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Over Protectively Insecure
Friday, March 14th, 2008 by admiralI could be writing a tirade about Spitzer, but I am not going to. In fact, I could make an off-handed comment about everybody doing that to him; however, I realized how suggestive a remark that would be. So I am going to commit to a little important stand up philosophy today. Did you know that there is a new radio network, built in the merger of two other networks, with a stated goal of simply setting the record strait? Would you believe that I have forgotten the point that I wanted to make with that comment?
Well, I do other things than stand up philosophy. Some of my work has been published on my online magazine and I have even been published by Associated Content. Look me up in a search engine and you will see how active I have been in this virtual life that I have been living. Part of what I do in my other lives is work on Linux based servers. It is time for me to update my in-house Linux server.
Slackware is the distribution that I have been using the most since something like 1993 when you had to go to nic.funet.fi to download it. Since I have not seen a recent enough update of Slackware, and the RedHat based distributions that I also use are too graphical for a stripped down server that I will only be making remote encrypted connections to, I decided on Gentoo this time. I am not devoted to any Linux distribution nor am I writing to express my taste in Linux servers. There is a problem with the software that I would consider more fitting of closed-source systems. So much effort went into securing some software that I have to run that it can no longer do what I need for it to do.
You cannot make a secure program if the security enhancements make the software useless for its job. Lighten up out there. The system is going to be less secure if I have to open up holes that you could pilot an aircraft carrier through just to use the software that I built the system to run. Most users are that way. I am going to abandon this overly tight software and run something else.
If you want to secure the Internet, something that will become more important as society degenerates, then making the software useful is just as important as making it secure. How secure is software that nobody uses? Well, how does it help to keep Internet connected systems secure? Market forces will drive users to whatever software makes them most productive for their resources. It does not help if you cannot use it.
