5 ms·

Then we can't do it. Cost is a requirement

LeifCarrotson 6mo ago
Cost is a parameter subject to engineering tradeoffs, just like performance, feature sets, and implementation time. Security and reliability are also parameters that exist on a sliding scale, the industry has simply chosen to slide the "cost" parameter all the way to one end of the spectrum. As a result, the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero that it's clear the true requirements for those parameters cannot be honestly said to be zero.
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  > the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero Zero is not the desired number, particularly not when discussing "hacks". This may not matter in current situation, but there's a lot of "security maximalism" in the industry conversations today, and people seem to not realize that dragging the "security" slider all the way to the right means not just the costs becoming practically infinite, but also the functionality and utility of the product falling down to 0.
  - DarkUranium 6mo ago
    I know a lot of security researchers will disagree with this notion, but I personally think that security (& privacy, I'm going to refer to both as "security" for brevity here) are an overhead. I think that's why it needs to exist *and be discussed* as a sliding scale. I do find a lot of people in this space chase some ideal without a consideration for practicality. Mind, I'm not talking about financial overhead for the company/developer(s), but rather an UX overhead for the user. It often increases friction and might even need education/training to even make use the software it's attached to. It's much like how body armor increases the weight one has to carry and decreases mobility, security has (conceptually) very similar tradeoffs (cognitive instead of physical overhead, and time/interactions/hoops instead of mobility). Likewise, sometimes one might pick a lighter Kevlar suit, whereas othertimes a ceramic plate is appropriate. Now, body armor is still a very good idea if you're expecting to be engaged in a fight, but I think we can all agree that not everyone on the street in, say, a random village in Austria, needs to wear ceramic plates all the time. The analogy does have its limits, of course ... for example, one issue with security (which firmly slides it towards erring on the safe side) as compared to warfare is that you generally know if someone shot at you and body armor saved you; with security (and, again, privacy), you often won't even know you needed it even if it helped you. And both share the trait that if you needed it and didn't have it, it's often too late. Nevertheless, whether worth it or not (and to be clear, I think it's very worth it), I think it's important that people don't forget that this is not free. There's no free lunch --- security & privacy are no exception. Ultimately, you can have a super-secure system with an explicit trust system that will be too much for most people to use daily; or something simpler (e.g. Signal) that sacrifices a few guarantees to make it easier to use ... but the lower barrier to entry ensuring more people have at least a baseline of security&privacy in their chats. Both have value and both should exist, but we shouldn't pretend the latter is worthless because there are more secure systems out there.
    - dundundundun 6mo ago
      In my experience, the proper infosec professionals both know and balance this well, it's the amateurs and posers who gets it wrong.
    - suburban_strike 6mo ago
      You're not wrong. The entire cybersecurity industry is a joke. You cannot play defense forever. You can only dig a bunker so deep, walls so thick, and areas so compartmentalized, before you have dug your own tomb and suffocated inside of it, or opened up a backdoor by tunneling through to the other side of the planet. It's called cyberwarfare for a reason. After mounting a defense, you're expected to stage an offense to proactively eliminate threats and deter future intrusions by fear of response. The only countries that understand this are Israel, Iran, Russia and China. The rest of us are content to burden ourselves with enduring global cyber-siege forever and acting like we're anything other than livestock building our own pens around us.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 6mo ago
    > utility of the product falling down to 0. Today a bank really sent me a legitimate email about trying their new site. Went over, it was their site alright, logged in with correct username and password - poof, instantly blocked for suspicious access (from my usual home machine), call helpline to fix. Now that's safe ... and useless. But safe.
    - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
      Reminds me of repl.it, which perma-blocked my newly created account before I even had a chance to type in e-mail verification code; in fact the notice about account block came before the one-time e-mail verification code. I still wonder what did I do wrong (support isn't responsive). But it's true that we're both safe from having a user/vendor relationship now.
      - suburban_strike 6mo ago
        This happens to me when I inherit phone numbers previously flagged for fraud, then try to sign up for new services. My email is clean (I'm not a fraudster) but they ban me on sight based on association with a bad number since I never bother with the transfer process. I always have to deal with this for the first year after changing carriers.
  - 1dontnkow_ 6mo ago
    The thing with zero bugs is that software is very complicated not due it being harder than hardware but by simply that get some devs, POs, sys admins, devops and stuff and zero bugs will be defined entirely different. For example, in theory the only real system with zero bugs would be one you use exactly always the same way, at the same place for the same exact goal and never change that. Its a bit related to the old saying in cybersec " the msot secure system is the one who isnt used at all and not connected to anything" so basically a tradeoff with UX always. But who would want that? I think thats why software on more actual mission critical systems are way more stable and bug free... still hate the word. Because it cant be avoided, since you see bugs sometiems are just situations when your uncontrolled actors (users, other services) use the system in a non-intented way so you try plan for that such us retry mechanisms, logging, backups etc. Because when we further think about it, have you ever witnessed a system in real life thats bug free? Humans have bugs all around, buildings, cars, even nature. So how would you expect we could do that, esp each random company? Also do we want that? What if we said there is a 100% defiend system we can make perfect in 100 years... Good, but whats the point?
- xyzzy123 6mo ago
  Is it the industry making this choice or the customer? You could make a car that's safer than others at 10x the price but what would the demand look like at that price? Would you pay 2x for your favourite software and forego some of the more complex features to get a version with half the security issues?
  - HappMacDonald 6mo ago
    Sometimes I want VSCode and sometimes I want Notepad. Well.. except that I never want either of those. So sometimes I want Kate editor and sometimes I want Akelpad.
  - 1dontnkow_ 6mo ago
    Thats very true and I think about often because even in everyday task e.g. "We need a new feature to download reports" then you get a ticket but still depending how much that is used, desired, invested in or marketed and all those things, how flexible should I make, whats all the errors, whats the data, how secure and million other small or bigger decisions. The point isn't how user stories are written, but realizing that everything is a compromise for practicality since if I wanted it to be the most secure thing ever, Id say "Lets just not offer that feature at all". But now back to cars, I like that I heard some companies promised or started to build cars again with real buttons. In our world its when I try to use more and support the tools which aren't build on Electron (and slow as hell) but actually care about performance. Open source and decent enough security is already the minimum requirement.
ablob 6mo ago
The question was not if it was possible within price boundary X, but if it was possible at all. There is a difference, please don't confound possibility with feasibility.
PaulHoule 6mo ago
Also people keep insisting on using unsafe languages like C. It depends on exactly what you are doing but there are many languages which are efficient to develop in if less efficient to execute like Java and Javascript and Python which are better in many respects and other languages which are less efficient to develop in but more efficient to run like Rust. So at the very least it is a trilemma and not a dilemma.
- jjav 6mo ago
  > if less efficient to execute like Java and Javascript and Python One of these is not like the others... Java (JVM) is extremely fast.
  - whstl 6mo ago
    The JVM has been extremely fast for a long long time now. Even Javascript is really fast, and if you really need performance there’s also others in the same performance class like C#, Rust, Go. Hot take, but: Performance hasn’t been a major factor in choosing C or C++ for almost two decades now.
    - PaulHoule 6mo ago
      I think it is the perception of performance instead of the actual performance, also that C/C++ encroaches on “close to the metal” assembly for many applications. (E.g. when I think how much C moves the stack pointer around meaninglessly in my AVR-8 programs it drives me nuts but AVR-8 has a hard limit and C programs are portable to the much faster ESP32 and ARM. A while back when my son was playing Chess I wrote a chess engine in Python and then tried to make a better one in Java which could respect time control, it was not hard to make the main search routine work without allocating memory but I tried to do transposition tables with Java objects it made the engine slower, not faster. I could have implemented them with off-heap memory but around that time my son switched from Chess to guitar so I started thinks about audio processing instead. The Rust vs Java comparison is also pointed. I was excited about Rust the same way I was excited about cyclone when it came out but seeing people struggle with async is painful for me to watch and makes it look like the whole idea doesn’t really work when you get away from what you can do with stack allocation. People think they can’t live with Java’s GC pauses.
whstl 6mo ago
Is having problematic features that causes problems also a requirement? The answer to the above question will reveal if someone an engineer or a electrician/plumber/code monkey. In virtually every other engineering discipline engineers have a very prominent seat at the table, and the opposite is only true in very corrupt situations.
- rvnx 6mo ago
  Unlimited budget and unlimited people won't solve unlimited problems with perfection. Even basic theorems of science are incorrect.

Cost is a parameter subject to engineering tradeoffs, just like performance, feature sets, and implementation time. Security and reliability are also parameters that exist on a sliding scale, the industry has simply chosen to slide the "cost" parameter all the way to one end of the spectrum. As a result, the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero that it's clear the true requirements for those parameters cannot be honestly said to be zero.

TeMPOraL 6mo ago
> the number of bugs and hacks observed are far enough from the desired value of zero Zero is not the desired number, particularly not when discussing "hacks". This may not matter in current situation, but there's a lot of "security maximalism" in the industry conversations today, and people seem to not realize that dragging the "security" slider all the way to the right means not just the costs becoming practically infinite, but also the functionality and utility of the product falling down to 0.
- DarkUranium 6mo ago
  I know a lot of security researchers will disagree with this notion, but I personally think that security (& privacy, I'm going to refer to both as "security" for brevity here) are an overhead. I think that's why it needs to exist *and be discussed* as a sliding scale. I do find a lot of people in this space chase some ideal without a consideration for practicality. Mind, I'm not talking about financial overhead for the company/developer(s), but rather an UX overhead for the user. It often increases friction and might even need education/training to even make use the software it's attached to. It's much like how body armor increases the weight one has to carry and decreases mobility, security has (conceptually) very similar tradeoffs (cognitive instead of physical overhead, and time/interactions/hoops instead of mobility). Likewise, sometimes one might pick a lighter Kevlar suit, whereas othertimes a ceramic plate is appropriate. Now, body armor is still a very good idea if you're expecting to be engaged in a fight, but I think we can all agree that not everyone on the street in, say, a random village in Austria, needs to wear ceramic plates all the time. The analogy does have its limits, of course ... for example, one issue with security (which firmly slides it towards erring on the safe side) as compared to warfare is that you generally know if someone shot at you and body armor saved you; with security (and, again, privacy), you often won't even know you needed it even if it helped you. And both share the trait that if you needed it and didn't have it, it's often too late. Nevertheless, whether worth it or not (and to be clear, I think it's very worth it), I think it's important that people don't forget that this is not free. There's no free lunch --- security & privacy are no exception. Ultimately, you can have a super-secure system with an explicit trust system that will be too much for most people to use daily; or something simpler (e.g. Signal) that sacrifices a few guarantees to make it easier to use ... but the lower barrier to entry ensuring more people have at least a baseline of security&privacy in their chats. Both have value and both should exist, but we shouldn't pretend the latter is worthless because there are more secure systems out there.
  - dundundundun 6mo ago
    In my experience, the proper infosec professionals both know and balance this well, it's the amateurs and posers who gets it wrong.
  - suburban_strike 6mo ago
    You're not wrong. The entire cybersecurity industry is a joke. You cannot play defense forever. You can only dig a bunker so deep, walls so thick, and areas so compartmentalized, before you have dug your own tomb and suffocated inside of it, or opened up a backdoor by tunneling through to the other side of the planet. It's called cyberwarfare for a reason. After mounting a defense, you're expected to stage an offense to proactively eliminate threats and deter future intrusions by fear of response. The only countries that understand this are Israel, Iran, Russia and China. The rest of us are content to burden ourselves with enduring global cyber-siege forever and acting like we're anything other than livestock building our own pens around us.
- B1FF_PSUVM 6mo ago
  > utility of the product falling down to 0. Today a bank really sent me a legitimate email about trying their new site. Went over, it was their site alright, logged in with correct username and password - poof, instantly blocked for suspicious access (from my usual home machine), call helpline to fix. Now that's safe ... and useless. But safe.
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
    Reminds me of repl.it, which perma-blocked my newly created account before I even had a chance to type in e-mail verification code; in fact the notice about account block came before the one-time e-mail verification code. I still wonder what did I do wrong (support isn't responsive). But it's true that we're both safe from having a user/vendor relationship now.
    - suburban_strike 6mo ago
      This happens to me when I inherit phone numbers previously flagged for fraud, then try to sign up for new services. My email is clean (I'm not a fraudster) but they ban me on sight based on association with a bad number since I never bother with the transfer process. I always have to deal with this for the first year after changing carriers.
- 1dontnkow_ 6mo ago
  The thing with zero bugs is that software is very complicated not due it being harder than hardware but by simply that get some devs, POs, sys admins, devops and stuff and zero bugs will be defined entirely different. For example, in theory the only real system with zero bugs would be one you use exactly always the same way, at the same place for the same exact goal and never change that. Its a bit related to the old saying in cybersec " the msot secure system is the one who isnt used at all and not connected to anything" so basically a tradeoff with UX always. But who would want that? I think thats why software on more actual mission critical systems are way more stable and bug free... still hate the word. Because it cant be avoided, since you see bugs sometiems are just situations when your uncontrolled actors (users, other services) use the system in a non-intented way so you try plan for that such us retry mechanisms, logging, backups etc. Because when we further think about it, have you ever witnessed a system in real life thats bug free? Humans have bugs all around, buildings, cars, even nature. So how would you expect we could do that, esp each random company? Also do we want that? What if we said there is a 100% defiend system we can make perfect in 100 years... Good, but whats the point?
xyzzy123 6mo ago
Is it the industry making this choice or the customer? You could make a car that's safer than others at 10x the price but what would the demand look like at that price? Would you pay 2x for your favourite software and forego some of the more complex features to get a version with half the security issues?
- HappMacDonald 6mo ago
  Sometimes I want VSCode and sometimes I want Notepad. Well.. except that I never want either of those. So sometimes I want Kate editor and sometimes I want Akelpad.
- 1dontnkow_ 6mo ago
  Thats very true and I think about often because even in everyday task e.g. "We need a new feature to download reports" then you get a ticket but still depending how much that is used, desired, invested in or marketed and all those things, how flexible should I make, whats all the errors, whats the data, how secure and million other small or bigger decisions. The point isn't how user stories are written, but realizing that everything is a compromise for practicality since if I wanted it to be the most secure thing ever, Id say "Lets just not offer that feature at all". But now back to cars, I like that I heard some companies promised or started to build cars again with real buttons. In our world its when I try to use more and support the tools which aren't build on Electron (and slow as hell) but actually care about performance. Open source and decent enough security is already the minimum requirement.

ablob 6mo ago

The question was not if it was possible within price boundary X, but if it was possible at all. There is a difference, please don't confound possibility with feasibility.

PaulHoule 6mo ago

Also people keep insisting on using unsafe languages like C. It depends on exactly what you are doing but there are many languages which are efficient to develop in if less efficient to execute like Java and Javascript and Python which are better in many respects and other languages which are less efficient to develop in but more efficient to run like Rust. So at the very least it is a trilemma and not a dilemma.

jjav 6mo ago
> if less efficient to execute like Java and Javascript and Python One of these is not like the others... Java (JVM) is extremely fast.
- whstl 6mo ago
  The JVM has been extremely fast for a long long time now. Even Javascript is really fast, and if you really need performance there’s also others in the same performance class like C#, Rust, Go. Hot take, but: Performance hasn’t been a major factor in choosing C or C++ for almost two decades now.
  - PaulHoule 6mo ago
    I think it is the perception of performance instead of the actual performance, also that C/C++ encroaches on “close to the metal” assembly for many applications. (E.g. when I think how much C moves the stack pointer around meaninglessly in my AVR-8 programs it drives me nuts but AVR-8 has a hard limit and C programs are portable to the much faster ESP32 and ARM. A while back when my son was playing Chess I wrote a chess engine in Python and then tried to make a better one in Java which could respect time control, it was not hard to make the main search routine work without allocating memory but I tried to do transposition tables with Java objects it made the engine slower, not faster. I could have implemented them with off-heap memory but around that time my son switched from Chess to guitar so I started thinks about audio processing instead. The Rust vs Java comparison is also pointed. I was excited about Rust the same way I was excited about cyclone when it came out but seeing people struggle with async is painful for me to watch and makes it look like the whole idea doesn’t really work when you get away from what you can do with stack allocation. People think they can’t live with Java’s GC pauses.

whstl 6mo ago

Is having problematic features that causes problems also a requirement? The answer to the above question will reveal if someone an engineer or a electrician/plumber/code monkey. In virtually every other engineering discipline engineers have a very prominent seat at the table, and the opposite is only true in very corrupt situations.

rvnx 6mo ago
Unlimited budget and unlimited people won't solve unlimited problems with perfection. Even basic theorems of science are incorrect.