I met Gary Kramlich a few years ago at the CypherCon security conference and we now chat on signal about open source things. When I started Open Source Security I knew he was one of the people I wanted to talk to about what it looks like to keep a project, codebase, and community alive for more than a decade. Gary is the lead developer of the Pidgin chat program. You can find him at reaperworld.com ...
Josh and Kurt embark on a thought experiment to discuss how a commercial entity would handle something like the xz incident. It was very specific and difficult to understand. It’s easy to claim just because source code being available doesn’t matter. But the reality is when source code is needed, it can make a huge difference for everyone working together, just like we saw with xz. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_456_What_if_XZ_happened_to_a_company_The_openness_of_open_source.mp3 Show Notes Lindt admits chocolate may not be ‘expertly crafted’ in class-action lawsuit battle Mitchell & Webb - Needlessly ambiguous terms
Josh and Kurt talk to Brian Fox from Sonatype and Donald Fischer from Tidelift about their recent reports as well as open source. There are really interesting connections between the two reports. The overall theme seems to be open source is huge, everywhere, and needs help. But all is no lost! There’s some great ideas on what the future needs to look like. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_454_The_state_of_open_source_with_Brian_Fox_from_Sonatype_and_Donald_Fischer_from_Tidelift.mp3 Show Notes Donald Fischer Brian Fox Tidelift Sonatype The 2024 Tidelift state of the open source maintainer report Sonatype State of the Software Supply Chain Anchore 2024 Software Supply Chain Security Report OpenSSF TAC issue 101
Josh and Kurt talk about the current Wordpress / WP Engine mess. In what is certainly a supply chain attack, the Advanced Custom Fields forking. This whole saga is weird and filled with chaos and stupidity. We have no idea how it will end, but we do know that the blog platform you use shouldn’t be this exciting. The bad sort of exciting. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_450_Whats_Wrong_With_Wordpress.mp3 Show Notes WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin Wordpress / WP Engine timeline Knorr German Recipes
Josh and Kurt talk about the 2024 Tidelift maintainer report. The report is pretty big and covers a ton of ground. We focus in a few of the statistics that should worry anyone who uses open source. We’ve known for a while developers are struggling, and the numbers back that up. This one feels like the old “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_447_The_Tidelift_2024_open_source_maintainer_report.mp3 Show Notes THE 2024 TIDELIFT STATE OF THE OPEN SOURCE MAINTAINER REPORT Canadian passport Changelog Interviews #433 Pandas CVE
Josh and Kurt talk about Chrome unexpectedly going EOL on Ubuntu 18. Keeping old things alive is really hard to do, and in open source it’s becoming more common to just run the latest version rather than trying to keep old versions alive for long periods of time. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_444_Open_Source_and_End_of_Life.mp3 Show Notes Chrome dumped support for Ubuntu 18.04 – but it’ll be back Linus Torvalds talks AI, Rust adoption, and why the Linux kernel is ’the only thing that matters’ Pidgin backdoor
Josh and Kurt talk about a story that discusses a story from Black Hat that references supply chains. There’s a ton of doom and gloom around our software supply chains and much of the advice isn’t realistic. If we want to take this seriously we need to stop obsessing over the little problems and focus on some big problems. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_443_The_Supply_Chain_Security_Crisis.mp3 Show Notes Black Hat USA 2024: Key Takeaways from the Premier Cybersecurity Event The Reason Train Design Changed After 1948
Josh and Kurt talk about CWE. What is it, and why does it matter. We cover some history, some shortcomings, and some ideas on how CWE could be used to make security a lot better. We frame the future discussion around the OWASP top 10 list. We should be putting more effort into removing removing entire classes of vulnerabilities. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_441_Is_CWE_useful.mp3 Show Notes CWE Episode 360 – Memory safety and the NSA Inside 22,734 Steam games
Josh and Kurt talk about a presentation Josh recently gave that was supposed to be about how open source works. The talk was the wrong topic for a security crowd, but there’s a lot of interesting details in the questions and comments that emerged. It’s clear a lot of security people don’t really care about the fine details about what open source is, their primary goal is to help keep development secure. ...
Josh and Kurt talk about a story talking about the “graying” of open source. There doesn’t seem to be many young people working on open source, but we don’t really know why that is. There are many thoughts, but a better question is why should anyone get involved in open source anymore? The world has changed quite a lot since open source was created. https://traffic.libsyn.com/opensourcesecuritypodcast/Episode_439_Where_are_all_the_youth_in_open_source.mp3 Show Notes The graying open source community needs fresh blood OSPOs for Good 2024 Day 1 Part 1 Day 1 Part 2 Day 2 Part 1 Day 2 Part 2 FFmpeg bug JSON Editor Online https://rfc3339.com/