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One good thing we can say about Linux bundling all the drivers is that it obviates the need to run almost all of this type of low quality (if not outright spywa
by digiown 9mo ago
One good thing we can say about Linux bundling all the drivers is that it obviates the need to run almost all of this type of low quality (if not outright spyware) driver management software. They are especially problematic because they can't be sandboxed easily like most other proprietary crap.
For whatever reason, distro maintainers working for free seem a lot more competent with security than billion dollar hardware vendors
- Hikikomori 9mo agoYou don't really need to run these updaters on windows.
- aleph_minus_one 9mo ago> For whatever reason, distro maintainers working for free seem a lot more competent with security than billion dollar hardware vendors I don't believe that these billion dollar hardware vendors are really incompetent with security. It's rather that the distro maintainers do care quite a bit about security, while for these hardware vendors consider these security concerns to be of much smaller importance; for their business it is likely much more important to bring the next hardware generation to the market as fast as possible. In other words: distro maintainers and hardware vendors are simply interested in very different things and thus prioritize things very differently.
- da_chicken 9mo agoSure. New sales means new revenue. Maintenance and support is just overhead. It's shortsighted, but modern capitalism is more shortsighted than Mr. Magoo.
- lloeki 9mo agoIt's a cost vs benefit. As long as the cost of such blatant violation of security principles doesn't outweight the benefit of focusing on something else, nothing is done. https://www.legalexaminer.com/lestaffer/legal/gm-recall-defective-ignition-switch-saved-company-1/ https://www.legalexaminer.com/lestaffer/legal/gm-recall-defe... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA2EBWFCULg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA2EBWFCULg
- jbstack 9mo agoI don't buy it. It makes sense for a small company where the cost of fixing it might be noticed. But AMD generates some ~$30bn in annual revenues. How much of a developer's time does it take to change the code to use HTTPS? $1000? $5000? Let's be extreme and call it $10,000. That's 0.00003% of AMD's annual revenue. It's barely even a rounding error on their accounts.
- scott_w 9mo agoBecause that's not how corporate maths works. The comparison is not "what is the cost of this vs our current revenue?" The calculation is "what could that engineer be doing instead and what is that worth vs fixing this issue?" Will fixing this issue bring in more revenue than ignoring it and building a new feature? Or fixing a different issue? If the answer is "no" then the answer is that it doesn't get fixed.
- jbstack 9mo ago> The calculation is "what could that engineer be doing instead and what is that worth vs fixing this issue?" I don't agree with this, because it pre-supposes that there's a limited number of engineers available. The question isn't "shall I pull engineer X off project Y so that he can fix security bugs?", it's "shall I hire an additional engineer to fix security bugs?". The comment above mine suggests the answer to that question is "no, because it's too expensive to do that compared to just paying to clean up security breaches after they happen", which is what I was questioning in my first comment.
- Symmetry 9mo agoYears of working in embedded computing have left me with the impression that most hardware companies are just bad at software. I think part of it is that the long cycle times of making hardware push them towards a culture of waterfall development. But years of working with the microcontroller libraries for ethernet PHYs, the bash scripts to build the kernels for SoCs, etc make me perfectly willing to believe they are incompetent with security.
- M95D 9mo agoAnd which are the companies that are good at software? Please, give at least one example.
- hhh 9mo agoApple
- scns 9mo agoXCode and Tahoe beg to differ.
- 4nonverbal-alit 9mo agoused to be. they're becoming microslop 2.0
- mring33621 9mo agoSurely you jest, good Sir!
- cmcaleer 9mo agoThese days I use Apple hardware despite Apple’s software, not because of it.
- hbn 9mo agoEveryone's gonna give you shit for this answer and there's a hundred things I could tell you about their software that pisses me off, but the bar is so low for software these days, their stuff is still in the high end of quality (they need to do a lot to get back to where they were 10 years ago though) Only other software I regularly use that I think is overall high quality and I enjoy using are the JetBrains IDEs, and the Telegram mobile app (though the Premium upselling has gotten kinda gross the past few years)
- zeendo 9mo agoThis comes down to intentions versus results. Viewed through the lens of results the comment you're replying to is still correct: The result is incompetence. I'd argue that's the only lens that matters when you're on the receiving end of such work.
- colechristensen 9mo agoIt is, mostly, the organization Linus created (and of course the enormous number of people participating). An absurd amount of weight is carried by a small number of very influential people that can and want to just do a good job. And a signal that they're the best is you don't see them in the news. We need more very influential people who aren't newsworthy.
- digiown 9mo agoThe most direct comparison would be the package manager, that's why I said distros. These driver management tools do a (poor) job at being a package manager, along with many other commercial software installation tools. With Linux itself, it helps that they are working in public (whether volunteering or as a job), and you'd be sacked not in a closed-door meeting, but on LKML for everyone to see if you screw up this badly.
- Avamander 9mo agoPopular Linux distributions also use HTTP CDNs. Even though the content is always signed, it still exposes the HTTP stack, signature verification code and a bunch of the application logic to the attacker. Apt has had issues where captive portals corrupt things. GPG has had tons of vulnerabilities in signature verification (but to be fair here, Apt is being migrated to Sequoia, which is way better). But these distros are still exposing a much larger attack surface compared to just a TLS stack.
- nextaccountic 9mo agoIs the issue in the OP related to windows? this wasn't immediately clear
- pooper 9mo agoYes, because you would only run such an updater software on Windows.
- charcircuit 9mo agoLinux has had support loading kernel modules since 1995.
- bravetraveler 9mo agomodprobe http://192.168.1.1/amdgpu.ko http://192.168.1.1/amdgpu.ko lol
- xattt 9mo agoAren’t vendors moving to a browser-based control model, where the hardware runs on a local web server that exposes various settings? It sounds terrible for security.
- kasabali 9mo agoRyzen master isn't a driver. Most of its functionality isn't even available in Linux, even with 3rd party tools or drivers.
- myst 9mo agoThe corporate drones have the management tower above them, the OSS enthusiasts do not. That is it.