phantomjs VS systemd

The points you make aren't unreasonable.

It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an earlier stage of the project, the support burden becomes too much to bear at which point the maintainer transfers ownership, and the project suffers from catastrophic consequences such as the xz backdoor we're talking about here, or other cases where the project mostly stalls and serves as an ego-boosting platform for the new maintainer, as was the case with PhantomJS[6].

This can also happen in your life, where a "friend" sees that you possess a certain skill, and then gradually tries to push an inordinate amount of their personal work related to this field onto you.

Personally, I think it's best to use an approach with extremely clear communication as to what the maintainer can and cannot provide. This can be seen, for example, in yt-dlp[1], where the consumer is clearly informed upfront that not providing detailed information as requested will lead them to block said consumer; or sqlite where their position regarding contributed patches[2] and support[3] is similarly made clear.

Having a shouty BDFL like Torvalds can also help improve code quality[4] and questionable contributions[5], though it is better that the shouty BDFL makes statements that are professional and do not show as much aggression; so for example, "Mauro, shut the fuck up"[7] would become "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace."

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&label...

[2] https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

[3] https://www.sqlite.org/support.html

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/

[5] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident

[6] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541

[7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

Last commit was in 2019, and it uses PhantomJS to query a page, which shutdown development in 2018

https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15344

Install Phantomjs and see if that improves things.

Automated Browser Detection. Cloudflare queries the browser for properties that only exist in automated web browser environments. For example, the existence of the window.document.__selenium_unwrapped or window.callPhantom property indicates the usage of Selenium and PhantomJS, respectively. For obvious reasons, you're getting blocked if this is detected.

I know there is https://phantomjs.org/ but is there something else people use these days?

The issue is some websites curl works fine to get all the rendered html, but some you don't get any content without a javascript engine.

Despite the popularity of Puppeteer and Headless Chrome, my team of threat researchers and I wondered, to what extent PhantomJS was still being used by bot developers. In this post, we share how we identified traffic associated with PhantomJS, the types of attacks performed, and its use in comparison to Puppeteer Extra Stealth.

I've been working on how to make a SPA crawlable by google based on google's instructions. Even though there are quite a few general explanations I couldn't find anywhere a more thorough step-by-step tutorial with actual examples. After having finished this I would like to share my solution so that others may also make use of it and possibly improve it further. I am using MVC with Webapi controllers, and Phantomjs on the server side, and Durandal on the client side with push-state enabled; I also use Breezejs for client-server data interaction, all of which I strongly recommend, but I'll try to give a general enough explanation that will also help people using other platforms.

Regarding youtube-dl, I remember someone mentioning they needed an external helper program called phantomjs to download from some sites. I really wouldn't recommend using phantomjs as it hasn't been updated since 2018 and I see it has known vulnerabilities too.

For this project we will need some extra binaries ( PhantomJS in particular) to take the screenshots. We’ll also use ImageMagick, but that is provided by AWS by default in the Lambda image, so we don’t package it separately.

ERROR: [iq.com] apvtge3eng: PhantomJS executable not found in PATH, download it from http://phantomjs.org

> 3. even `adduser` will not allow it by default

5. useradd does allow it (as noted in a comment). 6. Local users are not the only source, there things like LDAP and AD.

7. POSIX allows it:

* https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

> I for one love to type out 13 extra characters

FWIW, systemd is normally pretty good at providing autocomplete suggestions, so even if you don't want to set up an alias you'll probably just have to type `--b ` to set it.

> I wonder what random ASCII escape sequences we can send.

According to the man page source[0]:

> The color specified should be an ANSI X3.64 SGR background color, i.e. strings such as `40`, `41`, …, `47`, `48;2;…`, `48;5;…`

and a link to the relevant Wikipedia page[1]. Given systemd's generally decent track record wrt defects and security issues, and the simplicity of valid colour values, I expect there's a fairly robust parameter verifier in there.

In fact, given the focus on starting the elevated command in a highly controlled environment, I'd expect the colour codes to be output to the originating terminal, not forwarded to the secure pty. That way, the only thing malformed escapes can affect is your own process, which you already have full control over anyway.

(Happy to be shown if that's a mistaken expectation though.)

[0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/man/run0.xml

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#SGR_(Select_G...

bash & zsh are supported by upstream: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/tree/main/shell-completio...

the right person to replace sudo, not: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237

PS: https://pwnies.com/systemd-bugs/

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/32028#issuecomment...

There are some very compelling arguments made there if you care to read them

Maybe it was because you weren't pointing out anything new?

There was a pull request to stop linking libzma to systemd before the attack even took place

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31550

This was likely one of many things that pushed the attackers to work faster, and forced them into making mistakes.

The PR for changing compression libraries to use dlopen() was opened several weeks before the xz-utils backdoor was revealed.

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31550

I find this the most plausible explanation by far:

* The highly professional outfit simply did not see teknoraver's commit to remove liblzma as standard dependency of systemd build scripts coming.

* The race was on between their compromised code and that commit. They had to win it, with as large a window as possible.

* This caused serious errors.

* The performance regression is __not__ big. It's lucky Andres caught it at all. It's also not necessarily all that simple to remove it. It's not simply a bug in a loop or some such.

* The payload of the 'hack' contains fairly easy ways for the xz hackers to update the payload. They actually used it to remove a real issue where their hackery causes issues with valgrind that might lead to discovering it, and they also used it to release 5.6.1 which rewrites significant chunks; I've as yet not read, nor know of any analysis, as to why they changed so much.

Extra info for those who don't know:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/3fc72d54132151c131...

That's a commit that changes how liblzma is a dependency of systemd. Not because the author of this commit knew anything was wrong with it. But, pretty much entirely by accident (although removing deps was part of the point of that commit), almost entirely eliminates the value of all those 2 years of hard work.

And that was with the finish line in sight for the xz hackers: On 24 feb 2024, the xz hackers release liblzma 5.6.0 which is the first fully operational compromised version. __12 days later systemd merges a commit that means it won't work__.

So now the race is on. Can they get 5.6.0 integrated into stable releases of major OSes _before_ teknoraver's commit that removes liblzma's status as direct dep of systemd?

I find it plausible that they knew about teknoraver's commit _just before_ Feb 24th 2024 (when liblzma v5.6.0 was released, the first backdoored release), and rushed to release ASAP, before doing the testing you describe. Buoyed by their efforts to add ways to update the payload which they indeed used - March 8th (after teknoraver's commit was accepted) it was used to fix the valgrind issue.

So, no, I don't find this weird, and I don't think the amateurish aspects should be taken as some sort of indication that parts of the outfit were amateuristic. As long as it's plausible that the amateuristic aspects were simply due to time pressure, it sounds like a really bad idea to make assumptions in this regard.