This is mostly a meme from the overzealous FOSS and privacy crowd, not the security crowd. Professional security engineers do not, as a rule, encourage software engineers (or end users more generally) to only use open source software because "you can inspect the code for vulnerabilities."

Anyone with legitimate security expertise will understand the benefits of specialization and core competencies. Namely that despite the ideological perspective of many in the FOSS community, it is actually better to trust someone else with the security of your software. Because you most likely can't trust yourself with that task anyway.

The idea that most people can reliably identify security vulnerabilities in the software they use just because it's open source is laughable. They might find trivial low hanging fruit or obvious malicious activity, but they won't have a better picture of the overall security posture just because they can read the code.

As an obvious case in point, consider how few people identify vulnerabilities in Firefox versus how many people use Firefox. The people who write complex open source software don't even reliably find the issues in their own code.

I intended it to just be a comparison of the "only download something you trust" absurd advice you get from "security" people you see on TV or something... and what the user was suggesting about the old days.

My FOSS comment was really meant to reflect the absolute rabbit hole you go down when it is suggested people can simply protect themselves. It's never ending flow of tasks and things you need to know that I don't think anyone can do ...

All else being equal, I'd certainly have more trust in the FOSS version. Yes, i won't audit it myself, but source we can compile ourself is still easier to audit. As such I'd hope more people will have eyes on it than without source access.

Same for a hash of the executable I download being generated by an reproducible build. And I prefer to download and run the same installer as everyone else than someone offering a custom download link just for me.

Non of that means I don't have to trust the project/maintainer. But it is a bit of extra safety I want in some cases, e.g. for a password manager.

And many 'professional security engineers' ignore core security (e.g. auditing protocols, connections, user access, etc) to push AV software, 2fa tokens, NIDS, version/patchlevel compliance infrastructure, and other 'security tools', because this is easier and comes with 'vendor support'.

I don't argue that these tools are a 'meme' however simply because there are a few people that don't understand the whole picture.

I could just as easily argue:

"The idea that most people can reliably identify security vulnerabilities in the systems they use just because it's protected by vulnerability scanning tools is laughable. They might find trivial low hanging fruit or obvious malicious activity, but they won't have a better picture of the overall security posture just because they can read the audit report."

Don't forget, you have to compile from source as well. I'm thinking the parent you replied to forgot how awful sourceforge was, and even trustworthy projects could have garbage bundled in.

(In reference to the classic paper: https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...)

I'm thinking along the lines of google's blog on Meltdown and Spectre recently that basically said if two things are on the same processor.... there's nothing you can do now security wise and be sure about it.

> Hi, president of SourceForge here. Glad this is trending, albeit a few months later. These articles seem to trend on HN every few months, with many people not realizing SourceForge changed ownership in 2016 and that the new team's been working hard on improving. To be clear, we had nothing to do with the bundled adware decisions of 2015, and when we took over in 2016, the first thing we did was remove the bundled adware, as well as institute malware scans for every project on the site. We're working hard to restore trust, so if we win some of you back that would be cool. However, we're just focused on doing right by our million daily users.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loganabbott

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17592523

Let me guess: you also dislike GitHub because it's closed, and wish people would distribute software from their own, self-hosted git repositories?

Sourceforge is a hostile source of malware : https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gimp-developer-list/2015-May...

You mock those who desire freedom at your own risk. Github is microsoft now, and supporting it feeds the beast.

Under new management, SourceForge moves to put badness in past https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...

Oh no, it's the 90s and Micro$oft is evil! They're going to embrace, extend, extinguish all my open source software! I won't be free to develop software anymore!

I'm quite happy with Microsoft, and if supporting GitHub "feeds the beast", then I'm likewise happy to see that beast well-fed.

That might be because we (at least on sites like this) are being overzealous about security. Or it might mean that in the modern environment, security is more of the concerns than in the halcyon days of MS-DOS.

The security paranoid experts and FOSS zealots have always thought for some inexplicable reasons that if you can download a source and build the program yourself, then it's safe.

Code signing is something you can do on both open-source or closed-source, but it doesn't prove anything other than that a particular build was made by a certain person.

But that's what trust actually is. This IRL person or identity, that I trust, vouches for the non-maliciousness of this application.

I think only a loud (very small) minority think that. The rest of us know that's silly, and bringing it up to prove some point against "FOSS zealots" is also silly. FOSS does allow for independent code reviews (which do happen on some projects), but that's not the only reason FOSS > proprietary crap.

Your use of "crap" to describe proprietary software betrays your bias. It's dangerous to be emotional when we're talking about security, it's important to remain objective and data driven.

Not all proprietary software is crap and not all open source is safe. It's not that uncommon that companies whose very livelihood depends on their code being secure invest much more time and money auditing it, while open source is often a lot more lenient, because there's not real accountability nor negative effects for shipping insecure software.

I'm not sure either is that much better at this point!

Any scum can pay money to get a certificate; you don't have to pass an ethics examination.

It is just a racket.

I think I like the old way better.

Your old way still exists. Approximately all real world users demonstrably prefer the new way, but if you're set on your old way you can still write software for macOS and Windows. It will pop a warning, but you can make it run anyway. Give your users instructions for bypassing those warnings. If you trust them to manually verify your software then you trust them to follow those directions.

If your selling software, this probably isn't a good strategy. However, I consider it perfectly reasonable for software that's being created in one's spare time and offered for free.

(I think the current situation we have on Windows / macOS is a perfectly fine balance, btw—except for drivers, where installing unsigned copies is way too difficult)

Perception is everything in those first few moments a user get his hands on your software. But now if I dont pay the entrance fee I potentially get abandoned by said user bc they have been scared off.

Its not an app store yet. Give it 5 or 10 years when we no longer have an open web and all we have are walled gardens.

You downloaded it to an isolated environment and ran it and proved it didn't cause unexpected side effects. It was run behind a firewall that could log internet communication. If it proved to be good, you ran it in your main environment. If it proved to be bad you warned everyone who would listen to you.

I feel like the more "social" the web appears to be becoming, the less social it actually is. We had tight little BBS and IRC communities where this stuff was all discussed. Social meant we actually had meaningful conversations... okay, not always meaningful, but it was often about the pursuit of something useful.

It's nigh on impossible with the proliferation of the internet to take this approach these days. Things just didn't scale that well. This is why things like DD-WRT and other hacker sites while being more accessible are still very much a niche market.

It's funny how much more technical you had to be back then just to get online. It's as if we're driving the automatic version of the internet now. Back then we had cobble all the pieces together and even when you had, it was like driving with a manual gearshift.

and convinced yourself it didn't cause unexpected side effects.

Put a one month timer in your malware, and this would get past many of such attempts to ‘prove’ the software isn’t evil.

Add a few countermeasures against clock shifts (e.g. only be active a few minutes each month or only activate when a) enough time and b) enough user interactions have passed from the first run), and you’ll effectively get past most, if not all, of such black-box testing exercises.

To be fair, with virus proliferation in today's age, we were still more successful with the remedial precautions back then than seems to be the case today.

Are you asking if software existed before code signing? Yes, it did.

IMO he was clearly reffering to 'thing' being 'an effective thing' for preventing viruses, as opposed to him asking if people downloaded software before code signing.

Of course not, the person who wrote that has absolutely no concept of the modern Internet user, and probably thinks themselves materially better than them.