I hope for the good of humanity that a difference here is that Twitter has some utility, whereas the comparable code bases at large tech firms are mostly useless features/products (i.e. bullshit work).
I was wondering how the "io" module was involved when the exploit claimed to not use any import. The answer is "io = open.__self__" [1]. Allowing "open()" would be an oversight if a sandbox intends to block "io".
From the article, "Indian-origin people account for just about 1% of the US population and 6% of Silicon Valley's workforce ..."
Really? In tech organizations (in SV), and we are talking about tech companies here, I feel Indians make up about 40% of the workforce. They are so dominant statistically that I have to always remind myself not to be racist when faced with organizational dysfunction caused by "management".
Let's assume that all the issues are binary (i.e. you are either for or against a proposition). But there are a large number of them. Humans are lazy. We try to use few categories to organize people we come into contact with (e.g. left or right, colored or white).
What will happen next? We feel that "the other side" seems to be all around, almost half the population. Example: many who oppose abortion probably also believe Black Lives Matter.
The details in the article may be useful for malware research. But in most situations, when the target executable is PIE and is not sensitive about how it is run (which normal programs are), you can just "dlopen()" it like a shared library and invoke its "main()" function after changing the runtime environment in your own executable.
For anyone who wonders what about Charles Kuen Kao (高錕):
... Despite Kapany's work, the loss of signal over long distances via optical glass fibre was a recurring problem. What Kao did was work out how to fix this problem, and calculate how to transmit light over long distances. It was Kapany's work which led to the fabrication of the first ultrapure fibre in 1970. This was a game-changer in modern communication systems.
...
The more interesting question may be what innovation was achieved in performing the experiment, mainly I assume, in controlling and measuring the large number of photons accurately. Hints on those seem to be Fig. 2 [1].
In the spirit of sensationalizing "China" and "supremacy", does anyone know if this technology is relevant to some Star Wars weaponry for example?