Enforcing Approval Workflows at the Ledger Level, Not Just in the UI

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Many business applications only enforce document approvals through interface controls, which fails when documents are posted via imports, APIs, background jobs, or new screens. The article argues that approval checks belong at the lowest data layer, running in the same transaction that changes a document's status regardless of how the change was initiated. It recommends treating approval as part of a document's lifecycle, blocking posting unless approved, and locking financial fields once approval begins. Approval rules are proposed as stored data, snapshotted onto each document at submission and assigned to roles rather than individuals. Finally, it suggests hash-chained audit logs so that silent edits to records become detectable.

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Researcher finds airlock approval bypass in Hermes Agent guardrail, fixed in 0.2.3

A developer testing airlock, a prompt-injection guardrail plugin for Hermes Agent, found that its approval prompts could be skipped when a session ran unattended. In a oneshot run, a simulated agent sent mail contents to a local listener through a terminal command, and neither a prompt nor a block occurred. The cause was that airlock checked global settings while Hermes recorded unattended status within the individual turn. The issue was reported privately and fixed in airlock 0.2.3, which now asks Hermes's own approval logic whether a call can be approved without a human. The fix covers several run modes, including oneshot, yolo, cron, webhook and subagent contexts, and includes an end-to-end test. The author also describes a separate approach that refuses writes from tainted agents instead of asking for approval.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

ABLITERAX: an open framework for auditing and ablating LLM refusal representations

ABLITERAX is an open-source research system that locates refusal representations inside large language models and measures their linearity, multi-directionality, and distribution across layers. It performs targeted ablation under capability constraints and uses a held-out evaluation set to check that a drop in refusals does not come at the cost of general reasoning. The project's design stance stresses explicit limits, reporting of failures, and reversible, auditable changes to original checkpoints. Its authors argue that safety in frontier-scale and mixture-of-experts models is distributed across several pathways, so single-direction approaches tend to fail there. The document also specifies an architecture registry that requires verified adapters rather than name-pattern guesses for tensor mapping.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Git Reset vs Revert vs Restore: When to Use Each

The article explains that git reset moves a branch to another commit, git revert adds a new commit that cancels an earlier one, and git restore copies file contents without changing history. The main deciding factor is whether others have already pulled the commit: if they have, revert is the safer choice, and if not, reset can be used. The author tested all three commands on Git 2.56.0 in a scratch repository, including a push to a bare remote. The guide covers the three reset modes (soft, mixed, and hard) and how each treats staged and unstaged changes. It also shows how to undo a last commit while keeping the work and how to recover after a hard reset.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

SparkCat malware scans phone photos for crypto seed phrases and steals funds

Kaspersky has identified a malware called SparkCat that hides inside ordinary-looking applications, including some distributed through official app stores. It scans the photo gallery for seed phrases, which are often stored as screenshots or photos, and sends them to attackers. Once an attacker has a seed phrase, the victim's cryptocurrency can be drained. The article advises keeping seed phrases offline in a secure, durable location, avoiding storing them on connected devices, and considering hardware wallets with a screen rather than software wallets on phones or computers. The piece was originally published on 0xalert.com, a crypto asset protection service that promotes its own paid auditing and alert offerings.

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