- cross-posted to:
- autism@lemmy.world
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Getting noticed because of a 300ms delay at startup by a person that is not a security researcher or even a programmer after doing all that would be depressing honestly.
I love free software community. This is one of the things free software was created. The community defends its users.
To be fair, we only know of this one. There may well be other open source backdoors floating around with no detection. Was heartbleed really an accident?
True. And the “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” is a neat sounding thing from the past when the amount of code lines was not as much as now. Sometimes it is scary to see how long a vulnerability in the Linux kernel had been there for years, “waiting” to be exploited.
Still far better than a proprietary kernel made by a tech corp, carried hardly changed from release to release, even fewer people maintain, and if they do they might well be adding a backdoor themselves for their government agency friends.
The problem I have with this meme post is that it gives a false sense of security, when it should not.
Open or closed source, human beings have to be very diligent and truly spend the time reviewing others code, even when their project leads are pressuring them to work faster and cut corners.
This situation was a textbook example of this does not always happen. Granted, duplicity was involved, but still.
Ever wondered why ${insert_proprietary_software_here} takes so long to boot?
because AbstractTransactionAwarePersistenceManagerFactoryProxyBean needs to spin up 32 electron instances (one for each thread) to ensure scalability and robustness and then WelcomeSolutionStrategyExecutor needs to parse 300 megabytes of javascript to facilitate rendering the “welcome” screen
everytime this happens i become unexplainably happy.
There’s just something about a community doing it’s fucking job that gets me so normal feeling.
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I’ve gotten back into tinkering on a little Rust game project, it has about a dozen dependencies on various math and gamedev libraries. When I go to build (just like with npm in my JavaScript projects) cargo needs to download and build just over 200 projects. 3 of them build and run “install scripts” which are just also rust programs. I know this because my anti-virus flagged each of them and I had to allow them through so my little roguelike would build.
Like, what are we even suppose to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.”
I don’t want to go back to the days of hand chisling every routine into bare silicon by hand, but i feel l like there must be a better system we just haven’t devised yet.
THIS.
I do not get why people don’t learn from Node/NPM: If your language has no exhaustive standard library the community ends up reinventing the wheel and each real world program has hundreds of dependencies (or thousands).
Instead of throwing new features at Rust the maintainers should focus on growing a trusted standard library and improve tooling, but that is less fun I assume.
Can you give some examples of things missing from Rust standard library?
Easily, just look at the standard libraries of Java/Python and Golang! :-P
To get one thing out of the way: Each standard library has dark corners with bad APIs and outdated modules. IMHO it is a tradeoff, and from my experience even a bad standard library works better than everyone reinvents their small module. If you want to compare it to human languages: Having no standard library is like agreeing on the English grammar, but everyone mostly makes up their own words, which makes communication challenging.
My examples of missing items from the Rust standard library (correct me, if I am wrong, not a Rust user for many reasons):
- Cross platform GUI library (see SWING/Tk)
- Enough bits to create a server
- Full set of data structures and algorithms
- Full set of serialization format processing XML/JSON/YAML/CVS/INI files
- HTTP(S) server for production with support for letsencrypt etc.
Things I don’t know about if they are provided by a Rust standard library:
- Go like communication channels
- High level parallelism constructs (like Tokyo etc.)
My point is, to provide good enough defaults in a standard library which everybody knows/are well documented and taught. If someone has special needs, they always can come up with a library. Further, if something in the standard library gets obsolete, it can easily be deprecated.
I thought they already had decent tooling and standard libraries?
Like, what are we even suppose
supposed
to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.”
You’re starting to come to an interesting realization about the state of ‘modern’ programming and the risks we saw coming 20 years ago.
I don’t want to go back to the days […]
You don’t need to trade convenience for safety, but having worked in OS Security I would recommend it.
Pulling in random stuff you haven’t validated should feel really uncomfortable as a professional.
Debian actually started to collect and maintain packages of the most important rust crates. You can use that as a source for cargo
Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian.
those from Red Hat
Not the enterprise stuff; just the beta mayflies.
Yeah they messed up once. It’s still miles better than just not having someone looking at the included stuff
You’d think this would be common sense…
Eh, autism jokes are not funny. Ableism isn’t funny.
