Saving the earth from anarchy by eliminating the weakest link

Posted Sep 11, 2003 13:50 UTC (Thu) by rjw (guest, #10415)
In reply to: Saving the earth from anarchy by eliminating the weakest link by rakoch
Parent article: Saving the earth from anarchy by eliminating the weakest link

I think the point made is that the infrastructure that these companies run on should be open source, not particularly the specific specialised programs that they have written. IE, SQL Slammer and Blaster caused quite a few high profile companies to have public cockups. This would have been prevented.

With in house software, this is mostly a matter of abstraction. You do enough banking software, you'll wish that you had access to all the stuff you wrote before rather than writing it all again for fun (Company switching is something you do a lot working for banks... ) . Have a look at some patterns books (Analysis Patterns by Martin Fowler helped me with modeling financial stuff a lot), and you will see that all these "specialised" systems are not as special as you think.

There is some code that is completely specific to an area, and a lot that could be shared. Unfortunately, this almost always leads to "We are going to make a big database to hold absolutely everything!", and some spectacularly bad architecture being mandated throughout companies. Thats because, no matter how capitalist banks and other corps look on the outside, inside they are run on command, and rarely have an internal market that will actually pick out what to standardise on based on merit. This counts for both homegrown and bought in code.

Saving the earth from anarchy by eliminating the weakest link

Posted Sep 11, 2003 19:12 UTC (Thu) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link]

Doesn't this ignore a bigger problem?

There was a path between whatever person seeded this worm onto the Internet
and the ATM machine. Why? Yeah, using Linux would have meant it was
mostly unaffected by that worm. But why isn't the ATM network separated
from the corporate network, the Internet, or wherever the worm came from.
Yeah, I know the data has to be able to move back and forth to some
extent... but it should be severely limited, controlled, and monitored.

The same mistakes with Windows replaced by Linux is not much additional
security. Those mistakes fixed while retaining Windows would fix most of
the worm attack problems (though it would leave other security issues).