Skip to main content

Oracle explain exactly why you should only use Open Source software

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2015/08/oracle-explain-exactly-why-you-should.html


Unless you have been living under  a rock for the past few days, you are probably aware of the (in)famous "No, You Really Can't" blog post from Oracle.  The post sparked a firestorm of controversy with its ranting about the reasons Oracle customers can't probe Oracle products for security vulnerabilities.  The original post has been deleted, but a copy of the post can still be found at the Internet Archive.

In the post, the author makes the following interesting comment:

Even if you want to have reasonable certainty that suppliers take reasonable care in how they build their products – and there is so much more to assurance than running a scanning tool - there are a lot of things a customer can do like, gosh, actually talking to suppliers about their assurance programs or checking certifications for products for which there are Good Housekeeping seals for (or “good code” seals) like Common Criteria certifications or FIPS-140 certifications. Most vendors – at least, most of the large-ish ones I know – have fairly robust assurance programs now (we know this because we all compare notes at conferences). That’s all well and good, is appropriate customer due diligence and stops well short of “hey, I think I will do the vendor’s job for him/her/it and look for problems in source code myself,” even though:
  • A customer can’t analyze the code to see whether there is a control that prevents the attack the scanning tool is screaming about (which is most likely a false positive)
  • A customer can’t produce a patch for the problem – only the vendor can do that
  • A customer is almost certainly violating the license agreement by using a tool that does static analysis (which operates against source code)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Difference Between LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition (#31313) and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 (#45544)

http://robotsquare.com/2013/11/25/difference-between-ev3-home-edition-and-education-ev3/ This article covers the difference between the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition and LEGO MINDSTORMS Education EV3 products. Other articles in the ‘difference between’ series: * The difference and compatibility between EV3 and NXT ( link ) * The difference between NXT Home Edition and NXT Education products ( link ) One robotics platform, two targets The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 robotics platform has been developed for two different target audiences. We have home users (children and hobbyists) and educational users (students and teachers). LEGO has designed a base set for each group, as well as several add on sets. There isn’t a clear line between home users and educational users, though. It’s fine to use the Education set at home, and it’s fine to use the Home Edition set at school. This article aims to clarify the differences between the two product lines so you can decide which

Let’s ban PowerPoint in lectures – it makes students more stupid and professors more boring

https://theconversation.com/lets-ban-powerpoint-in-lectures-it-makes-students-more-stupid-and-professors-more-boring-36183 Reading bullet points off a screen doesn't teach anyone anything. Author Bent Meier Sørensen Professor in Philosophy and Business at Copenhagen Business School Disclosure Statement Bent Meier Sørensen does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations. The Conversation is funded by CSIRO, Melbourne, Monash, RMIT, UTS, UWA, ACU, ANU, ASB, Baker IDI, Canberra, CDU, Curtin, Deakin, ECU, Flinders, Griffith, the Harry Perkins Institute, JCU, La Trobe, Massey, Murdoch, Newcastle, UQ, QUT, SAHMRI, Swinburne, Sydney, UNDA, UNE, UniSA, UNSW, USC, USQ, UTAS, UWS, VU and Wollongong.

Logic Analyzer with STM32 Boards

https://sysprogs.com/w/how-we-turned-8-popular-stm32-boards-into-powerful-logic-analyzers/ How We Turned 8 Popular STM32 Boards into Powerful Logic Analyzers March 23, 2017 Ivan Shcherbakov The idea of making a “soft logic analyzer” that will run on top of popular prototyping boards has been crossing my mind since we first got acquainted with the STM32 Discovery and Nucleo boards. The STM32 GPIO is blazingly fast and the built-in DMA controller looks powerful enough to handle high bandwidths. So having that in mind, we spent several months perfecting both software and firmware side and here is what we got in the end. Capturing the signals The main challenge when using a microcontroller like STM32 as a core of a logic analyzer is dealing with sampling irregularities. Unlike FPGA-based analyzers, the microcontroller has to share the same resources to load instructions from memory, read/write the program state and capture the external inputs from the G