Thursday, May 15, 2008

Comic 424: Security Holes

This is actually quite amazing - a comic which I at first thought would suck hard because of all the computer stuff, but which was actually pretty funny for people who don't give a shit about different operating systems. And there's even a good Lord of the Rings reference! Sure, he puts in that crap about Debian-OpenSSL to remind you that he knows more than you, but it's still a good comic. I note that this is at least his second reference to preventing 9/11 though. That's a little...odd.

Summary: Best comic in many weeks.

1 comment:

  1. Some random anonymous dudeDecember 7, 2009 at 7:10 PM

    I'd like to point out (just for the sake of posterity ;-) that there is a good reason why this comic talks about Debian-OpenSSL.

    Back then, when this comic was released, it was revealed that some programmers working with Debian GNU/Linux distribution had commented-out (ie deactivated) some pieces of code they wrongly took for security flaws. Those pieces of code, however, were extremely important to make the software safer.

    So, instead of improving security, they precluded the software from running important code that implemented security measures. Just like the stick man in the comic is doing. :-)

    Also, the new code written by Debian developers spreaded to other Linux distributions, like Gentoo, Fedora and Ubuntu. And they were vulnerable as well, which is why there's that table here.

    This was the best comic in many weeks, indeed. Maybe one of the best of all time. And I think it's even more funny when you get exactly why Randall was talking about Debian-OpenSSL for a start.

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