Internet: survival of the biggest

The Economist has an interesting cover this time that you can see here. The big four are warring over our data. The squids will use and abuse our data in numerous ways and they will war over the full control over that data. Scary but true. The on-line article is here.

The digital revolution these giants have helped foment has brought huge benefits to consumers and businesses, and promoted free speech and the spread of democracy along the way. Yet they provoke fear as well as wonder. Their size and speed can, if left unchecked, be used to choke off competition

 … -->

continue reading →

Quote of the day

I am not alone in thinking this and here is the quote to prove:

The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that seem to outsiders to be fine, responsible choices and yet, like Windows in the 90s, will destroy you if you choose them. Java applets were probably the most spectacular example. This was supposed to be the new way of delivering applications. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups who believed that.

— Paul Graham

--> continue reading →

Stainless Steel Rat

It is refreshing to hear someone speak out for the necessity of crime. Last time I heard that was from James Bolivar DiGriz, “The Stainless Steel Rat” of Harry Harrison. This time it comes from nobody else than Whitfield Diffie, speaking at the Australian Information Security Association’s National Conference 2012 in Sydney this week. I remember I always sympathized DiGriz and I am apparently not alone there as Whitfield Diffie speaks out about the philosophy of crime’s usefulness:

“I’m inclined to think that society needs crime,” he said, explaining that in the event of a crime taking place offline, such as a home robbery, it creates jobs for police, judges, lawyers, insurance companies.

Yeah, all right, as long as we do not get caught!… -->

continue reading →

Conceptual integrity

I always admire people that can summarize your thinking into a simple and elegant phrase. This is akin to software design, reflecting the beautiful harmony. Behold:

“I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.”

–- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr, “The Mythical Man-Month”

--> continue reading →

Agile philosophy is flawed

I am convinced that agile software development methods the way they are used now do not work. They are actually a prescription for failure. The problem is that Agile philosophy fails even before starting.

Agile is described in many different ways but when you think about what it tries to achieve you must come to the unavoidable conclusion that it tries to provide a method to develop software with cheaper workforce. That’s the whole idea behind it. The business expects to get the software developed with not-so-brilliant programmers who can be paid a fraction of what the really good people would be paid. And then the good programmers can be also pressured into accepting lower pay for their work.

Well, it does not work. Oh, it does work to pressure the salaries of programmers, that it does. But the software becomes developed in a piecemeal fashion and it becomes really difficult to keep to a single encompassing coherent design. You must use really brilliant programmers to be able to keep the system well-designed, sleek and coherent. Unfortunately, this contradicts the original goal of not using brilliant programmers. And thus the system turns into a patchwork of vaguely connected functions and pieces.

To make a parallel, I think when I see a mechanical product labeled “Made in China” I hardly can expect some brilliant German engineering in it. The same goes here, when I see something coming out of Agile, I do not expect any brilliant engineering either. Agile is the source of cheap, faulty and disposable software.… -->

continue reading →

Dennis Ritchie

I will quote this on the relative anonymity of Dennis Ritchie‘s death versus Steve Jobs‘ celebrity send off:

“If you do everything just right, it’ll look like you haven’t done anything at all.” ~ God, ‘Futurama‘

This guy, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, did a lot of things right. Our task is to not screw it up too badly now.

Related articles:

  • Dennis Ritchie, Trailblazer in Digital Era, Dies at 70
  • Dennis Ritchie: the other man inside your iPhone
--> continue reading →

Why do they write insecure code?

First of all, nobody teaches engineers to write secure code. When people study mechanical engineering, they spend an awful lot of time calculating the designs for reliability and safety. They learn that the bridges must be redundantly safe, that there is a plethora of things that may go wrong with an elevator and so on. Do they learn anything like that in computer classes? No, far from it. People learn the computer programming languages and sometimes about cryptographic protocols. But they never learn how to make the systems stable, safe and secure. They never learn what may happen to a computer system in real life. They do not practice taking preventive measures the way any other engineering specialists would.

Many programmers are then lured into the fake safe heavens of firewalls, safe languages that “take care of things for them” and the proclaimed security of frameworks. Guess what, none of that is true, no language is “safe”, no firewall helps and no framework is perfect. But people are inherently lazy and they prefer to blame someone else instead of taking the responsibility.

And on top of all that comes the cost. Software is a form of art. The good, really professional programmers cost a lot of money. The good designs and their implementations take a lot of resources, read money. Security features are costly, security measures are even more costly. And companies are not willing to pay, customers are not willing to pay, everybody just bitches about poor security and the world moves on, selecting the lowest bidder for security critical infrastructure implementation.

We’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has two hundred thousand moving parts built by the lowest bidder.
— “Rockhound” in the movie “Armageddon”

Do you really think anything will change to the better if none of the above changes?… -->

continue reading →