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Overly strict and overly liberal both lead to ossification. That's merely the observation that buggy behavior in either direction can potentially come to be rel
by fc417fc802 1y ago
Overly strict and overly liberal both lead to ossification. That's merely the observation that buggy behavior in either direction can potentially come to be relied on (or to be unpredictably forced on you, in the case of middleboxes filtering your traffic).
I'd only expect security issues to result from being overly liberal but 1. I wouldn't expect it to be very common and 2. I'm not at all convinced that's a compelling argument to reduce the robustness of an implementation.
- NooneAtAll3 1y agowhat does ossification mean? open source something?
- remexre 1y agoIt's when existing implementations' inflexibility prevent protocol evolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification
- SchemaLoad 1y agoPretty much when something in the spec in theory could change, but in practice never does. So software and hardware gets built around the assumption that it never changes. For example for networking you can have packets sent using TCP or UDP, but actually there could be any number of protocols used. But for decades it was literally only ever those two. Then when QUIC came about, they couldn't implement it at the layer it was meant to be because all the routers and software were not built to accept anything other than TCP or UDP. There's been a bunch of thought in to how to stop this stuff like making sure anything that can change, regularly does. Or using encryption to hide everything from routers and software that might want to inspect and tamper with it.
- jraph 1y agoOssification comes from os, ossis: bones in Latin. Turning into bones. Stops being flexible. Common behavior becomes de facto specification. There's stuff that's allowed by the specification but not expected by implementations because things have always worked like this. It's not related to open source software. The seemingly matching prefix is coincidence :-) https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ossification https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ossification
- hoseja 1y agoSclerotization.
- baq 1y agoliterally it means that something is slowly turning into stone, like dinosaur bones. protocols and standard libraries suffer from this in figurative sense.
- lambdaone 1y ago"Overly strict" only leads to ossification if the designers of the system forget to build extensibility into their system design from the beginning.
- fc417fc802 1y ago"Overly" here refers to restrictions that exceed the relevant standard. An extensibility mechanism is useless if a nonzero fraction of the network filters out messages that make use of it in certain ways.