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If it isn't broken...
Jason Miller, 2005-07-18

There's an old adage that goes something along the lines of, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." This is a paradigm that's often ignored in the software industry. For better or for worse, a large portion of the software that we use is constantly being changed. Features are being added, code is being polished or optimized, bugs are being fixed, and as such many programs are in a continuous state of development. Naturally, this has security implications whenever something is changed or added.

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If it isn't broken... 2005-07-19
Alexey Vesnin
It's ALWAYS broken :) There's no all-the-time secure code. Not because of programming mistakes, not because of miscompilations - but because of that simple fact : the situation is always changing. And there's no program for all the purposes. I'm still using FreeBSD Branch 4, but there's a fifth branch, some Linuxes are improved greatly.... But all the time I'm setting up a server I'm making it based on FreeBSD v4. Why? The old-debugged code is the best! Every feature is a hole and breach. It's not a reason to stop adding the features, but it's a good reason to point our attention to the question : do we practically NEED the feature we want to add? Look at 'em all. And try to answer that question for all of them. Then you'll see, that at least 60% of features are more theoretically than practically useful. Especially in Windows OS. Try to use Windows NT 4 Server, if you really need a WINDOWS-server. Is there something wrong with it? No. It's just old, but not bad. Or use FreeBSD/OpenBSD for your server - are they worse than Linux? On a contrary... The key security hole is located not in code, not in hardware - it's in end-user mind. They often prefer more simple-administrable things rather than more complex but secure ones... Until we'll that problem - we'll always be in potential danger. The example you've mentioned - a BlackBox - is the rare good example of code creation art. I'm using it too - and it's much more useful than another unstable ones... By the way - my example for the same kind of software is OpenBSD - look at it. It's pretty good in secure way. Yes, they're adding a features. But most times only ones we really need.

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