The security industry is full of "thought leaders" who spout off opinions and forecasts.

There are no real credentials necessary to earn respect, because the infosec industry has historically mistrusted formal education.

So, we get people with little or no computer science education who just make stuff up. The people who know less talk louder and tweet a lot. The infosec press loves it. It's all really just marketing for infosec vendors.

when caustic humour is aimed at them... Please, don't hate.

He uses what he calls "caustic humor" to bash his political opponents, then tries to take the high road by reminding us not to hate.

Next, he'll claim that pointing this out is an ad hominem attack.

No, this is simply a freedom-loving position. I don't want to have to submit my employment choices to your approval so I am resisting your attempts to similarly violate the freedom of others.

One critical flaw with your worldview is that you only recognize government as a power structure. You do not recognize wealth and ownership as providing a parallel power structure.

Therefore, less government always equals more freedom in your simplistic, contrived universe.

Here in the real world, a total lack of government would mean the power of wealth is unchecked. That is not freedom, it's slavery. By the way, "collectivists" didn't enslave blacks in the American South. Wealthy landowners did.

The digital information used for attribution is so easily manipulated that it's nearly impossible to be 100% sure you have the right person... without a police style sting where you record the attacker in action.

For malware, attribution can be inferred by looking at code similarities among the malware.

Malware attribution is so difficult that I only know of one company that makes a serious attempt at it: crowdstrike.

Everybody on this thread seems to have forgotten the DEA was collecting Americam phone metadata in bulk since 1992, well before the Patriot Act. They did it under USC 21 section 876 (administrative subpoenas).

From what I've read, they were probably exceeding their authority, but carriers like Sprint gave them the data anyway.

What a profoundly naive and ignorant idea.

Expire all laws? Like all federal criminal law against fraud, racketeering, drug trafficking, computer misuse, theft, and murder?

All the laws enabling agencies like the FDA, which keeps the food supply safe? Laws that regulate and maintain the highway system and regulate interstate commerce? Laws that establish the FDIC and keep confidence in banks?

Not to mention the huuuuge body of procedural law, which defines how the courts work, how the military is governed, etc?

The US Congress would not have time to reauthorize the entirety of federal law, much less write new law. The states wouldnt have the time to do this either.

Businesses would hate this because there would be so much uncertainty.

Probably the "bright line" copyright distinction between APIs and actual works of art should come from the legislature, but our Congress is just as technologically illiterate as the judicial and executive branches.

Maybe in another 20 years we can have laws that actually bring us in to the 21st century.

Generally, if a carefully-crafted input can cause your application to crash, a similarly-crafted data may be able to exploit the same bug and cause an execution of malicious code. If â" as is usually the case â" the crash is due to buffer overflow and I can stomp over your app's memory, I may be able to place my code in the right place and it will be executed as part of the app...

This is only true for certain classes of memory management defects. There are many different kinds of defects, and many different ways to crash software that bring no possibility of remote code execution.

You don't understand software security testing. See my reply to gstoddard.

This isn't as difficult to find as you might think. You do not have to test millions or billions of random text strings.

Software security testing works by breaking inputs into categories, and assuming that if you test one or two items in the category, then the category is covered. Categories are derived from the software specifications.

Example categories:
1. 0-byte message
2. max-length message
3. max-length +1 message
4. message consisting of all NULL bytes
5. message with unicode characters ...

If ellipses are treated specially, then they are part of the specifications, and should factor in to the choice of categories. There is software to automate building of test cases based on the categories, and the testing could be automated as well.

If we only test likely cases, we are not doing security testing. Given that this is an unauthenticated network vector, it should be subject to security testing. Apple has the resources to do this.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you observed "they never bothered testing."

As long as software vendors have zero liability for defects, we'll probably continue to see easy-to-catch and easy-to-exploit bugs in software. Even software out of large, mature dev groups that should really know better.

I've worked my entire career in the private sector, and there is a huge amount of inefficiency (in addition to the profit which, as you mention, comes off the top).

Dead weight in the organization, people who are worthless but protected, executives playing turf wars for budget, leaders who block change so they can watch each others' backs, sabotage against competitors inside the organization. The worst are managers who are great at "managing up" but not actually good at leading their teams. They can cause damage for years before things change.

Sometimes the individual profit motive does not line up with the larger profit motive of the company, and the sacrosanct "invisible hand of the free market" totally fails.

0x0F. 2012 - Called out on slashdot for his text file manager's extremely poor performance (11 minutes to sort 1.8 million strings). Ironically claims he "chose" Pascal because it performs better than C++. Pasted Python but failed to indent lines, indicating he did not understand even the basics of Python.
0x10. 2014 - Zontar schooled him, doxed him, caught him in several other lies. People chimed in on Slashdot to say they hated him.
0x11. 2014-2015 - Bouldin repeatedly explained why OS hosts files are not suitable security against botnets, but Kowalrus didn't understand the technical aspects. Currently seems very confused about basic networking and how malware works. Doesn't understand basic Python, and believes the hosts file cannot be bypassed even after seeing Python code that does the bypassing. When provided proof that malware with millions of infections (Ramnit, Gameover Zeus) can bypass the hosts file (and other OS protection mechanisms), he called the malware "edge cases."
0x12. Still has not accomplished anything since his long-since-deleted "security guide" from 2007 or his text file manager from 2010. Nevertheless, he declares victory over everyone, on every forum he has ever visited. Has no friends.

Other events on Jan 31st:
* Guy Fawkes was hanged, drawn, and quartered.
* Germany used poison gas at a large scale for the first time in history of warfare.
* The Soviet Union exiled Leon Trotsky.
* Harry Truman announced a program to develop the hydrogen bomb.
* Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive.

0x0F. 2012 - Called out on slashdot for his text file manager's extremely poor performance (11 minutes to sort 1.8 million strings). Ironically claims he "chose" Pascal because it performs better than C++. Pasted Python but failed to indent lines, indicating he did not understand even the basics of Python. 0x10. 2014 - Zontar schooled him, doxed him, caught him in several other lies. People chimed in on Slashdot to say they hated him. 0x11. 2014-2015 - Bouldin repeatedly explained why OS hosts files are not suitable security against botnets, but Kowalrus didn't understand the technical aspects. Currently seems very confused about basic networking and how malware works. Doesn't understand basic Python, and believes the hosts file cannot be bypassed even after seeing Python code that does the bypassing. When provided proof that malware with millions of infections (Ramnit, Gameover Zeus) can bypass the hosts file (and other OS protection mechanisms), he called the malware "edge cases." 0x12. Still has not accomplished anything since his long-since-deleted "security guide" from 2007 or his text file manager from 2010. Nevertheless, he declares victory over everyone, on every forum he has ever visited. Has no friends. Other events on Jan 31st: * Guy Fawkes was hanged, drawn, and quartered. * Germany used poison gas at a large scale for the first time in history of warfare. * The Soviet Union exiled Leon Trotsky. * Harry Truman announced a program to develop the hydrogen bomb. * Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive.