Any sufficiently complicated product will eventually have major CVEs, as you say. Anyone having hosted Atlassians product know that these products are nothing but garbage fires on the inside, as the commenter above said.
Both of these statements are true and not mutually exclusive in any way.
So yes. Yes it does. Unless you meant that CVEs imply garbage code, in which case I think you read the comment wrong.
> everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products
This one fault doesn't tell anything about overall quality of the product.
The full sentence:
> The good thing about the fact that Atlassian offers both on-prem and cloud versions of their offerings is, everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products.
I.e., because the software is available for on-prem deployment, we have experience deploying, managing and debugging it, and therefore know that it is garbage, and we can apply this knowledge to conclude that their cloud offering is garbage.
It does not say the product is garbage because of a CVE.
But every sufficiently complicated product will have defects of this type, and a higher probability of defects does increase the probability of CVEs.
So, it follows in practice, as can be seen by looking at CVE rates from projects with high defect rates (web browsers, kernels, ...) vs projects with low defect rate.
Note that defect rate differences can be caused by multiple things.
Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker (which I used a lot, slowly :-))
Paper.
An Excel spreadsheet shared on a Windows for Workgroups share drive.
Carrier pigeon.
Quitting software to become a llama herder.
Seriously, though, after over two decades of using different tracking systems I think that the real alternative to stuff like Jira is to not go there. You may think that you need all those bells and whistles, but you really don't. What you actually need is the simplest possible issue tracking system you can get away with. All you really need is a prioritised list of issues, and a list of who is working on which issues now. ‘Kanban’ boards get pretty close.
Minimalism is power.
JIRA is too many things to too many people - in the quest to be everyone's bug tracker, they wrote (badly) in the whole kitchen sink. This is a general issue with most software, though. Especially big software.
You cannot have complex capable software that is also simple. That's an oxymoron. You can have complex software which works, but it is difficult to get there, and keep it there. There is simply too much that can go wrong that over time, it almost must go wrong.
Keeping everything 'simple' is not an alternative - the world is complex and so even a bunch of simple things, when put together, make something complex. Think unix shell scripts which can be so much sphagetti. The unix philosophy is to keep things simple, and yet ignoring the complexity leads to its own complexity.
That's the real 'terrible engineeing practices' which get down Atlassian and everyone else's programs.
Someone said 'use paper' or 'quit and become a llamma herder' - these seem simple but again, paper burns, shepherds get shot or held up by drug gangs.
All to say, I don't think JIRA is actually that bad. There could be worse products, there could be better. But it would exceedingly difficult to make something simple which also served everybody.
The most annoying bug was that one could only have around 4-5 tabs open before something went wrong and everything stopped updating.
Kiln was also a great product and allowed for using both Git and Mercurial. It was way better than anything else at the time, but lost out to Github.
I always liked Spolsky's Evidence Based Scheduling that was built into the products.
I used both FogBugz and Kiln at a previous employer, and I really liked FogBugz, but we had nothing but problems with Kiln. We had a fairly large team (maybe 75-100 people) and a good sized project (maybe 300k lines), and it was painfully slow to do anything in Kiln and it was down/broken at least once a month. It wasn't so bad early on when we were small, but it didn't scale with us very well.
Thanks
It is very enlightening. Try using their editor component to display the text of one of your Jira comments and making it display attachments.
My point is that it is experience acquired from managing these for a decade. If you wish to acquire this experience you need to run it, which is now even costlier than it used to be.
Think about that for a second. If someone finds a vulnerability in JIRA, they don’t just find a vulnerability in that software: they’ve got access to support tickets, issue tracking, etc about lots of vulnerabilities in lots of software. That’s a big deal.
The fact that the US government had to step in and say PLEASE TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY, rather than Atlassian going into a Code Red situation, shows that they just don’t take the level of responsibility they’ve been given as seriously as is required for what they’re doing. This isn’t just some lousy app having a CVE. This is the keys to the kingdom for a lot of very critical software. This is systemic risk. The problem isn’t the code, it’s the culture.
If you “work in the world of business software” and you think that’s a “complete bullshit statement,” I really hope you don’t work on anything for which such systemic risk is possible. Because, to turn your statement back on you, that’s a complete bullshit way to treat the responsibility you have for the data with which you’ve been trusted. Go build a social media app or an online shopping site or something, and stay out of critical systems that can create cascading vulnerabilities.
If you are maintaining the software of someone else and this software is exposed to the internet that's your responsibility to update the software. If you want your service to be available from the web and have good security, use the cloud offering, that's what it's for.
And if you don't want to use external software to manage your internal knowledge, then create some shared windows folders that nobody use and quickly becomes a mess. What alternative do your propose ?
Oh, you mean like Microsoft and Google in the examples I gave?
Why are you changing the goal posts? Your original statement was that this issue is evidence that "everyone is now aware of the awful engineering practices that underpin their products." My clear argument is that this is not the case, as lots of companies with systemically critical software also have bugs of this magnitude, or more.
Imagine being so naive as to think that documentation would be improved by e2e encryption. It's not bad enough convincing developers to write things down, now we need to explicitly share those things with every new person who joins the team?
"Sorry, we can't fix your bug for 6 weeks, Bob's on paternity and the fix is documented on his page".
> MAJOR difference between Chrome getting owned, and the program that hosts all of a company’s internal communications
There's at best 0 difference between these things. Pop chrome, harvest tokens, access Jira. Think about that for a second. What critical company information is not accessible to someone who has arbitrary code execution in your browser.
Confluence has become an absolutely disgusting, bloated Javascript beast. The amount of JS that it loads is unbelievable.
Then again, if you're only using the “ordinary” features, Jira doesn't have much advantage over any other bug tracker; Gitea can integrate with Jira just as well as with any other bug tracker, and well enough that the Jira / Confluence integration isn't necessary.
The Atlassian softwares are okay, but (from my limited experience) worse than their alternatives. On several occasions, I expected a bug, but it refreshed or redirected, and there wasn't a bug. I have found no bugs while using Jira, and not unusably many while using Confluence… but I can say the same for Gitea, GitHub, Gitlab and even Bugzilla. (Gitea's native issue tracker is actually good enough – and therefore better than Jira – for everything I ever used Jira for.)
Ohhh found the non power Jira user! Gitea is good enough for your org. Without knowing your requirements this is pretty much a blanket statement. Gitea is nowhere near good enough for a large engineering org.
Example: groovy integration with Jira allows an enterprise to build their own custom workflows. Like integrating with your Vcs to enforce funded work (requiring an open Jira issue in git commits). Features like this, until recently, left them in a league of their own. GitHub Actions has leveled that playing field. Gitlab and gitea can fight it out with bugzilla, but you won’t find them in most engineering orgs.
Another example: building out complex dev roadmaps ahead of time with constraints and relationships. Bridging the gap between dev, product, and project management
> but you won’t find them in any worthwile engineering org.
sure.
Perhaps you should consider that not knowing a thing is very, very different than that thing not being true...
I’m not really sure what the point of the rant is. It’s not as if such a comment conclusion is as big of deal to reality as an idiot staying unvaccinated.
But I get it; someone is “wrong”* on the internet.
* where wrong is defined very specifically to one or a handful of particular readers but the error doesn’t rise to being a real problem for humanity
Regardless of what one thinks about Atlassian, this is a completely ridiculous bullshit statement, and anyone who works in the world of business software knows it.
I don't think there is a company out there that hasn't had critical CVEs, nor most major open source projects, either.
Microsoft had a recent vulnerability in their Azure Cosmos DB product that left thousands of customers' data unprotected. Google has released multiple patches to Chrome in the past month.
If you demand you'll only use products from companies or open source projects that have never had a major CVE, you'll be writing a lot of your own software that probably has even worse security.