Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
Sven Slootweg
boosted
@trysdyn the other takeaway for today is that if you're a project maintainer, you can get a foreign intelligence agency to do a bunch of scutwork for you on their dime, provided you catch the exploit when it comes
Sven Slootweg
boosted
"what did we learn today?"
if you're going to backdoor your own software and your repo is on github, you should have a public mirror elsewhere because github will just disable your repo without understanding the consequences
"what?"
what?
Sven Slootweg
boosted
pretty interesting that github has only one hammer to respond to incidents like this and it's "block access to the repository so that nobody can see the source code history" apparently
(if i'm being generous, this might be to prevent dogpiling. but it sure does make all the commit references in the oss-security email this morning useless)
Sven Slootweg
boosted
After seeing how the XZ maintainer's burnout and mental health decline was exploited to the potential detriment of the whole world, we're totally going to be supporting our developers more, right guys? We're totally going to fund critical OSS and pay maintainers enough to hire on other maintainers to take the burden off of them and reduce burnout, right? Right?
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Inevitably, a vuln caused by maintainer burnout and underresourcing is going to spark more arguments about how to pay maintainers (hopefully sustainably).
As a former maintainer, things I would have liked to consider working on projects full-time include:
- a steady paycheque in line with industry salaries
- guaranteed for at least 2 years of employment
- with healthcare & other benefits
- and I can't be the only maintainer.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
One thing that the xz compromise also shows; simply having more eyes on something doesn’t make things inherently more secure.
Multiple distributions pulled the vulnerable xz updates. I doubt anyone really vetted the changes. I don’t blame distribution maintainers for that, they do a lot of work typically for free. But a lot of people have bought into the idea that getting your packages through a distro’s official channels somehow makes you safer. It probably helps with unexpected issues due to misaligned dependencies, but it does little for attacks like these.
In truth we got lucky that one person noticed some odd behaviour and decided to investigate.
To expand on this: you don't need to manage them. You don't need to track their progress. You don't need a special team for them, or a 'head of open-source'.
You pay them a salary in the same way that you would pay a salary to eg. someone who you don't really have any work for, but don't want to see leaving for a competitor either: you add them to payroll and just let them do their thing.
They're already a maintainer so they know how to manage the project. There are no further expenses or organizational overhead for you.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Do you want to stop "supply chain compromises" as a company? Here's a very simple way to do so: pay a stipend to a maintainer of something you depend on.
You don't really need dependency tracking tools. You don't need to exactly parcel out the 'right' proportionate amount of money to every maintainer. All of that operational complexity is unnecessary.
It doesn't even matter *which* maintainer you pick, as long as it's one who isn't receiving a stipend yet, and you pay them enough to constitute a salary.
It will cost you exactly one developer salary. If every able company does this, the problem of supply chain compromises is solved tomorrow.
All you need to do is simply *do it*, and talk about it so that other companies will too.
I would very much like for the conversation around xz to focus on how corporations have neglected their responsibilities to fund the work and support the maintainer, instead of focusing on the trustworthiness of the previous maintainer
Sven Slootweg
boosted
synadm maintainers:
JOJ0 (repo owner)
Ascurius
JacksonChen666 (me)
now the more interesting part is availability in maintaining the project:
JOJ0: pretty busy IRL
Ascurius: no idea what happened to them. their matrix homeserver seems broken and they have done nothing on the synadm repo for maybe about a year.
JacksonChen666: I have been temporarily given the lead for synadm by JOJ0, and did a couple of things recently. so I'm active.
so synadm currently only has 1 active maintainer. the other 2 aren't really available.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Quest: Find a 5V power supply with suitable barrel plug
Event log:
find a 5V power supply with a barrel plug too small
find a 5V power supply with a barrel plug too big
find a 5V power supply with USB output
Sven Slootweg
boosted
1am infodumping about optical fibers is completely normal and neurotypical, innit?
xz
It occurs to me that a lot of distros probably have a lot of already-built packages that involved one of the suspicious xz versions in their build process, and I don't know that they all have the tooling to track which packages need to be rebuilt...
Do you want to stop "supply chain compromises" as a company? Here's a very simple way to do so: pay a stipend to a maintainer of something you depend on.
You don't really need dependency tracking tools. You don't need to exactly parcel out the 'right' proportionate amount of money to every maintainer. All of that operational complexity is unnecessary.
It doesn't even matter *which* maintainer you pick, as long as it's one who isn't receiving a stipend yet, and you pay them enough to constitute a salary.
It will cost you exactly one developer salary. If every able company does this, the problem of supply chain compromises is solved tomorrow.
All you need to do is simply *do it*, and talk about it so that other companies will too.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
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 wanting to help. Could you imagine how happy that maintainer was? They were no longer alone.
And it turns out the only reason somebody wanted to help them was nefarious. I can’t imagine how they feel right now as everyone is blaming them. I hope they’re ok.
And it turns out the only reason somebody wanted to help them was nefarious. I can’t imagine how they feel right now as everyone is blaming them. I hope they’re ok.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
@aral Quite by accident, I have found that some managers respond to describing quality checks and safety inspections as 'the paperwork that keeps the CTO out of prison' can change attitudes in several layers in the company in one go. Most project managers seem to realise that if the CTO is going to be incarcerated, they are going down with them.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
most of my personal reactions to the xz thing today have been "this is almost the perfect crime and it's incredible it was caught this early"
Sven Slootweg
boosted
The fun* part will be figuring out how to prove other stuff hasn't been backdoored. While fighting the cops and spooks who want to be able to backdoor things without us noticing.
Sven Slootweg
boosted
Not the specific library, but the idea that compromising underpaid and burnt out open source maintainers is easier and cheaper than hacking a server.
- Website
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/
- Matrix
- @joepie91:pixie.town
- Pronouns
- they/them, he/him, whatever, it's not like I have any idea either 🙃
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
- No alt text (request) = no boost.
- Boosts OK for all boostable posts.
- DMs are open.
- Flirting welcome, but be explicit if you want something out of it!
- The devil doesn't need an advocate; no combative arguing in my mentions.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.
Joined Aug 2019
