you should have registered it. And finally, under no circumstances, period, may you ever reuse a version number. Ten years from now, package foo-1.2.3 will be bytewise identical to the one we issued last week. We guarantee it."
Anything short of that is a joke to the rest of the industry. I'm not being idealistic or unrealistic, either: these are completely reasonable, common policies that pretty much literally every other package repo implements.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Lovely article... What is npm?
Ignorance is bliss. On the plus side, it makes the house of cards web developers call a website these days, easier to knock over.
"Maintain your own dependencies!"
Bingo! Extra delicious cookie for you, sir! And a salute.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
npm is a central point of failure. I actually had a dream that someone hacked javascript on a central server and caused a worldwide DDOS of websites.. It's time for noscript to be enabled by default in all browsers and only run scripts on servers that are local and not on a centralized server. But of course this will never happen. In fact Firefox crippled their noscript with the change to webextentions.
I hope my buddy APK blocks these domains in the next hosts file engine update to keep me safe from this incompetent group!
Node.js Is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
learn the proper use of commas, as your sentences make no sense because of your misuse of commas.
Says the person using improper capitalization.
Man the harpoons! Thar be the whale named creimer!!
I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how.
Your and such, idiot an should learn How too grammer and's, spells!
Shut the fuck up creimer. Why don't you tell us about the time you said moving to mexico to marry an "underage sweet thing" was about "getting the most bang for your retirement dollar"
Why did you talk about your job at the fbi on social media when your shitty government body shop told you not to?
You are supposed to read, that mouthful of a sentence, like William Shatner, and treat each comma as, a dramatic pause for effect.
Didn't you get the memo? Creimer fired all his trolls yesterday. Your services are no longer needed. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Creimer posted an on topic comment. Please do the same.
You criemertards are as annoying as the beta fuckers of yore. Why don't you all go to a quiet corner an fuck each other.
Oh wait, you are probably the same people.
Oh wait, it's what you are already doing.
First of all, if npm is having a lot of issues with package deletion, they need a "staging" repo and a promotion policy, to protect the production repo from breaking changes.
Also, as is industry practice with maven central, it sounds like any company using npm needs to run their own caching mirror, to keep permanent copies of the artifacts your company is using. Unfortunately, I don't think npm's support for private mirrors is as good as maven's.
Anyone know of a good solution to this?
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
And not even one Amazon affiliate link in sight.
Yeah right fuck you. It's too late for that.
It's even worse that you're posting on topic. This means you could have been a productive slashdotter any time you felt like it but you actively chose not to.
I'd like to remind everyone that you will only act as good as you feel you're required to:
You read every website's ToS carefully to find the hard limits of your shitty behavior.
You acted like a raging asshole back when you thought you had millions of surplus positive karma points
Back when you thought you could repair your karma with sockpuppets or story submissions you were a massive prick too.
Now that you're finally out of cards you'll be a good boy? And we're supposed to just back off the second you make one marginally good post. We suggested that 6 months ago and that boat has sailed my friend. You'd sooner have them delete your account and start over than be where you're at now. It makes me happy knowing that it must eat you up to make a post like this.
Game over. Fuck off.
You sound bitters sweet fits!
So you are saying that retard APK's work failed yet again to prevent an attack.
He should be use to being a failure by now.
Even his parents regret not not aborting him.
Just because his software is such a sack of shit that it requires a rewrite when TLDs change doesn't meant he is incompetent.
By the way I hear it is also listed in the Misc section of some random web sites.
Here is the story of creimy the mountain and his royalties!
Listen to the audio version here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Creimy The Mountain"
includes quotes from Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D major (Edward Elgar), Johnny's Theme (Paul Anka), Off We Go Into The Wild Blue Yonder (Crawford), O Mein Papa (Paul Burkhard), Over The Rainbow (Harburg/Arlen), Star-Spangled Banner (Smith/Key), Suite: Judy Blue Eyes (Stephen Stills)
One, two, three
CREIMY the Mountain
CREIMY the Mountain
A regular picturesque
Postcardy mountain
Residing between lovely
Rosamond and Gorman
With his stunning wife ETHELL, A tree! A tree!
CREIMY was a mountain ETHELL was a tree Growing off of his shoulder
CREIMY was a mountain
(CREIMY was a mountain!)
ETHELL was a tree Growing off of his shoulder
(ETHELL was a tree growing off of his shoulder)
(hey, hey hey!)
Creimy had two big
Caves for eyes,
With a cliff for a jaw
That would go up 'n down,
And whenever it did,
He'd puff out some dust,
And hack up a boulder (HACK!) Hack up a boulder (HACK! HACK!)
Hack up a boulder (HACK! HACK! HACK!) Up a boulder
Now, one day, now I believe it was on a Tuesday, a man in a checkered double-knit suit drove up in a large El Dorado Cadillac, leased from BOB SPREEN
("Where the freeways meet in Downey!")
And he laid a HUGE, BULGING ENVELOPE right at the corner of CREIMY THE MOUNTAIN, that was right where his 'foot' was supposed to be.
Now, CREIMY THE MOUNTAIN, he couldn't believe it! All those postcards he'd posed for, for ALL OF THOSE YEARS, and finally, now, AT LAST, his Royalties!
Royalties! Royalties Royalties! Royalty check is in, honey!
Yes, CREIMY THE MOUNTAIN was RICH! Yes, and his eyeball-caves, they widened in amazement, and his jaw (which was a cliff), well it dropped thirty feet!
A bunch of dust puffed out! Rocks and boulders hacked up, (hack! hack!) crushing 'The LINCOLN'!
I gave him the money He acted real funny He hocked up a rock and It TOTALLED my car!
Oh, do you Know any trucks Might be bound for THE VALLEY?
I don't wanna stand here All night in this bar (Dear Lord)
I don't wanna stand here All night in this bar (No shit!)
I don't wanna stand here All night in this bar!
By two o'clock, when the bars are already closed down, CREIMY had broken 'THE BIG NEWS' to ETHELL. And with dust and boulders everywhere, CREIMY, choked with excitement, announced
"ETHELL, we're going on a VACATION!"
Yes, and they WERE going on a vacation! (Oh, and ETHELL, ETHELL, ETHELL, like every little woman, she of course was very excited! She creaked a little bit, and some old birds flew off of her.) CREIMY told ETHELL they were going to Yes! They were going to NEW YORK!
"ETHELL, we're going to New York!"
But first they were gonna stop in LAS VEGAS
It's off to LAS VEGAS to check out the lounges Pull a few handles,
And drink a few beers, (Oh, ETHELL!)
ETHELL, my darling, you know that I love you!
I'm glad we could have a Vacation this year! (Oh, NEET-O!)
Glad we could have a Vacation this year!
They left that night, crunchin' across the Mojave Desert their voices echoing through the canyons of your minds (POO-AAH!)
"ETHELL, wanna get a cuppa cawfee?"
(Howard Johnson's! Howard Johnson's!
Howard Johnson's! Howard Johnson's!)
"Ahhh! there's a HOWARD JOHNSONS! Wanna eat some CLAMS?"
The first noteworhty piece of real estate they destroyed was EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE
And TO THIS VERY DAY, 'Wing Nuts' and Data Reduction Clerks alike, speak in reverent whispers about that fateful night when TEST STAND #1 and THE ROCKET SLED ITSELF (We have ignition!) got LUNCHED! I said LUNCHED! (Lunched!) By a FAMOUS MOUNTAIN-IN and his SMALL, WOODEN WIFE.
"Word just in to the KTTV News Service undeniably links THIS MOUNTAIN and HIS WIFE to drug abuse and
There you are now spamming youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!
You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.
Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.
How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????
The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!
You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!
When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!
Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!
Bonus:
Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:
The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!
So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!
Signed:
The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!
CREIMER' SUBMISSIONS UPDATE: /. so make sure to go to:
Note also that creimer is trying to regain karma by getting his submissions published as articles on
https://slashdot.org/~cdreimer
https://slashdot.org/~Anonymou...
https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
https://slashdot.org/~ILoveFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IHateFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IAteFatC...
https://slashdot.org/~ITapeFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IApeFatC...
https://slashdot.org/~IPrayFat...
https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
and mod down his submissions as well. The great thing is that you don't even need mod points to mod down a submission, just click on the "minus" icon!
Yes, believe it or not, creimer owns all the above sock puppet accounts. It is a mystery why Slashdot management tolerates it!
creimer wrote:
I don't bother with mod points. I'm doing something much more sinister. It took ten story submissions ? I'll have to double check the number ? to move cdreimer's karma from neutral to excellent without ever being exposed to the capricious mods. Mmmmmwwwwahahahahahahaha!
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!
Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.
creimer wrote:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Creimy's head, while his supervisor was talking to him, not with him, since it is impossible to do with Creimy:
Chris' case is getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /.
The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.
For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.
Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!
Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."
For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
http://www.keynamics.com/image...
Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:
Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.
To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.
The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!
Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.
I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...
Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
http://ibb.co/mRVSaG
But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.
Thank You dear users,
---
Nancy Guerrero
Director
Special Education
Santa Clara County Office of Education
No way! You're the bitter, sweet tits
New Video: What Does Hyundai Mean? [youtu.be]
Sorry mister cdreimer!
I still don't know what Hyundai means. This video is a piece of trash! Was this some attempt at a joke or are you simply trolling?
You've spammed Amazon links for months, posted over and over about child brides, and generally been a shitty poster for more than a decade. A single boring-but-on-topic post doesn't change that you are a shit stain who deserves to be driven off Slashdot, dragged out into the street, and shot like a dog.
The creimertards are behaving badly after being dismissed by creimer. I wonder how long this will last.
Don't feel too bad. Neither did the Korean guy playing the trivia contest and hostess kept throwing clues his way.