Category: Tech

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Tim Bray tells us what’s awesome about Ruby

Tim Bray explains what is to like about the Ruby programming language:

I’ll jump to the conclusion first. For people like me, who are proficient in Perl and Java, Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive. Over the last week I’ve got an unreasonable amount of work done in a ridiculously short period of time, with lots of interruptions, in a language I previously didn’t know. It’s intuitive enough that I’ve often found myself guessing at a syntax or a method or a usage and getting it right first time.

Maybe the single biggest advantage is readability. Once you’ve got over the hump of the block/yield idiom, I find that a chunk of Ruby code shouts its meaning out louder and clearer than any other language. Anything that increases maintainability is a pearl beyond price.

I’ve been programming in C and Java for a quarter-century and I find Ruby easier to read, only a week in. Of course, a language’s culture is often more important than all that technical crap. I’ve found the ruby-talk mailing list to be a fount of wisdom and friendly to ignorant newbies too.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/24/Ruby

Follow the link to find out “What’s Lame” about Ruby.

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Best of Breed, or Best of Mediocrity?

Having worked for some time as a software engineer in the enterprise security
software world, I know that customers (enterprises) look for “best of breed”
software. For a large company customer, this usually means that a software
solution distinguishes itself in some way that makes it work well in their
environment. Often, this translates to reliability, cross-platform support,
person-to-person support and the ability to function beyond what is advertised.

As many are aware, there is “consolidation” going on in the security market.
Big fish are swallowing smaller fish, and it’s lucrative, in the short term,
for everyone except customers. Supposedly, the consolidation means that two
separate products can be “integrated”, or unified. Never mind the previous
competitive relationship that may have existed between the product teams and
their management. For some reason, people seem to think that competition
evaporates and that the two product teams will happily work together to build
the next generation “Best of Breed” software solution.

Not so.

In any big corporation or software company, there are constant power plays
being made. You could call this “decision making”, and if you have uncommonly
good leaders, you might even say good decisions are being made.
Unfortunately, it is human nature for most people to misuse and abuse positions
of power. Instead of making product decisions that are best for their merged
customer base, they make decisions that keep themselves in a position of power.

So, we have two best of breed products: Overdog and Underdog. Underdog is
easier to manage, but isn’t as complete in its offerings. Overdog is more
complete, but is more expensive to deploy and manage. Overdog has the advantage
of being used in Fortune 500 companies. Underdog, on the other hand, is trying
to break into that market space.

Enter Big Fish — a.k.a. Consolidator. Consolidator buys Overdog, and a few
years later, buys Underdog. We take two products, both “Best of Breed” in
different ways, and expect to see them merged together to make something “next
generation” — better, faster, stronger, and easier to use.

Whenever there is a consolidation, talented people get fired, and their
creative ideas and abilities are lost. Product integration never happens as
easily as anyone would like to believe (if it happens at all). And in the end, customers end up with a
product that we can best label as “Best of Mediocrity”. Consolidation means
that customers lose their “Best of Breed” solutions.

What can you expect from Software Consolidators? Mediocre solutions. Look
elsewhere for excellence.

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Principles of Reputation

One of my past professors, Phil Windley, posted some principles of reputation:

  • Reputation is one of the factors upon which trust is based
  • Reputation is someone else’s story about me – this means that I can’t control what you say about me although I may be able to affect the factors you based your story on. Also, every person should be able to have their own story about me.
  • Reputation exists in the context of community – this is different than saying “communities have a reputation about someone.”
  • Reputation is based on identity – reputation, as someone else’s story, isn’t part of your identity, but is based on an identity or set of identities.
  • Reputation is a currency – while you can’t change it, reputation can be used as a resource. Paul Resnick has a paper showing the value of a positive eBay reputation.
  • Reputation is narrative – you have to apply metaphor to interpret, reputation is dynamic becase the factors that affect it are always changing, reputation may require weaving together of plot lines.
  • Reputation is based on claims (verified or not), transactions, ratings, and endorsements. – this brings up the issue of evidence, recourse for slander or mistakes, etc.
  • Reputation is muti-level – a reputation isn’t just based on facts, but is also based on other’s beliefs about the target of that reputation. This requires some way of signaling beliefs to others.
  • Mutiple people holding the same opinion increases the weight o that opinion – repeat behavior is also another way of weighting reputation.

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Is Data Mining Fools Gold?

Here’s a thought provoking article about the problems of large-scale data mining by
governments. It’s written by a person living in the UK.

“Data-mining is complicated, and the more data you are mining, the more
false positives your software will throw up. If you act upon a false
positive for a motoring offence, it’s an inconvenience for the motorist,
but for an alleged case of child abuse, it can rip the family apart and
ruin the child’s life.”

“Furthermore, gathering large amounts of data is inherently dangerous.
Whatever information governments find interesting will also draw the
attention of criminals. Databases can be hard to keep secure, and it’s
not necessarily hackers that we should be worried about, but
unauthorised access by employees of the agencies that use these
databases. Equally, the more data you have, the more difficult it is to
maintain accuracy. In 2000, an audit of the Police National Computer
found that 86% of records contained errors, 85% of those errors were
serious, and some were libellous.”

“Technology can be a very powerful tool, but what it can’t do is replace
real human beings or traditional investigative work. Designed badly or
used poorly, databases are the technological equivalent of fools gold.”

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Article: Crash-only software

Crash-only software: More than meets the eye
by Valerie Henson July 12, 2006:
http://lwn.net/Articles/191059/

Properly implemented, crash-only software produces higher quality, more
reliable code; poorly understood it results in lazy programming. Probably
the most common misconception is the idea that writing crash-only software
is that it allows you to take shortcuts when writing and designing your
code. Wake up, Sleeping Beauty, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
But you can get a more reliable, easier to debug system if you rigorously
apply the principles of crash-only design.

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Mongrel web server

Here’s an interview with Zed Shaw, the author of the Mongrel web server — a web server for the Ruby programming language that is good for use in combination with Ruby on Rails and other Ruby-based web-app frameworks. It’s interesting in that it’s fast, secure, cross-platform, and it’s not a heavyweight solution (compared to Apache). Why is it more secure than Apache at the HTTP protocol level? Mongrel utilizes the Ragel State Machine Compiler
 to generate the protocol parser, “and that is very strict and seems to block a huge number of attack attempts simply because it is so exacting.”

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Hard Drive Encryption: PGP Disk, LUKS, BitLocker

Why encrypt a hard drive? It makes it safer to dispose of an old hard disk… your data won’t fall into the wrong hands. This only matters if you want data to remain confidential. Laptop owners should consider using hard disk encryption.

When is it a bad idea to encrypt a hard drive? First, if you have a dual-boot computer (Linux and Windows), and you want Linux to be able to access all of the data on the Windows drive. Second, when the data confidentiality is of low concern and the data availability is of high importance.

Bruce Schneier writes about Microsoft BitLocker, which will be available in Windows Vista:

BitLocker Drive Encryption is a new security feature in Windows Vista, designed to work with the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Basically, it encrypts the C drive with a computer-generated key. In its basic mode, an attacker can still access the data on the drive by guessing the user’s password, but would not be able to get at the drive by booting the disk up using another operating system, or removing the drive and attaching it to another computer.

PGP Disk is a current solution — no need to wait for Vista. On Linux, there are many solutions. The most current is LUKS and dm-crypt:

Apparently, HAL in Fedora recognizes LUKS volumes. It’s also possible to encrypt only your home directory with LUKS.

Update 5 June 2006

See also http://www.truecrypt.org/ and Wikipedia’s guide to disk encryption software.

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Security Myths and Passwords

Professor Eugene Spafford “is one of the most senior and recognized leaders in the field of computing.” Here’s what he has to say about password security.


http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/weblogs/spaf/general/post-30

In the practice of security we have accumulated a number of “rules of thumb” that many people accept without careful consideration. Some of these get included in policies, and thus may get propagated to environments they were not meant to address. It is also the case that as technology changes, the underlying (and unstated) assumptions underlying these bits of conventional wisdom also change. The result is a stale policy that may no longer be effective…or possibly even dangerous.

Policies requiring regular password changes (e.g., monthly) are an example of exactly this form of infosec folk wisdom.

Read the article for more details.

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Article: Innovative ways to fool people

Innovative ways to fool people
Scott Granneman, 2006-05-04
http://www.securityfocus.com/print/columnists/401

Scott Granneman’s latest column looks at recent security examples where people have been fooled in increasingly innovative ways: from keyloggers used in a massive bank heist and new Trojans that encrypt data and request ransom money, to real financial rip-offs that extend out from online virtual gaming worlds like World of Warcraft.

It’s a fascinating read. Here’s an exerpt:

We now have computer sweatshops appearing in China and Mexico, in which
young men are paid a few dollars per day (or less) to sit and play games
like World of Warcraft and EverQuest for about 12 hours a day,
performing often mind-numbing tasks in order to create virtual wealth.

It was therefore inevitable that bad guys would see an opportunity to
steal money in settings like this. Now someone has.