4 Ekim 2012 Perşembe

Who will fight for me?

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Recently on Dave Aitel's popular mailing list this question was posed:
does the EFF have our best interest at heart? The answer is clearly
no: I think the EFF has lost it's way and I doubt it can be set
correctly.

The catalyst that set off the discussions and this blog post come from
a March EFF blog entitled
"Zero-day exploit sales should be key pointin cyber-security debate".
 For those of you who do not follow US
federal politics, there are a lot of bills in play aimed at cyber
security reform and bringing organizations under the government
umbrella of protection. As someone who distrusts authority, I don't
like this. This increases government meddling in our lives while doing
nearly nothing to actually protect us.

The EFF has made a 180 degree turn on this issue. Originally, the EFF
was founded on libertarian principles of individualism opposing
government regulation, claiming that cyberspace should be sovereign.
Now the EFF wants to collectivize the Internet and impose its "ethics"
on coders, claiming we have a moral obligation hand over 0day
vulnerabilities for the common good.

That statement is beyond naive and shows a lack of understanding of
the process used to find vulns. Vulns are discovered because people
are looking for them. People look for them because they expect to be
rewarded. Removing the reward, and we'll no long look for vulns. If
the military stops buying weaponized vulns from researchers like me,
then I stop finding them -- I uninstall WinDbg and ignore program
crashes instead of spending two days trying to reproduce the problem
and weaponize an exploit.

These exploits are the munition of choice for the upcoming cyberwar.
The EFF naively believes in unilateral disarmament, that the US stops
buying these weapons even though Russia, China, Israel, North Korea,
and Iran continue. It's irrational to believe this makes the Internet
"safer".

In a related argument, the EFF describes exploit sales as "security
for the 1%" using the ugly class warfare rhetoric of the #Occupy
movement. It's a paranoid conspiracy theory that bankers are out to
get you, and it's a paranoid conspiracy theory that exploit
sellers/buyers are out to get you. Yes, I know it sucks that some
people have more money than you and more security than you, but
attacking them and curtailing their freedom's won't make you any
better off. The actual selling of weaponized exploits is only a smart
part of what vuln discovers do -- the vast majority of our efforts
filters out quickly to everyone else, both to vendors to help them fix
bugs, but also to everyone else to educate them on which products are
more reliable. Sure, people like me do things that you may not like,
but trying to curtail our freedoms will do more to stop the things you
do like.

The big thing the EFF has done with posts is to reduce funding. We
used to unquestioningly support the EFF because they promised to
support freedom of all of us. Now it has become obvious that they
really don't, that they are more of the standard partisan group,
promoting the interests of some at the expense of others. The obvious
basis of the EFF's posts have nothing to do with electronic liberties,
but everything to do with a partisan attack against the American
military specifically.

This was just a long way of saying the EFF is dead to me.

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