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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

I see publications like this come out of CISA every so often, but they always follow a similar format: "security is a really big problem", "the industry is consistently failing to apply well-known solutions", "will you pretty please just get on top of this already?"

There is no regulatory body equivalent to the FTC or SEC or FDA for software, and it shows. Big software isn't magically more altruistic than big pharma or big agriculture or big finance. Given a choice between making huge amounts of money with very little overhead and raising overhead in order to protect consumers, they will consistently choose the former. It's high past time we have an agency with real teeth to regulate the software industry.

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Even highly regulated fields like medicine or aerospace have frequent instances of irresponsibility for profit. Only fines that wipe out the profits of operating irresponsibly will get through them.

Conversely, we don't want to lose FOSS because single developers can't cope with the legal risks. Maybe there's opportunity for incentivizing cheap security certification of FOSS, or a CISA-approved subset of FOSS that is guaranteed to follow strict security practices.

I dont't think this would be a problem for FOSS. If I release an unsafe or not code compliant kitchen/house/etc. blueprint (and don't make claims to the contrary) nothing would happen to me. If I sell them the situation might be different. I think the same would apply to FOSS.

Unless code somehow stops being speech, I see no way that this could impact FOSS (in the US).

All that that strategy would mean is that the costs of security auditing would fall onto the business using the FOSS code. It will start looking very attractive to instead buy code from an established software vendor who will provide some level of liability guarantees and assistance in auditing rather than going it alone with FOSS and in-house or external auditing.

The costs of security auditing already fall onto the businesses using FOSS code, though. A business just blindly incorporating code without static analysis, vulnerability checks, etc is not exercising due care.

So basically, it would work like in every other industry? FOSS, for all the good it does, it also did break the economics of software. How much of the current problems with adtech, surveillance capitalism and VC funding stems from FOSS making it impossible to simply sell software components like products?

None of it. Emacs didn't kill word or Wang or WordPerfect. OS vendors still make money despite Linux and FreeBSD. The GIMP didn't kill Adobe. And if you want to sell proprietary libraries your market is going to be limited because OSs will distribute them and it will be hard to keep up when customers are fixing their own problems.

What killed the shrink-wrapped market was first piracy and secondly the way people use their computers change. Then add on the easy sharing that e.g. Google docs enables and it's all over but the shouting.

The SAAS model also has the benefit of aligning value delivery with outlays temporally. No more wait a year before shipping: instead get quick iteration with an ongoing revenue stream. You can recover from missteps in a way that the old model could not.

> Emacs didn't kill word or Wang or WordPerfect.

Not sure how to respond to that. Emacs is around, the latter two I believe not, but approximately nobody is using them anyway. And I say that as someone who lives in Emacs.

> OS vendors still make money despite Linux and FreeBSD.

Apple makes money on hardware. Microsoft makes money on cloud, and has been desperately trying to turn Windows into a subscription service for a while now. They even non-humorously said exactly this in some message in (IIRC) installer or update screen - I remember Windows 10 telling me "Windows is a service" as if that was a good thing.

> The GIMP didn't kill Adobe.

No, but again, GIMP and Krita are used by approximately no one, meanwhile Adobe switched to a quite abusive subscription model.

> And if you want to sell proprietary libraries your market is going to be limited because OSs will distribute them and it will be hard to keep up when customers are fixing their own problems.

I don't see how. Think about the 100 (or 10 000, if you're doing webdev) dependencies your product uses. Most of those could be a licensed product, creating a cottage industry of small vendors making a living from developing specialized libraries. This thing is real in some areas, e.g. industrial software, where there are e.g. protocols that are too complex and boring for Open Source community to care about supporting in full. But it's something impossible in general, because popularity of open source simply prevents this kind of market from forming.

Now, to be clear: I don't have a strong opinion on whether this is good or bad. Still trying to fully understand that one. But what I know for sure is that open source is a huge disruption to how the market would've worked otherwise.

> What killed the shrink-wrapped market was first piracy

I'm not convinced about that. Maybe video games had a problem, but money in software in general was in B2B, not B2C, and there the piracy was effectively mitigated by the legal system. In fact, both Microsoft and Adobe used piracy as opportunity because of that - kids would grow up using pirated copies of professional software, and then as adults, their companies and their employers would have to buy the properly licensed versions of that same software, because that's the only thing anyone has experience in using.

> The SAAS model also has the benefit of aligning value delivery with outlays temporally. No more wait a year before shipping: instead get quick iteration with an ongoing revenue stream. You can recover from missteps in a way that the old model could not.

SaaS has some benefits, but they tend to be single-sided, unless the customer and the vendor are comparable in power, which usually isn't the case. So while e.g. IBM or Microsoft can force Google or Adobe to behave, my small business will be taken advantage of by large SaaS vendors.

Oh my gosh. It's not FOSS that kills software, it's ctrl-c and ctrl-v.

Computers always allowed you to copy code for free and any new concept that took six months to be made up, can be duplicated for free in one second.

The real problem is that you have to ship code that can be disassembled and read by another human being, to sell software. This fact annihlates any incentive and control an author-of-software has over their conceptual labor.

What we need is a method to sell a binary (and source-code) that are completely free of human-perceivable information AND authorized against a purchase server. Identify the code author or not, both are fine, what matters is the conceptual labor is protected.

That's it. We do that and it becomes viable to do hard mental work for a long time, and take risks on bold moves. Make the concept work and sell the baked end result without giving away the recipe.

Every other industry keeps the means of production to themselves.

But for some awful reason, programmers are expected/required to ship the means of production, the understanding of the code and the concepts of the code AND be ready to answer anything, in a relationship with the purchaser.

The balance of effort between software developers and the benefit everyone else gets from them, is completely messed up.

> What we need is a method to sell a binary (and source-code) that are completely free of human-perceivable information AND authorized against a purchase server.

That sounds impossible in principle, not without taking away ownership of the machine from the user. I guess TPM + homomorphic encryption might allow this one day, but that doesn't feel like a win for society.

> But for some awful reason, programmers are expected/required to ship the means of production

Pedantic, perhaps, but I wouldn't classify code as "means of production". Dev tools and supporting tooling, maybe, which no one is required to ship.

I sort of agree with you're saying overall - you're pointing out the fundamental issue, open source is just something enabled by it. I focused on open source because, arguably, this reality of "messed up balance" was still manageable through the legal system, and it's the FLOSS becoming a cultural phenomenon in the industry that broke this.

And this is how it should be. Vendors need to be responsible for what they deliver, if it is FOSS or not.

When you give a piece of cake, that doesn't make you a cake vendor, do you?

You misunderstood. In the scenario you replied to, you give a piece of cake, to someone who then sold it to someone else. They are the vendor, not you.

So we agree :)

That was a piece of cake.

That could be a good thing - FOSS projects could sell liability protection to fund development.

They won't, because they'll need to find an insurer willing to underwrite it. Good luck getting liability and omissions coverage without an established business entity or licensure. Insurers themselves want to know you are following the law rather than fly by night operations.

I mean, there's a reason most FOSS software licenses contain some variation of "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES..."

That's all software.

I don’t think it is. If you pay for software it generally comes with some warranty and guarantee of fitness for purpose.

>> If you pay for software it generally comes with some warranty and guarantee of fitness for purpose.

Generally it does not:

Microsoft Windows EULA states:

"Disclaimer. Neither Microsoft, nor the device manufacturer or installer, gives any other express warranties, guarantees, or conditions. Microsoft and the device manufacturer and installer exclude all implied warranties and conditions, including those of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. If your local law does not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, then any implied warranties, guarantees, or conditions last only during the term of the limited warranty and are limited as much as your local law allows. If your local law requires a longer limited warranty term, despite this agreement, then that longer term will apply, but you can recover only the remedies this agreement allows."

Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/U...

Oracle EULA states:

"Disclaimer of Warranties; Limitation of Liability THE PROGRAMS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. ORACLE FURTHER DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS AND IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NONINFRINGEMENT."

Source: https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/standard-license.h...

> Generally it does not:

And that's a real damn shame, too. If only we had actual Engineering certifications for software engineers.

Things would be a lot more expensive... but perhaps they'd be a lot more consumer-friendly too.

> If only we had actual Engineering certifications for software engineers.

See Canada: Software Engineers are called Software Developers there, problem solved.

No, we have actual software engineering degrees. So there are software engineers here too.

Ton nom d'utilisateur ne me rappelle pas de souvenirs parce que j'ai tout oublié de ces mardis là

Hahahahaha I wish je pouvais oublier quelques mardi moi. Au moins c'était pas des jeudi :)

Microsoft doesn't provide any guarantee of fitness for use, and you blame that on software engineers being uncertified? Blame it on Microsoft!

(Now, there might be an argument you could make that, if software engineers had actual certifications, they would have the leverage to push back against Microsoft management and say "no, we're not going to ship that". But I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work, at least not at this stage of the game. Microsoft would just find coders in India or the Philippines or somewhere to implement it where there are no such professional regulations. No, when a company the size of Microsoft does something like that, the problem is not with the individual contributors.)

Even in places where Engineers are distinct from Developers (see Canada above), it's not common to learn code safety as a core principle for writing good software. Safety critical and real-time software principles are topics often left to upper year electives.

My university (UNSW in Australia) had a compulsory “Ethics for software engineers” course as part of my CS degree. It was shockingly interesting and relevant. We studied various ethical frameworks, went through case studies about bad software killing people and had class debates and things.

An ethics course is no panacea. But what I learned in ethics has been far more useful in my career than a lot of my hard CS subjects.

Many countries have them.

Yeah. I don’t think engineering certifications are needed. But I do think it should be illegal for companies to avoid legal liability for their products like this.

I mean, you don’t sign a 20 page contract when you visit a restaurant saying you agree not to sue them if you get food poisoning. Or sign something saying you take responsibility if you die in a plane crash, or from a shoddy building collapsing on your head. Companies in all other areas of society are held responsible for foreseeable harm caused by the products they sell. EULAs make a mockery of that, and the law should void or ban them.

Software has catastrophic bugs that make it more like house of card engineering than building engineering. But sure we can make NASA-grade programs, for NASA prices. Or actually we can’t, because there is an extremely limited supply of such scientists, who would also accept to work on a boring data entry app.

Software also suffers of untold expectations. Companies regularly spend as much time writing specs as developing the real software, and yet, imprecision still dominates the implementation.

I assure you, software engineers have zero say in the licensing decisions beyond the size of a small corp. It's all the management and lawyers at work.

In fact, in the US, if you get a licensed engineer to do an inspection or design job, they will also often include a list of disclaimers to avoid liability. You often have to negotiate the lack of said liability waiver in advance for a higher fee. Note, liability waivers don't protect from negilence, just all other scenarios.

Did you check the guarantee associated with Windows enterprise?

>> Did you check the guarantee associated with Windows enterprise?

That's a deep rabbit hole that leads to the Underdark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underdark) of Enterprise Legal Agreements.

Only high-level legal wizards and magisters can go there and expect to understand anything and keep their sanity.

Not a lawyer, but I expect it comes down to "if you follow our guidelines and pay us enough we can make the following guarantees, but there are certain things that we simply do not cover."

>if you follow our guidelines and pay us enough we can make the following guarantees, but there are certain things that we simply do not cover

This is exactly what a warranty is though.

Has the Commerce Dept gotten any money back?

>> This is exactly what a warranty is though.

Yes, but it is not for consumers. It is for big businesses that pay millions and have specific expectations. The more you are willing to pay to more you can get within specific limits.

Your original statement, "If you pay for software it generally comes with some warranty and guarantee of fitness for purpose." does not hold for consumers and only partially holds for enterprise customers.

It might be better stated: "If your business / entity / government has specific needs (e.g. compliance with legal or medical regulations, industry certifications, ISO requirements, auditing, etc.), has a large sack of money to pay, and a team of lawyers, then there are some software publishers who will sign contracts to guarantee you certain qualities about the software you license with them and perhaps some level of support of that software."

It's in the next paragraph:

---

Limited Remedy. If Microsoft, or the device manufacturer or installer, breaches its limited warranty, it will, at its election, either: (i) repair or replace the software at no charge, or (ii) accept return of the software (or at its election the device on which the software was preinstalled) for a refund of the amount paid, if any.

---

>If you pay for software it generally comes with some warranty and guarantee of fitness for purpose.

Unless it's some sort of bespoke software with a detailed contract (the details of which aren't available), I don't believe that's true.

Every single software license (as well as websites and other services) I've ever read (over the past 30 years or so) has had some similar disclaimer.

Would you provide an example that doesn't follow that pattern?

That's absolutely not all software.

If the argument against laws is the existence of the lawless, why have laws at all?

Those not self aware of rhetoric are doomed to repeat it.

FOSS has nothing to do with that. Companies providing products based on FOSS need to do their homework and check what they're using. If they can't guarantee that the FOSS library is reliable, they shouldn't use it.

No one size fits all regulatory quality requirement works.

What needs to be done in commercial software, as is done in all other industries and in existing safety-critical software deployments, is segregating use cases by criticality and requiring deployments reach and guarantee the necessary quality level for that criticality class. It is the job and liability of the deployer to guarantee the requirements are met. They may push these requirements down to their suppliers, but it is the deployer that is ultimately responsible.

This is why Home Depot is not required to only sell aircraft-grade rivets. It is the airplane manufacturer’s job to source adequate components, not the job of all component suppliers to guarantee their components are fit for all possible purposes.

Under this model you can release any software you want. It is the manufacturer using the software that bears the burden of proving it is adequate. Or, if the software maker want to voluntarily take on extra burden, the software maker can verify and certify that the product is adequate for whatever purpose they wish to support.

Quality where it is necessary, and flexibility where it is not.

You don't want government-mandated security specs for software projects, that would be an absolute nightmare with prescribed "sanctioned" languages and checklists applied with zero understanding of the underlying subject matter (the threat model of a video game is exceedingly different than one for a medical device).

The real solution is to come up with a framework around data leaks and their disclosure with provisions for mitigations (à la GDPR, keep only the data you actually need).

Anything else will end up boiling down to "Java is the best language for everything" because Oracle spend $N on lobbying.*

*Replace Java/Oracle with another pair.

But some types of software like medical or airplane controls do have those types of regulations around them, don't they? How well do they work?

Don't planes need to be restarted every few flight or all the flight input data goes crazy? https://gizmodo.com/turn-it-off-and-on-again-every-149-hours...

If anything, I hope we’ve learned that node uptimes are unimportant. It used to be a badge of honor to show some system hadn’t been rebooted in $years. Now that just implies that there’s unpatched vulnerabilities and countless hand-made configuration changes that nobody remembers and that will be lost if the machine dies.

A sign of a responsible organization these days is how short-lived their hosts are. If every machine in an organization has an uptime less than a week, I feel pretty confident in that org’s ability to recover from a disaster. I also know it’s harder for attackers to keep a foothold once in the system, since everything is being constantly updated and reimaged.

It's true that unmatched neglected systems are a Hazzard

But these days systems can be patched without restarting

So "uptime" is not necessarily accurate

* hazard

Hazzard is a fictional county in Georgia that's the setting for the TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard”.

Whenever we see a big mistake on these fields, it becomes a scandal. Whenever we see a big mistake in tech companies, it's just part of the daily news.

TL;DR: they don't work either.

See the Boeing 737MAX fiasco for reference.

Regulations are pretty easy to circumvent with enough money it seems.

Regulatory capture is a risk. The FAA allowed the max to be certified, and resisted grounding it after accidents. That is terrible, and there were congressional enquiries and legal settlements in the billions for Boeing - including several specifically for manipulating and misleading regulators. That all sounds like an argument for better regulatory oversight rather than no regulation.

I wasn't against regulatory oversight.

I was mentioning that it's a system as flawed as everything else if you just expect it to work.

Also I'd like this kind of direct life threatening decisions to become criminal charges (not just fines) for the ones signing them off, please, including in software regulations.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the software on the 737MAX. It failed because of systems engineering, not software.

Agreed. Software doesn't happen in a vacuum tho.

Those are easier to regulate. People research how large of a radiation dose is appropriate for an x-ray, or how long certain parts/materials can sustain what kinds of loads, and they can use this information to come up with appropriate regulations.

It's much harder to come up with the same kind of concrete regulations for software security (i.e., device must deliver no more than X dosage to patient). We might have to settle for forcing companies to carry exploit insurance, and make it easy to sue for breaches.

In aerospace? Extremely well. Software (in context) that is subject to DO-178 certification is generally more reliable than the plane hardware. This is an industry where the 737 MAX, a plane safer than driving per-mile, is considered a death trap because the standard for safety is being 1000x safer than driving.

The software in one of the highest reliability industries is one of the highest reliability components. Unlike in other industries, especially consumer electronics, where even in low reliability products the software is almost always the lowest reliability component.

To put a more concrete take on this. In consumer systems, 5 9s is viewed as a gold standard. A level to aspire to, not necessarily one to achieve. In critical aerospace systems, 9 9s is viewed as the minimum, a level to never drop below. Many systems see 12 9s or higher.

The minimum standard in aerospace is 10,000x higher than the maximum standard in consumer. And the software reaches and exceeds that standard. That is how far the gap is and how well it works.

However, the downside is the expense and time. But, this can be mitigated by only applying these techniques where it matters. A key component of the DO-178 standard is identifying how critical each portion of the software is. You then only apply the most rigorous techniques for the highest criticality pieces. Of course, this requires the pieces to be well isolated, so that errors in one piece of non-critical code can not affect critical code; otherwise the non-critical code is actually, transitively, critical and thus demands increased rigor.

These techniques are tried and true in the most demanding circumstances. It would be prudent to start from these expensive working standards and work downwards to invent cheap working standards rather than fixing cheap non-working standards into cheap working standards. I think every software developer here can attest to it being much easier to start from something working, no matter how crude, than to start from something broken.

I call BS on 12 9s. To actually meet that a system operating for all of the common epoch would have only 60 milliseconds of downtime. There is no way since Wilbur and Oliver that any aerospace system could accomplish enough runtime to be sure it isn't 11 nines instead.

As for your actual point most systems would be better with a GC'd memory safe language then the hard real time those specs you mention are written from.

I am not talking about individual airframes. I am talking about quality of service over the entire fleet. Note that I will be using terminology more fit for IT than actual safety-critical system terminology to highlight the analogous elements.

The DO-178 standards were instituted 30 years ago [1]. There are ~700 million passengers per year flying on commercial airlines in the US since 2003. Extrapolating that backwards to 1992, that would be ~20 billion service requests fulfilled. In 2019, the US averaged 1.57 trillion passenger miles over ~1 billion passengers resulting in a average flight of 1500 miles. That corresponds to around 3-4 hours on average at cruising speed. It takes around 3 minutes for a plane at cruising altitude to crash. So, since the DO-178 standards were introduced there have been 1.6 * 10^12 safety-critical service segments where a software failure over that period could cause a fatality.

There have been exactly zero fatalities connected to software errors since the DO-178 standard has been introduced. So, over 1.6 * 10^12 service segments every single one of them was successfully delivered by the software without failure. 12 9s.

Also, just in case it is not clear, calculating over multiple airframes does not result in redundancy reducing error rates. Every single airframe must succeed in their service of every single requested service. An analogous situation in IT would be having 10,000 servers with zero redundancy achieving 5 minutes of total downtime divided over all 10,000 servers resulting in 9 9s reliability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B

> There is no way since Wilbur and Oliver that any aerospace system could accomplish enough runtime to be sure it isn't 11 nines instead.

Especially when some plane models need to be rebooted every couple of weeks because of software bugs ;)

https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

You don't need to mandate the solution, just punish the negative outcomes. As long as Experian and their peers can get away with dumping gigabytes of data without any punishment, they will. Apply a generous fine to any data breach or an incident resulting in monetary loss incurred due to bad software, and you'll see things change.

Has there been empirical estimates of the true cost of damage caused by the Experian incident?

If a major company got liquidated for extreme negligence, even once in a while, security would be much more in the forefront of executive's minds.

Fines need to be percentage revenue based so they have some teeth for the big players.

> with prescribed "sanctioned" languages and checklists applied with zero understanding of the underlying subject matter

This is always brought up as a boogeyman every time regulation is proposed, but then we have stories about Incorporation by Reference [0], where Congress explicitly encourages agencies to incorporate standards written by industry groups into law. It's not a perfect system (for example, the copyright disputes), but it seems to work a hell of a lot better than the free-for-all we have right now in our industry.

> The real solution is to come up with a framework around data leaks and their disclosure with provisions for mitigations

Agreed. And an agency with teeth to enforce the framework. And the provisions for mitigations should have the force of law.

In other words: we need regulation!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37498473

It's already happening in certain areas. Check out the UNECE vehicle cybersecurity regulations: https://unece.org/DAM/trans/doc/2020/wp29grva/ECE-TRANS-WP29...

Thankfully, it does not contain prescribed languages, just functionalities and things you have to do.

There's a relatively easy way to write safe C, it's just rarely done.

Care to share the secret that would have avoided countless exploits?

Systematic use of bounded arrays, example is putty (C) and grpc (C++).

Oh come on. Computing was designed since day zero to be an completely open to all connections and possibilities.

So now you want to regulate in security, for a device that was never meant to be secure in the first place?!

This security business is a racket. If you wanted computers to be secure, you would have designed and sold ASICs from day one.

You can't regulate software without also regulating the hardware.

The UK locks down privacy laws and now you guys want to "secure and regulate software".

The internet, no more. Offline is the only way to program, and keep software in-house.

I recommend the reading of Atlas Shrugged to really understand why this is a bad idea.

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs"

If the Boeing 737 MAX nicely demonstrates why this is an awful idea.

You're saying you think defective planes/poorly trained pilots would be less common in the complete absence of rules regarding certification of pilots or airframes?

If anything, Boeing 737MAX demonstrates how effective regulations have been. I bet you'd have to look up another similar event, because they are so rare.

People lost their shit over the 737MAX. Boeing lost a ton of money and credibility. It made everyone realize that strong regulations need to be maintained and how it's a bad idea to allow manufactures to review their own product. It's also likely to result in even more regulations and a executives at Boeing being criminally tried.

Regulations are incredibly effective, but you can't go soft because they are working. Regulators have to be ever vigilant and politicians who push for softening of regulations need to be voted out of office. We are finally starting to see that conspiracies to skirt regulations constitute criminal behavior by senior company leadership, this is a good thing for the public.

>and politicians who push for softening of regulations need to be voted out of office.

I'm not sure I really see a distinction between that and a hardline tough on crime position. Not all laws/regulations are good and even an ensemble of individually good rules could be problematic in aggregate. Though in the current political climate, I would tend to agree that those pushing for reducing regulation are mostly not doing so as part of a well-intentioned effort to reduce adverse effects of regulation for the public good.

As I've said countless times before here, the 737MAX software had nothing wrong with it. It performed exactly the way the specifications required.

It's high past time we have an agency with real teeth to regulate the software industry.

As long as you understand who will pay for it: you. Along with the rest of us.

True, but we're already paying for not having it.

Considering how bad the state of software is, it's pretty obvious that we should have started paying for it long ago.

My software works just fine, thanks.

So says every dev who introduces a memory safety bug.

As opposed to right now where our users pay for it.

We are already paying for it.

This is the same argument against universal healthcare: “oh but look how much it will cost”. Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s also less than the price tag of the current system.

And you think that youre immune to the cost increases Clorox or Colonial Pipelines pass along so they can pay their literal ransoms?

Compared to paying $10,000 for a Windows license, yeah, I'm pretty much immune.

You people literally do not know what you're asking for, and you don't understand what would happen if you received it. When you stand on the shoulders of giants, it's bad form to kick the ladder away.

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