Can Freezing Features Improve Security?

From	alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com (Dr. Jai Maharaj)
Newsgroups	alt.fan.jai-maharaj, soc.culture.indian, alt.security, alt.computer.consultants, alt.politics, talk.politics.misc, alt.jyotish, soc.culture.india
Subject	Can Freezing Features Improve Security?
Followup-To	alt.fan.jai-maharaj, soc.culture.indian, alt.security, alt.computer.consultants, alt.politics, talk.politics.misc
Date	2015-06-04 17:49 +0000
Organization	Jai Maharaj
Message-ID	<20150604Va1MoCi19s@MyFF> (permalink)

Cross-posted to 8 groups.

Followups directed to: alt.fan.jai-maharaj, soc.culture.indian, alt.security, alt.computer.consultants, alt.politics, talk.politics.misc

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Can Freezing Features Improve Security?

By Balaji Narasimhan
Computerworld.in
April 29, 2015

How many times have you found bugs and security flaws in
new software, or have read about it? A developer does
something that makes life easier for you in some way, but
is it also making things simpler for some hacker?

While I use some of the latest iOS apps on my iPad, there
are some exceptions. For instance, I have installed --
without jailbreaking -- an old DOS Jyotish software from
1991 that I simply cannot live without. 

When people ask why I use such ancient software, I have a
simple answer -- sure, I can get one of the modern
Jyotish packages, but every new feature means new bugs,
which can throw calculations out of sync and make
predictions go bad, hurting my reputation as an
astrologer -- not that this is great anyway.

It is not correct for me to impose my opinions on others,
but I have to ask this question -- should we, as an
industry, say no to unnecessary feature additions? Adding
features means that you have bloatware on your hands --
and this is in spite of the established fact that 80 per
cent of the people use only 20 per cent of the features. 

Worse, adding features hurts security. How many times
have you found bugs and security flaws in new software,
or have read about it? A developer does something that
makes life easier for you in some way, but is it also
making things simpler for some hacker? 

A case in point is the recent flaw that was found in a
popular open-source networking library that could allow
attackers to snoop on the encrypted traffic of over
25,000 iOS applications.

This is doubly shocking because iOS -- in fact, anything
from Apple, including OS X, which is built on the
venerably safe Unix platform -- is generally considered
safer than non-Apple platforms like Windows. 

But a large number of iOS and Mac OS X use a library
called AFNetworking, a popular open-source networking
library. So, whatever safety you get because of the
inherent nature of iOS or Mac OS X is negated by a flaw
from an external source.

Continues at:

http://www.computerworld.in/opinion/can-freezing-features-improve-security%3F

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

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Can Freezing Features Improve Security? alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com (Dr. Jai Maharaj) - 2015-06-04 17:49 +0000

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