this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
124 points (97.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36187 readers
1575 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

So with open source software more on my mind lately I was wondering - while I get the benefits of transparency and such, how safe is it? If the source code is available to all, isn't it easier to breach for people (like the recent cookies hack)? If I'd have an open source password manager, would it be easier for people to get my passwords somehow than if I use something not open source? Do I just not understand how software works in general?

And what are other benefits that may be not so obvious to someone not so knowledgable about this?

Edit: thank you all for really insightful answers! Among other things I also learned just how much I don't know :)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The idea is that having "many eyes" on the code, the vulnerabilities should be found and solved more readily. BUT... of course this is true only for big projects which actually do have many contributors.

Viceversa, while skilled (or high budget) attackers can still find vulnerabilities in proprietary software (think of how people still crack consoles and games), good-intentioned people cannot contribute to weed out these vulnerabilities.

But most important of all, it's trust. There is no way to be sure that a proprietary piece of software is actually as secure or respectful of privacy as it claims to be. Whatsapp claims to have end to end encryption, but you can't tell if it's truly secure or if it has a backdoor or some other spyware in it. For OSS instead you can always read the code yourself, or trust the many eyes that did.

Some months ago it came out that as soon as windows 11 is boot up for the first time, it starts contacting services like Amazon and steam (allowing for tracking) before even asking for license and privacy agreement. The same thing could not happen in Linux because the code is open.

Also, by using proprietary software from big corporations you give them power over your infrastructure and your work, and possibly on other people interacting with you. Which is definitely not poggers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

BUT… of course this is true only for big projects which actually do have many contributors.

It’s not always that easy. OpenSSL had the heartbleed vulnerability for two years before it was discovered and patched. Log4j also had log4shell unnoticed for a while. These two projects are both widely used.

On the other hand, we don’t know to the same extent which serious vulnerabilities have existed (or still exist) in closed software. Heartbleed and log4shell got huge attention because they impacted open source software. They would probably still be left unpatched if they were in closed source software.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Vulnerabilities exist in every piece of complex software. Open source means that when a something is found, it'll be patched and pushed out quickly because there is no secrecy and everybody just wants it to get done. In commercial, closed source software, the infectives are different. Companies world rather spend their time on money making activities that supporting their old stuff. And they're scared of reputational damage, so they're more likely to sweep things under the rug. Generally, i trust open source software far more.