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tld
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 Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 2:51 pm Post subject: |
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You know, those folks really do remind me of some of the supposedly "black belt" Windows coders I've worked with over the years. A great deal of what I recall really starts to make sense now. There seems to be a mindset that nothing that is simple can ever possibly be good enough...and that any such thing must be immediately obscured behind enough layers of ill/un-documented abstraction so as to never be understood by anyone, ever again, without brute force reverse engineering. What's more, it's a mindset that seems to be inherited directly from MS themselves. Is it just me??
Last edited by tld on Sun Dec 07, 2014 2:52 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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khayyam
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 2:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Anon-E-moose wrote: | From the end of the blog
| Quote: | | While this exercise has been quite educational in many ways I am surprised that this undocumented early-alpha quality code base is used for anything serious. Many concepts are either not defined, or defined by the behaviour of the implementation. The APIs are ad-hoc without any obvious structure, partially redundant (what's the difference between Terminate and Kill ?), and not documented in a way that allows a reimplementation. If this is the future I'll stay firmly stuck in the past ... |
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Anon ... all of that can be explained with two little words (or one neologism if you so like): "dbus-haters".
best ... khay |
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Anon-E-moose
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:17 pm Post subject: |
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| khayyam wrote: | Anon ... all of that can be explained with two little words (or one neologism if you so like): "dbus-haters".
best ... khay |
 LoL
Note: I don't even have dbus emerged, and have found no pkgs (on my system) that won't work without it
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:23 pm Post subject: |
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tld,
Its the CYA mentality. You don't understand my code so you can't fire me.
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Anon-E-moose
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:52 pm Post subject: |
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What's sad about it is that a programmer, looking at nearly a decade old code (in current usage) has that hard a time figuring out what is going on.
And the same mindset that gave us hal, dbus, etc is giving us The next generation headache™ and people think this is a "good thing" *shakes head in amazement"
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Last edited by Anon-E-moose on Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:55 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Anon-E-moose
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:55 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | tld,
Its the CYA mentality. You don't understand my code so you can't fire me. |
I'm not sure if it's that or simply that they are amateur programmers with no understanding of proper design.
I suppose one could argue either way. 
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steveL
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 4:48 pm Post subject: |
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| steveL wrote: | You really need to let go of the idea that we can "all just get along." You cannot "get along" with someone who is trying to intimidate and control you. You can submit, fight or walk away.
I choose to walk away, as it's less noise and less wasted time. |
| sitquietly wrote: | | I do too. I know something about how control can be imposed. |
Thanks for an excellent post, sitquietly. I'm splitting it to keep focus on this part: (emphasis added)
| Quote: | | The Air Force exercised their right to take direct control of the management of our company -- if you falter on the schedule or attaining the goals of such a military contract they have the right to assume direct control over your company. |
That makes it a bad idea, in business-terms, to do any business with them, afaic. You'd simply have no recourse, and if that were a company you'd built up over years, it'd be a real killer.
OFC if you've only built it up with the hope of selling it on, as every VC does, then that's not an issue. It would just kill the craft of what you're doing, as you experienced.
| Quote: | | I worked for a company that obtained a contract to build systems for the U.S. Air Force. That became a significant proportion of our revenue, as military and NSA contracts are now a significant proportion of the revenue for Red Hat. We didn't even realize, certainly I didn't realize, how much control the Air Force had gained over us by virtue of a contracted system that is "vital to the national interest." |
Yeah Red-Hat are light-years away from the company they were in the early 90s (the kudos they've been trading on wrt the community, ever since.)
| Quote: | Our system was in fact important to the security of several military bases, but it was probably not as vital as Red Hat systems that run our entire nuclear submarine force.
I ended up with an Air Force lieutenant occupying the office beside my workspace, I had to pass a security clearance, and the Air Force gained the right to direct not only our management decisions but also our engineering decisions.
I had designed a very capable embedded controller.. All in mere kilobytes of EPROM. The documentation was the best I've ever written and the system was my proudest work. |
Oh man, gutted. I love the "kilobytes of EPROM" part :-)
| Quote: | | I had done the Unix-thing and used plain ascii for the command language and an extensible protocol, i.e. a dictionary and a command interpreter. It was easy to understand, efficient, and extensible. Lets say, to stretch my point, that it was like Linux was before Red Hat and Poettering. The Air Force would have none of that. Their edict was that the data and commands must be kept in an unreadable binary format, just like Red Hat has for some reason started forcing on the Linux system logs. |
The sad part is how stupid all that is. The issue was addressed in the round years ago, with encrypted filesystems.
| Quote: | They hired their own consultant to obfuscate my code -- yes they actually said that they wanted to make the code harder to understand. For some months I worked in a locked steel Faraday cage assisting in the transformation of my system into a properly binary and obfuscated mess for the Air Force.
My point is not really about my particular experience or whether I liked or disliked the Air Force's redesign of my system. It is that Red Hat is known to be dominated by American military and security agencies -- their main income is from military contracts and a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff became the Chairman of the Board of Red Hat.
I know from my experience that Red Hat products (e.g. kdbus, systemd) _could_ be directly engineered by those national agencies. |
And the one thing we know from history, is that if people think they can gain an advantage by doing something, even if they are wrong and trying to fix a gas-pipe with a scalpel, then they will do it. As you described above with your project, they are under the delusion that security-by-obscurity which does indeed have some place in human situations (eg if you don't know where something material is, it is harder to steal it, since you cannot remove it, by definition) also applies to digital tech, which by definition is duplicated the instant it is entered, and is free to reproduce, or transmission would not function.
| Quote: | | We are entering a period in which the heart of Linux is re-engineered by Red Hat. I don't trust that re-engineering to produce the system that I want to use or work on. |
Me neither. It worries me that now we'll have to keep a healthy dose of scepticism for every kernel update. It used to be the case that we could rely on the transparent focus on the craft, as the soul of how Linux operates.
Looking forward 10 years and more, what happens when Torvalds retires or dies? There are several people in the kernel-world who follow his methodology, but equally there are plenty of shills who are only in it for the payout. Real coders don't care about marketing, they care about code sometimes to the exclusion of all else, so many of the influential people, especially in the wider Linux monde, are the public-faces of the kleptocrats, afaic. "Interesting times" ahead, for those who live long enough.
| Quote: | | Gentoo seems to be one of the best cultures in which to bring along the best engineering of systems that follow The Linux Philosophy. I sure hope that we can continue to make it possible to run a Gentoo linux system as a large set of simple tools...which can be connected with well specified interfaces...which are usually textual data streams. |
Thanks for that link: it was truly excellent, and good to see that reiteration of a commitment to the UNIX philosophy, at the heart of Linux, when it was starting out.
We need to get back to that ground, and refuse to leave it. |
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steveL
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 5:53 pm Post subject: |
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| tld wrote: | | That's one of the most painful things I've ever read. It actually makes any Windows technical scavenger hunt I've ever dealt with look almost elegant. |
This bit is hilarious:
| Quote: | | D-Bus is low-overhead because it uses a binary protocol.. the protocol is ASCII-only. The value of any string is .. encoded in UTF-8 |
As we've seen (thanks Navar) dbus is nothing like low-overhead, by comparison to the "dead" technologies it supplanted.
| Quote: | | I recall reading elsewhere that, in spite of being out there in the field, for example in RHEL7 (as in E for Enterprise), the DBUS API definition itself if documented as being "beta"...which essentially means you can't communicate with it in a way that isn't guaranteed not to break in the future. I guess that's how they "get off the hook" when the break your shit later on. |
Yeah, though that doesn't stop Poeterring mislabelling it a "standard", and tub-thumping about how everyone else has to "get on board". Real standards require more than one implementation of something new, before they even consider standardising it (usually so that everyone can cooperate across variant impls.)
And ofc in other areas, he'll quite openly advocate breaking ABI and not ever worrying about the consumer, in the name of "innovation", when to every one else it looks like he just doesn't know how. There are indeed variant ABIs in dbus (equivalent to soname: eg some.long.crap.systemd1) so the technical point about how relabelling it IPC is both stupid and misleading, still stands.
The guy's an amateur, afaic. I wouldn't trust him with a pair of scissors.
This just makes me grin: | Quote: | | Creating/closing sessions is exclusively the job of PAM |
as I've been advocating just using PAM, and ditching nubkit, for quite a while.
Typically I've been told polickysh1t is supposed to make PAM redundant for those poor users who simply can't get their head round a config (not like it's needed for the vast majority in any case: that's what a distro is for.) Not to mention requiring an embedded js interpreter to get the same effect, instead.
I'm glad though, as this means that we're not going to get any "but systemd only needs polkit" crap down the road.
I'd class that as a "Quiet Change" in standardisation-speek. ;) |
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steveL
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| Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 6:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Anon-E-moose wrote: | If this is the best justification that people like GKH and the LP cabal can come up with then we really don't need kdbus.
They need to go back and design dbus and do it right. |
Yeah, IPC has been all the rage since the early 90s (when much of the interesting work has already been done.) I couldn't find any info on NML from chasing that url, though I love the RTAPI stuff.
Did you take a look at the TIPC links before?
| Quote: | | I wasn't a fan of working with CORBA quite awhile ago but, this was interesting, from a performance aspect. Personally, it would have caused me to avoid dcop/dbus from the get go. |
Yeah CORBA was a beast back then. Thanks for the paper, it was interesting. dcop was already 6 times faster than dbus, but it could easily have used the orb methodology for optimisation. Though I agree you might as well just use the C orb and build up from there.
And if you're going to pub/sub, use TIPC. |
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Anon-E-moose
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| Posted: Mon Dec 08, 2014 12:09 pm Post subject: |
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Another nice post from Patrick from a year earlier than the last one
http://gentooexperimental.org/~patrick/weblog/archives/2013-10.html#e2013-10-29T13_39_32.txt
Funny comment
| Quote: | | Quote: | Then, one of the most complex bits of the whole thing, which is the
remarshalling service that translates old dbus1 messages to kdbus
GVariant marshalling and back is a systemd socket
service, so no chance to rip this out of systemd. |
Ok, that's a non sequitur to start; one does wonder why kdbus uses a different message format than dbus if it's supposed to be a replacement. And just because it's part of systemd and undocumented still does not mean in any way that it cannot be either cut out and made to work standalone, or reimplemented from scratch as a standalone tool. The ignorance (or incompetence?) in that statement reminds me of windows users that denigrated linux for not having a shiny GUI ... |
And in conclusion
| Quote: | | Quote: | | I just hope you guys do it knowing what's at stake here. |
Yes, that's why some of us are so antagonistic. Propaganda much?
So, to summarize: No one else can implement what systemd does, and thus you must use it. It is so brilliant that you shouldn't even try!
Just reading this propaganda is making me unhappy, with that level of dishonesty and misdirection I don't see how we can have a nice discussion. Most of the arguments are either circular ("No one can write logind without writing logind") or false ("Cgroups are at the center of what a server does").
At the same time everyone who disagrees is a luddite ... or illiterate ... or whatever. Anyway, YOUR UGLY, so I win discussion! or something something.
Oh well. Who would expect a rational discussion when you can just cause infinite flamewars, wasting all the time that could have been used for improving things ... but that would be boring. |
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Navar
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 1:29 am Post subject: |
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No, sadly I had not heard of it (or simply don't remember in the zillion other kernel options). So thanks for that. I did burn some of my dinner in the process of getting lost scanning through the spec today. 
I guess a bigger question would be what on the Linux user space side is making use of TIPC? |
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Navar
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 2:18 am Post subject: |
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| Anon-E-moose wrote: | | Quote: | So, to summarize: No one else can implement what systemd does, and thus you must use it. It is so brilliant that you shouldn't even try!
Just reading this propaganda is making me unhappy, with that level of dishonesty and misdirection I don't see how we can have a nice discussion. Most of the arguments are either circular ("No one can write logind without writing logind") or false ("Cgroups are at the center of what a server does").
At the same time everyone who disagrees is a luddite ... or illiterate ... or whatever. Anyway, YOUR UGLY, so I win discussion! or something something. |
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Yep. The simplest response I've seen is simply refering to us who won't drink their kool-aid as 'haters'. Like every other political/internet/etc. diatribe in that vein, it de-evolves into hyperbolic comparisons, the I win button, and supposedly good theater. Embarass away your (peer) opposition, argument over. I'm even almost fine with that sort of asshatery until there are pretend (no olive branch) attempts to emo-'understand' why there's backlash (aka, playing the victim card). Sometimes they're not even pretending--which just re-iterates anyone stating issues was talking to a wall. Don't break the user experience, don't forget the user, and try to make the user actually look forward to any features/fixes/changes you're doing; versus forcing that, fundamentally. I used to enjoy seeing new OSs and DE paradigms who were showing how they could improve my experience and workflow (including eye candy aesthetics), rather than make it awkward for their version of style.
An answer to that has always been quiet shunning, ignoring and a major movement away from their forced way. I don't know how you achieve that from devs and users when it's a popularity contest that they'd already held the crown in. It can happen on its own when negative things blow up on the prior two groups--something we're expecting and semi-hopeful for. Although I consider the process painful either way particularly with respect to security and (dev)user experience who ultimately lose time instead of enjoyably progressing. |
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Anon-E-moose
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 3:57 pm Post subject: |
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From todays News and Announcements
[ GLSA 201412-12 ] D-Bus: Multiple Vulnerabilities https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=7666718#7666718
Thank Gawd that we aren't trying to introduce such shoddy code into the kernel.
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krinn
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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wonder how many vulnerabilities you need to swap a "multiple vulnerabilities" into a "shitload of vulnerabilities" status  |
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NeddySeagoon
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 4:55 pm Post subject: |
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I can just see the argument now ... dbus is insecure, we must have kbus now!
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tld
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2014 7:39 pm Post subject: |
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Holy crap...check out that list of references! Maybe someone can explain something to me regarding the entries in the vulnerabilities database...is that "Original release date" when the vulnerability was actually reported??? If so, it looks like the oldest one goes back to the beginning of July!
It's almost as though, in order to counter the arguments that folks like myself have been making...that systemd will introduce Windows-like reboot frequency to Linux...they've decided to "save them up" to make things look better. Sounds like a plan to me...to replace weekly reboots with an approach that leaves you're servers vulnerable for five months. FFS...I actually hope I'm misinterpreting that. If (God forbid) I was an IT guy supporting RHEL7 I'd go through the fucking roof at that announcement.
Just wow...
EDIT: Yea...I know that's DBUS and not systemd...all from the same brilliant minds though... . Actually, looking at the original bugs I think a lot of them were actually resolved some time ago. In any case, why would anyone want this sort of crap code in their init system, especially in a server. |
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ct85711
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2014 12:00 am Post subject: |
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| It would be interesting to see all the security issues that is currently open on systemd. I wouldn't be surprised if there's quite a few open, but not released to the public while they wait for RH to eventually fix it. (Assuming the security reports are not published, till a patch has been made. I don't know on how that system works, to know if there's a deadline for the times the dev's just ignore the issue.) |
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depontius
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2014 4:31 am Post subject: |
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| tld wrote: | | Holy crap...check out that list of references! |
About half of the bugs in that list look like plain old bugs, and about half look like poorly thought-out implementation details.
But with the first bug, the "defined behavior" is at fault.
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mrsteven
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2014 6:23 pm Post subject: |
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| tld wrote: | | It's almost as though, in order to counter the arguments that folks like myself have been making...that systemd will introduce Windows-like reboot frequency to Linux...they've decided to "save them up" to make things look better. |
I always thought they already have some sort of official reasoning about that. Something like: "Yes, you will have to reboot a little bit more often, but thanks to systemd this will be so freaking fast that you should not care about that." However, the idea of having a freedesktop patchday also seems to be... interesting... 
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ct85711
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2014 7:01 pm Post subject: |
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| How could a patch day sound good? As it's going to be like M$, of only releasing patching once a quarter (unless it is a major issue). |
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depontius
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2014 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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| ct85711 wrote: | | How could a patch day sound good? As it's going to be like M$, of only releasing patching once a quarter (unless it is a major issue). |
We use RedHat at work, and I've been hearing about "patch Thursdays", though I haven't really seen it that way yet.
But then again, that would just feed the conspiracy theory side of things.
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ct85711
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| Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2014 12:03 am Post subject: |
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| The reason I started using linux so long ago, was because I was tired of having to wait for a dang update to eventually come when some company feels like they want to release one. If linux changes to become like that; I'll switch to some other OS. |
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MustrumR
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| Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2014 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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| ct85711 wrote: | | The reason I started using linux so long ago, was because I was tired of having to wait for a dang update to eventually come when some company feels like they want to release one. If linux changes to become like that; I'll switch to some other OS. |
With linux you still have to wait for Linus Torvalds or Greg Kroah-Hartman to release an update (unless you decide to use a non-released version). |
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ct85711
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| Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2014 7:09 pm Post subject: |
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| That is a lot of times different, on a developer waiting to make sure it is properly fixed, and some company waiting just because they missed their deadline for releasing a patch and have to sit on it till next cycle. |
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steveL
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| Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:49 pm Post subject: |
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| I think it was more of a ploy to put Greg K-H on the same level as Torvalds, when they're blatantly not on anything like the same level, whatsoever. |
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Kernel & Hardware
