Isn't the Cursor Marketplace separate from VSCode's? Maybe it's as simple as someone impersonating Anthropic because they never registered there? Code signing alone wouldn't help in cases like that.
Vendor A publishes a public key on their site for authenticating any signature. There is an entire subset of cryptography dedicated to addressing these needs. This is just yet another software player, Cursor, taking the absolutely easy no effort path because otherwise they would be, I don't know, "losers". I mean only losers would setup a basic authenticated provinance for bits of code they are pushing to the world to be executed by all and sundry. Really, this profession has become a complete clown show.
> Really, this profession has become a complete clown show.
Always has been because there is so far zero liability for anything someone programs and distributes commercially. That's the single root cause. If not that software wouldn't be in general such major shit show. What we have is the result of being allowed to throw out even the most toxic shit out without any consequences if it causes damage, no mater how large the damage is. Software companies caused so far over the decades likely hundreds of billions, or even a few trillion damages in sum, yet nobody responsible ever got the bill. It's wild west—since now over 60 years. This has to stop finally!
Let's see where things will move as soon as we have regular product liability for software:
Despite that I also think that this is the right and long overdue move on the EU side. We need to break the basic pattern that nobody cares as long as the responsible effectively never get the bill when they mess up.
Software is "Unsafe at Any Speed" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed ] to bring a striking analogy — even we have since about 60 years the tech to build software which provably (in the mathematical sense) matches its specification. Still what you have on the market is utter garbage, and instead of getting better it gets currently actually worse with lowering the garbage quality level even more with "AI" slop. That EU legislation could become the escape hatch; that's why I'm looking forward.
It's the biggest fundamental change which ever happened in how software is treated legally. This is a revolution!
Under the new legislation software products become regular products; there is no liability exception any more.
If you commercially distribute defective products to end user you're in general liable for the damages these defective products cause. This now includes pure software just as any other (physical) product on the market.
If you don't know how product liability generally works in the EU, and what this means for software see here:
I don't think even VSCode does this. Probably not even any package managers I know of? Code signing, yes, but not for organization verification? It's pretty much like a username - anyone can claim it if it is unclaimed?
edit: VSCode has a verified marker for publishers but I don't know how that works or if Cursor does the same.
This is a solved problem, just look at how EFF's certbot works. You cannot just claim that you are porn.com unless you put a payload there that matches what the bot expects.
And force everyone who wants to publish an extension to buy and manage a domain name? What if it expires? You're just replacing one set of problems with another.
You don't need to force everyone, both an coexist in this context. I do believe a company with nearly a trillion dollars of planned expenditure can afford to buy a domain and renew it prior to expiration.
Then you would have the same problem. Anthropic has no presence on the Cursor Marketplace, so what is stopping someone from claiming the name and just not associating a domain name?
Nothing, but that extension would be flagged as "unknown" or "third-party" source or something and you'd get a big warning before proceeding to install it.
Also, a basic scan of the package would have flagged an ssh backdoor, no? It didn't seem to me like its obfuscation was very sophisticated.
A big danger warning before installing extensions is a great way to kill your FOSS extension crowd off. Verifying ownership of a domain doesn't even guarantee that anything about the extension is trustworthy. People get phished all the time and skip through warnings.
Scanning is a curious one. It's not always obvious because developer tools have legitimate reasons to do a lot of these things. LLMs are better at understanding what it's actually doing now though so that might have worked. But who knows, people have snuck in backdoors into many things before.
Literally "Made by <verified domain name>" would go a long way. Cursor is just making poor technical decisions. But then I'm sure we'd have a news story about homoglyph attacks on Cursor.
> Code signing, yes, but not for organization verification
They don’t do organization verification, but they do verify where code comes from. You may be sure that packages are built by alpine, which made sure that the dist files comes from the sources that the maintainers added, and the latter ensure that the sources are correct. In truth, it’s a very small circle of trust.
From the producer's side, sure, we[1]'re all pretty sympathetic to the fact that if you publish a library a bunch of random people will build bridging libraries for languages that you have no control over.
But from the consumer's side it is very much an expectation and if you find yourself in the situation above it's on you to make it very clear that such extensions and third party tools are unofficial.
In this particular case I think it's fair to say that Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool.
1. We specifically being library and tool producers that are noticeably overrepresented on this forum.
> Anthropic really dropped the ball on signaling that this was an unofficial third party tool
Had the tool been up longer than the 11 hours the malware was live? If not, then why would Anthropic try to get it marked as unofficial, as opposed to take it down?
Or are you saying that every author and publisher should request Cursor to mark their extensions on the Cursor vsx pass-through as unofficial?
I think the way SO works became a burden as the pace of the industry increased. It frustrated a lot of people. I also wonder how much impact changes to Google search had in that initial decline.
Why are they plowing money into this garbage? I don't understand it. I guess it is because Google is lagging behind in the AI race but the roi of this bs must be close to zero. Clowns.
Yeah, I’m really mixed on this story. Why are they so insistent on not just blocking the sites? I don’t even really think a slippery slope is at play here. This is a very specific legal circumstance that doesn’t seem to have any chance of expanding to other forms of censorship.
Quad9 already states that they strongly oppose piracy, so just block the sites. The piracy sites will be fine.
I don’t think DNS is as neutral as Quad9 believes it is. DNS is like the sign for a business on the road and the domain registrar is like the building permit you get to build the sign. DNS is a way to find a website or business without even bothering with a search engine. Try typing in stamps.com, office.com, booking.com, weather.com.
The thing is that in most parts of EU any muppet can go about and find anything between fairies to wood peckers to stop deforestation. So if you own the land act first ask later is the correct way.
I am not claiming that it is right. Hardly Google that came up with this plot. Local people knowing how stuff actually works advised on this as it is not that uncommon.
Log4shell did not get that bad because it was only the less used version 2 that was effected.
The standard way hackers go about today is data theft and extortion. I think we would have heard about it if was a big problem.
People should off cause keep their servers up to date no matter what. The total panic that was yesterday with people posting all kinds of random AI slop was pathetic.
One of the few corps I applied for a job at that did not even reply. Also known for being a bit of a crappy employer as well even long before EA bought them. Many other studios was also out of line back then to be fair.
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