Here are two separate ideas about programming, Internet security, Internet
architecture, and free software. Both of them are fundamental to
everything those of us who work on free software are doing.
-
Writing secure and reliable code is a highly complex and demanding
task. It's something that one has to learn, like any other skilled
profession. It's not something we're very good at teaching via any
mechanism other than apprenticeship and experimentation. The field is
changing quickly; if you took ten years off from writing
security-critical code, you would expect to have to learn multiple new
tools (static analysis, testing techniques, security features),
possibly new programming languages, and not infrequently new ways of
thinking about threat models and vulnerabilities.
-
Nearly every computer user trusts tens of thousands of other
programmers and millions of lines of code with their day-to-day
computer security and reliability, without auditing that code
themselves. Even if you have the skill required to audit the code
(and very, very few people have the skill to audit all of the code
that they use), you do not have the time. Therefore, our computer
security is built on trust. We're trusting other programmers not to
be malicious, which is obvious, but we're also trusting other
programmers to be highly skilled, careful, cautious (but still fast
and productive, since we quickly abandon software that isn't "actively
developed"), and constantly adopting new techniques and treat models.
I think both of those principles are very widely understood and widely
acknowledged. And, as we all know, both of those principles have failure
modes, and those failures mean that our computers are nowhere near as
secure as we would like them to be.
There has been quite a lot of
technical discussion about both of
these principles in recent days and months, ranging from better code
analysis and testing through the flaws in particular programming languages
to serious questions about the trust model we use for verifying the code
that we're running. I'm going to switch gears away from that discussion
for a moment to talk about a
social aspect.
When a piece of code that one is using has a security vulnerability, it is
not unusual to treat that as a trust failure. In other words, technical
flaws are very quickly escalated to
social flaws. This is less
likely among practitioners, since we're all painfully aware of how many
bugs we have in our own code, but it's still not unheard of, particularly
if the authors of the code do not immediately and publicly show a
socially-acceptable level of humility and contrition (in the middle of
what is often a horrifically stressful experience).
I think this reaction comes largely from fear. Anyone who has given it a
moment's thought is painfully aware of just how much code they are running
on trust, and just how many ways it could be compromised, accidentally or
maliciously. And how frequently that code
is compromised. The
less control one has over a situation, the more terrifying it is, and the
cold reality is that we have very little control over our computer
security. There is a natural tendency, when afraid, to look for targets
for that fear.
Now, go back and think about the first principle.
Anyone who has ever worked on or near free software is painfully aware
that we have far more good ideas about how to improve computing and
security than we have skilled resources to execute on those ideas. My own
backlog of things that I've already thought about, know would be good
ideas, and simply have to implement is probably longer than my remaining
lifespan. I suspect that's the case for nearly all of us.
In other words, we have a severe shortage of programmers who care and who
have skill. We desperately need more skilled programmers who can write
secure and reliable code. We may (and I think do)
also need better
tools, techniques, languages, protocols, and all the other machinery that
we, as technical people, spend most of our time thinking about. But none
of that changes the fact that we need more skilled people. In fact, it
makes that need more acute: in addition to skilled people to write the
code we use, we need skilled people to write the tools.
Skilled people are not born. They're made. And in professions where
training techniques are still in their infancy and where we don't have a
good formal grasp on which techniques work, those skilled people are made
primarily through apprenticeship, experimentation, and learning from
failure.
Worse, people who
were skilled do not
remain skilled without
continually participating in that learning process. See the above point
about a fast-changing field with evolving best practices. It's not enough
to know how to write secure code to the best known practices today, or
even enough to retrofit all of your existing code to current knowledge
(which is often so large of an effort as to be practically impossible).
You have to constantly, continually learn more, for which there is no
reliable formal training.
We have to try, fail, try again, and fail better.
But failure that leads to a security vulnerability is treated as a loss of
trust. We trusted that person to write secure code that we could use.
They failed. Now we can't trust them. Based on the trust model of
security, we should revoke their ability to try again and instead rely on
people who have not failed, since that will make us more secure.
Except now we just broke the learning process. And there's no such thing
as a programmer who can stop learning. So what does that do to our
resource pool?
It's sadly ironic, but I believe the free software community writ large
has a very serious collaboration problem: we do not tolerate each other's
learning processes. This leads to a wide variety of social failures
around hostile communities and the failures of meritocracy that other
people have talked about at much greater length. But even if you set that
all aside, it
threatens our security. We need secure code, a lot
of it, a lot more than we have right now. To get that code, we need
people who can write it. We need to grow, encourage, and support those
people and enable their learning processes.
Code is written by people. If we rip people apart when they write bad,
insecure code, we don't get better, secure code. We get fewer people
writing security code. We get far fewer people writing security code in
public, since some of the people who haven't been ripped apart will look
at that experience and say, "No way am I going near that problem area.
It's too scary. I don't want to end up like those programmers."
Fewer people writing security code means fewer people learning how to
write better security code.
Fewer people capable of writing good, secure code is not a solution to any
of our problems.
If we do not tolerate, support, and encourage the learning process
required to become a skilled programmer, or maintain one's skill in
programming, we are destroying our future as a community.
When you find code that is broken and badly written, you have found a
problem that should be reported, analyzed, and corrected. You have also
found a programmer who is about to have one of two very different types of
experiences. Either they are about to learn how to become a better
programmer, or they are about to be publicly shamed, humiliated, and
treated as untrustworthy. Which branch they take is partly up to them,
but it's also heavily influenced by how all of us react socially to the
discovery of bad code.
One of those branches leads to more good, secure code being written in the
future. The other does not.
Dashkiosk is a solution to manage dashboards on multiple
displays. It comes in four parts:
url_for is normally used to avoid hard coding of URL in Flask based
webapps. I've been using it in SILPA 
So the Kelly report of the independent review into the events leading to the Co-operative Bank s capital shortfall was published yesterday. During the day, I was putting odd bits from it out in 140 characters with the hashtags #coops #kellylessons. Here they are in one more permanent place. How many of these lessons has your organisation whether a co-op or not learned?
I'm mostly back into my normal routine now. Next week should be spot on. Today,
after my chiropractic adjustment and another walk to the post office to collect
another package, I got stuck into cleaning the house.
I got that mostly done before my massage, and knocked out the rest of it before
I picked up Zoe from Kindergarten.
Zoe seems to have successfully dropped her day time nap at Kindergarten now,
which certainly makes a huge difference to getting out of the place on time.
I'd underestimated the number of kids coming to Zoe's birthday party, so I
needed to get some extra goody bags made up, so we headed directly out to
Westfield Carindale to raid the The Reject Shop for some more bits and pieces.
After we got home from that, Zoe watched a bit of TV and helped me assemble the
extra bags, and then we had dinner.
After some epic procrastination (on Zoe's behalf) I managed to get her to bed
approximately on time. I really need to try some different approaches to
getting through the bath time routine, because it's just taking too long. I
gave myself a couple of time outs because I could see the situation
deteriorating if I didn't. It's unhelpful that my blog seems to be the third
hit in Google at the moment for "positive parent procrastination". I don't have
the answers.
The IT security world is still reeling from the impact of the 
Unfortunately, SMS is no substitute to the one-time-passwords generated using 
The insecurity of traditional telephone networks has been on display for all the world to see in the 
The staggering reality of the situation is that attackers don't even have to directly hack their victim's phones to access SMS messages.
As the Android API documentation demonstrates, 
Next time you log in to a web site, if the firm does try to enrol you in an SMS authentication scheme, it may be a good idea to click the "No thanks" option.
If you have already been registered into an SMS authentication scheme, fill out the online complaint form and inform the firm that you will only accept a proper authentication token or 
This weekend, 
I was tempted to ask if she also wanted my fingerprints and a DNA sample too. Not wanting to be too offensive though, I simply told her that there was no way she would be making a copy of our documents. I tried to explain it to her in terms that she would understand: that AirBNB had already verified my identity and that 
Current Glamor Performance
I finally managed to get a
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Okay, so far so good. But now it gets really exciting (and this is a feature added with 0.6.1): We can now query a component by the items it provides. For example, I want to know which software provides the library libfoo.2:
On the last UDS we talked about 
Update: As the comments pointed out, this bricked 
The