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> 95% of companies on the planet do not have the necessary resources or expertise to run a robust authentication infrastructure Wait, what exactly makes this p

> 95% of companies on the planet do not have the necessary resources or expertise to run a robust authentication infrastructure Wait, what exactly makes this problem so fundamentally hard? What stops someone from just releasing a software system that solves the authentication infrastructure problem in a general way (e.g. as Kubernetes did for cloud orchestration)?

TremendousJudge 5y ago
same problem as centralization, it's a very attractive target for attacks, and if it's broken, you are compromised too
- paskozdilar 5y ago
  I don't understand the centralization argument. If anything, software solutions should make systems less centralized, since anyone will be able to run their own auth infrastructure on their own hardware. If you mean that a single codebase could be an attractive target for attacks, it's still not a problem since the Free Software community loves having a dozen of competing implementations of the same thing just for the sake of it :)
  - TremendousJudge 5y ago
    Sorry, I don't mean that the actual system is centralized, as in everybody pings back to the same server or organization, but that it shares a similar vulnerability with having the same codebase running in local hardware. And this isn't even solved by having standard protocols, open source implementations as you mentioned -- only mitigated. OpenSSL was exploited too.
gbloeb 5y ago
Economic incentives and strongly held technical opinions like those of paxys occupying staff+ positions at every participant in modern computing. We’ve deluded ourselves as an industry into believing that computers are too hard to build operate for anyone but Marvel’s Avengers of the Bay Area. That lie underpins the entire market capitalization of public cloud and it’s amazing how little clothing that lie actually wears in the end. Kubernetes doesn’t go after it, either; it complicates your system so exponentially that it drives the same lie. All Kubernetes does is assign a workload to a machine and hook crap up to it. That problem was solved in the 1960s by systems that don’t take multiple FTEs just to operate itself. When you look at Kubernetes in this light there’s a moment of clarity waiting regarding why it exists in the first place, and why it will never in a millennium replace Borg. In 2010, I joined a social media startup. I was the only operations employee on the team of nine who had ever touched an actual server with my hands. We’re on the third or fourth generation of systems people now who’ve never heard anything except the cloud-native drum and how they’ll never be qualified to run their fingers along the faceplate of the computers running their business. paxys is sharing a derivative of that because it is a strongly held industry belief and a safe language to speak in this market. It just doesn’t make it true, and that’s a powerful realization, but that’s not something most people are ready to hear and truly understand. You’re asking the absolutely right questions. You’re just asking an industry that gave up on itself so long ago that kids born after UTAH2000 can vote now.

TremendousJudge 5y ago

same problem as centralization, it's a very attractive target for attacks, and if it's broken, you are compromised too

paskozdilar 5y ago
I don't understand the centralization argument. If anything, software solutions should make systems less centralized, since anyone will be able to run their own auth infrastructure on their own hardware. If you mean that a single codebase could be an attractive target for attacks, it's still not a problem since the Free Software community loves having a dozen of competing implementations of the same thing just for the sake of it :)
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  Sorry, I don't mean that the actual system is centralized, as in everybody pings back to the same server or organization, but that it shares a similar vulnerability with having the same codebase running in local hardware. And this isn't even solved by having standard protocols, open source implementations as you mentioned -- only mitigated. OpenSSL was exploited too.

gbloeb 5y ago

Economic incentives and strongly held technical opinions like those of paxys occupying staff+ positions at every participant in modern computing. We’ve deluded ourselves as an industry into believing that computers are too hard to build operate for anyone but Marvel’s Avengers of the Bay Area. That lie underpins the entire market capitalization of public cloud and it’s amazing how little clothing that lie actually wears in the end. Kubernetes doesn’t go after it, either; it complicates your system so exponentially that it drives the same lie. All Kubernetes does is assign a workload to a machine and hook crap up to it. That problem was solved in the 1960s by systems that don’t take multiple FTEs just to operate itself. When you look at Kubernetes in this light there’s a moment of clarity waiting regarding why it exists in the first place, and why it will never in a millennium replace Borg. In 2010, I joined a social media startup. I was the only operations employee on the team of nine who had ever touched an actual server with my hands. We’re on the third or fourth generation of systems people now who’ve never heard anything except the cloud-native drum and how they’ll never be qualified to run their fingers along the faceplate of the computers running their business. paxys is sharing a derivative of that because it is a strongly held industry belief and a safe language to speak in this market. It just doesn’t make it true, and that’s a powerful realization, but that’s not something most people are ready to hear and truly understand. You’re asking the absolutely right questions. You’re just asking an industry that gave up on itself so long ago that kids born after UTAH2000 can vote now.