What are some examples of xkcd 2347?

Log4j was a fun one to watch unfold everywhere when things went haywire

The neat thing about the log4j thing was even a cursory explanation of the vulnerability made anyone with a passing familiarity with security say, "Why the fuck would that even be a feature?!"
- What was it?
- Wait until you learn that PDFs support embedded Javascript.
That was not a fun week to be a developer.
- As a non-java company developer at the time, I think our biggest challenge was explaining to everyone that Log4j didn't affect us. It took a non-zero amount of effort because a lot of customers panicked. To be fair, it was also an industry where confidentiality is important.
- Oh man. I missed it by like a month. I graduated with my bachelors in December, and started in January. I was hearing horror stories from my new coworkers about how people had to cancel vacations to get stuff patched asap
- It was if none of your code used log4j. I remember being very grateful that I had chosen java.util.logging and Logback for my Java logging needs.
That one was so annoying because you had to be using the log server to have any issues. If your network was locked down, the log server was disabled, or if you happened to be using a version that was from before the log server was added, then there were no issues. But clients just heard "log4j" and thought it was unsafe.
- 'clients' are really dumb sometimes...

Werner Koch, the guy who created, and who has maintained for 25 years now, pretty much all by himself, GnuPG, the modern email encryption replacement for PGP.

Just the other day, I realized I actually live just a few kms away from the guy, here in Germany ... very tempted to reach out to him someday and actually buy him an actual coffee.

That was the one I couldn't remember, I got GPG and PGP confused but I remember it involved email encryption.

This guy was the reason that every security dev had those personal public keys clearly posted next to their email address on every announcement and blog post they ever released.

Sci-Hub anyone?

Alexandra Elbakyan manages this truly awesome source of scientific papers completely on her own. She got sued twice and lost, had to change the URL multiple times due to takedowns and only gets along by donations.

It is a crime to humanity to lock knowledge behind a huge paywall. She does God's work.

And it's not like the actual scientists/academics support knowledge being locked away either, or profit from it.
- shit, scihub is easier to use than the library, so we're all grateful to her too.
She's the best thing that's happened to the s scientific publishing field. I'm no longer a student but I still enjoy reading scientific papers and I'll be damned if I have to pay $20 per article (which doesn't go to the authors) since I no longer have access to a library that maintains relationships with these big publishers.

cURL was one of these for a while (according to my limited understanding)

It was made in the 90s and it didn't get commercial support until a few years ago.

Left pad https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/rage-quit-coder-unpublished-17-lines-of-javascript-and-broke-the-internet/

Had GPT summarize what happened.

The "left pad" incident refers to a controversy that arose in 2016 when a developer named Azer Koçulu removed his JavaScript package called "left-pad" from the NPM (Node Package Manager) registry. This caused a ripple effect, breaking numerous projects that relied on this package and highlighting the potential risks of relying on external dependencies. The incident sparked a debate about the stability and trustworthiness of the open-source ecosystem and led to discussions about best practices for managing dependencies in software development.

This is the one I came to post about. The fact there's a library for this is so stupid to me.

I feel like it demonstrates how npm and modules have probably to some degree gotten out of hand.
From memory the NPM blokes had to have a think about how they handle important packages because of that. Didn't they revert the changes to left pad to ensure everything else didn't break?

Fascinating to see the house of cards some of these solutions / libraries are built off
- Yes. They added it back. The policy now is that you can't remove packages that are depended on (or something to that extent, I don't know the specifics).
- Yeah I'm pretty sure Github themselves restored the package if I recall correctly
This famously broke builds at Facebook.
That's always the one I'm thinking of when anyone mentions the xkcd.

npm is one crazy infrastructure.

Who maintains ffmpeg?

Looks like there has at least been a small team working on ffmpeg for some time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFmpeg#History
There was some drama in the past with the Libva fork, but it's mostly all passed by now.

Public NTP time servers have occasionally been that piece of infrastructure.

NTP is used for synchronizing computer clocks, ultimately using highly-accurate time sources such as atomic clocks. The most authoritative public time servers tend to be run by research universities, national labs, and so on.

Multiple home router vendors have sold devices configured to poll university NTP servers vastly excessively; effectively running a denial-of-service attack against public infrastructure. In a few cases, public time servers have closed down because of abuse by misconfigured consumer devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_server_misuse_and_abuse

I really like that the https://www.ntppool.org project exists for that purpose now.

A developer maintained a NodeJS package called left-pad that would add leading whitespace to strings. He unpublished the package and broke basically the entire Node ecosystem until the repo owner forcibly republished it against the author's wishes.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/

TzData is basically maintained by 2 guys. Pretty much every computer, phone and language relies on this database for timezone information.

The core-js library is used by 1000s of top websites and is maintained by one guy
https://github.com/zloirock/core-js

He also went to prison
- It's honestly a fascinating read. We count so much on these kinds of people to keep our way of life intact, but when they ask for a little help in their own life, they get spat on.
- That feels it went seriously bad
- This story got me sad. But also, the guy should know better as not to dedicate all of his time on that. This article talk a bit about this issue.

OpenSSL / Heartbleed was the event when this comic came out IIRC.

I didn't even know about core-js until the dev complained about all the sites which use it. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md

Basically every Windows sysadmin is indebted to Mark Russinovich and SysInternals. Fortunetly, PowerToys has come a long way because I'm pretty sure sysinternals haven't been updated since Windows XP.

Mark Russinovich now works for Microsoft and they own Sysinternals. Also the tools get updated quite regularly.
- "Mark works for MS" is a massive understatement. He's CTO of Azure now.
  
  And speaking of Sysinternals, arguably the most exciting update was when ProcessExplorer got a dark mode late last year :)

Node frameworks are famous for this purely because of a lack of standard library. I feel like most languages have a standard library that balance being generic but still providing utilities of common used stuff. So a company that doesn’t want to rely on a random guy’s library can build their own with only the features they want. But with Node, any complicated feature is using a tree of hundreds of random packages that you have no idea who created them.

I believe the nodejs fiasco is what prompted this comic?https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/
- AMP-free url: https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/
- Another example is a large number of libraries using an external dependency to check if a number is odd.
- I believe it was the OpenSSL-security scandal, iirc.
- It's possible leftpad was an example Randall was thinking of, but the date of the comic is Aug 17, 2020, more than 4 years after leftpad.
  
  https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency
Someone ought to write a Node.js fork that includes native implementations of popular modules that are unlikely to need maintenance like isodd. Then come with a custom version of NPM that refuse to install the packages.
- Deno basically did this by including a standard library that removes the need for the most popular modules. It's the best js/ts experience I've ever had.

Not a package but FileZilla is developed by Tim Kosse for over 20 years. I know that there are a lot of other FTP-Clients but FileZilla is my favorite. Easy to use and very very stable. There is a pro version sure, but most of the time the regular one does the job. My company throws thousands of dollars a month at Adobe, Microsoft and others. But they would never even think about giving anything to Tim Kosse and others, even though I've probably saved days of work with tools like this.

My company's anti-malware started triggering on filezilla's installer a few years ago because they started packaging apparently sketchy ads in it. Dunno if that's still the case or not. I ended up switching to WinSCP instead. (Which I believe is actually another example of just one or two guys running that show too.)

runk

In the same kind of vein as imagemagick, Dave Coffin's dcraw tool at least partly underlies almost every non-proprietary RAW image decoder, and some of the commercial ones (if they don't use code, they use constant matrices and such).

He's not a sole maintainer to any of his major projects anymore, but honorable mention to Fabrice Bellard who initiated both ffmpeg and qemu among other notable activities.

IIRC the Expat XML parser that's embedded everywhere was basically on spare-time maintenance by Clark Cooper and Fred Drake for a couple decades, but I think they have a little more resources now.

SQLite is a BDFL situation more than single-maintainer, but D. Richard Hipp still has his hands on everything, and there are only a relatively small number of folks with commit access.

Would you like to hear an OpenSSL joke?

It's 64k letters long and you can repeat it back to me when I'm done.

It's "A".

https://www.heartbleed.com/

I don't get it. What's funny about "A complete film set up for the day less than a week and a half hours or so to get a new Hampshire the same thing we have to do yay for it to be done with the repellant the same thing we have to do you have to be a car or a goat does it make you feel better than I expected it to my mother-in-law and I will be there in a few minutes to be there for you to get back to me is getting a little bit of a man on the way to work through the ditches the other day and I will be there in the morning and I will be there in the morning...
- Did you just keep tapping the center predicted text suggestion?
- /c/YourJokeButWorse

Edit: maybe it was core js. I don't remember the name exactly.

Standard JS. It's a library maintained by one guy in Russia who went to jail for some car accident (I don't have the full context). He needed money and had trouble getting it. Then the Ukraine invasion happened and that only made it more difficult for him to get money. Also he was harassed by less technical people seeing his code on websites thinking it was malicious.

It's really a sad story to me.

You mean coreJS, not standard JS, right? But yes, it's a sad story.
- Wow I saw that my angular projects used core-js, but it seemed so massive and fundamental that I assumed it had the backing of a large company like angular itself. It's staggering to see that it was largely being held up by a single person and I hope their situation has improved since writing that blogpost. I can't even begin to imagine donating so much time and energy to a project even in spite of getting so much hate in return.
Yeah it was quite shocking for me to read his story. Link for everyone who hasn't come across it yet. https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02-14-so-whats-next.md

Edit: Just noticed that he used the exact same comic in this write up.

Salvatore Sanfilippo - creator of Redis.

Well, he actually received many appreciations from the community. But it's worth knowing IMO.

https://www.eu-startups.com/2011/01/an-interview-with-salvatore-sanfilippo-creator-of-redis-working-out-of-sicily/

Look up a machine called Therac-25. great example of this. Terrifying.

That's terrifying!

I'll save the next guy a search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- Tl;dr:
  
  The Therac-25, a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), was implicated in six accidents between 1985 and 1987 where patients received massive radiation overdoses due to software errors.

As a game developer ImGui comes to mind.

FORM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FORM_(symbolic_manipulation_system)

Recent news article: https://www.wired.com/story/a-crucial-particle-physics-computer-program-risks-obsolescence/

Nodejs left-pad https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/23/npm_left_pad_chaos/

RenderDoc is made by one person. It's used by every graphics programmer. It's free, open source, faster + better than anything else. I love it.

The Network Time Protocol was certainly one of these for a long time, although I think it gets reasonable support now.

Having the clock read the same on all the computers in the world makes so many thing possible.

A bit older, but how did time even get standardized between time zones so we're all synchronized to the same minute / second, only being different by the hour?
- Oh you're in for a great story! It mostly comes down to the American railroads, but you can listen to a good podcast on it at https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730727038/episode-918-the-day-of-two-noons

I believe a great example is... you know... the entire internet.

glibc

Huh, is glibc really only maintained by a small number of people? I would not have expected that.
- it's not much.. https://salsa.debian.org/glibc-team/glibc/-/graphs/sid?ref_type=heads

FFmpeg, libc

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