msquic VS PowerToys

I referred to sockets as an API design, not to express an opinion on whether you should place your protocol implementations inside or outside the kernel. (Although that’s undeniably an interesting question that by all rights should have been settled by now, but isn’t.)

Even then, I didn’t mean you should reproduce the Berkeley socket API verbatim (ZeroMQ-style); multiple streams per connection does not sound like a particularly good fit to it (although apparently people have managed to fit SCTP into it[1]?). I only meant that with the current mainstream libraries[2,3,4], establishing a QUIC connection and transmitting bytestreams or datagrams over it seems quite a bit more involved than performing the equivalent TCP actions using sockets.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6458

[2] https://quiche.googlesource.com/quiche

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/msquic

[4] https://github.com/litespeedtech/lsquic

The documentation of MS QUIC says it is cross-platform, it should work on Linux, it has a CMake preset for Linux and you can download the prebuilt binary releases for Linux.

Hello HN, my name is Varun, and I am the co-founder of StepSecurity. Here is the backstory about Harden-Runner. We thoroughly researched past software supply chain security incidents. The devastating breaches of SolarWinds, Codecov, and others, have one thing in common – they attacked the CI/ CD pipeline or the build server.

These incidents made it clear that a purpose-built security agent was needed for CI/ CD. While there are numerous agents available for desktops and servers, such as from CrowdStrike and Lacework, none have been tailored specifically to address the unique risks present in CI/CD pipelines.

With the understanding that a specialized solution was needed to secure CI/CD environments, we developed Harden-Runner, an open-source solution tailored specifically for GitHub Actions hosted runners. It can be seamlessly integrated into your workflow by simply adding a step. The agent installation process is also lightning-fast, taking no more than 5 seconds to complete.

Harden-Runner's security agent is designed to closely monitor all aspects of the workflow run, including DNS, network, file, and process events. This allows for real-time identification of any potential security breaches. To prevent incidents like the Codecov breach, where exfiltration of credentials occurred, Harden-Runner allows you to set policies that restrict outbound traffic at both the DNS and network layers. Additionally, we are actively working on implementing further restrictions at the application layer, such as using HTTP verbs and paths, to provide an even more comprehensive security solution.

An excellent example of how Harden-Runner effectively blocks outbound traffic can be found in the following link: https://app.stepsecurity.io/github/microsoft/msquic/actions/.... As you can see, all traffic to unauthorized endpoints is highlighted in red, indicating that it has been blocked; this is because these endpoints are not included in the allowed list defined in the GitHub Actions workflow file, which can be viewed here: https://github.com/microsoft/msquic/blob/aaecb0fac5a3902dd24....

One of the key features of Harden-Runner's monitoring capabilities is its ability to detect any tampering or alteration of files during the build process, similar to the SolarWinds incident. To further enhance security and protect against potential malicious tools or attempts to disable the agent, Harden-Runner includes a disable-sudo mode. This mode effectively disables the use of 'sudo' on the hosted runner, providing an additional layer of protection

Harden-Runner has already been adopted by over 600 open-source repositories: https://github.com/step-security/harden-runner/network/depen.... To fully understand the capabilities of Harden-Runner and how it can protect against past supply chain attacks, please try out our attack simulator GitHub repository at https://github.com/step-security/attack-simulator. I would love to hear your feedback.

https://github.com/microsoft/msquic (QUIC / HTTP3)

Windows PowerToys GitHub Repo

RunFlow is a cross-platform productivity tool which can launch apps and search files and more, that similar to Wox and PowerToys on Windows, and also similar like Alfred and Raycast on macOS. But we have differences with these tools, and we have our own unique new features. Right now, at the below, we will introduce you what features of RunFlow have been implemented in more details. It's an amazing journey, let's start.

I'm curious - when you were doing research into the mechanics of hinting options, did you stumble onto any relevant discussion around allowing custom pixel geometries to be defined, to enable hinting on modern OLED / WRBG displays? There's a good thread on the topic here[0], with some people referring to it as 'ClearType 2' on the MS side [1]. On the oss side I know FreeType theoretically supports this[2], but I can't quite figure out how relevant the FreeType backend is to this most recent work.

This is great work btw.

[0]: https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype/issues/932

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/25595

[2]: https://freetype.org/freetype2/docs/reference/ft2-lcd_render...

Thank you all for the informative advices. Here is the summary for those who are in the same situation:

1. Run Windows on Linux by using VM

for the applications you can’t run on Linux

Risks:

* some softwares may attempt to detect VMs and refuse running

* Anything what needs to touch hardware may not work.

2. separate "data" partition on D:

3. back up %APPDATA% and %USERPROFILE%

4. learn chocolatey, scoop or winget

Winget should be good enough

5. Don’t worry about C:\Program Files

6. (Mixed) Use/Don’t use Ansible (or saltstack/salt)

Use:

* Allows you to setup a new machine quickly and consistently when one breaks, get stolen, or lost in an inconvenient time.

* You can get a clean and consistent development environment so that you do not depend on anything accidentally installed on the machine.

* If you define specialised roles, create test playbooks for those individual roles, use these roles to compose more complex playbooks, and offload logic to custom ansible modules that are written in python, you won't wrestle with heavy logic in the template or playbook layer.

* installing software and pulling some configs and scripts down is fine

Don’t use:

* You will spend your days fighting a mix of yaml and Jinja.

* You will end up looking at Python errors because there are no static types.

* errors are cryptic.

7. Use WSL2

You need 32gb of ram, but ram is cheap so choose a good thinkpad

8. Debloat with Recommended Tweaks

Run

irm christitus.com/win | iex

from Administrator Terminal (Powershell)

The link leads to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/mai...

VirusTotal

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/709834b0e003b6bb546cf16e...

9. Get [PowerToys](https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys)

10. Use Devbox for containered environment

https://www.jetpack.io/devbox

11. Dual-Booting Linux and Windows

If you use physically separated drives, you don’t need partitioning.

12. Dedicated Windows machine for class

Yes it sure would be the cleanest solution but I prefer one device for everything

13. keep a git repository with all dot files in it

Many people suggested me to use virtualization, otherwise just let Windows be Windows.

Also, backing up seems to be a good practice.

I’m planning to write a blog about this, if it worked.

Again, thank you all for the helps!

Powertoys Run (https://github.com/microsoft/powertoys) can do this. There are not that many plugins as Alfred but Window Switcher is built-in.

For sharing a mouse/keyboard between Windows PCs, there is Mouse Without Borders. It's included in PowerToys nowadays.

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

- https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

If you’re on Windows, download PowerToys. It’s an app published by Microsoft officially. Then enable Quick Accent in the settings of PowerToys. Now all you have to do is hold down the key you want accented until the switch shows up, then add an accent with your arrow keys.

microsoft/PowerToys: Windows system utilities to maximize productivity (github.com)