OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure.
I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.
This is a great quote.
Flatland_Spider,
Absolutely! I don’t think any system in the world has more legacy cruft than email.
I would like to eventually see it rebuilt from the ground up, but I don’t have faith in today’s corporations building a federated network that’s fair for everyone. Facebook/microsoft/apple/google are much more interested in controlling us & our data.
True; if they do to email what they did tot instant messaging, then email would transform to closed source communication islands. E.g. XMPP was widely supported but now Google and Facebook no longer support XPMPP clients; Whatsapp still uses an old version of XMPP and doesn’t support federation.
Email is the only free, standardized, and universally supported communications method.
Agreed. I remember when I only needed one XMPP client to connect to the majority of my IM services. Now I have around four separate clients which I use regularly, plus a few more than I only use occasionally. I really do not want to see that happen to business communication. Yet, with many businesses using platforms like Slack and Teams today, we’re probably heading that way at least for internal communication. Email will always be around though. What does one do when a business using Slack needs to send a message or information to another business using Teams? Federated email to the rescue.
Now we need messaging middleware. Ridiculous!
Next, they’ll add a hardware dongle to make sure the computer is authorized to run the software.
I meant more in the meta sense of it. “Writing is tricky…”
Protocol Labs (https://protocol.ai/) is doing some interesting work with distributed systems, and I wonder if some of their tech could be adapted to the problem.