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- Torvalds criticises the 'security circus'
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Why give this fanboy nonsense publicity?
It's a blatant untruth on Torvalds's part, born of complete ignorance of the way in which OpenBSD's actually maintained, made in full knowledge of the fact that anything he says about the *BSDs (and OpenBSD in particular) will be parroted by every idiot who fancies he might have something to gain by blindly uncritical Linux advocacy.
re: nonsense
Well, I think the first article I saw on the subject sums it up for me:
And I just happen to agree with him. So many times security issues are blown out of proportion. Most of the time they are obscure issues that would never be exploited in the every day life, but let's make a big deal out of them giving crackers more information to use against us. Yes, the security issues should be known and fixed, but as Linus said, just as any other bug. Many other times they are used by Microsoft people to prove Linux isn't any more secure than Windows.
Should Linus have used that metaphor? Well, no, probably not. But he is entitled to express his opinion and make his point. I just wouldn't have been so rude about it.
As far as linking to the headlines - that's what I do. I don't have to agree with them and many times I don't like the articles I link to. But I'm not into censorship. I'm always catching hell for linking to articles that "insult" Linux or OSS. But folks need to know the good and the bad. They need to know what other folks are saying. Some may want to go to the site and comment. It'd get pretty boring around here if I ignored everything somebody thinks I shouldn't link to. I try to please the crowd, but you can't. You can't please everybody all the time. I just do the best I can with what I know how.
re: re: nonsense
Well I pretty much side with Security.
If you're driving down the road at 70 mph, and your tire blows out just as you notice your glovebox won't stay shut, are you: A) more worried about the blown out tire that might cause you to careen out of control and maybe die, or more worried about the glovebox because that annoys your passenger? Obviously some problems are more important then others.
Security - especially at the enterprise level - is the PRIMARY concern. PERIOD. And the fact that it's obscure and MIGHT not be exploited is a very weak (and stupid) security practice (if your business has 15 entrances - do you leave one door unlocked because maybe a thief is too lazy to check all 15 doors?)
Also, it's sad when the developer of Linux states that "all bugs" are equal. Since they are pretty much are all equally IGNORED, for proof, look at pretty much any 6 month rush-to-release distro.
Because of that, I for one, am GLAD that security problems get the hype and attention. I don't want a possible exploit vector ignored for 3 or 4 releases because it's just another bug.
re: re: nonsense
Yes, of course, you're right. I was a bit flippant with that original remark due to being on the defensive. I went too far the other way to try and justify my actions.
re: nonsense
> But folks need to know the good and the bad.
No, they just need to be well-informed. Isn't the fact that you can apply years of knowledge and judgement (and therefore a measure of discrimination) what distinguishes tuxmachines.org from automated aggregators?
> So many times security issues are blown out of proportion. Most of the time they are obscure issues that
> would never be exploited in the every day life, but let's make a big deal out of them giving crackers
> more information to use against us.
I'd have thought full disclosure was necessary to any serious, open source security auditing. It's certainly established policy with every other major FLOSS OS.
In any event, the distinction between (in Torvalds's words) "boring normal bugs" and security bugs is ultimately unfounded, provided, that is, your security policy's proactive (as in the case of OpenBSD) rather than than reactive (as is largely the case with Linux). I quote:
"During our ongoing auditing process we find many bugs, and endeavor to fix them even though exploitability is not proven. We fix the bug, and we move on to find other bugs to fix. We have fixed many simple and obvious careless programming errors in code and only months later discovered that the problems were in fact exploitable."
re: re: nonsense
well, "well-informed" was exactly what I meant. It's what I try to do.
> I'd have thought full disclosure was necessary to any serious, open source security auditing. It's certainly established policy with every other major FLOSS OS.
yes, you're right. Of course it is.