@nobody I'm pretty sure politics here is allowed, as long as it's not supporting genocide.

Feel free to veer off it, but if you want a chat that is politics with a hint of infosec then go somewhere else

And as long as we err on the side of talking about infosec.

Absolutely @forest

@Jis12yearsold. No, we're allowed to talk politics.

Just not exclusively.

@Jis12yearsold. The best thing you can do if you disagree with something is to stand, not to back off.

@Jis12yearsold. I think it's pretty much all about one or two posts that we didn't see.

And I think the rest of the current issue is just miscommunication.

@Jis12yearsold. Right, SO I set up a bot to split my infosec messages into ten parts.

To clarify, @RoryAlsop if J links me an article about the current conflict and we chat about it, is that something that would be moderated by you?

It's not hiding. It's removing

They weren't removed. They were moved to a hidden room.

All 200 of them (which is annoying, because I know for a fact that there weren't 200 comments supporting genocide).

@forest no. Your wording works better for J, and you are pretty much spot on. It's a rational balance

@Jis12yearsold. Honestly this looks like something the feds would do

Yeah, all we know currently is that the comments were "a little more overt".

@forest that's generally the way we have to do it where conversation goes way too far that way.

Did he ever say to gas the Jews? Or to slaughter Israelis? Or anything horrific like that?

@nobody I don't think they would do anything like that. It's really not their bag

@RoryAlsop On most other channels there's the "trashcan" where they're moved, but they're still visible to people who intentionally want to see their own messages.

@RoryAlsop No I'm talking about hiding evidence

As far as I can currently tell, mods assumed the true intent behind the messages.

@nobody I keep telling you, this is to avoid SE coming down very strictly. We back a bit away from that boundary and things get much more relaxed

I mean really, it would be immensely useful if we could see the problematic messages.

Otherwise we'll all stay under the impression that some mod misunderstood a message.

@RoryAlsop Alright I appreciate that. Can't we have some transparency anyways?

For example, AviD believed that Zionism is by definition a Jew's right to be alive, so naturally he saw anti-Zionism as a call to violence, when that is not the typical meaning of "Zionism".

Or is SE Inc against transparency too?

At least 3 mods independently misunderstood? I don't think so

@RoryAlsop Doesn't have to be independent. See: psychological priming.

Well atleast three users also independently missed the problematic messages

Possibly not independent enough @nobody

@RoryAlsop But we can't tell, since we can't see it.

Exactly

@forest I am definitely primed to protect the chat from being killed again

@forest I know

Its a private room, just grant us access, you don't have to show it to the whole world

@nobody Or at least tell us what that one message that resulted in 200 nuked was.

@RoryAlsop But again, can we learn at least what was said, even if in general if only so that we don't make the same mistakes ourselves?

@forest Yeah, well I mean if the mods are hesitant to publicly repost, just do it in a private room

@Jis12yearsold. no it's just easiest

I mean, if what was said was "let's normalize anti-Zionism" and someone took that to mean "let's normalize anti-semitism", then I am at risk of breaking the same rule, and I don't even know it.

It's much easier to take out a conversation than cherry pick individual messages

Not really no

But if it was only one or two messages, why not delete them in the same way as if I started spouting the n-word right now? (in which case I'm sure only my messages would be nuked)

We have a very limited set of tools

How about as a compromise, a mod tells us what happened, without opening the room? Just tell us what was said. How did anyone explicitly support genocide without any one of us noticing?

It wasn't just one or two - as I said there were a couple that were rather bad, and the rest were not inflammatory, but encouraging

@RoryAlsop Anything that I said?

@Jis12yearsold. no - I keep telling you. If you pretend you don't understand, please listen to forest.

I don't think he's pretending. I think there's a miscommunication.

forest is asking the same question

@forest is it bad that I'm calling you out as a voice of reason and restraint? :-)

This is a very heated topic and we're all understandably very upset.

@RoryAlsop I mean, in the 200 messages. I hope to be a voice of reason, yeah, but I am also upset at the state of affairs and would like to understand better what actually went on.

@Jis12yearsold. I'm upset you feel that way, as it really is the opposite

As it is, my concern isn't with the 200 deleted messages (it annoys me, but I can see how that could happen with mods who have limited tools), but the fact that we're not told what was said, and what encouraged what was said. Since none of us know what rule was broken, we're all at risk of breaking the same rule, and then getting in trouble because "we were already told".

@Jis12yearsold. I do think the whole chatroom moderation issue right now is a bit of a red herring. Rory has said that we are allowed to talk about politics within reason (and it appears the last few days have been within reason, sans whatever specific events occurred that warranted mass-deletion).

The topic itself is absolutely terrible - I wish humans could just be nice to each other. But it's not the core topic for this room, so if everyone could please treat non sec topics as side issues not the main topic

@Jis12yearsold. We don't even know what "those statements" are, so I think we should be a little careful when making assumptions that he was in the wrong and not just misunderstood.

@Jis12yearsold. we don't have a concept of "banded in with an individual" and the deletion of messages is not a punishment

@RoryAlsop I think he's referring to the statement that we "encouraged him", as well.

I think this could be all cleared up if the message/messages in question could be paraphrased and a simple explanation given as to why they were bad.

Yep, you know we all do infosec, we don't liked closed source stuff

@forest I'll explain another way (in an extreme form, so please take it that way) - a mob encourages each other into more and more outrageous acts none would do on their own. A bit of positive reinforcement moving the acceptable centre way out of bounds.

We want tounderstand why we are being moderated

This is nowhere near that, but by encouraging, I just mean the concept of what is acceptable is steered towards boundaries

@RoryAlsop I understand that, and I can see where you're coming from, but right now I have the belief that a mod took Evan's stance to "normalize anti-Zionism" as an attack against the Jewish people, and that our agreement (in that we're angry at Israel) acts as fuel to the fire.

But nothing that I read, and from what I can tell, nothing that nobody or J read, called for genocide.

@forest there is an element of that - it's a bit broader but yes

So I do believe this could have been a big misunderstanding between Evan and the mods, perhaps tainted with his past behavior if he pushes buttons in the past.

@Jis12yearsold. that may actually be true - I am unsure why they came here as they don't usually

@RoryAlsop Here's my main issue: Everything that I saw him say, I agreed with (based on my understanding of what he said). I am now at risk of repeating something he said and now having people think that I am supporting genocide. I need to know what went wrong to avoid that. If I say "Israel is involved in apartheid" is that it? If I say "Israel is killing more Palestinians than the other way around", is that it? If I say Zionism is racism, is that it? Etc. As it is, I just don't know.

@forest I don't think you will. Your choice of words comes across as pretty carefully measured

@RoryAlsop But other people here also agreed with him who may not choose words as carefully, and could then run afoul of the issue. There's also a big difference between choosing words wrongly and calling for genocide. A blanket statement like "Israel shouldn't exist" is poorly worded and can be easily misunderstood, but is not calling for murder (for example).

@Jis12yearsold. I think it was a glitch. He's back.

Oh happened again. Must be having internet problems,.

Just a glitch - moving to different machine

Man I just regret not having logged it. Then we could just have asked for messageids

@Jis12yearsold. If you have a VPS or shell I could put something on, I could write something that periodically scrapes all big SE chats.

We are clearly not communicating well, a chat log should have been able to conclude this 500+ message convo in just 10 messages

@nobody I think so too, especially since this seems to stem from AviD's misunderstanding of the term "Zionism" and his taking offense to Evan's attack on it.

@Jis12yearsold. Site moderators are rather unrelated to SE staff.

I'm sorry. I admit forest is getting the crux of my point much better than I. In my defence I have a fever of 102° and currently feeling terrible so my words should be better

@RoryAlsop Not the rona, I hope?

Oh wow. I appreciate you being so patient with us even in this politically-charged time and while sick. I hope you know that we're all just on edge.

Just got tested - was negative. Just some cold I guess

Yep, I appreciate the time you took with us

Ah good.

I still would rather know what the messages were, though, as this is a serious accusation against Evan! Typically SE moderation only discusses these issues if the moderated party consents for privacy reasons, which I don't think is likely to be a problem here.

I'm not using me feeling crap as an excuse - I really should be able to articulate better than this

@forest thank you

I will reiterate - my aim is to protect the DMZ not to punish the regulars

@Jis12yearsold. One place Rory is coming at is that apparently, in the past, DMZ was shat on by SE staff because mods didn't manage to keep "something" under control, resulting in mass-exodus.

I know - but mods assume we get it as we are the front face :-)

Lucky we get paid so much for it eh, /s

And I think Rory is trying to prevent that from happening as well (in the same way that I tried to encourage Evan to define Zionism when he used the word so as not to cause people to misunderstand, as AviD did). I don't think he's personally trying to censor us.

^ yes

I try to take nothing personally

The tool we have of things do get upsetting is just to step away and ask another mod to take a look

But... we'll still all be a little bitter about not knowing what happened. Hopefully when Evan is unbanned (assuming he is right now), he'll be able to tell us.

He's not banned, just muted

@RoryAlsop Unfortunately, Journey mentioned that he has a personal bone in this fight, and AviD is Israeli (?), so two of the three mods already have reasons to be more trigger-happy when it comes to calling a message out as unacceptable. Likewise J has a Palestinian girlfriend, so we all have a strong motivation to look at things through a particular lens.

One of the reasons I was asked to have an independent look

@RoryAlsop That's why we were hoping you could expand on the issue.

I think I have given as much info as I can, but I may be given more leeway once SE staff have had a look. Am unsure.

So right now you're being mute on the specifics because it's awaiting an official investigation?

Rather than because you personally don't think we should be allowed to know?

In other news, I'm really enjoying this lemsip

I won't apologize for anything I said either, but I am glad that we were able to get through some of these particularly thick misunderstandings and miscommunications. And hopefully it will resolve itself in the near future (both specific issues in this chat, and the whole Gaza situation).

But there's not much more we can gain from this topic as it is right now. :P

I doubt Israel/Palestine will ever sort it out because humans are horrible in groups

S/are/can be

But I really hope they do

Probably not, but we may be able to make it less asymmetric if we stop giving one side all the weapons. I'm not a huge fan of the two-state solution (especially since those born in Israel today had nothing to do with the original injustice and theft of the land), but it's better than what we have now.

@Jis12yearsold. How much do you know about the Windows kernel? Would you be able to help me in understanding microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/07/08/…?

Hopefully you'll find Linux more interesting when you switch to that. :P

heh

@Jis12yearsold. Yeah it seems to be like standard rodata protection, but implemented using extended page tables, not regular page tables. But I have no idea how much it protects and whether or not it's security theater (e.g. protecting only kernel text is pointless since you can easily compromise the whole thing with an arbitrary write of kernel data).

> The concept of protecting kernel memory as read-only has valuable applications for...and even third-party drivers like anti-cheat and digital rights management (DRM) software

I'm against this :)

yeah lol

Hey, wouldn't it be great if we had a widely use, horribly insecure OS in which good drm was next to impossible?

@Jis12yearsold. Yeah for sure. That's true with Linux as well. The core Linux is actually pretty solid, but many of the drivers are... eh... But I'm trying to wrap my head around KDP to know if it actually does anything useful or if all you'd need to exploit the rest of the kernel through the driver is attack some non-protected memory.

@Jis12yearsold. You need to be able to write to some memory to start ROP in the first place.

Also Windows has CFI for some of the kernel, although it's only forward-edge (?).

Not nearly as strong as PaX RAP.

This is one of the newer VBS mitigations that is designed to enforce immutability of +R0 pages of kernel memory via SLAT and protect it from data corruption attacks.
There are two variants of this mitigation:
1. Static KDP
2. Dynamic KDP
Static KDP is aimed to prevent data corruption attacks commonly used to elevate privileges, kill defences, disable PPL by tampering with the Protection byte in nt!_EPROCESS structure etc. with a Ring 0 R/W primitive. With Static KDP, PSP drivers can protect a section of their image using MmProtectDriverSection which would make it Read Only(RO) using EPT ent…

From public.cnotools.studio/kernel-mitigations

@Jis12yearsold. This protection takes place as the driver is loaded (it has to be signed).

So it looks like all KDP does is enforce regular WP using VT-x with EPT instead of CR0.WP?

And so only works to protect from exploits that add the write bit to the PTEs or set CR0.WP = 0?

Initialized only once sounds like it's EPT-enforced W^X. Is that it?

I'm trying to gauge whether or not this is security theater. Unless I'm wrong, all it does is require attackers to be slightly more clever with what memory they attack (e.g. blog.can.ac/2019/10/19/…).

Sounds like W^X, or like security theater?

ah

Linux has no equivalent at the moment.

@Jis12yearsold. It does seem like a good idea, but it could be that the protection is so coarse-grained that it'd be tantamount to re-implementing process isolation in a microkernel, but with EPT.

Many exploits aren't ROP chains. There are lots of e.g. integer overflows.

But perhaps the goal is to make it so that a subsequent buffer overflow caused by an integer overflow in some size variable during memory copy cannot be used to overwrite some const function pointers, since const puts it in .rodata and this enforces WP using EPT?

@Jis12yearsold. Sure, but Linux exploits also tend to go after drivers.

I think it's used in protected core (or whatever they call it) Windows systems.

I think I'll ask a question about it on the main site.