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the_falltoday at 4:53 AM3 repliesview on HN

That's the most honest assessment you can expect from any small-scale developer. What do you expect them to say or do? Their adversary is presumably a national intelligence agency of a superpower.

The odds may be better if you operate the way OpenSSH does: move slow, security first, architect everything to be very difficult to attack. But if you're building a text editor, it's not your mindset, and probably never will be.


Replies

avazhitoday at 8:02 AM

> The odds may be better if you operate the way OpenSSH does: move slow, security first, architect everything to be very difficult to attack. But if you're building a text editor, it's not your mindset, and probably never will be.

I mean, if you look at the Notepad++ website this developer seems just as concerned at spamming political messaging all over everything as much as he is with writing the software he's distributing. It's pretty crazy he apparently didn't think to take more basic precautions given he is basically permatrolling Russia and China with his messaging. Big brain moment for him. And meanwhile, after reading that disclosure nonsense none of us even know what's going on - like, should we be formatting machines that were affecting during that timeframe? Was the attack targeted and specific only? Who the fuck knows!

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xeromaltoday at 5:10 AM

Yup, the only way to combat this as a smalltime dev would be to turn off auto updates and make people build from source.

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hjoutfbkfdtoday at 7:30 AM

and yet OpenSSH was almost the victim of a giant hack too (xz-utils)