Open Source Security

Josh and Kurt talk about some new open source projects that aim to start taking back some of our privacy and rights. It's a huge hill to climb, but it seems like there is some hope. Open source doesn't care about growth, or numbers, or anything really, so it can't ever lose.

• Codeberg
• Veilid
• Hawkins Cheezies
• Apollo's Reddit API costs

Josh and Kurt talk about namespaces. They were a topic in the last podcast, and resulted in a much much larger discussion for us. We decided to hash out some of our thinking in an episode. This is a much harder problem than either of us expected. We don't have any great answers, but we do have a lot of questions.

• Not Red Hat
• NPM hash package
• Episode 129 – The EU bug bounty program

Josh and Kurt talk about PyPI suspending new accounts and packages for a day, and a 60 minutes story about deepfakes. The problems are mostly the same, but for very different reasons. The world is changing faster than we can keep up, so what is a human to do?

• PyPI Repository Under Attack: User Sign-Ups and Package Uploads Temporarily Halted](https://thehackernews.com/2023/05/pypi-repository-under-attack-user-sign.html)
• 60 minutes reporter voice clone
• Cooridor Crew deepfakes
• Certificate bit flip
• Candy is delicious

Josh and Kurt talk about the Open Source Summit in Vancouver. Josh was there and we pick on two observations. Firstly that security keeps trying to use fear as a feature, except it doesn't work. Secondly we discuss AI and how people are talking about it. It is changing things, how much is yet to be seen.

• SLSA
• FRSCA
• S2C2F
• MSI leak
• Intel microcode
• Tom Scott AI Video

Josh and Kurt finish up the leftpad discussion. We spent a lot of time talking about how the market will respond to these sort of events, and the market did indeed speak; very little has changed. There is an aspect of all these security events where we need to understand the cost vs benefit just isn't there. it may never be there. Rather than whine and complain, we need to work with our constraints.

• Episode 77 – npm and the supply chain

Josh and Kurt revisit Episode 77, which was named "npm and the supply chain" but was a discussion about the incident we all know now as "leftpad". We didn't understand what was happening at the time, but this would become an event we talk about for years to come. It's shocking how many of the things we discuss are still completely valid five years later.

• Episode 77 – npm and the supply chain

This is the second part of remastering Episode 42 which is all about the security in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. It's a fun show and it's shocking how many of these security themes are still relevant today.

• Original Episode 42
• Part 1

The podcast is on a hiatus for a little while due to some personal matters, but that creates an opportunity to remaster some fun old episodes. These shows are REALLY hard to listen to at the current quality (tools and talent has come a long way in the last few years).

This is a remaster of Episode 42 which is all about the security in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie. It's a fun show and it's shocking how many of these security themes are still relevant today.

• Original Episode 42

Josh and Kurt talk about a blog post about pip and virtual environments. This eventually turns into a larger conversation around packaging tools and how we see incremental changes over time. The package ecosystems were what we needed a few years ago, but our needs have changed.

• One Does Not Simply 'pip install'
• Dag Wieers RPM
• Webfinger GitHub repo

Josh and Kurt talk about some data on the size of NPM. Josh wrote a blog post and a report about the amount of SEO spam in NPM was released. Open source is enormous, and it's mostly one person. It's hard to imagine how this all works sometimes and this lack of understanding can create challenges.

• Josh's blog on the size of NPM
• One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now
• Linux Kernel power distribution graph