Mike Gao
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mgao.net
Mike Gao
@mgao.net
Software Engineer
[Verifying my cryptographic key: openpgp4fpr:237d13ae0bcb31c038b9bf63e43cfb9c6b95be84]
May 17, 2025 at 5:32 PM
How can anyone expect a career politician who’s only passed one bill to actually drive change? As a friend of mine puts it best:
It’s like expecting your coasting EM to fix your XFN collab.
Does your EM keep saying, 'How can I support you?' Yes.
Do they actually unblock you? No.
April 24, 2025 at 2:14 AM
Cole, a close friend I personally worked with before, is one of the smartest, hardest-working and most ethical individual I know. He voluntarily left his highly paid position at Jump Trading to join DOGE and I’m willing to bet every dollar that he will have a positive impact to the U.S Gov.
The men carrying out Musk's coup are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.

Make them famous. And, eventually, when possible, arrest them and charge them with multiple felonies. www.wired.com/story/elon-m...
The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk's Government Takeover
Engineers between 19 and 24, most linked to Musk’s companies, are playing a key role as he seizes control of federal infrastructure.
www.wired.com
February 3, 2025 at 7:56 AM
Reposted by Mike Gao
March 30, 2024 at 9:39 AM
Reposted by Mike Gao
I'm watching some folks reverse engineer the xz backdoor, sharing some *preliminary* analysis with permission.

The hooked RSA_public_decrypt verifies a signature on the server's host key by a fixed Ed448 key, and then passes a payload to system().

It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable.
This might be the best executed supply chain attack we've seen described in the open, and it's a nightmare scenario: malicious, competent, authorized upstream in a widely used library.

Looks like this got caught by chance. Wonder how long it would have taken otherwise.
Woah. Backdoor in liblzma targeting ssh servers.

www.openwall.com/lists/oss-se...

It has everything: malicious upstream, masterful obfuscation, detection due to performance degradation, inclusion in OpenSSH via distro patches for systemd support…

Now I’m curious what it does in RSA_public_decrypt
March 30, 2024 at 5:13 PM
How to make Google Cloud profitable:
Making a ~$990M depreciation expense adjustment related to extended useful life estimates on data centers. 😂
April 26, 2023 at 1:41 AM