Brief items

[...] Pick just about any crypto, it should be good enough. It's the key management that'll let you down.

When I'm auditing crypto code for security vulns, I pretty much ignore the crypto itself, I just use it as a beacon to where the mistakes are being made.

Today the Canadian Supreme Court ordered Google to remove search results that the Court doesn't feel should be present. The court demands that Google remove those results not just for Canadian users, but for the entire planet. That's right, Canada has declared itself a global Google censor.

I've been predicting for many years this move toward global censorship imposed by domestic governments. I suspected all along that attempts by Google to mollify government censorship demands through the use of geoblocking would never satisfy countries that have the sweet taste of censorship already in their authoritarian mouths — no matter if they're ostensibly democracies or not. Censorship is like an addictive drug to governments — once they get the nose of the censorship camel under the tent, the whole camel will almost always follow in short order.

[...] I regularly get e-mails from people explaining in graphic detail how their whole lives have been hacked. Most of them are just paranoid. But a few of them are probably legitimate. And I have no way of telling them apart.

This problem isn't going away. As computers permeate even more aspects of our lives, it's going to get even more debilitating. And we don't have any way, other than hiring a "professional cybersecurity firm," of telling the paranoids from the victims.

The GPU vendor mexican-standoff-farce is bound to become the laughing stock of history. I would put my hopes to the reverse-engineered drivers like Freedreno or the fine work from the etnaviv people.

The combination of SELinux, Smack, AppArmor and/or TOMOYO is not the goal so much as the test case. MAC was the coolest possible technology in 1990. We've implemented it. I don't see anyone doing a new MAC implementation. I *do* see security modules that implement other security models in the pipeline. Some of these need to maintain state, which means using security blobs in the LSM architecture. Some of these models will want to use secmarks to implement socket based controls. If we can provide for SELinux+Smack* we can be confident that we can support anything today's kids want to throw at us. If we blow that off Linux won't be able to adapt to the security needs of the future.

One thing that I realized recently is that nowadays, distributions lost the war. As the title of this post says, difference is our strength, but at the same time, it is also the seed of our ruin. Take distributions: Gentoo, Fedora, Debian, SuSE, Archlinux, Ubuntu. They all look and act differently, focusing on different target users, and because of this they differ significantly in which software they make available, which versions are made available, and how much effort is spent on testing, both the package itself and the system integration.

While describing it this way, there is nothing that scream «Conflict!», except at this point we all know that they do conflict, and the solutions from many different communities, have been to just ignore distributions: developers of libraries for high level languages built their own packaging (Ruby Gems, PyPI, let’s not even talk about Go), business application developers started by using containers and ended up with Docker, and user application developers have now started converging onto Flatpak.

I have also reviewed the patches and after I wiped the blood from my eyes, things looked marvelous there as well. ;) (I am always amazed as to the scale of changes introduced in Apache minor versions...)

I really enjoyed my time working on FirefoxOS, and getting a nice clean break from platform work, but it was always bitter-sweet. Everyone working on the project was very enthusiastic to see it through and do a good job, but it never felt like upper management’s focus was in the correct place. We spent far too much time kowtowing to the desires of phone carriers and trying to copy Android and not nearly enough time on basic features and polish. Up until around v2.0 and maybe even 2.2, the experience of using FirefoxOS was very rough. Unfortunately, as soon as it started to show some promise and as soon as we had freedom from carriers to actually do what we set out to do in the first place, the project was cancelled, in favour of the whole Connected Devices IoT debacle.

I’m thankful that the sewing machine was invented a long time ago, not today. If the sewing machine were invented today, most sewing tutorials would be twice as long, because all the thread would come in proprietary cartridges, and you would usually have to hack the cartridge to get the type of thread you need in a cartridge that works with your machine.

POSIX threads are also terribly low-level. Asking someone to build a system with mutexes and cond vars is like building a house with exploding toothpicks.