The NSA Is Looking At Systemd's KDBUS

[nanonyme]

While I am one of those people who dislike our intelligence agencies and don't trust them. Having them double check the security of KDBUS will make me fee it is more secure. Unless they start sending in tricky patches.

I guess you're assuming they tell of security holes they find

[Delgarde]

Well... they're the SIGINT arm of the US Spying Trifecta. The thing is since they, the US Army, and various other parts of the US government uses Linux it is actually in part their job and in their self interest to make sure it's secure.

Especially given some of the recent hacks on US government and corporate sites. Though it'd certainly be fine irony if it turned out that some of those hackers were taking advantage of holes that the government had arranged to be exist.

[Delgarde]

They should have just used a simple virtual file-based IPC as is the Unix philosophy, instead of a special socket type.
Seems the guys from Plan 9 from Bell Labs who designed the IPC system Plumber got it right.

You say this regularly - but the fact that everyone uses DBus and not Plumber suggests things aren't as simple as you say. It's almost like developers don't find low-level file-based IPC protocols as useful as having a nice standard high-level system that they can use.

[duby229]

You say this regularly - but the fact that everyone uses DBus and not Plumber suggests things aren't as simple as you say. It's almost like developers don't find low-level file-based IPC protocols as useful as having a nice standard high-level system that they can use.

I wouldn't call it nice or high level or standard. Just because monopolistic practices are destroying a number of important projects doesn't mean that any of it is a good thing.

[anda_skoa]

I wouldn't call it nice or high level or standard.

These attributes depend a lot of the point of view.

For program developers (developers of applications or services) it is quite nice and high level, due to the great bindings that exist for basically all programming environments.

It is also the most widely used control and monitoring channel between services (user session and system level) and end user interfaces (applications or workspace UI) on Free Software desktop platforms, so at least there it is basically a standard.

Just because monopolistic practices are destroying a number of important projects doesn't mean that any of it is a good thing.

I think the benefits of a shared and thus more widely used system outweights the loss of DCOP and Bonobo.

Cheers,
_

[bkor]

I wouldn't call it nice or high level or standard. Just because monopolistic practices are destroying a number of important projects doesn't mean that any of it is a good thing.

DBus is something like 10 years old. It was designed amongst KDE and GNOME using Freedesktop.org. At that time there were loads of complaints about the needless differences between desktop environments. Bonobo was not used that much because it was pretty complicated to get into. When you have at least two projects working together it is not a "monopoly". Further, this happened like 10 years ago, your "are destroying" is pretty off.

What is true that there aren't too many companies involved in desktop Linux. But then it's kinda strange to accuse the one that's still around of doing too much work.