Christian Findlay

Working on dev tools

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

Super stoked to announce beta testing of my latest app for Apple users 🎉

All your battery charge meters in one place! Just hit the link for beta testing

https://t.co/ewrvqBiF4S

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@danpdc It’s a turbulent time but the main problem is geopolitical. We’re in the middle of multiple wars and one of them has made the cost of transporting anything double.

I know that war is just a constant fact of life now but it has major economic consequences and it’s getting worse

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@TheDerivative Yeah but that’s also because of geopolitical and economic circumstances. It’s impossible to pick apart what the actual causes are

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@michael_kove Pretty much

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

I hope people realize that governments and other actors are already using spyware to exploit these vulnerabilities

They’ve been telling us they’re doing this for over a decade

This is how they hack phones and computers

Get it now?

Maybe time to fix the holes you think?

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@mike_pendon You can easily make a Linux distro. It’s actually not out of the realm of possibility for anyone

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

This is also why we need open source OSs

It’s why Windows and macOS may become untenable unless they are open sourced

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

I hope people realize that governments and other actors are already using spyware to exploit these vulnerabilities

They’ve been telling us they’re doing this for over a decade

This is how they hack phones and computers

Get it now?

Maybe time to fix the holes you think?

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@EowynCarter No it wasn’t. It was always exploitable. It probably was exploited but we didn’t realise it was being exploited

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

I hope the takeaway from this PHP thing is that people start to wake up to the fact that our software and infrastructure is like Swiss cheese, can’t be trusted and this is the work of HUMANS.

AI is not the threat. Infact, AI is the ticket to finding and fixing the security holes

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@NetrunnerLogic You can’t exploit a hole that doesn’t exist

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@NetrunnerLogic No, actually. That’s not how code works, unless your team just doesn’t care.

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@GemmaBlackUK Literally had an argument with someone about a decade ago who wanted to build his own encryption over http

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

The number of times I’ve pointed out security holes and people have said things like…

“It won’t happen”

“You’re being paranoid”

“We don’t need https. We can just encrypt it ourselves”

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@imsnk8 This was in the Osprey repo. It wrote a few files in Osprey for fun.

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

Claude Code is still way better than Codex

Last night I pointed Codex Astra at an existing Osprey app compiled for macOS and told it to create a new similar app that CC had no trouble with

It wrote the whole thing in Swift. It had no idea the point was to use Osprey

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@CatalinAdler All human written code is spaghetti, whether it’s open source or not. Windows is surely the same and macOS would have similar issues but less attack surface

The difference is that if a malicious actor wants to plant something in Linux, they have to do it in the open

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@danpdc This is only the tip of the iceberg

AI is already sitting on hundreds or thousands of exploits that haven’t been reported yet

You can open any critical repo and find exploits everywhere with AI

The point is now is the time to actually do something

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@SeanTynan Even AI is not the silver bullet but it’s a starting point and we can at least think about tackling the problem at scale now

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@gubatron At least AI attempts to design secure code

A lot of humans I’ve worked with are actively hostile towards secure coding practices

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@michael_kove I hope people come to realize that they’re brains are not as sharp as they think

The arrogance to think that the fallible human mind is even remotely capable of safely engineering critical systems is mind boggling

This is a wake up call that human engineering is dangerous

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@vyrotek @mrwcjoughin Signals, yes. It’s a standard pattern

[Christian Findlay @CFDevelop]

@weswinham Just confront the problem and acknowledge that you need to fix bugs.