US Homeland Security to Support Open Source 186
An anonymous reader writes "CNET is reporting that the US Department of Homeland Security is extending its support to open source software. The DHS will be giving Stanford University, Coverity, and Symantec a $1.24 million grant to improve the security of open source software. From the article: 'The Homeland Security Department grant will be paid over a three-year period, with $841,276 going to Stanford, $297,000 to Coverity and $100,000 to Symantec, according to San Francisco-based technology provider Coverity, which plans to announce the award publicly on Wednesday.' It's nice that our tax dollars are being used for the right stuff."
Symantec? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Symantec? (Score:4, Insightful)
I fail to see how giving Symantec money will improve the security of anything unless we're talking about securities...as in Symantec stock. Once upon a time the name Norton prepended was a good sign. I am not trying to troll or incite flames, but I find Symantec (and McAfee for that matter) sorely wanting these days. I would be leery of running anything with their name attached to it on one of my boxes.
At least they only get $100,000 and the bulk goes to Standford.
Symantec? (Score:4, Insightful)
Surely there is a group/company more appropriate than Symantec to scrub for bugs?!?
Re:Sort of good.. (Score:3, Insightful)
While I normally am suspicious of almost everything done by DHS, I do see this as a good thing. It seems like a good start, anyway. If only we could get them to put the other 99.997% of their budget (based on their 2005 budget [whitehouse.gov]) behind Open Source...
Looks like someone has a well-placed friend (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought only China has "guanxi" problem?
Re:Err wait a second. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait for it, wait for it!
Is it a good thing that DHS is supporting open source?
They are not supporting open source. They are supporting commercial code which can be applied against open source code.
The open soure developers and their code base are left to go scratch.
KFG
Potental Funding for Twelve Steps in TrustABLE IT! (Score:3, Insightful)
Stanford is also the home of the Meta-level Compilation (MC) project [stanford.edu], a useful auditing tool for trusted build agents.
Now that Microsoft is getting into the signiture and behavour based antivirus industry, maybe Symantic could turn its patten matching technology to checking source code instead of binaries.
Wow... but is it right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Oxymorons (Score:3, Insightful)
The last thing Symantec can afford is the proliferation of secure operating systems.
They'd do better offering money to Linux/*BSD kernel development or the Mozilla Foundation (for instance).
Open sourse (Score:2, Insightful)
Then maybe the open sourse community can help them with some of their problems like this one:
"Symantec has admitted its flagship consumer security application, Norton AntiVirus 2005, has a security vulnerability that allows certain types of malicious script to infect a user's personal computer with a virus."
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,200006174
Want to Improve OSS Security? (Score:5, Insightful)
A team of 4-5 people could probably finish off the C standard library in a matter of months and make good progress on the more common daemons that are often run on Linux systems (Bind, apache, the various mail servers, etc) in the span of a year. The money DHS is spending on this would be more than enough to hire a team that size for a year to work on that.
Re:OpenBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
This spending is just more pork barrel crap that will probably not accomplish anything and will just get pocketed by somebody. Security doesn't just get fixed with a couple million bucks and a year of coding, it's an ongoing long term process, and the #1 problem with security today is lack of education and/or indifference on security issues, NOT a lack of pork barrel spending.
OSS bug reports and bug fixing (Score:3, Insightful)
Do most Open Source projects even do anything with bug reports?
Other than:
1. Ignore them.
2. Claim they are not bugs, but features.
3. Claim they are valid "design decisions".
4. Say they'll get around to fixing bugs when they are done adding features - e.g. they'll fix the root exploit to the FTP daemon after they add a 3D Open GL interface to it.
5. Say it won't be fixed. Bugzilla has a "WONTFIX" status which is used quite often.
6. Fix the bugs by wholesale destruction and replacement of whole sections of code, or even the whole code base - now you got all new bugs!
7. Claim the bug is in another piece of software or hardware and they're code is just the unfortunate victim.
8. Blame software patents, George Bush, Hurricane Katrina, Microsoft, little green men/women from Mars, sunspots, quantum time fluctuations or anything else for why they can't or won't fix it.