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Security Concerns Paramount After Early Reviews of Diaspora Code
Stoobalou writes with this excerpt from Thinq.co.uk:
"Following the release of the source code for the Diaspora social networking platform, hackers and tinkerers the world over have been poring over the code in order to improve, enhance, and otherwise help the project in its attempt to unsettle Facebook. Sadly, the current opinion is that the code just isn't up to scratch. While the team clearly stated that 'we know there are security holes and bugs' in the code that was released, it's possible that they weren't aware of just how many show-stopping issues there are — issues which make it hard to recommend that you roll your own Diaspora server just yet."
You're wrong. I'm 99% confident that 2011 will be the year of Diaspora on the desktop.
It might encourage the workers on Diaspora code to work harder for security. I mean, even if you think you have every security hole plugged, until you open that code up to the world you won't really know. So what, there are many more security bugs than expected. That's fine, delay the release a little bit and start patching.
Unless this completely discourages them to the point that they turn emo and start lying in the dark crying, I'm pretty sure they can fix this and still release.
Yeah, but it will be like email is now. People won't need to run their own servers. They will be able to pick from a variety of free diaspora hosts who get their revenue from ad dollars and harvesting your data (and that of your friends, who might host their own diaspora node at home, or on another service), and then we will be free of facebook's horrible privacy violations, and be in a new universe of less accountable companies with even worse problems.
I can't wait, diaspora, here I come!
After a few months, a big project has bugs? Really? That's amazing! After all, Windows has been around for only 20 years and it's perfect, right?
I think I'll reserve judgment for sometime in 2012...
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
zomg! Pre-alpha! This thing is sure to be a failure!
Seriously, a bunch of kids from NYU... what did you expect?
It's not a bad thing though, as long as people are willing to constructively collaborate on the project.
Okay, I have no horse in this race, as I only have a passing interest in online social networks (enough to read the article, but not enough to join one), so I am not very passionate about this news in one way or another, but...
Isn't that why it's called pre-Alpha software?? I mean, bugs happen. In open architectures, you fix them. If this were a closed software project, you wouldn't even know about them. If there were endemic, critical flaws inherent in their underlying assumptions going into this project, then that would be news, but "oversold Alpha software contains bugs!!!" is hardly worth noting. Being free software, many eyes will ensure that the Beta version is better, presumably.
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
I'm more interested in the protocol than the code. If the protocol is vulnerable to attacks/fraud then it is a show stopper.
If the ruby-web-stuff-code contains bugs and security holes, I'll just write my own (read: wait for someone else to do it).
I couldn't find any relevant info about the protocol in TFA. Am I missing something?
I don't understand why Diaspora has had saturation coverage in the mainstream press (and pretty heavy coverage here, for that matter) before it even went alpha, but identi.ca gets so little.
Something doesn't have to convince every user just to succeed. To me, Diaspora represents everything RIGHT with the FOSS community. Collaboration on software that, on its own, would never survive. However, with people working together on it, they can increase its usefulness (and increase their own skills, which by proxy would improve any future projects they worked on.) Diaspora is a grand experiment, one that I hope works out.
I fail to see how working with people dedicating their time and knowledge can be seen as a bad thing.
Living With a Nerd
Again, a project that was way overhyped before any code became available.
Unlike Facebook, the Diaspora network is planned to have more than one server operator. Some might offer ad-free accounts to subscribers. Others might be run by a company that offers ad-free accounts to its employees, a school that offers ad-free accounts to its students (echoing the original meaning of the word "facebook"), or a church or other non-profit club that offers ad-free accounts to its members.
Yes, I understand that any security vulnerability is a bad thing. In that merit this is a bad thing. BUT...
These are people fresh out of college, and haven't gotten a lot of real world experience. I, myself, am only out of college by a year and a half. The first year was spent as a sys admin, but the past 6 as a developer. They have probably heard of some types of attacks, but are unfamilier with details. Others, if they are like me, they haven't even thought of. All of this comes from being "in the trade".
This is why Open Source is good. It can rapidly increase a programmers competency if they get constructive criticism. It sounds like they are getting plenty of that, but the article kinda makes it sound like the should know all this.
I, for one, am glad they are doing this, and that they have decided to release some code early for review. Not only will it allow bugs to be fixed early, but it will also give them lessons for future use.
What worries me is that from the sounds of it that there is so much wrong that they will miss their deadline of the october launch if they do it right and address the show stoppers before release (Ubuntu-itis perhaps?) If they make the deadline and it sucks it will fail. If they miss the deadline by a couple months or more, the hype will be gone and Diaspora will be tossed aside.
I honestly hope they succeed. I use facebook and I like it, however the endless amount of drivel I see (and have to ignore) plus all the security changes and stuff means the clock is ticking on the site before the mass exodus begins. I have high hopes for Diaspora because it's open source and not centralized, and I hope it hits before the next awesome social networking site pops up and takes the glory.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I respect what's been done so far with Diaspora, but for all the hype and money poured into this project, this is a bit embarrassing. To me, it looks like a byproduct of a closed development model with a small team...I'm glad there can be community participation on the project now but I don't understand why the community wasn't involved in the beginning.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
So, they started from scratch whipping up a solution that's potentially huge, with programmers that apparently aren't that experienced.
I question how intelligent this approach really is.
My solution would have been: Take a standard XMPP server, use its capabilities in the area of code stability, pubsub technology, server-to-server communication and properly documented communications protocol (as an RFC), and just write a javascript-based client (based on jQuery and strophe.js for example) that uses it. Any common server like ejabberd would be perfectly able to handle the stuff they need, no server-side coding required at all. As a bonus, the code has already been tested for security and has fewer bugs due to being out in the open for much longer.
Additionally, it would be trivial to have competing implementations. They already exist.
My point is, then obviously new they were inexperienced and that the code would have numerous problems. That's why the article said only the die-hard fans with blinders on would try to set this up and be subject to the security holes.
What I'm trying to say in my post is that since they knew there were problems, they went ahead and released the code so others can look. This is one of the great strengths of open source. If you know you have problems in your code, you can release it and have others look over it and provide insights into what you are or are not doing correctly.
Should inexperienced people be trusted to create a highly secure network protocol and implementation? No. Not even remotely. BUTThey took it upon themselves to get the process started. Once they felt they had something worth others looking at, they released the code, and professionals with more experience provided feedback.
BURN THE WITCHES
Version 0.0.0.0.1 of something more complicated than "Hello world" released along with huge warnings that it is not ready for production and people are shooting the entire project down. It has had 4 people working on it, now they've stuck to their word and opened it at the time they said they would. Why is this news surprising or bad? Why is it even news?? People have found gaping holes, said people will close gaping holes - that was the whole point of it being open wasn't it?
“If you've been on the Diaspora mailing list, there are people who are clearly not security professionals who are asking each other, 'OK, what do I need to do to get this running because I hate being on Facebook,'” he said. “They are going to get burned in a very serious manner very, very quickly if they actually succeed in doing what they're trying to do.”
(screams into pillow)
Each one of the coders probably thinks the other coders are responsible for security, because it's nobody knows exactly what the other modules actually do. It's not written down anywhere.
To be fair, this isn't the only system I've seen like this... and kudos to the team for sticking their code out where everyone can see it. I'm sure that there are similar problems in many widely-used systems, but since they're closed source, we can only guess about the details.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
So in other words, yes, it's a little bit worse than Facebook at this point.
include $sig;
1;
Umm... Am I missing something here? Why would you set up your own Diaspora server using a Developer's Release? It's in development, as in not ready for prime time yet. There might be too many security issues for it to go live in October, as is scheduled, but if the open source community gets behind the project, that could easily be overcome.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the catch-22 of many open source start-ups: You need outside developers to help you work out the bugs in your software, but when you publish your development software, everyone beats you up for all the bugs they find in it.
Stop criticizing and start coding.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
It is excellent that security analysts have taken the time to investigate this code base. I think Eben Moglen made a very strong case for the value of this project, and the voluntary efforts by global security researchers is extremely valuable to the long-term health of Diaspora. Getting security people involved early is a Very Good Thing.
issues which make it hard to recommend that you roll your own Diaspora server just yet
Well, yeah. It is brand new pre-alpha code from a small team. If you are going to run brand new pre-alpha code from a small team on a network connected computer, it would be best to know about things like tripwire, process monitoring, traffic monitoring, and chroot, just for starters. You should probably be running it, if anywhere, on a sacrificial box that you can kill remotely. If you are considering running highly experimental code, you should either know how to handle it or know your limitations (I know I don't know enough to run this code in the wild).
Some products, like OpenBSD, start with high security as job one. Perhaps such projects can be somewhat trusted in their early state (though they will likely be deficient in other important areas). Others start with other prime motives, and should not be so trusted in the early days. The key value of Open Source is not that it is perfect in all critical areas on the first day of publication. It is that it can be collectively enhanced to become very strong in all areas over time. The first step in that process is publishing the broken stuff so the global system of experts can get together for a barn raising.
In short, this is exactly how it should work. This is not a sign of weakness but a significant step forward on the Open Source best practices road.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I admit that I haven't read through the code, and I am not a programmer. But it seems to me that if this can be hosted and run by individual institutions, it could have a fairly large impact in higher education in the next few years. Employees could use this like intranet-lite, and alumni and students could use this the way Facebook was originally used -- a social network for the school itself. The only difference is that it could provide very useful data directly to the school instead of an individual. I've also read a lot of complaints about how the project focused first on user interface instead of back-end programming. Isn't that similar to how Facebook itself started? I don't think there were a bunch of new protocols declared for the "Face book" launch.
The Diaspora guys should hire Austin Heap.
article and this comment sponsored by the makers of Facebook: the original and premier stalker tool and dont you forget it
Article - A Pre-alpha release of the User Interface has security holes. For some reason this surprises people, and those who do know better are acting shocked, despite the fact that compiling "#include " by itself can be considered a pre-alpha release and that they have no idea about the project path.
Comments - Since I wouldn't have started with the user interface, this project is a failure. Stupid kids with no real-world large project experience can't do anything. The money they raised is completely wasted, even though we've no idea how much of that they've actually spent, with 4 programmers living in NYC working on this, they must have spent the $200,000 on gold plated Ferraris. They are not following my formula for creating large successful social networks (my current success rate: 0/0), therefore it is worthless. Trying is the first step towards failure.
Remind me never to show a work in progress on Slashdot.
This sentence no verb.
To me the real story here is how four students with no real skills or experience managed to convince people into giving them $200,000.
Of course their code is going to be utter rubbish, they are uni grads with no experience, discipline, standards, or any of the myriad other factors that are required to make rock solid code. It sounds like they don't even have a documented protocol to work, and I'm guessing that means there's nothing in place for inter-communication with add-ons or third party code.
Even if you assume they worked mainly on the front-end, that's seriously only a week or so of work for four developers, especially when so much has been cribbed from elsewhere.
I'm expecting a delay to their release to fix the major obvious flaws, massive security concerns, and a lacklustre launch of a product no-one really needs that much. If Facebook is so bad that you have already removed your account, or haven't subscribed yet - then you might be a contender for this product. Most others will simply stay where their friends all are - because that's the whole ********* point of a social network.
Never underestimate the power of inertia.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
(I might be making an assumption with how this is "distributed", friends and trusted servers might be acceptable. But i'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt because they did a very poor job explaining important details like these.)
Encryption should never be your only line of defence for PRIVATE information.
"Distributed Encrypted Backups" and "distributed" is scary because this is PRIVATE information and not PUBLIC information, not only is this uncharted territory but it is fundamentally wrong. With Tor and Freenet there was nothing of value stored or transferred.
A malicious user could archive torrents of encrypted personal information, even if it takes 20-50 years to crack this is unacceptable. Normally you are just packet sniffing on a small fraction of the population.
This project could be a false prophet that will that will doom the success of any future social projects.
Also, these client diversity and data portability concepts may not be compatible with attempts at real privacy and security, for example your perfect email client and server is at the mercy of the client on the other sending/receiving end. These concepts make the assumption that the indefinite storage of information is a good idea, while i happen to think that the expiration of messages is a good idea, and an idea that can look appealing with the right spin. (well, these concepts are may be ok for making the transition to something better, but i think it encourages defeatism, accepting to be average)
disclaimer, i'm about to finish a security/privacy focused social networking website that isn't exactly 'open' for the foreseeable future but its not feature fancy/flashy either.
All that's really needed here is managing the hype until the system is deployment-ready. I know it's a difficult for a small team already overloaded with to-do lists to have to deal with PR as well, but this is critical to a project with a planned large social scope. They need to do all they can to keep this lying low until the resolution of all major issues that would sour the public's fickle and first-impression-is-everything opinion.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
It's not any dumber than two college dropouts in Cupertino building a personal computer in their garage or some lone crazy finish student making his own OS.
Budgets considerably larger than $200,000 have been spent on software projects written by professional programmers that don't run at all.
I do not make predictions about diaspora, too early for that.
I have been suprised by the reported problems, esp. with html injection.
Diaspora seems a rails app.
Rails, like most web frameworks, takes precautions against such injections, and IIRC even basic tutorials mention those, so an unskilled coder that RTF tutorials ought to avoid those.
So I guess they released very early and the code and protocol will have to be massaged a lot. Changing the code is trivial, the protocol is a bit more delicate. :)
It's also probably too late to use gnunet, freenet, other p2p or stuff as i2p or tahoe-lafs as an infrastructure, too. Like every other coder out there, including me, they are gonna pay for the NIH syndrome
But ok, let's see what happens. Good luck to diaspora.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'm not entirely sure, but I think the HTML injection is caused by their use of WebSockets, which uses EventMachine and then ties back into the Rails app or bypasses it and goes straight into the MongoDB. That's my basic understanding of it, if I'm wrong someone should correct me.
/endpost
As for people criticizing the project, I think that it's way too early, it hasn't even hit Beta status, it's an Alpha release.
WebSockets is actually the aspect of this project that interests me the most, if they can make a "standard" social communications protocol or API that functions over WebSockets, I think that'd be the greatest outcome for the project. If it succeeds in creating that protocol, it wouldn't only kill FaceBook, but Twitter as well. Also, that would allow other developers to create other implementations in different languages(sans Rails) , user interfaces or mashups.
Either way, I watch this project with great anticipation and bated breath.
P.S. MongoDB is a NoSQL database...... HA! Now the Web 2.0 synergy in this post is complete.(Yes, I did throw in a few terms just for shits and giggles.)
Geeks don't grock information, they grep it.