Bald now, don’t let the profile pic fool you. ✝️
Joined May 2009
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Samer Masterson retweeted
CONTAINERS WERE NEVER A SECURITY BOUNDARY
how many times do we have to tell you this?
Containers are no longer a security boundary.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a crazy amount of Linux kernel vulnerabilities and exploits. This has forced us to rethink the security of infrastructure that relies heavily on the underlying kernel, especially containers.
As models become more capable, the barrier to escaping a container has fallen so much that adversaries can now generate working kernel exploits in a single shot. CVE-2026-80521 is one such example. We discovered it using dfs-large1 from @depthfirstlabs and generated the exploit in one shot with GPT-5.6 Sol. The exploit still works on the latest Ubuntu 26.04 release because the fix has not yet been backported.
Read our full writeup: depthfirst.com/research/cont…
Samer Masterson retweeted
These are the golden years:
1. Exhausted after the kids are down
2. Walking with my son after practice
3. Playing Barbies with the girls
4. The endless questions
5. The “I love you” out of nowhere
6. Little feet running through the house
7. The funny prayers
8. The dance recitals
9. Toys everywhere on the floor
10. The giggles
11. The 47 bedtime requests
12. Little socks everywhere
One day, I bet we’ll wish we could have just one more day like this.
Samer Masterson retweeted
Every year on 9/11 I take the kids to ground zero to write down names engraved in the memorial. Then we go home and look them up to talk about their stories. Today, my youngest was writing a name when a woman walked up and asked her what she was doing. When she explained, the woman gently asked “will you write down my son’s name too?” We spent the next few minutes talking to Morton Frank’s mother about his life. He was 31. When I asked her how she was holding up on the 25th anniversary she teared up and said, “same as every other day.” #neverforget
Samer Masterson retweeted
maybe it's just me but the Rams look like a football team that took a 9,000-mile, 16-hour flight within the last 48 hours
Samer Masterson retweeted
As I go to bed tonight I’m thinking of those 15 Rams staffers who conducted a two year experiment trying to prove that the optimal way to prepare for an NFL game in Australia is to simply refuse to acknowledge that you’re in Australia
Samer Masterson retweeted
As confirmed earlier through our official channels, in mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the PHYSINT project. PHYSINT is an important project both to me personally and to KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS. Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner. In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in XBOX a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again. Please rest assured that development of PHYSINT, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward.
Samer Masterson retweeted
I thought about object storage a lot when I was working on serverless stuff and want to nerd out
In some ways you can build every piece of software in the world on key-value stores. A key-value map is the most fundamental data structure in all computing (see: Redis, DNS, LevelDB, etcd, git, ext4, BGP… are all dicts if you squint hard enough)
So in addition to S3 just being… the first cloud product ever made, there are a few systemic reasons why S3 won over the past 20 years:
- Moore’s law stopped but NICs continued doubling in bandwidth every 2 years, eventually network becomes faster than SSDs (even for consumers! simonhearne.com/2020/network… ), so disaggregated storage became the default (e.g., Snowflake paper)
- There was the “big data” craze and as datasets grew too big for one machine, the sensible place to put them is not in an RDBMS, but a bunch of blobs with “infinite” read bandwidth
- AWS charges massive egress costs. As everyone moved to the cloud, you needed to move storage there as well, otherwise it became too expensive to process your data. Storage became the moat for a lot of cloud companies (and still is!)
- AWS has really solid full stack reliability, better than any competitors. S3 is critical infrastructure for the whole world.
Samer Masterson retweeted
The RCA for the outage we had at GitHub yesterday is live.
We're sorry it happened and hope this answers your questions about it. The team is already working on the actions listed here to fix it.
githubstatus.com/incidents/z…
Samer Masterson retweeted
The benchmarkpocalypse:
danluu.com/benchpocalypse/
ALT There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalypse. While it's become easier than ever to make serious performance gains, it's also become easier than ever to reward hack a benchmark and make fake performance gains. The former is probably happening quietly across many different companies, but the latter is something I see at least once a week nowadays. Someone will claim they optimized X and got some huge performance improvement over existing software, but, when you look at it, what they did was make some optimization that improves benchmark performance without actually improving real-world performance. This is often some kind of "we rewrote X in Rust"1 project or a new startup that's looking to either fundraise or sell something, but it happens on other kinds of projects as well2. Rather than ...
Samer Masterson retweeted
There is no clearer example of the gap between the Beach Boys and the Beatles than the fact that John Lennon was so evil that he inspired a peaceful man to kill him, while Dennis Wilson invited a serial killer into his home and he didn't kill any of them, not even bald Mike Love
Samer Masterson retweeted
Remember to treat your body like a data center.
Consume as much literature and water as possible.
