full-disclosure - Is the FBI using email Web bugs?

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Message-ID: <1073664447.3663.12.camel@tantor.nuclearelephant.com>
From: jonathan at nuclearelephant.com (Jonathan A. Zdziarski)
Subject: Is the FBI using email Web bugs?

> Feature++ = bloat = bugs++. In the interest of fairness, this is shown
> on the mutt.org bugs page too. Mutt has many features, and lots of bugs.

If you believe security to be lack of bugs, then to you lack of features
== security, however this is an incorrect statement IMHO.  To me,
however, the term security is an active term (not a passive one) meaning
it isn't related to the complexity of the software, but the pro-activity
of the programmer to implement secure programming; as complexity rises,
security doesn't necessarily need to rise with it.  Lack of bugs
certainly makes it more difficult to exploit some holes, but that
doesn't mean it has any security.  A secure program makes a
differentiation between trusted inputs and untrusted inputs, performs
several pro-active sanity checks to insure that data is valid - and it
is not about to perform a function it isn't supposed to, and provides
necessary warnings and such when it is uncertain.  This is a far cry
from having a program that is written without any regard for security
but doesn't happen to have any known bugs.