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Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by arghwhat on Monday September 06, 2021 @01:30PM (#28435975)
You are missing the point entirely.

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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by shukantpal on Monday September 06, 2021 @02:23PM (#28436494)
However, one does not conclude from the other as is insinuated in the comment.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by arghwhat on Monday September 06, 2021 @03:42PM (#28437203)
If all products have CVEs, and CVEs are a form of defect, then it follows quite naturally that highly defective products will have CVEs, likely more than less defective products.

So yes. Yes it does. Unless you meant that CVEs imply garbage code, in which case I think you read the comment wrong.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by kruczek on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @06:51AM (#28443197)
But here we're talking about one particular CVE:

> 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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by arghwhat on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @07:10AM (#28443314)
This is a complete misunderstanding caused by not readinf the first half of the first sentence of the comment.

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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by aeternum on Monday September 06, 2021 @08:03PM (#28439437)
It follows in theory but may not in practice. Certain software may have lots of defects that are not CVEs.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by arghwhat on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @07:16AM (#28443344)
All products will have defects that are not CVEs, hopefully by a large margin.

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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by wiz21c on Monday September 06, 2021 @04:43PM (#28437872)
> these products are nothing but garbage fires

Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker (which I used a lot, slowly :-))

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by eadmund on Monday September 06, 2021 @09:36PM (#28439917)
> Would you care to give us alternatives, for example, to the JIRA bug tracker

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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by smaudet on Monday September 13, 2021 @12:41AM (#28507917)
I don't disagree that Atlassian programs are generally bloated, but it is interesting to see everyone jumping at JIRA when its Confluence with the CVE...

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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by bamboozled on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @09:43AM (#28444740)
I would prefer to use anything but JIRA,I fucking loathe it.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by borkyborkbork on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:14PM (#28452248)
Jetbrains Youtrack is soooo much better in any and all ways that I can think of. https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by kodah on Monday September 06, 2021 @05:20PM (#28438227)
ZenHub! I love, as an engineer, that it layers on top of GitHub issues. So, in my general day to day I never leave GitHub.com or GHE, while project managers get all their shiny toys in ZenHub that plays nicely with GitHub issues.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by sufyanadam on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @11:17AM (#28445891)
Pivotal Tracker. I've found it to be a much more productive tool, and teams using it typically move alot faster and are far happier than those using Jira.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by jimbob45 on Monday September 06, 2021 @06:21PM (#28438763)
Is TFS no longer considered a competitor? Feels like it should have been the first mentioned here. Not saying TFS is problem-free, of course.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by mzl on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @01:35AM (#28441274)
I've had to use Azure DevOps recently, and it made me long for the speed, simplicity, and stability of Jira...

The most annoying bug was that one could only have around 4-5 tabs open before something went wrong and everything stopped updating.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by derekbaker783 on Monday September 06, 2021 @09:45PM (#28439967)
Azure DevOps?
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by HillRat on Monday September 06, 2021 @05:53PM (#28438516)
Spolsky’s FogBugz is still out there after a few ownership changes, and is still a hell of a lot less painful to use than Jira.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by dwd on Monday September 06, 2021 @08:11PM (#28439478)
It was innovative 13 years ago, but never really caught on.

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.

https://fogbugz.com/evidence-based-scheduling/

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by jlarocco on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @12:58AM (#28441089)
> 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 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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by knightofmars on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @09:07PM (#28451761)
No. It isn't. Having recently moved (a year ago) from FogBugz to Jira it's like a fresh breeze has blown into our case management process.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by samstave on Monday September 06, 2021 @02:56PM (#28436792)
Where may I learn more about exactly how they are "garbage fires on the inside"?

Thanks

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by Aeolun on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @08:15AM (#28443735)
Atlaskit (their UI framework) is open source.

It is very enlightening. Try using their editor component to display the text of one of your Jira comments and making it display attachments.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by gjvc on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @10:05AM (#28445014)
find or create an installation and examine how the database is put together
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by trhway on Monday September 06, 2021 @03:05PM (#28436879)
Try to use one
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by pixiemaster on Monday September 06, 2021 @03:19PM (#28436989)
Try using two of them connected together.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by wizzwizz4 on Monday September 06, 2021 @04:02PM (#28437426)
In order to do that, one would have to try to connect one to the other, which is usually sufficient.
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by arghwhat on Monday September 06, 2021 @03:39PM (#28437169)
First you need a fire starter, which in this case must be made out of bills valued 100 USD each or greater. It'll take quite a few to light the Datacenter licenses that are the now the only on-prem tier on fire...
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by brazzy on Monday September 06, 2021 @06:51PM (#28438994)
So... you do not, in fact, have an answer to the question?
Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by arghwhat on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @02:53AM (#28441753)
Lacking humor I see.

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.

Re:US Cybercom says mass exploitation of Atlassian Confluenc... by ashtonkem on Tuesday September 07, 2021 @09:18AM (#28444430)
Actually using these products suffices. Especially confluence, which regularly reduces me to a stream of particularly foul profanity.