Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119318909016582

by turrini • 10 days ago

78 82 10 days ago

marc.info

cptroot• 10 days ago

I would love to know how OP came across this email nearly 20 years after the fact

SoftTalker2• 10 days ago

It's one of Theo's more famous dismissals/takedowns.

DonHopkins4• 10 days ago

Some people keep classic flames alive to deploy in times of need. Theo's good, but he can't hold a candle to the late Marc Cripsin railing about emacs line-mode-visual. Grr.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1tf1iy/imap_inventor...

From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs
What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23? I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".
People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software. This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.
Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults alone.
If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real work depend upon those distributions.
It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn their expectations upside down.
Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will repeat itself over and over again.
Grr.
From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs
They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea. Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an extremely bad idea.
I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations: all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.
I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when I did ESC <n> CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the default.
Surprise. Grr.

Gualdrapo• 10 days ago

"Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is “difficult” and declined to comment further."

https://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616t...

Imagine being so hard you're labelled as "difficult" by no other but Linus Torvalds

TylerE• 10 days ago

I mean, Torvalds has called basically every person on earth an asshole at some point, hasn’t he? He’s the opposite of being sparing with critisicism, and frankly has historically often used his bully pulpit to do it.

pdpi• 10 days ago

My read on Torvalds is that, coming from him, "asshole" is a much lesser criticism than "difficult".

sidkshatriya• 10 days ago

Thanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link:

"De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal."

There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened.

However, I think Linux has always has and till today has better leadership, and management compared to OpenBSD.

I also think GPLv2 was another good that happened to Linux. It just creates an irresistible force to contribute back. With *BSD, a company might contribute back or it may not.

scythe• 10 days ago

It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and never looked back. Which is not solely a license issue; you can definitely release GPL software for FreeBSD, but the "license war" culture (to the extent it really existed) may have been an issue.

And I guess I do think that FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux. Maybe the chaos was necessary for growth, but it still seems to be a hurdle for new Linux users in the current day.

mmh00002• 10 days ago

Ha! That’s some rose-colored-glasses view of BSD history.

The lawsuit didn’t help. But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”.

It wasn't until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSD's user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.

bawolff3• 10 days ago

I never believe people when they say, we would have been famous if not for one piece of bad luck 35 years ago.

Yeah, i'm sure the lawsuit was crappy and set things back. But if you can't recover after 35 years, then its something deeper than what happened 35 years ago.

oooyay• 10 days ago

Even very smart, very accomplished people can be very wrong. Xen is seeing a resurgence from Xen Orchestra and I've used it in my homelab. It's quite pleasant. I also, of course, use de Raadt's software as well.

estebank• 10 days ago

I think that everyone has the power to be wrong, but to be very wrong with convincing arguments, you must be smart.

A smart person can come up with post-hoc rationalizations that hold up under some scrutiny, to the point it is very hard to convince them otherwise. Add to that people who became famous or successful on the back of "being right" on some subject matter, getting used to "being right even in the face of overwhelming push back", and you have a recipe for very smart people being very wrong in very visible/loud ways.

tptacek10• 10 days ago

One of his dumber takes. Virtualization replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel" (KVM and the userland hypervisor). It's a drastic attack surface reduction, and the empirical data bears that out: kernel LPEs aren't even newsworthy (there's whole repos full of unnamed, unremarked-upon LPEs), and KVM escapes are very rare.

ummonk• 10 days ago

How big is the OpenBSD kernel and userland actually compared to a virtualization layer?

boricj• 10 days ago

Doesn't that message date back to a time that either predates or is almost concurrent with the introduction of x86 hardware-assisted virtualization? I wasn't around playing with VMs back then, but I'm not sure that the track record of x86 virtualization 20 years ago was that great.

tptacek10• 10 days ago

It does, but that's an argument about implementations, and his comment is an argument about design. Just read it again and see if you think it's reasonable. Pay attention to the tone and (especially) the conclusory certainty he deploys.

justsomehnguy• 10 days ago

The letter is dated 2007-10.

AMD released (ie commercially available) Pacifica on May 23, 2006 while Intel did released their Vanderpool a half of year earlier November 14, 2005. [0]

Windows Server 2008 was RTM'ed on February 2008 which provided Hyper-V as a first class component. [1]

Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 added support for both Intel VT (IVT) and AMD Virtualization (AMD-V) and was released 11 June 2007. [2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#AMD_virtual...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Virtual_Server#Versi...

dredmorbius2• 10 days ago

The email in question actually addresses one of the first, if not the first, x86 hypervisor product, Xen, relying on both my memory of the time (I did some work with Xen in the mid aughts) and Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_virtualization_tec...>.

The Xen hypervisor itself was pretty minimal, as I understand mostly serving to time-slice CPU cycles among guest domains and partition memory access. As a contrast to VMWare, device access and drivers were handled by the guests themselves.

As such, the attack surface of the Xen hypervisor itself is fairly minimal. Most security issues seem to be denial of service vulnerabilities, though there are some privilege escalation, access, information leak, and overflow issues listed:

<https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/>

I generally respect de Raadt's expertise and instincts, though he may have been over his skis here.

TZubiri• 10 days ago

I'm anti virtualization, but mostly due to the internal complexities of the guest applications being swept under the rug, it's undeniable that the host is protected and thus neighbouring guests (of course it is with almost 20 years of hindsight I can say this.)

That the hypervisor is effectively an operating system/kernel I have always held, and that it is a smaller and thus less vulnerable kernel is an appropriate explication I think. It's very hard to secure an all purpose kernel like Linux without actually building it yourself (and even then..)

naturalmovement• 10 days ago

If someone purposely dug up emails you wrote 19 years ago, I'm sure they'd find some of your "dumber takes" as well.

I'm not sure what the purpose of revisiting this is beyond provoking a flamewar on a slow Sunday.

tptacek10• 10 days ago

I mean, I agree there. We all have dumb takes! I hear roughly once a month about my old "I don't think Dual EC is a backdoor, it's too dumb and obvious for anyone to actually use it" take.

bawolff3• 10 days ago

Probably people are responding less to the dumbness of the take and more the arrogance of the tone combined with the dumbness of the take. Everyone has dumb takes, not everyone is an asshole while giving their dumb takes.

Regardless i do agree with you though, not sure what the point of digging up ancient skeletons is.

throw0101a• 10 days ago

If someone purposely dug up emails you wrote 19 years ago, I'm sure they'd find some of your "dumber takes" as well.

"Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them which will hang him."

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...

xattt2• 10 days ago

replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel"

Is a Proxmox kernel that much smaller than a typical Linux kernel?

tptacek10• 10 days ago

I don't know. I don't use Proxmox.

dehrmann• 10 days ago

Isn't Proxmox a management layover over Debian and KVM? I doubt the kernel is even smaller.

Veserv5• 10 days ago

Virtualization is responsible for effectively none of those security benefits.

It is the reduction to a smaller “kernel” that is responsible. If you applied the same design and operational model to running regular old processes instead of virtual machines you would also get a system with less security holes than the grossly insecure rat’s nest that is Linux, Windows, or whatever other commercial IT OS you have in mind.

Virtualization is almost entirely orthogonal, if not harmful, to security of the platform and operations. It is not magic pixie dust that makes your operational model more robust. You need a robust operational model, then you can have a robust operational model with virtual machines.

There is a reason why the most secure systems in the world are separation kernel architectures instead of hypervisors even though most of those systems do support virtualization as a feature, just not as the basis of their security propertys.

tptacek10• 10 days ago

You can falsify these claims simply by looking at the records of platform vulnerabilities. I don't think this is a live argument.

10000truths• 10 days ago

While this is true, the unspoken factor here is compatibility. Fixing the design and operational model of Linux (or any Unix derivative) to a sensible default-nothing architecture requires completely changing the semantics of the OS, which would break so much existing software to the point that one might as well write a new kernel+userspace from scratch. It's a lot easier for a sysadmin to just plop their existing rat's nest in a hardware-accelerated parallel universe and say "job done".

vlovich123• 10 days ago

A simple tool was presented, iofuzz, that exposes exploitable security flaws in most, if not all, virtual machines available today. To the knowledge of the author, no similar research has been conducted before. The results produced by crashme, a tool well known for over a decade, locating trivial flaws dem- onstrates this. No virtual machine tested was robust enough to withstand the testing procedure used, and multiple exploitable flaws were presented that could allow an attacker restricted to a vir- tualised environment to reliably escape onto the host system. The results obtained demonstrate the need for further research into virtualisation security and prove that virtualisa- tion is no security panacea.

https://taviso.decsystem.org/virtsec.pdf

He’s not wrong based on the research at the time. The mistake is presenting this as if it’s something that will be true for all time. Is virtualization a panacea? No. CPU manufacturers can’t even protect against side channel attacks. But it’s completely missing what this provides which is that the difficulty and cost of creating an exploit is higher today than 20 years ago. And it’s amusing to hear someone blasting away at the security of others when BSD has its own share of problems and architectural weaknesses are discovered through popularity of your system being an attack target, not because you’re smarter than everyone else and made better choices (sometimes it can be true in places, but harder to maintain for a big piece of software like an OS)

DonHopkins4• 10 days ago

My favorite Theologism:

    "My favorite part of the "many eyes" argument is how few bugs 
    were found by the two eyes of Eric (the originator of the 
    statement).  All the many eyes are apparently attached to a 
    lot of hands that type lots of words about many eyes, and 
    never actually audit code." -Theo de Raadt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

znpy5• 10 days ago

I think de Raadt and OpenBSD are hugely overrated and some takes are as dumb as the one in the post.

OpenBSD is only secure because because it does pretty much nothing and does it very slowly (its firewall just recently broke the 4gbps firewalling capabilty, for example) but somehow a cult has formed around it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

bawolff3• 10 days ago

In fairness, minimizing surface area (doing nothing unless you need to) is security 101, so i hardly think that is a criticism.

znpy5• 10 days ago

Yeah it’s one way to look at it for sure…

hylaride3• 10 days ago

Counter-take:

Linux is only secure because of OpenSSH.

In all seriousness, the OpenBSD guys are very conservative with technology. The OpenBSD pf stack (as well as much of the kernel) isn't heavily threaded due to the risk of race conditions. They also (correctly) predicted a lot of the speculative CPU attacks by not supporting it by default.

They've done a lot of security research and pioneered a lot of open source work around OS-level stack smashing technologies, like memory executable-space protection (W^X), early process privilege separation, memory space randomization, etc. Some of these features are not great for performance, but do help and have been adopted by other systems.

You're basically arguing that an armoured car sucks because a Ferrari can smoke it on a race track. There are times you want a Ferrari and there are times you want a Brinks truck.

rustcleaner• 10 days ago

If OpenBSD pretended Qubes OS was a feature prototype/reference OS build and made a fork of OpenBSD to feature-match Qubes OS (calling it QuBSD or something), that would be great!

jurgenaut23• 10 days ago

god bless usenet. The good ol' flame wars aren't what they are used to anymore with all this moderation and trolling feeding each other around here.

brynet• 10 days ago

This is not usenet, it's the openbsd misc@ mailing list.

antod• 10 days ago

Maybe they mixed up usenet by doing what I used to do back then - use gmane so I could follow various mailing lists via NNTP for better thread tracking and not filling up my inbox.

Gud• 10 days ago

I don't understand the constant (almost always unsubstantiated) criticism of the *BSDs from many Linux advocates.

Personally I evaluate each OS by it's merit, and I've concluded that OpenBSD, FreeBSD and some Linux distributions(I use arch btw) are solid operating systems.

On the server I prefer FreeBSD because of it's amazing flexibility, and stable yet evolutionary base system and in my opinion, superior init system. Simple RC scripts FTW.

I use Arch Linux for superior software and hardware support, related to client usage.

I use OpenBSD for various network appliances.

dlcarrier• 10 days ago

If you like Arch and init systems with simple RC scripts, check out Artix Linux (https://artixlinux.org/), which is an Arch-based Linux distribution that supports multiple options for init systems.

ranger_danger2• 10 days ago

I wished more people would take issue with developers' bad attitudes.

I know this is an extremely unpopular take, but I refuse to use software where the main dev(s) are openly abusive to others. Sadly this includes the majority of open source operating systems and many other very popular applications... but it's my decision and you're welcome to disagree with me. I am not trying to prevent others from using said software, and I don't look down on them for it.

I think if everyone was always forced to separate the art from the artist, then boycotting wouldn't even be a thing, so there should probably be some kind of middle ground.

rurban• 10 days ago

There was no abuse and bad attitude. He was telling the truth about Linux hypervisors. And it got worse since then. Then they talked Xen, which at least has a security boundary. Now everybody switched to kvm with none. Only speed matters, security not at all.

mvdtnz2• 10 days ago

You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid

.. is abusive.

ranger_danger2• 10 days ago

Disagree, but regardless, both Theo and Linus have long, storied histories of prolonged habitual abuse without much remorse. Even after Linus "stepped back", it never really stopped after he came back.

We'll probably also disagree on what is abuse or not, but that's ok.

dstnn• 10 days ago

Dude is 100% right

worik• 10 days ago

That is old news, Theo was harsh, arrogant and rude. He was not always right, but always RIGHT!!

But ten years ago. What is the point now?

jraph• 10 days ago

Don't take this personally, but I am sorry to have to inform you that it was, in fact, almost 20 years ago. Just months after Rihanna released Umbrella, and a year after Mika released Relax.

dredmorbius2• 10 days ago

I hate to break it to you, but 2007 is rather closer to twenty years ago.

mvdtnz2• 10 days ago

I don't know who this guy is but this is just a shitty way to interact with people. Presumably he's successful or we wouldn't be talking about him without any introduction, but I wouldn't hire this person to sweep the floors at my office.

Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

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