Hi Fritz (and anyone else capable of an informed response),

There is a discussion going on right now on the SPAM-L list about the 
potential (in)security and code-quality of ASSP.

I made a post asking what others used, and that I used ASSP and how much 
I like it, and got slammed heavily. In the discussion that followed, one 
person actually took a peek at the code (assp.pl), and pronounced it - 
well, here is the primary comment that most of the others on the list 
have latched onto to support their anti-ASSP stance:

*****************
"Having spent a significant chunk of last night inside the 9000+ lines
of its poorly-commented, spaghetti Perl, I can see why you would wish
that [I had said something about hoping Fritz lives forever ;: ]: it's 
very badly structured/written.  Oh, some of the ideas are pretty good, 
but it really needs to be completely recoded from scratch with an eye 
toward making it maintainable by others."
*****************

Also, I'd appreciate comments from those qualified on the potential 
(in)security of ASSP. There has been a lot of follow-up concern about 
how secure ASSP is - ie, the potential for holes/exploits for ASSP. Most 
of these concerns relate to 'what do you do if Fritz gets hit by a bus 
tomorrow' and then some horrible exploit is discovered by the spammers 
(who can also look at the assp.pl script) and all of a sudden, 
everyone's servers that use ASSP are now OWNED by the spammers...

The subsequent discussion resulted in concerns that can be summed up as:

1. The code is ugly
(while this may be true, it doesn't *automatically* mean anything, in 
and of itself, beyond it will be difficult to maintain)

2. The code is *potentially* insecure, due to the ugly nature of the 
code, and due to its dependencies on CPAN modules
(again, true enough, but applies to all s/w - without specific pointers 
to actual, reproducible insecure code, it doesn't mean anything)

3. It is primarily maintained by one person

So, Fritz, Michael, anyone else who knows Perl and is familiar with the 
code - how would you respond to this comment and these concerns?

Since I am not a programmer, I am not qualified to respond to these 
concerns, but I'd love to pass on some quotes from one or more of the 
developers (Fritz? Przemek? anyone else?)...

-- 

Best regards,

Charles

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT
Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your
opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash
http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV
_______________________________________________
Assp-user mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/assp-user

Reply via email to