On Jul 29, 2013, at 1:18 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:

>  But even I am getting a little frustrated by the constant claims that "what 
> we have now is insecure and broken, and must be fixed ASAP". The reality is 
> that everything's more or less OK - there's a risk, certainly, and it could 
> be severe, but many, many people are routinely using PyPI all the time 
> without issues. And telling them that they are wrong to do so, or that they 
> are being extremely naive over security, isn't helping.


This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how security issues present 
themselves. Of course things just work for people because security issues are 
not like regular bugs. They don't negatively affect you until someone attempts 
to use them to attack you. Keep your front door unlocked on your house and your 
valuables will remain inside _until_ someone decides to try and rob you. If you 
wait until people are affected by a security vulnerability then the horse has 
already fled the pasture and you're just attempting to close the gate after the 
fact.

I'm pushing hard on doing what we can to secure the infrastructure because this 
shit matters. Everything is more or less OK, only because no one has decided 
that people installing from PyPI are not a valuable enough target to go after. 
Prior to this push that was basically the only thing prevent someone from 
attacking people, that they had never decided to bother too. We are better, 
it's somewhat harder now, but in many areas that's still the only thing keeping 
people safe.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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