tech companies donate their april fools’ day joke budget to open source maintainers challenge 2024

Polite reminder about the Jia Tan XZ hack: if an organization is so well run and well funded that it's able to play that long a game to that degree of depth and sophistication, that organization does not have all its eggs in one basket.

When Elon Musk, JK Rowling and the cops are unhappy, you know it’s a good law that will protect people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-68703684

There’s a combo hot take brewing in my head about the #xz and #redis debacles. It goes something like: When the shit hits the fan and part of the reason appears to be an overworked and underpaid maintainer, lots of people come out of the woodwork to demand more respect and money for them. But when a maintainer recognizes that they’re in an unsustainable situation and dares to make a proactive change, well FUCK THAT GUY. WHO THE HELL DOES HE THINK HE IS?

nation state actor maintenance of an open source project may introduce a lot of backdoors, but it also helps a lot of PRs get merged, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

being forced to mute the word “backdoor” is queerphobic

I think the most important lesson from the xz incident is that if you're losing an online argument about the quality of your open-source project, you can now safely accuse the opponents of being state-sponsored sock puppets and drop the mic

Happy Transgender Day of Visibility and Easter. May your eggs crack.

Them: What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done? Me: Awfully bold of you to assume I’ve peaked.

I wrote this ⬆️ a few years ago. As the fallout from the #XZ hack reverberates, expect to see people calling for a "real name" policy for contributors to critical infrastructure. But, as I explain, there are several practical problems with that. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/02/whats-my-name-again/ That's before we get to the ethical and privacy issues. Oh, and making it *easier* for attackers to target named individuals.

Maintenance is more important than innovation. This xz debacle is a symptom of a system that prioritizes lots of things above maintenance. Take this as a reminder to rest, to mend things & pay attention to what needs mending in yourself. Do the radical thing of working slowly and making all things more whole.

Personally, I’d rather celebrate a day about real living people than a fictitious magic zombie.

Attached: 1 image This text is not something we wrote in a rush this morning to meet the moment. We've had variations on this on our site from day 1. I believed it then and I believe it now.

people are saying the xz backdoor is likely the work of a nation state actor, and given that it appears to been slow rolled for a couple of years and immediately became obsolete before it was fully launched - you do have to admit it bears the hallmarks of a government IT project

New blogpost: _**[It is about trust, not software](https://neilzone.co.uk/2024-03-30-it-is-about-trust-not-software.html)**_ My reflections on the `xz` situation. > This isn't about software, it's about trust, and trust, especially *digital* trust, is easy to misplace...

"open source needs more funding!" *nation state pays for backdoor* "not like that!"

I know nobody wants to admit it, but security shit shows like heartbleed, log4shell, or xzgate are kinda exciting times to live thru. 🤓 Also I’m afraid it’s the only way to prove the problems we’ve been droning about for years are real and not made up by greedy maintainers.

My heart goes out to xz. A single maintainer, who was clearly in a rough place with mental health, screaming out to the world for some help and additional contributions, and somebody shows up wanti...

Attached: 1 image @bob

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange that's a warning to malware state actors - do not get between a db guy and performance. They will fuck you up.

my only contribution to the xz discourse: absolutely none of the supply chain stuff we're currently doing, including the things i like, would have stopped this. the only things that can stop this are (1) compulsively treating all code as untrusted, and (2) way, way stronger capability checks and restrictions in running systems. (1) is economically infeasible (the world runs on free labor from OSS), and (2) has had only very limited practical success.

Random, unordered, probably useless thoughts on today's apocalypxze... Part of the success in getting this into Debian may be the result of there being no xz maintainer there. It is "maintained" ...

@glyph @eb@social.coop I'm frustrated that big tech's efforts to increase core library security are "your project is too popular, you must use 2FA" and "the best reverse engineers in the world will find your bugs and put you on a 90 day disclosure deadline" and not "here is $100K/year and benefits to keep doing what you're doing at your own pace."

@eb@social.coop I really hope that this causes an industry-wide reckoning with the common practice of letting your entire goddamn product rest on the shoulders of one overworked person having a slow mental health crisis without financially or operationally supporting them whatsoever. I want everyone who has an open source dependency to read this message https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00567.html

Attached: 1 image #xz #CVE #cve20243094 #Linux

It’s not surprising that a major security vulnerability is once again caused by maintainer burnout and someone stepping in to take over. We’ve all been talking about that risk for years. Sadly it’s also unsurprising that OSS teams still are going to need to plead with management to stay funded, and paid OSS maintainers will still do unpaid overtime to work with volunteers. 🙃.

Love to see forks emerge when a company gets greedy and transitions to source-available after years of accepting third party contributions and establishing market share under an open source license.

Hey, with people in the news getting sentenced to prison, facing the possibility of prison time, etc., just a reminder: it is not desirable, nor funny, that violence in prison (including sexual violence), be a part of someone's punishment. Even people you really, really do not like who have done really super bad things. It is to the United State's shame that violence in prison is part of our carceral system, and we should not celebrate it, ever. We should seek to eliminate it.

Attached: 1 image Going to need slightly bigger [truth table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_table)... :calculator:

Hey everyone! #vultr just enshittified! They re claiming ownership of all intellectual property you host on their VMs. https://grimgreenfo.rest/notes/9rdle0uyo4d30029 Clear violation of copyright law. So, where are people moving to? What options are out there? that suck less?

I feel like subscriptions have generally made software quality worse. There was an argument that having to make paid upgrades to generate revenue to pay salaries put pressure on companies to change things that didn’t need changing, just to get that upgrade money, and subs reflected the holistic task of careful maintenance better. But in practice what’s often happened is the subscription props up bad decisions on product direction, because subs have to keep paying either way.

@noracodes@tenforward.social IMHO you should pay for open source if you are making a profit on it. Lots of companies are reselling proprietary software and are paying for licenses without having specific feature wishes for the software, they just pay for the maintenance.

"Vendor lock-in"? They wish. All these vendors are locked in here with ME.