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130 lines
5.7 KiB
130 lines
5.7 KiB
11 months ago
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html lang="en">
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<head>
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<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
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<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1, viewport-fit=cover">
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<title>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</title>
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<!-- CSS -->
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/print.css" media="print">
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<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/poole.css">
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</head>
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<body class=" ">
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<div class="sidebar">
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<div class="container sidebar-sticky">
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<div class="sidebar-about">
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me"><h1>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</h1></a>
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<p class="lead">Old school dev living in a 2.0 dev world</p>
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</div>
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<ul class="sidebar-nav">
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/">English</a></li>
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/pt">Português</a></li>
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/tags">Tags (EN)</a></li>
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="/pt/tags">Tags (PT)</a></li>
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</ul>
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</div>
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<div class="content container">
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<div class="post">
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<h1 class="post-title">Commented Link: Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software</h1>
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<span class="post-date">
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2021-02-18
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/links/">#links</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/google/">#google</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/safety/">#safety</a>
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<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/rust/">#rust</a>
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</span>
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<p>Initially announced on HackerNews as "Google to Pay Developers to Port Their Code
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to Rust" <a href="https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/mitigating-memory-safety-issues-in-open.html">on this
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post</a>,
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what is actually going on is not quite what it seems.</p>
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<p>And it seems this time HackerNews comments <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179032">actually got what it actually
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means</a>.</p>
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<span id="continue-reading"></span>
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<p>But let me surmise this.</p>
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<p>First of all, the funding is not going to open source developers so they can
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secure their applications, or look for alternatives that seem more
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secure. Google will fund another company -- ISRG -- for them to write new
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versions of some code. So, even if the idea is pretty good, it won't translate
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into offering help to the authors so they could still work on their project; the
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money will all go to someone else, to provide patches.</p>
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<p>This "someone will provide patches" always remind me of a talk by Brett Cannon
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on a DjangoCon. "You see this little puppy, so cute, but what I see is 10 years
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of walks, giving food and picking its crap."<sup class="footnote-reference"><a href="#1">1</a></sup> So, while ISRG will provide
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patches for improving open source projects using memory safe languages, there is
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no word about "and continue to make things work". Sure it is nice to have a
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safety patch in some other language landing in your project, but who will take
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care of it in the next version? And the next one? ISRG or the original author --
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whose, again, got absolutely nothing in the first place?</p>
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<p>Second, there is this line:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>The ISRG's approach of working directly with maintainers to support rewriting
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tools and libraries incrementally falls directly in line with our perspective
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here at Google.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>What feels strange about it is that we know, for a long time, that Google does
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not work for the common good; it works for itself (and that's ok for the
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company). But what if the secure way of some project does not fall in the exact
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"perspective" of Google? Will they fork it? Accept that their perspective isn't
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the right way?</p>
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<p>For example, recently Cryptography replaced a core element to use Rust -- which
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totally makes sense in a secure project. The problem is that some people, using
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some non-mainstream architectures, <a href="https://github.com/pyca/cryptography/issues/5771">saw their builds
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failing</a>. Now, again, it makes
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sense for something that enforces security to use a memory safe language, but
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what that was the proposed solution by ISRG -- which, again, aligns with the
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perspective of Google -- and the author decided that portability is more
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important?</p>
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<p>In the end, it feels like Goog is trying another way to take hold on open source
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projects for their own purposes and not actually caring about helping end users
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to have a better internet experience.</p>
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<hr />
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<div class="footnote-definition" id="1"><sup class="footnote-definition-label">1</sup>
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<p>Paraphrased, I can't really recall the actual quote.</p>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</body>
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</html>
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