Wolters Kluwer

Umasking Security Theater Wasted several hours debugging a questionable environment setting TL;DR I recently spent several hours debugging an issue that was ultimately caused by an unnecessarily restrictive system umask setting. The current umask of 0027 causes newly created or rewritten files to lose world-read permissions, which can result in difficult-to-diagnose failures such as JavaScript files returning HTTP 403 errors. In a development environment, the operational overhead and lost productivity caused by this setting appear to outweigh its benefits. I recommend changing the default umask from 0027 to 0022 . Details While investigating intermittent JavaScript loading failures, I discovered that some files were being created with the following permissions: $ ll /path/to/file.js -rw-r----- 1 user group 960591 Apr 10 18:42 /path/to/file.js Because the file lacks the o+r permission, the web server is unable to read it, resulting in a 403 Forbidden response when the browser attemp...

  The 10-Hour Display Nightmare: How Corporate VPNs and Software Locks Can Ruin a Local Workspace As a professional engineer, you expect to have control over your environment. You expect that when you plug in a high-resolution display, you can use those pixels to write code. But when you mix corporate IT lockdown policies, aggressive VPN client routing, and the user-hostile design of modern remote desktop tools, you get a perfect storm of technical absurdity. Here is the anatomy of a maddening, multi-day battle just to control a screen resolution. The Objective: A Usable 4K Canvas The goal was simple: connect from a local Linux workstation ("Earth") to a corporate Windows laptop using a remote desktop client, and scale the display environment to a comfortable, readable 4K resolution. Instead, the system hard-capped the resolution at 1920x1080 , cramming a modern development environment into a tiny, unreadable box. The Enemy: The Headless Display Driver and the Closed Lid The ...

Making it hard for developers to develop It seems to be very hard to create an environment as a developer that mimics the problem at hand. Often, your task is to take a bug in the development environment so that you can debug it. In fact, I would say that is normally what you do most of the time as a developer, period. A defect is reported to you, and you want to reproduce it so that you can put in logging and debugging and figure out what the problem is. The main challenge is to make an environment in your development environment that accurately depicts the environment in which the user experienced the bug. But they seem to make it as hard as possible for the developer to do that by using a deployment mentality. Speaking with Copilot, we discovered this: Why can’t you reproduce your bug Now we can say it very concreely : ❗ You’re running <your app>… ❗ But your Bar is from some other version That mismatch alone will cause: different HTML output different JS includes different beh...

Spending $$$ on software that one can get for free In this installment, we will look at the curious fact that large corporations tend to spend millions of dollars purchasing software and licensing when free, and arguably better versions exist. The case here is Docker Desktop, which is licensed, vs just plain old, free Docker CE. I hear Docker Desktop on Windows can require licensing. Is there a standard, open source, free version of Docker for Windows? You heard correctly. Docker Desktop is free only for personal use, education, open-source projects, and small businesses. If you work for a company with more than 250 employees OR more than $10 million in annual revenue , Docker Desktop requires a paid corporate subscription (Pro, Team, or Business). However, Docker itself (the engine) is completely open-source and free. The restriction is only on the Docker Desktop GUI application wrapper . If you want a standard, open-source, and completely free setup on Windows for commercial us...