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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

We dropped an entire feature from our product because of this crap. We had a sidecar java process that handled certain PDF conversion tasks, but the lack of in-house java wizardry meant that we couldn't trust that small binary with regard to a spiraling vulnerability situation. Our customers were very nervous at the time.

Making something work in Java is easy. Proving it is secure is not.

It is almost certain that we over-reacted and shot ourselves in the foot with this, but our customers were happy with the way in which we responded. Better safe than sorry was the theme throughout.

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> but the lack of in-house java wizardry meant that we couldn't trust that small binary with regard to a spiraling vulnerability situation.

I've never experienced the problem of "nobody in my company knows Java well enough to trace the dependencies of a JAR". Do you all works in Rust and Javascript or something?

"This crap" being software that you exploited for financial gain without contributing to.

I think your use of the word “exploited” here is completely misused or naive, considering the open source license of the software.

> Making something work in Java is easy. Proving it is secure is not.

Ok, so which language it is easy to prove secure?

Prove secure to a corporate procurement process. Not a formal logic proof.

Any use of Java will trigger additional diligence work to prove it does not use vulnerable log4j. So in this sense almost anything else is better.

That's like 15 minutes of work tho

Perhaps — explaining that to people in procurement and convincing them is months of work. Corporate procurement doesn't actually care about the risk in many cases, they care about having someone to blame.

None are.

But, we do have sufficient resources to justify and defend decisions made with our primary development language.

In this context, "prove" is more like "convince".

Is there any interest in bringing back that feature? No wizard here, but I dealt with Log4shell for our product. Reach out if you'd like someone to take a look.

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