If there are any Europeans here, I'd love to make my vulnerability database that's accumulated from all linux security trackers and the CVE/NVD open source if I can manage to find some folks who'd help with maintenance.
Currently hosting costs are unclear, but it should be doable if we offer API access for like 5 bucks / month for private and 100 / month for corporate or similar.
Already did a backup of the NVD in the last couple hours, currently backing up the security trackers and OVAL feeds.
Gonna need some sleep now, it's morning again.
My project criteria:
- hosting within the EU
- must have a copyleft license (AGPL)
- must have open source backend and frontend
- dataset size is around 90-148 GB (compressed vs uncompressed)
- ideally an e.V. for managing funds and costs, so it can survive me
- already built my vulnerability scraper in Go, would contribute it under AGPL
- already built all schema parsers, would contribute them also under AGPL
- backend and frontend needs to be built
- would make it prerendered, so that cves can be static HTML files that can be hosted on a CDN
- needs submission/PoC/advisory web forms and database/workflow for it
- data is accumulated into a JSON format (sources are mixed non standard formats for each security tracker. Enterprise distros use odata or oval for the most parts)
If you are interested, write me on linkedin.com/in/cookiengineer or here.
"Fourth, national vulnerability databases like China’s and Russia’s, among others, will largely dry up (Russia more than China)."
"Fourth [sic], hundreds, if not thousands, of National / Regional CERTs around the world, no longer have that source of free vulnerability intelligence."
"Fifth [sic], every company in the world that relied on CVE/NVD for vulnerability intelligence is going to experience swift and sharp pains to their vulnerability management program."
All major powers have at least one each, some few for different parts of bureaucracy. Most of them are probably minimum budget operations just rsync-ing US CVD but they exist.
I don't think the EU has any interest in this. They've been aware of the risk of relying on the US for software security for years, but AFAIK there have been no efforts to do anything about it. Maybe the current situation will kick some butts into gear ...
Off topic: your username is very appropriate given the situation.
>They've been aware of the risk of relying on the US for software security for years, but AFAIK there have been no efforts to do anything about it.
Indeed. Just as Germany knew their economy is vulnerable to Russian gas and did nothing about it, even after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Just as the west knew moving their entire manufacturing sector to one country would make them vulnerable, but choose to ignore it because it was too profitable.
I never EVER saw politicians act proactively for the good of the nation or the people, all they do is act reactively after the shit hits the fan to control public opinion and blame someone else to make sure they get re-elected, that's it.
Once you realize our rulers aren't competent at their jobs or acting in the peoples' best interest, it all makes sense. They're in it for the grift and to enrich their monopolistic friends in the private sector, to make sure line goes up in the next quarter, that's it.
Yes, I know there are good politicians out there who care and fight for their local communities, but they never make it to rule at national or international stage and actually change the rotten system because the status quo doesn't allow that.
Politicians react to the public when it stands up. Otherwise it will follow other agenda's.
That is why it is critical to have an informed public. When journalism has to compete with corporate owned Fake News and Entertainment, journalism dies, and democracy will follow. Then, add the spy business of Big Tech in the mix, with algorithmic silo's. The people don't even realize they are locked up in a jar, where they live on a diet of cultural engineering.
Now, pause a moment and think about what happens when you add AI-models to the mix. Your daughter, your neighbor will be totally brain-wrecked.
>When journalism has to compete with corporate owned Fake News and Entertainment, journalism dies, and democracy will follow.
Which journalism are you referring to? The one owned by Rupert Murdoch? The Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos? MSNBC? CNN? Are they better just because they're owned by different billionaires and interest groups?
I got news for you, the journalism you knew died a long time ago.
Germany had with under the best deal for gas possible with Russia, I don’t understand the sentiment calling it a vulnerability. There is still a working pipeline available and Russia stated clearly if would continue delivering gas, if Germany wants to.
Except what Russia states and what Russia does are only aligned when it serves Russia. Russia stopped delivering gas through NordStream 1. After that, Germany took note of the danger and decided it would do better without that dependency.
> Germany took note of the danger and decided it would do better without that dependency.
So they just swapped dependencies. And it's not that the new dependency will have no strings attached.
Diversifying while keeping russian energy in the loop, as part of a risk-management strategy, would make more sense. Completely cutting off russian energy just gives more bargaining power to their new energy provider.
> There is still a working pipeline available and Russia stated clearly if would continue delivering gas, if Germany wants to.
You conveniently leave out that minor detail that it was RUSSIA who stopped the gas.
Germany tried hard to keep it going, even making a sanction-exemption or a Siemens turbine repaired in Canada, which according to Russia was needed. Only that when they were to receive it nothing happened, gas stopped anyway.
Nordstream 1 which had if I recall correctly one working turbine left and went into inspection during which an oil spill was noticed and the restart of the service was postponed. Shortly after Nordstream 1 Pipeline A + B and Nordstream 2 Pipeline A was been blown up.
It’s up to debate if the oil spill which was uncovered during the inspection which postponed the gas delivery was a political move.
The turbine, which underlies sanctions, should have been still in transit during that time and even if delivered useless.
There is still Nordstream 2 Pipeline B intact available to deliver gas and it uses Russian made turbines compared to Nordstream 1.
The whole discussion is very special to say the least if you leave out that some adversary blow up the infrastructure.
I'm German, I followed those developments closely at the time. Russia refused to deliver gas! The blowing up of the pipes happened quite some time after that!
That shows that Russia prepared for using gas as an economic weapon against Germany especially well before they even started the war.
From the Zeit article:
German
> "Die Gasflüsse über die deutschen Grenzen sind unüblich niedrig für diese Jahreszeit - mit Ausnahme von Nord Stream 1, die sind konstant hoch", sagt Fabian Huneke. Es sei verwunderlich, dass vor dem Hintergrund der hohen Preise und der hohen Nachfrage die Gaslieferkapazitäten Richtung Europa so wenig genutzt würden. "Wenn Gazprom sich marktrational verhalten würde, würden sie die Gaslieferungen nach Europa auch durch die Pipelines, die durch Belarus und die Ukraine führen, verstärken." Den Grund für dieses Verhalten sieht der Energiemarktexperte in der Ukraine-Krise.
English, translated by Google
> "The gas flows across the German borders are unusually low for this time of year - with the exception of Nord Stream 1, which are consistently high," says Fabian Huneke. It is surprising that, given the high prices and high demand, the gas delivery capacities to Europe are so little used. "If Gazprom behaved in a market-rational manner, they would also increase gas supplies to Europe through the pipelines that run through Belarus and Ukraine." The energy market expert sees the reason for this behavior in the Ukraine crisis.
The transport of the turbine was accompanied by sanctions and each party didn’t wanted to get punished, awaiting exemption documents for delivery. As the article already states in the headline and further acknowledges in the content Russia was not refusing to get their turbine back but waiting for documents themselves which the article beautifully conceals with the little word ‘apparently’.
The unusual low gas storage reserves at the beginning of the year 2022 in Germany with 45% compared to usual 75% while Nordstream 1 is delivering at full capacity could be related to the sanctions which lead Poland to stop transit through the Jamal pipeline and other transit routes through Ukraine and possibly gas market trade activities. Having just the ‘economic weapon’ argument is lacking, especially in regard that Russian gas is still to today reaching Germany and it is in the interest of Russia to deliver.
Tangentially... how did the German name of the city/region get into _that_ form? Is it a loan from English?? Germany and Russia have been closely entwined for centuries.
Wikipedia has a comment which appears to make no sense:
> The [old] form Moskovĭ has left traces in other languages, including English: Moscow; German: Moskau; French: Moscou; Portuguese: Moscou, Moscovo; and Spanish: Moscú.
But all of the older forms include a /v/. How did that drop out of every language except Portuguese?
(There is an English term Muscovy for the region, but wiktionary suggests that it derives from the formal name given to the region in international Latin rather than deriving from Russian. In that case, a /w/ would also generate a letter V, so there's no explanatory power.)
Except that Russia did not deliver (not any meaningful amount anyways), when the pipelines were still intact. And yes, they pretended to be willing, firing off a series of excuses sufficiently transparent to make it clear between the lines that it's a demonstration of power. Get your history straight: "Russia stated clearly if would continue" has between zero and negative value.
>I don’t understand the sentiment calling it a vulnerability
- You're Germany.
- You join NATO for protection from Russia, an actor with a long history of military aggression[1]
- Your export economy is based on manufacturing.
- The energy driving your manufacturing sector is ~60% cheap gas from Russia, your military aggressive partner.
- Russia invades Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to no ones surprise
- Leaders of USA and Eastern Europe warn you of Russia's influence on your economy
- You ignore all this and build another gas pipeline from Russia
- You are surprised Russia invades Ukraine(again) and gas sanctions cripple your manufacturing economy
MFW German leaders and HN commenters see no vulnerability in this.
Someone please stop the planet, I wish to get off, my sanity can't handle this level of stupidity anymore.
> Someone please stop the planet, I wish to get off, my sanity can't handle this level of stupidity anymore.
News from an American here, on an antidepressant and deathly fat from stress eating:
I’m worried about the eventual welfare of those protesting. I’m hearing that people of color are being told by their pastor to stay home rather than protest so as not to risk being used as scapegoats.
My family and friends are divided and still dividing over politics. I recently was crazily ranted to by big-personality entrepreneur immigrant that told me his story of how easy it was to come to the states, rags-to-riches, and how they were supporter of the administration because “they don’t want to pay taxes for illegals”. Part of the half of the U.S. that supports the administration isn’t just brainwashed, but has a very strong, angry, and desperate look, and the other part says “just wait four years and it will be over”, but it won’t; before the election, this party used gerrymandering and legal action to ensure that election, then post-election replaced election officials and many government officials.
The DOE is claiming anti-semitism and the need to have viewpoint diversity to deny funding to schools that are known for their open viewpoints.
And yet somehow I’m still surprised when they kill the CVE program.
It’s an ever-escalating circus of chaos, because our administration thinks this was needed to ensure U.S. interests, because those vulnerable in the U.S. were manipulated by outside actors and internal power-hungry politicians and zealots, and all is spun to just feed into the chaotic nationalism that is trying to one-up every other dictator that has ever lived.
To top all of this off, AI, which I use daily, will take my job before I retire, and I have no backup plan.
Despite all of this, I have the will to live, to support those whom I love (even the crazy ones), and to try to make the world better. I continue to pray for direction on all of this.
Perfect exmple of the "one-deep" conservative response.
PP is looking for a pattern, finding, and abstaining from questioning or contextualizing it:
Engaging only with the first or most obvious layer of an issue—never going deeper into context, nuance, or systemic causes.
The quickest counterexample that comes to mind is Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It has returned billions to American citizens.
I'm gonna have to stop engaging with you here if you start a comment by accusing someone to be a conservative.
If your first reaction is putting people into political/ideological camps in order to make their arguments weaker and easier to attack form a holier than though political/ideological angle, it's game over for me as I like to judge actions objectively based on the outcomes, not conservative vs democrat, left vs right, etc. since corruption and incompetence is colorblind.
I don't care which side of the political isle did what, I'm pointing at the systemic failures of the entire system built like a house of cards by all political parties, which collapsed as no thought was put into building it, and only chased short term profits at the expense of long term security. Trying to finger point a single political side only detracts from the issue which is the classic "divide and conquer" tactic politicians have been using to deflect blame and get away with it.
It is damningly simple, the root cause beneath far too many issues our advanced civilization faces: we have a global adult immaturity issue, species wide. The leaders that are crony capitalist and widely populist are in truth terribly immature public figures. Our incredibly short sighted (also an immature behavior) news and analyst media pretends to be adult while never really having any solutions that are not plain school yard bullying and tribe glorifying. And the public is only allowed outsider fringe opportunities to include their voice in these public non-debates. We do not produce adults anymore, we produce a civilization of Lindsay Lohans that think they are adult men and women.
If capitalism is allowed to operate without regulation, it corrodes.
If government is allowed to operate without regulation, it corrodes.
The pattern is clear. Unchecked power imbalances are bad for everyone, but the folks at the top of a power imbalance generally advocate for it, and change the environment to ensure their power and reduce everyone else.
I know that they are a 501(c)3, but they have significant revenue and intellectual property, so in order to do the lift and shift, there would need to be some money changing hands to accomplish it. Not only that, but being owned by the EU gives the ability for MITRE employees to have the option to immigrate to the EU to protect against any retaliation.
I cannot believe I am typing that second sentence, but here we are.
> Not only that, but being owned by the EU gives the ability for MITRE employees to have the option to immigrate to the EU to protect against any retaliation.
According to which rule would "owning by the EU" result in an option to immigrate? Immigration is handled on a per country basis. I don't see how the EU provide such an option.
The EU has agreed upon programs in order to bring in, through an immigration policy, high skilled persons from non-member states. More importantly, working within the member nations, as to which member nation would want MITRE to be located within their borders, is not something that is a hard sell given that it has economic advantages for whichever state(s) onboard MITRE.
> The EU has agreed upon programs in order to bring in, through an immigration policy, high skilled persons from non-member states.
Where in this is the option that the EU provides an option to immigrate because the EU owns something?
I'm very well aware of knowledge workers. It's not something the EU can provide as an option. What you linked to is the legal framework around how EU members can provide such a thing.
That still leaves decisions on who to admit to states. As far as I can see its main effect is to allow people admitted to one country as highly skilled to travel to (not live in) other countries?
I think all the big companies that owe their ongoing business should band together and fund it. No way an organization like this should rely on just one sponsor.
Non-profit means (in this case) payed by somebody who does not have anything to say about the transaction. It would be better to pay for it so that people who are interested in this subject have a say.
oh but you forgot the mandatory time before they even start considering the tender.
looking at average speed of bureaucracy in EU it will take roughly a year to set date for a meeting that will set the date for actual meeting which will decide if this will go forward or not....
(if you think i'm joking - i'm basing this on proposed EU initiative for nuclear power which started with setting a date of meeting to setup a meeting to draft an agenda)
This would be hilarious. That would be a good thumb in the eye to the current administration who complained long and loud about how Obama let ICANN leave US possession. Just imagine the campaign commercials in 2026,
>The POTUS transferred our cyber defenses to the EU
Well, that's kind of the point? The current administration doesn't care about cyber defense, any less than it cares about protecting the environment, protecting consumers, having top-notch universities and research, foreign aid etc. etc. Actually, it takes pride in not caring about all of these things.
My guess is that they feel they are supplying something the whole world is benefiting from, and they believe that unfair.
That ignores the fact that the US benefits immensely from this, and that they benefit domestically from providing that benefit more widely by getting a lot of free contributions from the outside. But the US foots the bill of those who do get payed, so its unfair...
Its a bit like when you are a two-bit loser but have a private island where you can do whatever you like, and invite every celebrity you can find over to party every weekend, then start complaining that they haven't paid any of the island running costs and that they are all spongers because you are the main attraction of the island parties.
And at the best restaurants! And I get to choose the restaurant! And choose when we eat! And pick the appetizers, drinks, entrees, and desert!
So instead I will allow myself to be robbed and we'll all share the cost of a low-key restuarant. Or maybe let's charge each other to eat together, yeah!
> The current administration doesn't care about cyber defense, any less than it cares about protecting the environment
On the contrary, I would argue that they deeply care about the environment. The REAL point of all those tit-for-tat tariffs with China including with small mail/packages are to drastically cut cargo/shipping emissions. The threatening of annexation of Canada? That was really to get ~70% reduction in air passenger traffic BECAUSE they care about the environment. Same with creating a few high profile border horror story incidents against nationals from allied countries. The real point of it? Reduce transoceanic air passenger loads and save the environment. /s
The main costs definitely not hosting and can be quite significant. MITRE had $2.37B revenue in 2023, most if it contributions. I don't know how much of it can be attributed to the CVE, but I assume it's not an insignificant part of it: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/422...
Yes, maybe reach out to Michiel Leenaars from the NLNet foundation. But IIRC NLNet mostly funds shorter development tracks, not ongoing upkeep/maintenance.
We should host it and collect membership fee from people who need this data. This way we can make it resilient against lack of government support. I would love to pay 5-10EUR/month to use such a service.
I would email someone like Patch My PC they seem good stewards of stuff open source from my vague looking and they are good people. They may just host a clone of it that's open.
(Spain, doing storage and web hosting)
What usually worries me the most is the administrative or management part, which I don't know how big would be for this project...
I agree with you there. Before CISA got sacked / taken down, they were working together with the BSI and other CERT agencies on a vulnerability exchange format.
This might be the optimum time to implement CSAF and to lead by example when it comes to vulnerability disclosures.
The European, GDPR compliant subnet of the Internet Computer could suit your needs. The app would be decentralized out of the box and it can't be shut down by a single entity like a traditional cloud provider or nation state. Hosting 100GB costs about 500$ per year [0]. This is not a traditional hosting provider, it's a decentralized cloud. Reach out on the forum [1] or to me if this sounds like a good fit to you (I think it does, from your list of requirements).
Seems way overkill & unnecessary. Wouldn't the e.V. (foundation) especially with FOSS backend/frontend already ensure continued operation? Also if it's about redudancy/resilience it seems like good ol' torrent/ipfs or even a dedicated dht (if you really want to have fast updated content) would be much more efficient.
The problem with discussing politics is that it gives you the kicks. Its very easy to get into a feedback loop and take things quite far off civility. I am also guilty of it, many times.
IMHO there needs to be a mechanism for breaking the loop and then we can have civil online political discussions. Unfortunately most places just ban it or ban those who got into the loop, either way its ugly.
IRL when discussing politics and things don't go badly its thanks to 3rd party who will moderate or calm down the heated debaters.
No thank you. I am absolutely uninterested in civil discussions with people who literally want to kill me and deport my good friends to guantanamo bay cuba. When you accept nazism you throw the concept of civil discourse out the window.
Having civil discussions with people who disagree isn't about politeness or acquiescence. Having political discussions per the same rules we use for technical debates, like steel manning, allows information to actually flow both ways. I'm up to four people now that I changed parties between 2020 and 2024. That doesn't seem like a lot, but if everyone was doing it it would make a difference. It took time. I had to non judgementally listen to their concerns and intuit the fears underneath. They were reasonable intelligent people operating off of propaganda mostly. The emotional hook had been set and used draw them further and further into false narratives that fed their fears and hopes. To think I am immune isn't realistic either. My triggers are getting used to pull me the other direction, to make me uncompromising, and to view those who disagree as inhuman. Some of that is game theory polarizing us, but some of it is the intentional result of the Kremlin's standard divide and conquer they have been using on us for over half a century. The antidote is calm conversations with voters who have been made scared about irrational things, and looking to see what fears we are being manipulated with as well.
No thank you. I am absolutely uninterested in civil discussions with people who literally want to control everything I say and put my good friends into reeducation camps. When you accept communism you throw the concept of civil discourse out the window.
Case in point: you have decided that those who disagree with you want to kill you, deport your friend, and are otherwise nazis. While a minority do, that isn't the majority.
See, its unlikely that its those people that you meet online and you won't be able to do anything to them anyway.
%99.999 of the time its usually trolls or people with good intentions(with wrong solutions based on wrong information or understanding of the situation). Trolls can be fun when they play with hypothetical scenarios and edge cases, conducting thought experiments.
You are also unlikely to change the views of the people with good intentions through discussion but they are very useful to understand what their motives so you can develop beter arguments or solutions. Also, you might find out that on some issues you are one of those with good intentions(but misguided understanding of the situation).
Apart from the few maniacs On Here who seek out the unregulated intentionally. Raw milk (all those tasty diseases). "Research chemicals" (don't hear so much about that lately, but there were whole microdosing fads).
That said, I’m for people being idiots. I’m just done paying for it. If you’re chugging raw milk during a bird flu epidemic and your family gets sick, insurance and the public should only pick up the cost after you’ve declared bankruptcy.
Similarly I wish I could enact carveouts so I wasn't supporting peoples health problems related to commenting way too much on the internet, hackernews in particular.
Milk is my main drink. I don't drink beer or wine, it's mostly just plain milk for me. And while there is a substantial taste difference based on the % of fat, I have never seen a difference in taste between pasteurised and non-pasteurised. I actually bought a bottle of raw milk from a farmer just to try it. No negative effects, but it just tasted insipid compared to 5.4% fat milk I can get at the supermarket.
People who claim a taste difference between raw and pasteurised, I'd very much like to see someone taste the difference on the same cow's milk blind, before and after pasteurisation. I just don't think it affects the taste much, and certainly not as much as fat %.
And for people who claim health benefits, I would like to see a double blind study demonstrating those benefits.
I think the main difference is fresh. When I was in high school I stayed with a dairy farmer who brought in a jug of milk from the tank for breakfast after milking the cows. After that I can't drink regular milk.
Pasteurization does affect taste though. Around me there are two different dairies, one does regular pasteurization and one does vat pasteurization and I can tell the difference. There is ultra pasteurization which is just gross. I've never put unpasteurized head to head against equally fresh pasteurized though, and given what I now know I'm not going to.
What the cows eat matters for how milk tastes too. Cows can get sick. Udders can get infections. Milking processes (machinery) and its ease of cleaning can vary. Bacteria is everywhere. Pasteurization is a cheap, effective and has no real drawbacks. This whole raw milk thing is just silly and has become political for some silly reason.
You may be onto something about the different cows. This was while I lived in France temporarily. I had no idea that I was drinking raw milk. I was commenting how delicious it was and a coworker said "oh is that the stuff you have to boil". Me "wut". It was much better than the supermarket milk I could get.
And we enjoyed our milkborne tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and septic sore throat thoroughly, too. The risks actually doubled the joys. Why does a supposedly enlightened society step all over my right to choose which eliminated diseases to bring back?
To play devil's advocate - it's horrible when gaming, programming, business or even porn forums get overrun by politics.
It's not that the political topics are unimportant but all my feeds just end up looking the same as each other and the same as a newspaper app. I hate election nights because of this.
I miss that, too, but the way we get there is by re-establishing democratic norms and boundaries. The United States is flirting with fascism, and globally we are seeing the fallout from that and the cascading effects of climate change, not to mention the impacts of AI on employment, surveillance and censorship, social media, etc. Keeping politics out of forums like the ones you mentioned is like keeping oxygen out of a space station.
Porn forums are a thing. For example, this politician lost what should have been an easy election because someone found his old comments on a porn forum - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_North_Carolina_gubernator.... Among other things he commented on the forum that he'd like to bring slavery back.
Honestly did not believe that people commented on porn forums before this incident.
I think it's a stretch to suggest _all_ are, I'm not sure I could believe that a game like Super Hexagon is political. Would it be political to paint the tree in your backyard, or to draw a picture of your cat?
No it’s not. It’s a position that comes from experience of knowing that it’s a complete waste of time because nobody’s mind is being changed.
Further, there are entire segments of political groups who just want to assume your beliefs like a political straw man so they can denigrate you.
It’s an unhealthy waste of time and that doesn’t truly hit you until you invest the time in talking to an otherwise rational person, provide the closest thing to proof of your perspective in a situation and then watch them deny it anyway.
> it’s a complete waste of time because nobody’s mind is being changed.
What you said can be true if you approach the discussion with an attitude of “I want to change everybody’s mind” instead of trying to get to some agreement and truth.
Not only stating an opinion is compatible with a constructive discussion that could lead to a mutual adjustment of opinions—in fact, stating your opinion is a precursor to having a discussion that can change it.
> It’s an unhealthy waste of time and that doesn’t truly hit you until you invest the time in talking to an otherwise rational person, provide the closest thing to proof of your perspective in a situation and then watch them deny it anyway.
The magic happens when one person realizes that another, obviously sane in every other way person can think very differently about topic X. Repeated exposure to alternative views from other people in your circles leaves no alternative except to adjust your own opinion on topic X.
Thing is, it’s tricky or impossible online. Aside from a handful of well-known people with some reputation or infamy, most of us only know each other as handles with no context. On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog or a basement dweller who lives with his parents and could never hold a job. Meanwhile, access to a group of like-minded people is always at your fingertips when you are online. However, when you are in a company of people who clearly are similar enough in what they achieved, in their choice to work for the same company, maybe good in their software engineering skill, etc., it makes their opinion something that may count.
Not being able or willing to freely exchange and consequently converge on opinions with people whom you routinely meet in real life, and only discussing said opinions in your respective online bubbles, strikes me as a path to having more and more divergent, incompatible, extreme opinions (which I rather suspect might have been happening a lot in recent years).
Maybe don’t always just take their word for it. Some (most?) people will continue to express their view vocally, but the fact of encountering an opinion from someone they otherwise find a reasonable and sane person will cause introspection and adjustment, and maybe in a different group they would express an adjusted opinion. Most people are always affected by others (excluding sociopaths or other unusual cases).
Depends. We’re a small, very international startup and have a super strict “no politics” policy. Politics and work are not a good combination when you’re employing people from all over the world.
But I would not consider it a political statement to adopt this policy.
I think it exists two different general ideas of what politic mean.
For some (including me), politics are, following the oldest definition: 'how do I and fellow humans organize ourselves to live together' this often leads to a belief that everything is politics (for me it's true, but it's a belief, not a fact).
For other, I think that when they say politics, they think of geopolitics and partisanship, which is fair, because it's how politicians and political journalists themselves define politics. For this group, hopefully, not everything is politics.
So to me, this disagreement about wether or not all is political is often semantic rather than ideologic.
Your statements are incoherent. Politics is decision making and power relationships within groups of people. It is 100% a political statement to adopt this policy as it exercises power over a group. You cannot function as a group without politics. "Where do y'all want to go for lunch" is also politics, as it involves group decision making and power relationships (Do you go to the vegetarian place? Do you avoid the spicy place?) It's a completely banal decision but it is still politics.
If what you want is a "don't piss off your coworkers by discussing topics unrelated to work that you know will annoy people" policy, that is fine, but don't pretend you are not engaging in politics.
The politics of saying "no politics" is that you are drawing some line that separates some political issues into "politics" and others into "not politics". Because to truly avoid all politics is impossible; even if you believe banal, purely intra-personal politics are not political so much of the basic organization of a business & capitalism are politics. "Should we allow remote work" for example is a deeply political question that ties deeply into discussions about the rights/value of neurodivergent & disabled people in the workplace. To say 'I don't believe in God' is a deeply political and dangerous statement in some parts of the world, but fairly banal where I live. To contrast, in Indonesia, it is technically _unconstitutional_ to not believe in a "one and almighty God"
I wish people were at least honest about "no politics" to mean "lets avoid to unsafe, potentially divisive issues relative to our geographic location, and take the basic tenets of neoliberal, capitalistic society to be assumed". And yeah, that is a more than reasonable policy. Its a difficult policy in international spaces, because its very hard to not trespass that line when political contexts differ so strongly across the globe
The word “politics” is vague, and that only makes banning political discussions worse if it only becomes political when the higher-ups don’t like it.
Say your company has a possibility of working with some client company who is directly or indirectly involved with cause X. If it is “political” to talk about not working with them because of X, but it is “not political” to talk about working with them, then you see what I mean.
It doesn’t have to be a destructive conversation: one employee might say we should avoid them, but you might say we need to work with them because we need the money now and can drop them later when we are in a better place. Other employees could talk how cause X is not that unethical for reasons. If someone balks at a point of view incompatible with theirs and is incapable of expressing a viewpoint in a way that respects other views, maybe that someone is not mature enough and next time your HR can avoid that type.
Yeah exactly, the same people who shout the loudest about "everything is politics" and want to talk about it at work would go apeshit if someone at work said "I'm not comfortable with abortion", etc. HR would quickly be called and shut them down.
I am torn.com player which is a MMORPG as far removed from politics as can be. But when large part of dev team are ukrainians that were suddenly unable to work from clearly political reasons you can't ignore it.
First, “no politics” is not a political statement to me, more of an implicitly adopted political position.
Personally, if I have a personal political position and my colleague has an opposite one, I don’t see why we can’t talk about it. If you have a workplace rule about no politics during working hours, you better have this rule for all non-work discussions at work, or I personally would feel uncomfortable.
— If politics talk happens at work too much and affects productivity, then it is a problem, but then it is a problem with any non-work topic.
— If it causes heated debate, ruins morale, and makes people dislike each other, then it is a problem, but then it is a problem with any topic that causes heated debate. For some people it’s golf, for some philosophy, for some music. How many topics should be banned?
Are you from the US? In the last 15 years it has become impossible for two people to reasonably disagree over political positions because of how much vitriol is thrown around on the attention markets—even if both individuals themselves are rather tame. When having an otherwise normal political opinion makes you a racist bigot or a beta cuck because the opposition is so determined to get their way at any cost, no, you can’t just talk politics at work and have a cohesive team. Someone will feel oppressed.
Work is about making money. Politics is a distraction unless there’s an issue that directly affects the business. Then it’s fair game. Like this one. Many teams of individuals will have to figure out how to navigate this situation so discussing it in context is apropos and can be done objectively.
> When having an otherwise normal political opinion makes you a racist bigot or a beta cuck because the opposition is so determined to get their way at any cost
If someone calls me a racist bigot or a beta cuck, that is a problem. That problem also has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with someone not being emotionally mature enough or equipped to handle a discussion with someone who has different views, or someone having a mental breakdown.
I am not from the US, but I had enjoyed some reasonable conversations with people from the US (among other countries) with very different views, and I was never called names. There are awkward moments when you have to hear something you don’t agree with, but that is most of life if you ever interact with people.
The key is to be like an HTTP server: liberal in terms of what you can accept, but strict with what you put out there.
> Work is about making money.
You have just thrown another political position into the mix, I hope you realize that?
> It has to do with someone not being emotionally mature enough or equipped to handle a discussion with someone who has different views, or someone having a mental breakdown.
Any moderately sized company is practically guaranteed to have a few people like this. So getting into these discussions has a high risk of becoming an HR issue as tempers flare and conversations become vitriolic.
There's also the issue that the company founders and leadership have political opinions of their own that might inform company policy and any political opinion to the contrary may be perceived as pushback from a "troublemaker".
> getting into these discussions has a high risk of becoming an HR issue as tempers flare and conversations become vitriolic.
Here we can forget that IRL face to face people are much less likely to be offensive to each other. If they get to literal name calling and aggression, sure, that’s an HR issue, HR gets paid to sort this out, doesn’t it? I don’t see how politics is different from any other topic on which people can have strong opinions.
> There's also the issue that the company founders and leadership have political opinions of their own that might inform company policy and any political opinion to the contrary may be perceived as pushback from a "troublemaker".
That is why “no politics” is somewhat dishonest. In my view, either blanket forbid all off-topic talks, or don’t censor by topic and handle fights if they arise. There can also be softer guidelines about how to behave at work without an actual ban of any topic.
Being straight is also pretty much political at this point. With the way it's being slipped into the culture (all that trad stuff, images of lifestyle to aspire to, etc.) and has become (has always been perhaps) a part of political messaging and campaigning, heterosexuality is political. Even within the heterosexuality itself and its expressions, there's still politics - "what's the right way to do it" and such. (not saying this like 'oh those poor straight people' but just that, it is all, all political)
For what it’s worth, I completely agree, I just thought LGBTQ was a clearer example because of how different it is seen in different parts of the world, and how it is at the same time an inescapable part of many people’s identity.
One might argue that it's even more important to discuss international politics these days, considering how interconnected the world is and how so many countries seem to be facing many of the same issues.
Incorrect, not talking about politics does not signal any political affiliation.
I think the "everything is political" statement is technically correct but practically useless. In the workplace the discussion is mostly about allowing or disallowing politics that are irrelevant to the business.
No it’s not. It’s having discipline to not pollute unrelated conversations with your politics. I am very against the status quo but I don’t complain about it to a bunch of anonymous usernames on a forum focused on technology.
> having discipline to not pollute unrelated conversations with your politics
Discipline isn’t found in hiding. Someone who cannot discuss politics without polluting conversations isn’t disciplined, they’re unpracticed in conversing and thinking through their views.
Technology and the consequences of using technology are inherently highly political.
New or improved technologies shape communities.
Ignoring that is a political statement as well.
Just see how online media has changed discourse, how Amazon changed retail business, how business analytics change the way businesses work, how always being connected changes relations, ...
When developing technologies one can be Wernher von Braun "(where the rockets land and whether they contain explosives is) not my department" or one can consider consequences.Both are a political position, with consequences.
Between the four books there is a lot of paper being printed, with chemicals which have to be sources somewhere.
But a bit more serious there are different angles to this:
One is that the formalization Knuth did, is basis for the way other research on computer science has been setup.
His work on TeX as part of writing the books has great impact on how scientific reports are being written, which themselves have consequences.
And then there is all the consequence while implementing technology. How optimisations by better algorithms enable data mining, replacing manual labor, ...
Now of course impact differs. Not everybody is building V2 rockets (as well as Saturn rockets) like von Braun did, but there are many wheels in the machinery.
I myself am a small wheel in building database engines. The software is used by sports clubs to manage their members, shop owners to manage their inventory, companies to run their ads and air craft carriers to replicate strategic data across the ship, so that if one part is damaged, the other can still operate. If I were to leave, the organisation would continue developing, but the work has impact.
That’s a very narrow redefinition of both technology and politics, and even there it’s only a step away from discussions about how automation affects millions of jobs, how daily lives are shaped by what’s allowed by the software which large companies or governments build, or how amassed data can be misused in ways which wouldn’t be possible without efficient algorithms.
Is communism the only political topic? Or does whether or not The Art of Computer Programming talk about accessibility in software not constitute a political opinion?
> You can believe something without proselytizing.
You can talk about politics without proselytising. Why should discussing a topic even invoke the words like “belief” and “proselytising”?
Not only stating an opinion is compatible with a constructive discussion that could lead to a mutual adjustment of opinions—in fact, stating your opinion is often a pre-requisite to having a discussion that could lead to it being changed.
The magic happens when person A realizes that another, equally sane person B can think very differently about topic X. At that point, the person A has to either 1) write the person B off as crazy (not so easy when that person is obviously sane in every other way), or 2) realize that there may be something to it and ever so slightly adjust own opinion on topic X, or at least become more tolerant.
Not being able or willing to freely exchange and converge on opinions with people whom you routinely meet in real life, only discussing them online in your respective bubbles, is a sure way to having only more and more wildly incompatible and divisive opinions, and I suspect it is exactly what has been happening in recent years.
It's in favor of not having relationships break down in your community/company.
Only a small percentage of people are able to handle fundamental disagreements calmly and without it bleeding over to other interactions.
Will the SE and sales guy work as well together if the former knows the latter donates half his commission money to organizations that help kill babies?
I have friendly relationships with a few people who have political opinions some of which are opposite to mine.
> Will the SE and sales guy work as well together if the former knows the latter donates half his commission money to organizations that help kill babies?
A friend of mine is a vegan. Anywhere he works, to him, most of his coworkers not just help kill conscious beings that have self-awareness and feel pain, they literally eat them. Does this mean talking about what you have for lunch should be banned? Does this mean he should throw a fit any time he talks to a non-vegan?
Incidentally, we sometimes have good debates about the nature of consciousness, the effectiveness of individual veganism on reducing suffering, utilitarianism and deontology, vegan food options, etc. I feel being converted and I don’t mind it.
> Anywhere he works, to him, most of his coworkers not just help kill conscious beings that have self-awareness and feel pain, they literally eat them. Does this mean talking about what you have for lunch should be banned?
You're making the opposite case of what you think. Your Vegan friend is avoiding taking about politics constantly because they're not bringing up the fact that everyone is consuming the flesh of innocent animals every time they go for lunch. If they started talking about the politics and beliefs of veganism at every meal shared with coworkers, I think it would have a negative impact on those relationships.
Turning the question around, will the SE and sales guy work as well together if the former knows the latter donates half his commission money to FSF while the other is hard advocate for commercial software?
Politics are across all layers, including at technology decisions.
It’s really a question of time and place. There are many foundational topics in life, such as politics, religion, and philosophy. But it’s not always helpful or appropriate to discuss them in a particular setting.
That said, HN already has an extremely wide range of subject matter, so I wouldn’t say politics should be out of place here. It can, though, become a divisive distraction that disrupts other conversations, so I can appreciate that some limits are needed.
> The ancient Greek understanding of an “idiot” referred to someone who was a private citizen or a person who did not actively participate in public life or politics.
It's scary how widely this varies between different communities. On Reddit, /r/politics is mostly people acting like they're auditioning for the writers' room on one of those late-night talk shows, whereas /r/ukpolitics and /r/australianpolitics are almost exclusively people making insightful, analytic comments.
Agreed. Those who don't care about politics are doomed to be ruled by those who care.
Moreover, avoiding politics is impossible. It's all around you. Labor, entertainment, food, housing. Burying your head in the sand will only get you to have your ass in the air.
Maybe "be polite" should be a better rule than "avoid politics".
Everything was always political. Laws, the economy, conflcit. How is any person not affected by these? The government is responsible for all or a large part of how a country functions.
People who say "I'm not political" are deflecting to avoid conflict
One of the benefits a working democracy conveys to its citizens is that they largely don't have to care about politics. They can trust that government action is relatively consistent over time, that laws will be enforced fairly enough, that their property will be protected to a reasonable degree, that the currency will be reasonably stable, that the roads will be maintained, that some public transport will be available, that sudden wars won't erupt around them, and so on.
That's what makes working democracies successful. But it seems that it also makes democracies vulnerable because people don't realize they have these benefits because they live in a working democracy. They start to think these benefits have nothing to do with politics and are just the way things are, like the laws of nature.
Interestingly, I believe that the reality is exactly the opposite: on the political regimes' spectrum of democratic -> authoritarian -> totalitarian only the middle one doesn't require people's participation. Both democracy and totalitarism need to be actively maintained by significant part of the population, otherwise they converge to the "natural" state of things - authoritarian order. None of the stuff you listed (fair laws, property rights, etc.) occur naturally once it has been set up at some point in past. That's why they talk about "checks and balances" all the time, and they are impossible without active participation.
I think the most significant distinction is exactly that:
Authoritarian - leaves people alone in general as long as they stay out of politics. Examples: 90% of regimes throughout human history. Almost all post-soviet countries, almost all of Middle East and Africa, Singapore, etc.
Totalitarian - forces people into actively participating in leader's political goals and penetrates the daily life. North Korea, USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy.
>The citizens elect the government so how can you not care about poltiics?
I don't think there's a direct correlation between the ability to vote and caring about politics. People usually care about politics when it affects them negatively. I would guess that most people in most democratic systems don't have strong negative experiences with their governments and, thus, are not incentivized to care about politics.
Note that I'm not making an argument that they should not care. I think they should, but the very system that allows participation probably also decreases the incentive for most people to participate.
Alternatively people who say “I’m not political” are benefiting from the status quo and political direction of things (long term, not necessarily short term). They frame inaction as apolitical.
> People who say "I'm not political" are deflecting to avoid conflict
A great truth. Even isolating yourself from society like a hermit is still a political decision: you are rejecting society as it is, and prefer to live in your own solo society. That's politics.
I don’t think that’s totally accurate. If I live as a hermit but perform my civic duties like voting and paying any taxes, I don’t see how choosing to live in solitude is anything more than a lifestyle choice.
When this is discussed, what's being meant is that everday party politics are spilling out and overwhelming a project's or industry's individual, internal politics, which are often a completely disconnected meta.
Appealing to "well everything is connected" I'm not sure is useful. It's interesting from a semantics perspective the first few times you come across it maybe, then swaps around into being plain frustrating, then lands on just missing the point.
Finally, I think people who want to stay out of said party political meta I think are doing a pretty big favor to their mental health, and I really can't fault them one bit for it. No coincidence either.
"Party politics" is ill-defined, and so a "no politics" rule becomes an arbitrary hammer that bosses can use to smash employees. If I say "I'm going to get a COVID vaccine this afternoon" is that discussing party politics? In the UK, where I live, the vaccine was provided by the government, so I'm implicitly discussing the actions of the government. That is under any reasonable definition a discussion of politics.
"everyday party politics are spilling out and overwhelming a project's or industry's individual, internal politics" is how "no politics" rules are usually justified, but this was not what happened in the poster child cases of implementing "no politics" rules (37signals, Coinbase). 37signals in particular tried to spin it this way, but it was the actions of a group within the company approved by the founders that caused the problem. (Coinbase was just completely incoherent from the start. Their mission is something like "End economic inequality" which a reasonable person could take to mean anarchist or communist discussion is on topic.)
There's no way to define any modality of politics such that someone like you won't come around and start going off about how it's a leaky segmentation, and is actually just an excuse for censorship.
Every artificial segmentation of the real world is leaky. Just like the recognition that politics is everywhere, this too is not actually inquisitive. It's like arguing that stairsteps are chairs. They can be, but that doesn't make the word "chair" ill-defined.
> but this was not what happened in the poster child cases of implementing "no politics" rules
There is no such thing. These may be notable cases in your cohort, for me it's the first time I heard of these. And I've seen my fair share of these rules.
The covid vaccine example is a good one in terms of something in everyday life that is politicised.
It is also illustrates the problem with discussing politics in an international forum. The KCL study of covid conspiracy theories (carried out during the pandemic) found that in the UK young people and those who identified as left wing were more likely to believe conspiracy theories. I am pretty sure this is significantly different from the US. Also matches things I have heard (e.g. my daughter met people at university who refused the vaccine because "we don't trust the Tories".
It is pretty common for Americans to assume that the Conservatives are equivalent to Republicans, and Labour are like the Democrats, which is very far from the truth. It has always been far from the truth but the reasons why change - e.g. in the 80s Thatcher and Reagan were not far apart, but that that time Labour were far to the left of the Democrats (actual socialists).
> I think are doing a pretty big favor to their mental health, and
It your mental health is harmed while defending your political views it's possible your views are the issue.
For example if my view was that "domestic animals shouldn't be abused and penalties increased for such crimes" I wouldn't have mental health issues discussing this.
So if I now said some intentionally asinine garbage, e.g. about how dogs need to be disciplined, shown who the pack leader is, and sometimes that necessarily involves a beating, and how if you disagree you're woke, that wouldn't make you very understandably very distraught?
Because it would make me pretty distraught, and I don't think that it's because anything is wrong with the idea of not abusing animals.
Even doing this mental exercise for the sake of this conversation is already extremely frustrating for me. And I don't think this should surprise you, or is anything strange or unusual.
The vast majority of people will get stressed talking to people they think are evil or against their values. Someone breaking down in tears because another person says they "don't give a fuck about the bloody Gazans" is not behaving particularly unusually.
The views don't matter as much as how strongly they are held.
> Someone breaking down in tears because another person says they "don't give a fuck about the bloody Gazans" is not behaving particularly unusually.
it might be reasonable if you have personal close links to Gaza (e.g. you are worried about family who live there), but otherwise it OUGHT to be very unusual.
> it might be reasonable if you have personal close links to Gaza (e.g. you are worried about family who live there)
That's another problem with political discussions at work - you're often not sure why someone has a particular beliefs and so it's hard to know whether disagreement will be taken as an abstract difference of opinion or as an attack on their family, friends, or homeland.
I mean I think The Republican Incumbent was chosen specifically as a tool because he is so extreme, pervasive and demoralising and creeps into everything. Definitely by Russia, maybe also by our "friend" in the ME. Although it's not that reported on they are on friendly terms.
Disaffection lends itself easily to creating a Russia-style society. This all feels pretty Dugin-esque, and his proposition (return to values, reject interest/hope in politics because it is always flawed anyway, bind together under the state) fits perfectly, and is finding prominence at the perfect time.
Just my opinion, but to me this seems far more akin to Dugin than whatever Curtis Yavin is pushing
> That's because we got reliant on the funds from government
Not we, some people got reliant on the funds from government. It is always at the cost of someone else. The tax the rich and bourgeoisie mentality is what led to Mao Zedong and Stalin, but no-one wants to learn about history anymore.
Tax the rich mentality also led to the "golden age of capitalism" of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. The tax rates on the wealthiest in the US at that time were huge, and that money went into job programs, housing assistance programs, construction projects, etc.
Agree, but it goes both ways, with technology (that many of us here have helped create and maintain) also reaching out into every facet of society and community, many times in close symbiosis with the political powers that be, to the detriment of said society and community.
Not 100% sure what I wanted to say, maybe that said politics (and the political as a whole) wouldn't have invaded almost our entire lives without the help of technology.
I view the archive.org, Wikipedia, CVE program, and Linux Kernel to all have had discussions on HN about how to they should be funded. Is that kind of politics the kind that people wish that HN stayed out from?
What people mean when they say this is that they don't want to engage in party political and/or tribal political discussions. They don't want to do this because it just means rehearsing talking points.
People are not dumb. They know that politics is everywhere but they want to live and love and talk about things that are interesting.
Not keeping politics out of our lives is the reason we’ve ended up with a totalitarian fascist dictatorship. If politics is forbidden, people have to just make up their own minds and vote for what makes sense to them, instead of banding together and slowly intensifying to the most radical extremes in bids to outdo each other.
Everytime you discuss politics on the internet, you entrench the current administration.
Yep. It's also true of people who think they can simply move out of the US and that "solves" the problem too. America's problems are still (almost) everyone's problems too.
True. But it's much less of a problem outside. For example, does the gun culture in the US affect the rest of the world? It sure does. You can guess where most of the illegal weapons come from. But we rarely even think about getting shot while at school or on our way to the groceries.
> A coalition of CVE Board members launched a new CVE Foundation "to ensure the long-term viability, stability, and independence of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program."
This kind of a consortium needs to explicitly avoid being captured by both the product vendors (who could be incentivised to manipulate the CVE issuance process to support their own remediation timescales), and by security companies (who could be incentivised to obtain a competitive advantage via preferential access to the CVE database).
It isn't impossible for a commercially-funded organisation to avoid this kind of capture, but it isn't easy either. My mind immediately jumps to the relationship between the Mozilla Foundation and Google.
CNAs [1] are assigned blocks of CVEs and then assign from within that block, but the system only works if there is overall administration of the CVE Program [2].
My concern is that a capture of the administration would become a capture of the entire programme. Looking at the structure, it seems possible that CISA are in a position to prevent any such capture but, given some of the recent positions taken by the US government, we'll need to wait and see how that plays out.
yes, but it's a hierarchy. If you disagreed with their judgement you could always go up the chain, and MITRE can take the privilege away again if they think a vendor is misusing it.
This smells like a quick attempt to enable phishing for vulnerabilities, and not a legit way to make progress. The comment is from a person that runs a security startup and the site is a google site that people can report to google as a scam.
The way their letter is worded it seems that they have a rainy day fund constituted to ride out the stormy next few week and I'm fairly certain they'll come back with more details as to how they'll be acquiring funding from now on in the next few days. Maybe paid access to an API, maybe donations from large companies that use the system, maybe something else ::shrug::
Hopefully a project as important as this doesn't just dissapear completely because of government pressure.
I wonder what level of compartmentalisation inside DHS means they didn't see this as having sufficient downsides?
I ask this, because I don't think anyone in the subject matter specialist space would have made a strong case "kill it, we don't need this" and I am sure if asked would have made a strong case "CRISSAKE WE NEED THIS DONT TOUCH IT" -But I could believe senior finance would do their own research (tm) and mis-understand what they saw in how other people work with CVE, and who funds it.
> I wonder what level of compartmentalisation inside DHS means they didn't see this as having sufficient downsides?
This was not a carefully-weighed decision based on a cost-benefit analysis. This was a political order, consistent with the administration's policy of "cut everything, recklessly, indiscriminately."
There are many problems going on right now, but in terms of cuts this is one of the most problematic: everything is secret, with no oversight or deliberation. It's indistinguishable from corrupt malice because it's not done with open thoughtfulness.
I can't tell what argument you're making within the context of my post?
The OP said indiscriminately, which means they're cutting uniformly across the board. I responded with "mostly discriminately" which means they're more selectively cutting based on prejudice. You then linked me a data point where you show they cut funding because it has the word "homo" in it and tell me to "get a hold of myself".. but your link would directly support what I've said?
It is clear from context that the original comment is using "indiscriminately" in a sense of "without due care; thoughtlessly". Your first reply comes across as simply contradicting it, i.e. asserting that actually these cuts were made with an appropriate level of thoughtfulness. Your point that there are criteria which are being applied is a useful contribution, but you should have expanded on this in your original comment, as it was not clear that you were reframing the discussion in this way.
If I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt (which I hate), it's a shotgun approach; cut things relentlessly and see what falls apart. Chaos engineering applied to a country and / or the world.
That’s exactly what it is, and they said as much repeatedly while campaigning. Voters, in their zealotry against the perceived status quo, failed to realize how much of what we have right now you don’t want to cut recklessly, as well as just how reckless the people that they were choosing to do that job were.
wunderkind is a loanword, it's one of those cases of a German word being used but being odd in English since it's so similar.
Like kindergarten which is often speller as "garden".
Absolutely not. They are not broadly experts, and they are not making these decisions after careful consideration, as evidenced by their continual acts of stupidity and basic errors and cutting things despite having no idea what it is they are cutting. Musk got in an argument with someone who said DOGE cut funding for a cancer treatment program, and Musk was calling the person a liar, and the person provided evidence and Musk admitted it was an accident. They are a clown car of idiots who vastly overestimate their own knowledge and underestimate how much good the government actually does. They think they can just slash and burn and there will be no negative consequences because they think the government is worthless.
What's funny, and it might be because of the translation, but I first thought her book where all entrepreneurs are hidden away in a sort of parallel country was a dystopian satire and a joke about some people sense of self importance. Then I learned about her (and when the book was written too) and realised her book was to be read as it was written, 'seriously'. Which makes it silly, but a funny story.
She was an Objectivist. She considered social security to be "legalized plunder". Then when she needed it, she decided to take it.
One of her wonderful worldviews was to rejects altruism as a moral imperative, arguing that individuals should live for their own rational self-interest. Social security, based on the idea of supporting others, contradicts this principle.
It takes strong and complex social glue to create a place where millions can safely follow their own self-interest.
Which means anyone whose wisdom matches their self-interest is going to understand that different things have very different efficiencies at different scales.
And some things happen to be dramatically more efficient/person and more effective, the larger the scale they can be coordinated at.
>It takes strong and complex social glue to create a place where millions can safely follow their own self-interest.
This exactly. All of these people who profess to believe in objectivism could easily move to a failed state and do anything they want to with zero government intervention. But they don't do that. They want all of the benefits of a working government with none of the things required to actually create a working government.
Also, even if you don't need it yourself, it's far nicer to live in a society where people's basic needs can be met otherwise we end up living in some kind of Mad Max apocalyptic wasteland where people with nothing and nothing to lose roam the country looking for targets.
> One of her wonderful worldviews was to rejects altruism as a moral imperative, arguing that individuals should live for their own rational self-interest. Social security, based on the idea of supporting others, contradicts this principle.
This position was already pointed out by Plato (in the Gorgias IIRC) as being inconsistent. Political systems are made up by people - if a society, in particular a democratic one, has certain systems in place, then this is probably because it was (at least believed to be) in the people's self interest.
Hang out around here for a while and you will realize quickly that us tech bros mostly just know tech stuff. Our perceived intelligence in topics which we don't spend our time on is called hubris and we are swimming in it at all times.
They've done their degrees and masters in Computer Science, and many of them dropped out. But they focused on AI, so I'm assuming this makes them great at statistics, but does this mean they are great at security? Given the way they've gone through a variety of departments, I'd say they aren't.
The DOGE crew are incompetent. Witness their firing of all the people who look after the nuclear stockpile and Ebola research.
Vampire capitalism. They want civilization to break down so they can offer a solution for profit. The enemies of all people and life on the planet are a tiny group of oligarchs and their supplicants.
I agree, given the right definition of “capitalism”.
Unfortunately “capitalism” has two quite different meanings. Which are rarely clarified in use.
Capitalism with a big C, a too common overarching ideology, gets bent to mean whatever the greedy, unethical and rich want it to mean so they can get more money.
But small c capitalism, evolving from both practical and ethical foundations, is a system so useful it has multiplied the benefits of civilization. But it is just one such system.
It can’t do everything, it needs other independent systems (justice, dispute resolution, rules of clarity, risk & trust limiting systems, for starters) to work, and extending it to places it doesn’t work causes great harm.
(Like when perversely applied to those enabling systems, in big C form, as is happening now.)
As if laws have any meaning to this administration, and anyone expecting this will only last four years instead of turning into one of those countries so much admired by the captain at the helm, is fooling themselves.
When the citizens realise this, the structures to clamp down any revolution will be in place.
"We are paying MITRE how much? Bigballs and co will write a better ststem in 1 week and have it integrated with xAI. How hard could it be? Send out a first draft of an xAI contract to our DHS contact"
No one analyzed it most likely. It’s possible on of the college students working for Doge doesn’t understand security because they are a child with no real world experience that Elon brought in to slash costs.
> perhaps the thinking is to radically change approaches?
If there had been a replacement or reform plan for even one single iota of the things this admin has cut, I might give them the benefit of the doubt. But there's not. It's just kill, kill, kill.
> I wonder what level of compartmentalisation inside DHS means they didn't see this as having sufficient downsides?
Come on, are you living under a rock right now? There are massive indiscriminate funding cuts to anything that Elon/Doge deems to be "fraud", and they explicitly do not care about the collateral damage.
This is not about the DHS or "compartmentalization". This is just a politician running amok and having real consequences.
This sort of thing is happening across the federal government. There is no rhyme or reason. DOGE has been given an unrealistic target for cuts and they're desperately cutting whatever they can get their hands on. If you look at the federal budget it's nearly impossible for DOGE to hit their stated goals without touching benefits like medicare and social security (which are off limits so far) so the only option is deep, deep cuts into the narrow slice of the federal budget that excludes those protected categories.
There is no rhyme or reason to what gets cut, other than someone under pressure to hit KPIs (dollars cut) was desperately searching for things that looked easy to cancel.
This is happening everywhere the federal government touches. Most people aren't aware of it until they come around and pull the rug on something that intersects with your own life.
Even my die-hard Republican distant relatives are suddenly shocked because programs they benefited from are being cut. They thought they voted for something different.
Like what exactly? I mean the guy ran on cutting the budget by 2 trillion. In his last term he gave tax breaks yo the rich. Where did they think the cuts were coming from?
He ran very hard on raising tarrifs. Which demonstrably raise prices (thats literally their goal.) But now people claim "I didn't vote for this."
In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.
I get it, people are good at cognitive dissonance. But this is the place for blunt truth. They voted for this. I'm not letting Republicans got off the hook here. They voted for this.
Just like to my Republican friends who are upset that CVE is cut. You voted for this. The general public benefit from CVE even though they dont know it exists. Just like you benefitted from dozens of other programs you didn't know existed, but have also been cut.
That's the problem with cuts. They ultimately end up hurting everyone.
Now clearly there's some fat that could be trimmed. Companies do it all the time. Done well its good. Swinging a hatchet in a crowded elevator does not seem like "Done well".
> In truth they voted for him because he was the Republican on offer and they're die-hard Republican. The Republican party has made no secret of its agenda for decades.
This is actually simply not true. The Republican party before the Tea Party looked nothing at all like this. Trump won the presidency last year riding a wave of distinctly not-your-typical-Republican lower class voters. As he rose the old guard Republican establishment formed the anti-Trump wing of the party until they were forced out one by one.
To put some numbers to this: Bush won the upper income brackets by 5+ points in 2000, with a lead that widened as you went up the income ladder. Trump lost the equivalent brackets in 2024 by 5+ points, a 10 point swing away from what Bush won them by. The lower brackets are even more stark, with a whopping 18-point swing towards Trump in the $30k-$50k bracket (inflation adjusted to $15k-$30k).
These numbers show that Trump is not a Republican in the George W Bush sense and he's certainly not a Republican in the Ronald Reagan sense. He's a populist and won on a populist agenda by putting together a coalition of rabid social conservatives (who probably really did go Bush in 2000) and poor people (who largely did not).
You are ignoring that trump rode to power explicitly by enabling the shittest of Republicans that already exist. To try and let republicans off the hook for supporting him, especially a 2nd time? Is hilarious
I'm upvoting you because you make a coherent argument, and votes here should be for that, not whether I agree with you or not.
I would agree he's not George Bush, much less Ronald Reagan. Nevertheless those who voted for Bush and Reagan also voted for Trump.
This has been "decades" in the making in the sense that since Obama was elected (in 2008), Republicans have embraced racism at the heart of their populist message. That swing rightward was made palatable to center republicans with a woman democratic candidate in 2016 (one not terribly well liked in democratic circles) and a black woman candidate in 2024.
While racism, and misogyny gather a bunch of votes, long-term distrust of institutions is sown, and fostered. Republican policy becomes protecting white guys, and especially old, rich, white guys.
Reagan was popular and competent, and worked for the good of America. Today's president is nothing like him, but wins because a bunch of people "vote Republican".
Populism is not an agenda it's a style. Also the majority of poor people voted Democrat, the majority of people with low education levels voted for Trump (which is not the same thing as dumb, although voting for Trump is dumb regardless of PhD or lack of HS diploma). There's overlap between low levels of education and income but if you define class by income then low income people mostly voted Dem
When someone hands you a pencil, you don't wonder what variety of tree the wood came from, or what paint chemistry was used for the coating. It's a pencil. You might have broad opinions on whether the one in your hand is comfortable to use, and sharp - but you leave the details to the pencil makers.
About 70% of the population engage with politics the same way: Leave the details to the people who do this stuff for a living.
Do they expect to be disappointed? Sure, but everyone who engages with politics expects to be disappointed.
This pencil was proudly advertised as being comprised of the remains of all that was decent in humanity. The fact that it wrote in blood was gleefully touted and cheered.
You are a pencil company director. A CEO candidate promised to cut expenses by 30% by eliminating waste. People who do this stuff for a living countered wood and graphite exceed 70% of your expenses. The CEO candidate proposed to increase graphite spending. Do you wonder what the CEO would do if hired?
I'd say that the rhyme and reason are quite clear [0]. They published a playbook, and they are implementing it at a record pace.
> The NSC [National Security Council] staff will need to consolidate the functions of both the NSC and the Homeland Security Council (HSC), incorporate the recently established Office of the National Cyber Director, and evaluate the required regional and functional directorates.
> Given the aforementioned prerequisites, the NSC should be properly resourced with sufficient policy professionals, and the NSA should prioritize staffing the vast majority of NSC directorates with aligned political appointees and trusted career officials. - Project 2025, pg 52.
> ... History shows that an unsupervised NSC staff can stray from its statutory role and adversely affect a President and his policies. Moreover, while the NSC should be fully incorporated into the White House, it should also be allowed to do its job without the impediment of dually hatted staff that report to other offices. - Project 2025, pg 53.
The goal is to build up a political organisation to use as a weapon, and to scrap the rest - as a legal excuse to say that the political appointments will be necessary.
They have to find some gumbah to head the security dept,because the best one they had,left in a hurry. Heard he went to Denmark. ( I am really really kidding )
The ryme is Humpty Dumpty, had a great fall. Now China and Russian security forces step up their relentless attacks. Let's hope the white house falls first.
> Even my die-hard Republican distant relatives are suddenly shocked because programs they benefited from are being cut. They thought they voted for something different.
Out of curiosity, which programs? And is this enough to change their opinion about Trump, or do they still think it'll be worth it?
> This sort of thing is happening across the federal government. There is no rhyme or reason. DOGE has been given an unrealistic target for cuts and they're desperately cutting whatever they can get their hands on
You make it sound like poor DOGE employees are being forced to do this on this kind of schedule, which definitely isn't the impression I got. They're all a bunch of incompetent overconfident weirdos who think they know better and what to do. Is there any pressure to do anything quickly?
And the US federal budget is quite easy to trim. E.g. remove an aircraft carrier from the planned construction pipeline and you've saved $15 billion with no actual ramifications.
Remember, DOGE has nothing to do with money or "efficiency". It's a pure ideological dismantling of the Federal government aimed at eliminating oversight, regulations, assistance and entitlements as envisioned by ultra-conservatives for decades.
This isn't speculation or hyperbole, it's specifically laid out in their published plans: By hobbling or outright eliminating federal agencies responsible for executing the laws passed by Congress, the administration can circumvent the democratic process and impose their extreme vision of limited government on the country, regardless of popular support.
The U.S. system of government relies on established norms as much as it does law. Conservatives realized that they can ignore precedent with impunity if they had an executive willing to do so. They then spelled out exactly how, and are now enacting that plan.
Then SCOTUS's decisions last summer turbo boosted their agenda. The ruling that only Congress can hold the President legally accountable essentially means executive power is unchecked if the legislature is unwilling or unable to Impeach and convict. The President can now confidently ignore the law and judicial orders with a veneer of legality. And this is what he's doing.
(The fact that all this just so happens to benefit Russia after their decade long campaign to destabilize their opponents in the West is a topic for speculation.)
DOGE is about permanently altering how our country works modeled on the right wing worldview, plain and simple. Since that's their overall goal, they're not concerned where they swing the wrecking ball - it's all going to get destroyed eventually.
> The U.S. system of government relies on established norms as much as it does law.
And it's also happily breaking the law. The Executive doesn't legally have the power to allocate resources (or not), not to mention the power to arbitrarily suspend due process.
They are breaking down the federal government intentionally. DOGE was never going to hit their goals, they were impossible to hit. The goals were just cover to take full control over anything they can get their hands on.
> Even my die-hard Republican distant relatives are suddenly shocked because programs they benefited from are being cut. They thought they voted for something different.
They voted for others to be hurt and to lose benefits, not their “in group.” Surprise surprise, they are considered the waste by those they voted for.
I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but let's not take things out of context, he clearly seems to mean it in a "I want everyone" sense here, rather than just the poorly educated specifically.
> DOGE has been about fighting corruption and reducing wasteful spending
It absolutely staggers me that anyone can still say this with a straight face. I will ask this, though: as part of the DOGE fight against corruption and wasteful spending how many of Elon Musk's government contracts and subsidies have been cut?
Also ~12K IRS workers (7x per head ROI) and inspectors general (who actually get results and are fully accountable) have been cut. And our already bloated military budget is increasing to $1 trillion without an eye being batted. DOGE is theatre.
"A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.” —- Donella Meadows
> "A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.” —- Donella Meadows
I see at least three obvious reasons for the cuts:
1. Politically-motivated "purge the weak" Nazi stuff - Cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, cutting Social Security, cutting education, cutting anything that benefits people who are old, poor, queer, female, etc.
2. Privatization - NWS and NOAA are wonderful public services, and they'd rather profit from the data they produce. This is why taxes in the US are such a bitch to file, tax companies oppose any policy change that would make the paperwork easier for filers.
3. They might actually be Russian assets. Tearing down institutions that took generations to build makes space in the world for Russia to exert more influence. You can tell this is working because Europe is now wanting to re-arm.
It makes me sad. If I had a billion dollars I would still want to live in a better country. These guys only want a better world for themselves, and making everyone else into a permanent servant underclass only plays into that.
Your words don't make any sense in this environment. The idea that any person at an agency could stand up to or convince the DOGE team of anything is preposterous.
Anything that weakens the US or puts our cybersecurity in a place that Russia can exfiltrate data will happen. This is not about the US needing anything and it's silly to think otherwise. See also the NLRB whistleblower and the security backdoors that DOGE demanded to allow data exfiltration and the subsequent death threats to the whistle blower.
You mindset is behind the times and needs to adjust to a, frankly, insane current reality.
> Your words don't make any sense in this environment. The idea that any person at an agency could stand up to or convince the DOGE team of anything is preposterous.
Your comment embraces and spreads the powerlessness they want you to feel and spread.
Of course you can stop them - like any other negotiation in life, especially non-friendly ones, you need to make it in Trump's interest either by carrot or stick. Trump has interests; identify them and identify your power in those regards ('power and interest' is the term), and use it.
Also, stop helping them make DOGE the scapegoat. It's Trump.
DOGE is doing this, it's not a "scapegoat", and Trump is not going to negotiate anything here, that's ridiculous.
What leverage do you have for the DOGE boys? What power? Resigning? Because on the Defense side of the government the best leverage that some teams have found is mass resignation, meaning that nothing happens.
There is no negotiating with bullies, it merely breeds more concessions.
> DOGE is doing this, it's not a "scapegoat", and Trump is not going to negotiate anything here, that's ridiculous.
DOGE follows Trump's direction and acts on his behalf, as you must know. They make a big deal out of DOGE so Trump's name is less attached to these actions. Then they can take much of the blame with them when they go away, with Trump and the GOP blaming them for 'excesses'.
> Trump is not going to negotiate anything here, that's ridiculous.
> What leverage do you have for the DOGE boys?
You don't understand how negotiations work. Everyone has interests, strengths and weaknesses, and power. You need to make it in Trump's interest to keep the CVE program.
Everyone saying they are helpless, and that anything else is ridiculous, are panicking. Very unfortunately - dangerously - many people legitimize the panic. It's so normalized that it's "ridiculous" not to panic.
Every day you continue this behavior, you fall further and further behind and lead others in that direction. Will you wake up in time?
> Isn't the US supposed to be the birthplace of modern democracy?
I would not dare not mention the revolutions in England and in France. And before that some Greece city states, and definitely Rome. The US declaration of independence is just another point.
It's just not practical to organize a rally to save a niche cybersecurity program. People are busy protesting to protect Medicaid and keep themselves out of foreign gulags, they can't divert the attention to CVE.
> You need to make it in Trump's interest to keep the CVE program.
This guy is ~80 years old and bragged about "person, woman, man, camera, TV." He recently got into a Tesler and exclaimed "everything's computer!" Have you seen the way his aids explain executive orders to him (like a child) before he signs them?
He doesn't have the foggiest notion of comprehension of what the CVE program is, or how it would benefit him. Unless you're greasing his wheels, it's not going to happen.
I don't think there's any reason to believe that Trump is mentally competent to understand what's happening here or engage in any kind of meaningful negotiation.
I'm curious by what means you think Trump can be bargained with.
Do you mean things like handsfull of like-minded countries selling t-bonds? No one in the R party has any leverage, and it's not clear that even a few US billionaires could exert any influence.
Do you really think Trump has ever heard of "CVE" or could comprehend them?
No, it's definitely DOGE doing all of this. Each one of these young fools need to be named and shamed. The level of damage they have done is unprecedented. They will, in their later years, hopefully look back at this time in their life with a great deal of shame and embarrassment.
I have the feeling that there will be no redemption arc for those ones and the repenting would be for show before a court of public opinion.
I'm going to be to the point here, if you guys over there don't start to heavily push and organise, and I said it already, you're one Reichstag fire away from something very bad, and from my point of view, there is probably one kristallnacht pending in the mix.
This is not a hyperbole and if someone wonders why this has relevance to the discussions, in this case most of the people around here are blue team, and it does feel like the red team has already taken anything that wasn't attached and now taking the time to take what's bolted on...
I guess the silver lining of all this, is in their hubris, they forgot the bread and games motto, so they're might still be a chance to turn things around somewhat... But the window is closing at an impressive speed.
I'm an Australian. We have a guy called Clive Palmer, who has formed a party called (no joke) the "Trumpet of Patriots". It's certain nobody will vote for him. The opposition leader married himself to MAGA (and close to Trump) and now it appears like this will prevent him from winning.
It needs to be the "shame and embarrassment" Nazis felt at the end of WWII and not the traditional shame and embarrassment they are used to feeling after losing the civil war and Jim Crow laws. It will just happen again in a generation otherwise.
Nazi did not felt shame and embarrassment. They felt loss. They felt to be weak. Nazi and Germans felt sorry for themselves after the WWII. The feeling of sorry for stuff they have done to others is something Germany found a bit later, largely due to Nuremberg and general policies not allowing it to stay hidden.
Forget about them feeling sorry for anyone but themselves. They will feel resentful and as if they were being treated unfairly even when actual clear criminal investigation happens.
No, blaming "someone inside DHS" is what makes no sense. It 100% makes sense to blame DOGE and actual perpetrators. You can stop them only if you start to blame those who do the stuff you dont like instead of blaming everyone else except them.
it might also be deliberate: that they actually don't think the government should be involved in this sort of thing. after all, someone could be making a profit on this, and that seems to be their highest value. if gov is involved, that makes it a communal effort, and you know what else starts with "commun-"?
yes, those reasons are stupid and ignorant AND intentional.
but is there any evidence against that interpretation?
Yes, there are apparently various ways of profiting from vulnerabilities. The interesting question would be whether any of the regime insiders have a way to profit.
I think it's more of a principle: if it looks like someone could charge money for it, they think that would make the country stronger, because all they understand is first-order profit. Trump's ethics is "get away with whatever you can".
For instance, most people find healthcare middlemen (pharmacy benefit managers, etc) to be grotesque parasites. But to a laissez-faire fundamentalist, they're smart for finding a way to liberate some profit, even laudable.
I love Hanlon's razor. Super-helpful in certain contexts: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
But, having known about it for a dozen years now, I also find it inadequate alone as a razor without the following caveats/corollaries:
Hubbard's corollary to Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system". ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor#Exceptions )
Or (HN) Nerdponx's punchier simplification: "When money is at stake, never attribute to incompetence what could be attributed to greed." ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41066724 )
Hanlon's Razor is susceptible to pathological inputs, causing unbounded runtime.
A large amount of things related to Trump fall into that category, and it's important to recognize when you need to instead treat it as a superposition: It is both malice and incompetence, unless the perpetrators decide to plead just one or the other.
Stupidity rarely has a consistent destructive track record. You score occasional wins. Only malice allows every decision to do damage. (The other razor, essentially - Occam)
If you made this careful analysis, you'd hear "CRISSAKE WE NEED THIS DONT TOUCH IT" for almost everything (and it likely would be right for a significant portion but not everything).
That's why the current approach seems to be to axe everything, listen to how much screaming there is, then reinstate only the projects where the screaming is really loud.
You forget that their stated policy (and I don't doubt their commitment) is that whoever complains the loudest were probably scamming. That "honest people don't complain"
I can't believe what a bunch of bollocks this administration is. I couldn't believe it the first time, and this time I thought "Well at least I'm ready, it will be a lot like last time" and it's so much worse
A lot was lost in the midterms and Supreme Court appointments.
Hopefully these 4 years energize people to vote. I know protesting and direct action and so on are also important, but the gradient is not negative for voting for every office you can vote for in every election.
> Hopefully these 4 years energize people to vote.
This euphemism has to end. I think you mean: "Hopefully these 4 years energize people to vote Democrat".
Why not just say it plainly instead of using supposedly non-partisan language? This neutral phrasing seems to be an appeal to a "silent majority" that agrees with you and disagrees with Republican leadership. What if that silent majority doesn't exist?
I'm scared that elections won't be secure, especially with the way the Republicans are trying to (arguably unconstitutionally) wield federal power to force individual states to change their systems in abrupt ways.
I fear the situation either ends badly or in a bloodshed. They aren't respecting the courts, so assuming they will accept defeat in elections is naive.
People can learn once the world puts most of its money into education.
The unfortunate part is that education is often also part of propaganda and spinning history for said propaganda. These days I wish education had a bigger emphasis on history and history should be looked at from different angles, like how the same thing is being taught from different angles.
You are assuming there will be next elections that are free, fair, and matter.
Trump says a lot of things that ultimately doesn't matter, but he has also said, and is the type of brute to believe it, that he intends to stay in power. He and his cronies have successfully dismantled the checks and balances that should have prevented him from doing they, legally. IMO the only way he leaves the White House without stirring trouble is in a casket.
Given the current government has blown off an unanimous 9-0 supreme court decision, right now I can't feel too optimistic there will even be more elections.
I think there will be more elections, but I think they will be fraudulent, because I think Trump has shown he is adept at turning things around and then trying to pretend that what he's doing is analogous to what the other side has done.
For example, a lot of people have forgotten, but the phrase "fake news" originally came about in the wake of the 2016 election about all the (actually false) misinformation that was spread on social media in the run up to the election. Trump adeptly then co-opted the term, so any news he didn't like he could just call it "fake news", and who was to say any news he called fake was any less fake than what people were calling fake before?
My guess is the 2028 elections will be marked by fraud, and then when people protest or object, Trump and the Republicans will just say "Hey, you called all those Jan 6 protesters traitors and said the election was secure, how is now any different? Now you're all the traitors."
The only belief that gives me hope these days is "History will judge the complicit."
> Trump tells them they are OK. They are worthwhile.
The chasm between what Trump says (and what the propaganda says about him) and what he actually does is astounding. Most of his fans are completely uninformed of what he says and does. We've never had a president (and cabinet) with more conflicts of interest. He's been a pioneer at abusing power; tariffs on Canada because of a fentanyl crisis... give me a break!
> The Democrats say "we feel your pain" Fuck them, truly. Voters do not want some Harvard educated lawyer to "feel their pain".
Yeah, apparently they want some billionaire who doesn't pay his taxes, who was given millions by his daddy, and who famously stiffed small business contractors at his buildings, to say he feels their pain.
That said, I actually upvoted your comment because right now it's heavily downvoted but I actually think there is an important point behind your comment. It may feel insane to me, but Trump is so beloved by his base because he was the first one to really acknowledge their anger and give it validity. "Make America Great Again" is a slogan that works because a lot of people have seen their financial and social position deteriorate over the past 30-40 years and they want to go back and they want someone to blame (even if going back is impossible and they're blaming the wrong people). Trump understood this, the Democrats didn't, or worse, branded anyone who harbored some of this anger as a bigot. This is basically how all fascist leaders come to power - the parallels with Mussolini are uncanny, right down to having a minor body part shot off in an assassination attempt.
Relevant recent example to me: a lot of folks can't understand the hypocrisy about bitching about inflation under Biden, but then saying "we'll hunker down" in response to the expected inflation from tariffs. The difference is the Trump base believes he is taking them "back to the promised land", and for better or worse Trump is definitely a man of action, so they're more willing to put up with temporary hardships if they think the direction is right. With Biden and the Dems, they just believe they'll get more of the "slow slide."
> Trump is so beloved by his base because he was the first one to really acknowledge their anger and give it validity. "Make America Great Again" is a slogan that works because a lot of people have seen their financial and social position deteriorate over the past 30-40 years and they want to go back and they want someone to blame (even if going back is impossible and they're blaming the wrong people).
I agree. And they're not wrong to want to go back or blame someone. We can "go back" in terms of increasing the QoL of our populace. Idk, the Democrats were always clear about wanting to uplift people. Obamacare and Medicare for All were extremely clear policy positions meant to uplift the common man. Eliminating student debt (a policy I don't agree with) was also obviously positioned to help people improve their economic and social standing.
I don't know why people say Democrats missed this and Trump saw it? The Democrats won on slogans that capitalized exactly this sentiment. Obama's "Hope" and "Yes we can" are obviously in a context where people didn't have hope or questioned whether we could.
I think he just got lucky against bad candidates, and we ascribe way too much to his branding and the other garbage. Clinton's branding was about HER (i.e. I'm with her), not about THE PEOPLE (biggest political branding mistake in the 21st century imo). And Harris never had the popularity to go to to toe with Trump.
Idk, I think people are mad, but I think the Democrats have spoken to that more authentically and proven themselves to actually do things that help the common man than Trump ever has
The Democrats were always constrained by what's reasonable, whereas Trump has been able to promise the sky, even though delivering it means the sky is now falling.
We never ever told people they are losers for wanting a better life. One of the most popular candidates for the Dem ticket was Bernie Sanders. He actually wanted to cut our biggest budget line items and spend them on the things people worry about the most (healthcare, something most Americans worry about being able to afford).
Trump is a literal billionaire. How is him telling the sons of people who used to do manufacturing that they're okay any better than a Harvard educated lawyer saying he feels for them (Trump and Vance are both Ivy League educated, btw)?
I also want Americans to have a better life. I also think we spend way too much elsewhere instead of at home. A lot of Democrats think that and drive policies for that. Trump may care about that too, but you can't vote for who makes you feel good. You have to learn how to vote for who will actually improve your life. We are the rulers of America, we have to understand our economy, our government, etc. No one is going to do it for us. I'd much rather vote for someone who talks down to me and will deliver stability than a guy who hypes me up and tanks the economy
The real irony here is that a lot of ycombinator founders and the people reading HN were exactly the ones making this possible and now start to wonder why the snake eats its own tail.
Or they wanted this, because this could be part of the privatization of many government functions. They, or at least some of them, could see this as controlling this function for money. It's a regular stream too, the valuable subscription model and customers who really need the service (and if they don't, just add a new law in the name of IT security forcing firms to sign up).
exactly; I hope ycombinator and its proponents can enjoy living in the ancap fantasy land where you have to pay to be alerted for a climate change fueled mega hurricane (also caused by this exact same reckless, unregulated greed) because NOAA was disbanded. Billionaires shouldn't exist, but neither should millionaires.
This makes me wonder what other stuff most people don't know exists but is important to our society has quietly disappeared in the last few weeks. We know about this one because we know it's important. What are the things we don't know about?
https://www.project2025.observer/ lists a few. Of course, those are only the agencies the Trump people know about and explicitly want to destroy, but it's a start.
Weren't there major problems with the current CVE implementation, especially with the waves of script kiddies and AI tools spamming the database and the fact that projects who take security seriously have little to no say in the "score" that gets assigned?
As an active consumer of CVEs: yea there are major problems. No there's nothing better and no I don't have any better ideas.
The scores are mostly useless, I would not care if they disappeared, I do not look at them. I don't really understand why people get so upset about garbage scores though. If a high CVSS score creates a bunch of work for you then your vuln mag process is broken IMO. (Or alternatively, you are in the business of compliance rather than security. If you don't like working in compliance, CVSS scores aren't the root cause of your misery).
Having a central list of "here's a bunch of things with stable IDs that you might or might not care about" is very valuable.
Yeah, most businesses need window cleaners too. If you're a window cleaner and you complain about all the birds shitting on windows, I dunno what to tell ya.
If you're working in compliance either
A) you're stuck in your compliance job, that sucks, CVSS scores aren't the reason why though.
and then a random 9.8 critical comes that affects some software you have in a way that makes it a 0 in your environment but it doesn't matter cause the cve tanks your organizational Security Score (tm) by 10 arbitrary points and management is wondering when you'll secure the company again because the Security Score is their only tangible deliverable to measure success
Spot on. Vulnerability scanners that make up an organizational Security Score (TM) tend to operate at the wrong level of abstraction, flagging some library somewhere that never runs and has nothing to do with your production flow or architecture, or some test keys with zero security impact. Go explain that to management, because obviously the security tools are right and you are wrong. This sad state of affairs is unfortunately the best that the security industry has been able to deliver. Trying to wrangle complexity by adding more complexity is the craziest notion to me. Yes, no scoring scheme is perfect, but when the scheme introduces more noise, what have we gained (well, security vendors gain, but what have organizations gained).
I disagree that it is Way Better than before. A judgement call is worth more than a team wasting effort chasing irrelevant pseudo-vulnerabilities being reported as vulnerabilities. A broken yardstick is worse than no yardstick.
But that's an issue organizations bring upon themselves, by defining semi-arbitrary KPIs that are used without proper interpretation. It's not directly caused by CVEs or assigned scores. It's like blaming git that it count lines in diffs, because your company created a KPI that measures developer's based on LOC changes.
Yeah like when we bundled in a .js library for client side date processing that has a CVE affecting node.js servers with high score. Our auditors don’t care they tag the whole app as high risk. It doesn’t even run on the server!
the auditors that sign off on your security to meet your clients requirements usually know way less about your security posture than your clients do
its all just surface-level box-checking. most companies required to get 'penetration tests' just get an overpriced Nessus scan sold as a pentest and that meets their reqs.
Incompetent auditors don't detract from the classification system, though. If we removed every data point auditors misinterpret or don't care to understand, we may as well remove all metrics.
Solving this problem in a generalized way is really hard.
Maybe I have a dependency on Foo which has a critical vulnerability in a feature that I don't use. I suppress the warning and all is well. Then two weeks later someone on my team decides to use that feature, not knowing that there's a problem with it. Now we're fucked, and we'll never know because the vulnerability has been suppressed.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good. It is(was?) a very useful and important system.
Trump must be receiving a lot of emails from companies wanting to fill the void, and I bet the Trumpiest of them all is going to be awarded a contract worth 10x the budget CVE had, and do a much worse job.
Most tracking tools have exception processes. But yeah, security as a product family instead of a simple score seems to be a foreign concept at most companies.
I feel that. So tired of management being completely uninterested in actual, actionable security holes but getting wildly spun up because they saw a notice with a big scary number that has absolutely no relevance in our architecture.
The scores were never going to be that accurate across people's environments (IDK how much other places relied on them, places I worked never did that much) and issues with the scores don't seem to be a good justification to torch the whole CVE system anyway.
This^ and to add to that, at the very least MITRE assigned IDs which is great. Plus they did an initial scoring, which, well… will never be perfect like you said and I’m sure these things evolve throughout time and get better (not talking necessarily CVSS vX).
What a shame on this current gov. administration, if you can even call it that.
I think the question everyone in this thread should ask is: why is it the government's job to do this, especially given the prior widespread view that they're doing a bad job? Is the software industry so immiserated by poverty that it cannot organize its own distribution of security bulletins? Clearly not: GitHub already runs its own vuln tracking scheme that's better integrated with the tooling we use for open source software. The industry routinely sets up collaborations like standards bodies, information sharing groups and more. And there is as whole ecosystem of security companies to help you understand vulns in your stack.
So there seems nothing specific to CVEs that requires government involvement, but the existence of the tax funded scheme does discourage the creation of competitors that might function better.
But, to CVE or not to CVE ... that is not the question. US deficit spending is out of control. This sort of thing had to happen some day. It's what Europeans in the 2010s called "austerity" and it always makes some people scream but this graph:
... is not sustainable. Up to 1984 overall US debt was stable. Since then its growth rate became dangerous. Debt/GDP ratio is now worse than just after WW2. The federal government is currently spending more on interest than on defense or Medicare:
The US is currently getting its first taste of what parts of Europe started going through in 2008, and unfortunately there's bad news: the cuts you're seeing now are mostly cosmetic. They're what can be done within the current framework of laws, sort of, with lots of bending of the rules and creative interpretations of them and maybe some oversteps. But it's just the start of what's needed. Large scale reform of the laws themselves will be required regardless of whoever wins the next elections.
This is like, exactly the sort of thing that the public sector should be doing. There's no profit incentive for this to happen in the private sector.
I don't disagree with your overall sentiment re: unsustainable debt. But the answer must be reform and taking hard looks at the military budget, not just randomly cutting programs that you disagree with politically.
> But, to CVE or not to CVE ... that is not the question. US deficit spending is out of control. This sort of thing had to happen some day.
I suppose more people would be more amenable to these wholesale cuts if the current administration weren't blowing through even more money than before [0]:
> The new Treasury Department data shows a deficit of $1.307 trillion for October through March, the first six months of the fiscal year 2025. And spending is $139 billion more in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year, with borrowing over that period $41 billion higher.
We're currently fighting no wars and yet Trump is proposing a record $1 trillion defense budget [1]:
> “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military,” he said. “$1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.
And that's before proposed cuts to tax revenue [2]:
> Extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would decrease federal tax revenue by $4.5 trillion from 2025 through 2034. Long-run GDP would be 1.1 percent higher, offsetting $710 billion, or 16 percent, of the revenue losses.
So this whole "we're just imposing much needed austerity" to justify penny-wise-pound-foolish policies is kind of laughable when the proposed increase to our peacetime defense budget alone wipes out Elon's most recent estimate of DOGE's total savings [3].
you like to say word 'bikeshedding', adoption of formal intellectualish sounding terminology even when inappropriate is orange-site affliction I advise against. I am saying this for your own sake... speak truths with POWER
Thank you for the unsolicited defense. Linguistic bikeshedding is tantamount to an ad hominem. It's the mark of someone unable or unwilling to form a rational, valid argument or engage in civil discourse. Let's instead refocus to the HN site guidelines please. :o)
Maybe you don't see how it's bikeshedding. Ah well, let me try to explain.
It's because it's like if someone had forgotten to validate the user's role in an endpoint in a Django app, and someone said that they should have used Rails because it's easier to understand. In reality both are easy enough to understand to be able to do an authorization check, and the framework isn't the issue. So the person suggesting Rails is bikeshedding.
Likewise, if someone made another vulnerability database it would likely have the same issue, and this isn't really the place to solve it. If somehow this does trigger the realization to solve it, then it will be by luck.
We're getting into pedantic arguments, but bikeshedding is when multiple people argue to death about the easy stuff because it's easy, and don't argue at all about the actually hard stuff, because none of them know enough to argue about it. I don't know what your example is, but it's not bikeshedding.
I had argued for a less pedantic take, but I guess by replying to you I'm being pedantic. It seems to me that my example not only is bikeshedding by the definitions I find but also that to me it fits your definition of it. It's easier to talk about what framework you think is best than it is to talk meaningfully about process, which is more relevant place to look to prevent serious bugs, assuming both frameworks are capable. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
Bikeshedding is when people need to make a decision on something, and keep talking and talking about the easy stuff. Your example of someone offering a driveby opinion isn't an instance of a group of people needing to make a decision.
Ah, it wasn't a driveby opinion how I imagined it, and I've experienced stuff like it in the past. It would then go into talking about rails features and libraries that could save the day, and the django counterparts. The decision that needed to be made would be what action to take to prevent a similar issue from occurring in the future.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but bikeshedding is when you say "OK guys we need to figure out the architecture of this complicated new service" and then there's a bunch of debate on libraries and frameworks and very little debate on the actual (hard) problem it needs to solve.
Getting a bit tired of posts like this (no offense), something dumb / nefarious happens like funding is cut for <useful thing>, then someone posts an off the cuff comment or question like, "wasn't this <useful thing> not that useful because <superficial reason>?".
Why do people do this, to down play all the destruction of the last few months? Seems to be some type of coping mechanism.
NIST maintains the National Vulnerability Database (NVD).. This is a key piece of the nation’s cybersecurity infrastructure. There is a growing backlog of vulnerabilities.. based on.. an increase in software and, therefore, vulnerabilities, as well as a change in interagency support.. We are also looking into longer-term solutions to this challenge, including the establishment of a consortium of industry, government, and other stakeholder organizations that can collaborate on research to improve the NVD.
> Security and vulnerability handling in software is of ever increasing importance. Recent events have adversely affected many project's ability to identify and ensure these issues are addressed in a timely manner. This is extremely worrying.. Until recently many of us were relying not on the CVE project's data but on the NVD data that added that information.
Five years ago (2019), I helped to organize a presentation by the CERT Director from Carnegie Mellon, who covered the CVE backlog and lack of resources, e.g. many reported vulnerabilities never even receive a CVE number. It has since averaged < 100 views per year, even as the queue increased and funding decreased, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmC65VrnBPI
I did find this post to be non-helpful and confusing. It would be helpful to edit it (or write differently in the future) to clarify that the sudden defunding event occurring today is separate and not related to the previous funding cuts. If that's the case.
Is there no connection between 2025 funding cuts and previous ones? e.g. If a year of work after the previous cuts resulted in an open-data collaboration between NVD and commercial vendors to share a subset of CC0 vulnerability metadata, could that industry collective now argue for government to share (with companies) the burden of funding an open, decentralized program for CVE tracking? Commercial vendors could still offer additional metadata and analytics, over and above the public baseline.
> A bipartisan bill that would establish a nonprofit foundation aimed at boosting private-sector partnerships at the National Institute of Standards and Technology was reintroduced in the House and the Senate.. the proposed foundation structure was described as replicating similar nonprofits that support public-private partnerships at other science agencies.. we encourage a strategy that leverages NIST’s leadership and expertise on standards development, voluntary frameworks, public-private sector collaboration, and international harmonization.. NIST’s funding has been in focus following a budget cut of roughly 12% to $1.46 billion in fiscal year 2024.
Edit_2: is there a shortage of database rows, or people to write a shell script? Why not pre-allocate N CVE IDs for every CNA, while a new plan is worked out? At least one random commercial vendor could foresee the shutdown early enough to reserve CVEs.
> Garrity posted on LinkedIn, “Given the current uncertainty surrounding which services at MITRE or within the CVE Program may be affected, VulnCheck has proactively reserved 1,000 CVEs for 2025,” adding that Vulncheck “will continue to provide CVE assignments to the community in the days and weeks ahead.”
> A coalition of longtime, active CVE Board members have spent the past year developing a strategy to transition CVE to a dedicated, non-profit foundation. The new CVE Foundation will focus solely on continuing the mission of delivering high-quality vulnerability identification and maintaining the integrity and availability of CVE data for defenders worldwide. “CVE, as a cornerstone of the global cybersecurity ecosystem, is too important to be vulnerable itself,” said Kent Landfield, an officer of the Foundation.
> Moving forward, cybersecurity companies will have to “fill the void” .. NVD said in April [2024] that it is “working to establish a consortium to address challenges in the NVD program and develop improved tools and methods.” .. CISA acknowledged the concerns and outrage of the security community and said it is starting an enrichment effort called “Vulnrichment," which will add much of the information described by Garrity to CVEs.
Vulnerability enrichment was mentioned in many talks. However, most organizations seem to handle it internally. There doesn’t appear to be momentum toward a shared or open source solution – at least not yet.
Following your comment's reference leads to a claim of NVD needing 300 to 550 million (?!) per year, but only receiving 4 million in funding. If anyone has pre-2024 data on NVD or MITRE CVE funding, that would be helpful, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43701532
> Since February 2024, the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has encountered delays in processing vulnerabilities.. caused by factors such as software proliferation, budget cuts and changes in support.. NIST, an agency within the United States Commerce Department, saw its budget cut by nearly 12% this year.
Reading that article closely it says nothing about an NVD budget cut, only a NIST one. They were trackijg the changes after NIST's budget was cut, not NVD's. As pointed out below, CISA announced a cut and then NIST more than made up for it by reallocating funds, for an NVD funding increase, even though NIST had their overall budget cut.
One of your references has budget numbers that are two orders (?!) of magnitude higher than the CISA number. Hopefully someone can chime in with granular historical data for NIST NVD and MITRE-via-NIST CVE funding.
I've noticed that there's a post like this in most articles on HN that could be construed as negative for the current administration: some vague false statement followed by either a factually incorrect explanation or some quote that does not support the statement.
Your post has now been edited to be factually correct. But the misleading implication that this abrupt cut is part of some other cuts that started before remains.
The post (currently AND previous to comments being moved here from a different HN thread) links to the official _2024_ (not 2025) statement about NVD cutbacks. Here's a 3000 word article with quotes from Linux Foundation and commercial vendors, around the same time, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43700884
I think it’s ignorance and arrogance. The US seems to be on a path to lose technological and science leadership. The current leadership doesn’t seem to understand things that aren’t flashy. I wonder when they’ll dial back on food safety. I am sure RFK knows some vitamins that protect against salmonella
important to note: the US's food safety is already really bad. salmonella isn't a thing you have to worry about in first world countries. can't wait to see what plague demon spawns out of a food industry running amok after the FDA gets gutted.
> important to note: the US's food safety is already really bad. salmonella isn't a thing you have to worry about in first world countries.
There were 65,000 cases of salmonellosis in the EU in the most recent data I could find (2022). Thats a lower per capita rate than the US, but definitely not zero.
I agree that it’s not zero, but according to CDC, the US sees about 1.35 million cases per year in a population of about 346 million, which is about 390 cases per 100,000 people. Your figure for the EU over a population of 447 million in 2022 gives 14.5 cases per 100,000 people, or more than a factor of 26 less.
Being 26 times less worried about something translates, at least for most things, for me, to not being worried about it any more.
Salmonella and it causes are very regional in EU. Places like Finland have basically 0 cases of salmonella caused by domestic poultry products per year. If there salmonella is found from any chicken in the flock, the whole flock will be quarantined and generally fully slaughtered (meat & eggs must be pasteurized after the slaughter if they are sold). In 2023 0.1% of the tested flocks had salmonella.
"The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years," says Dianna Bourassa, an applied poultry microbiologist at Auburn University, "So that's not the issue."
I don't think he's considered a small gov conservative. He increased spending last time and has continued so far this term. His tariffs are one of the biggest expansions in gov interference in modern history. They are also attempting to significantly expand executive power beyond even 9/11 terrorism days.
Reduce government spending; since it's not actually a government organization (as far as I can tell, I never looked into it before), other organizations can fund it. How much goes into this organization a year anyway? I'm seeing a Mitre corporation that does lots of other stuff too that has a revenue of 2.2 billion a year.
Multi-trillion-dollar companies benefit from and contribute to this system, surely they can spare 0.01% of their revenue to this bit of critical infrastruture?
Yes, you can also run such a system based on donations. But I personally think that such a system is important enough to be paid for by the government. When you run on donations, there will always be conflicts of interest and the risk of running out of funds.
But yeah, Mitre being a private organization that was paid for by the government was a problem.
Yes, I'm sure corporations funding the CVE system would go wonderfully.
"It would be best if we don't see any severe CVEs for our products this quarter, if you want our funding next quarter."
Reduce spending. Steelmanning (not actually believing this): it probably cost a lot for what is essentially a database, and can be done cheaply by private sector (Google, Microsoft).
Threat intelligence firm Flashpoint noted in March 2024 it was aware of 100,000 vulnerabilities with no CVE number and consequently no inclusion in NVD. More worryingly, it said that 330 of these vulnerabilities (with no CVE number) had been exploited in the wild.. Since the start of 2024 there have been a total of 6,171 total CVE IDs with only 3,625 being enriched by NVD. That leaves a gap of 2,546 (42%!) IDs.
Despite all those private companies and various OSS projects being willing to contribute ideas, infrastructure and code, they have somehow failed to coalesce into a decentralized replacement for NVD, built on CC0 data and OSS tooling.
I tried to look over the history and I only see a funding increase, CISA cut $3.7 million at the end of 2023 for the next year and in response NIST reallocated extra funding to NVD: $8.5 million in 2024
A funding shortfall and strain isn't a funding cut. And from what I see there was a funding increase.
> According to NIST, while the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is processing incoming CVEs at the same rate as before the slowdown in spring and early summer 2024, a 32 percent jump in submissions last year means that the backlog continues to grow.
> CISA had previously been supporting the NIST NVD program with approximately $3.7 million per year in interagency funding, which they have discontinued
2024
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025
Assuming that's spread over both years it wasn't as big of an increase as I said, but is still an increase even inflation adjusted.
> 2025 article claims 30% increase in 2024 workload
Underfunding in the face of more workload isn't itself a funding cut.
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, this funding remains a fraction of the $300 million to $400 million estimated to be needed annually to fully restore capacity, with an additional $120 million to $150 million required to prevent further system “deterioration.”
Did NVD receive 300MM annual funding pre-2024? That would be a 98% funding cut.
For decades, the US could be counted upon to fund things with little immediate benefit but massive long-term positive externalities. I don't think its likely that the republican party will "go back to normal" post-Trump, so we can all kiss the long-term reputation building that American hegemony relied upon goodbye. Short of a great depression-esque political reset, I do not see things changing for the better.
It's a dying empire, really nothing else to say. The USA led world order is over, we've voted ourselves out of it, and now need to learn how to deal with that.
> I really can't think of a non- nefarious justification for this
Tragedy of the commons - NVD and the CVE project havr been backlogged and facing funding issues for a couple years now, and most security vendors are either cagey about providing vulns in a timely manner (as it can reduce their own comparative advantage), or try upsell their own alternative risk prioritization scores.
Every company will gladly use NVD and CVE data, but no one wants to subsidize it and help a competitor, especially in an industry as competitive as cybersecurity.
Why? This administration is not acting in good faith, you don't have to act as if they are. People and institutions doing that is part of how we got here in the first place.
I still find it wild that so many people are trying to frame these decisions through a political lens. This is the actions of a foreign bad actor dismantling critical institutions from within, not "bad policy".
> I still find it wild that so many people are trying to frame these decisions through a political lens.
Why? The decisions are pretty well politically aligned with the ideology which detests the size and scope of the government (realistically, those aspects which the ideologues feel are not in their interest). What is unexpected is the swiftness and the brutality of action, but revolutions tend to be messy, and make no mistake, this is a revolution.
> This is the actions of a foreign bad actor
Now this sounds like a coping strategy: everything is so preposterous it couldn't possibly be homegrown. Foreign influence and underhanded actions are as old as human interactions, but IMO outright plants can't succeed without a massive economic and power asymmetry between the adversaries.
They are not. Trump is no libertarian or small government guy. The build the wall guy is the opposite of that. Even with stuff like social security he usually at least rhetorically claimed to be for more benifits (as long as it goes to "real Americans") and he is all for increasing police and military spending. And generally spending more on stuff that gives him money. Plus giant tax increases (tarrifs). He doesn't care much if government is dismembered as long as it owns the libs and gets rid of the public corruption prosecutors/others who might stand up to him
Trump's actions towards Putin are highly irrational. Maybe he's being blackmailed, maybe he's being bought, maybe he just has likes Putins style but there is a reason people suspect him despite it being unlikely in the general case.
> He doesn't care much if government is dismembered
This is exactly the process that conservatives take to privatise services into their own friends pockets. Destroy services until they're ineffective and use it as an excuse to privatise it.
There's no such thing as small government, only large sprawling private services that the government hands money to.
lol, coping strategy? I'm not American and have no reason to 'cope' with anything. There is enough evidence to make a strong allegation about Trump being a Russian asset.
The entire world seems to be able to 'cope' with that assessment.
Imagine being eaten alive by a cackling hyena that ambushed you and all the while being like "hmm what is the appropriate steelman here? why do I deserve this? why is this just?"
In reality this would never happen so all these people playing steelman are just detached/insulated.
Probably the thinking goes that someone in the international community will step in. CVE is in practice a global registry for all, thus "Why should the USA Department of Homeland Security pay for all the freeloaders".
Still shortsighted and stupid, but it's plausible this is intended as leverage to get someone else to pony up.
That's a good idea to raise during the budget time or with some warning ahead of time. But even discussing the cost of CVE program itself is likely a waste of time and money. When trying to deal with 2tn deficit, looking at things that historically got ~$5M is just a distraction. And the lack of it may cost even more given how many existing agreements/contracts rely on cve to be a thing - maybe just in gov lawyers having to rewrite things.
Selling bonds is not the same thing as a family budget being in the red. Either you know this and you're making this argument in bad faith, or you don't and, well...
Listen, I hate the debt, but we have an income problem, not a spending problem. The military looks like a waste, but it does more than build bombs i.e research etc.
The issue we have is that republican every chance they get since the 1970s have cut taxes. And then blamed democrats for causing the deficits. We don't need smaller governments. We need a reasonable tax system that taxes people. It can be progressive like it was before we decided rich people just need it easier than poor people.
Yes, I will pay more taxes sign me up, especially if they can finally fix the roads and fund research. The problem is my taxes as a middle-class person go up and rich people get a tax cut. It's stupid. I like water provided by government utilities, I like planes that don't crash into stuff because there are air traffic controllers. These things used to work because we paid for them. When you buy cheap you get cheap.
Yeah republicans claim to want to run the government like a business, but the first thing a business should do when they have a deficit is raise revenue! And especially in the case of the US government, the the only barriers to doing that are self-imposed.
Military also employs a bunch of people who otherwise would be poor. Also provides a gentrification path for a bunch of previously poor people extending throughout their lives.
This is an absolute pittance compared to the total budget. And considering the current administration wants a $4T tax cut they are not interested in trimming the deficit at all.
Yep, DOGE is a song and dance distraction. If they were serious about lowering the deficit they wouldn't have laid off ~12K IRS workers (whom show a 7x ROI per head.) They also wouldn't be asking to increase the military budget to $1 trillion per year. Trump has spent 1/3 of his days in office so far golfing; $30 million+ so far paid to Trump properties for the privilege of that. This is the biggest capture in US history and it's all out in the open.
We don’t need to spend tax dollars to increment sequential integers.
The “CVE program” can be done by a volunteer or two in spare time. It’s not some major operation, it’s just a registry of integers that can live on GitHub.
You manage the system and not the CVEs themselves. The simplist thing would be a list of numbers that correspond to Google docs. The owner of the Google doc can share it with the needed parties and eventually set it as public.
You truly believe that the CVE database (and others like CWE) are only about assigning serial numbers to random reports, don't you? I see people underestimating and understanding the work of others in matters like this. Is that a trend now?
I saw this same behavior quite a while back. While I'm out of the CVE game these days, it seems that there is a forever rotating new group of people who simply don't and can never see the complexities on the process.
I think it's a testament to the previous stewardship that it appears so simple.
No I don't believe that, but it might as well operate like that. The extra stuff isn't truly needed and was being outsourced to the companies that own the products since it wasn't providing much value. Take a look at Daniel's blog posts about CVEs for curl for what happens when you let them handle it.
Grok becoming an artificial nepobaby running the entire CVE program with zero oversight sounds so fucking funny I don't even care, PLEASE god make this real holy shit I can't breathe at the thought
Why would they spend money to replace it? The idea is to weaken and destroy the US and its institutions. Giving Palantir money might mean that security improves, and that goes against their goals. They have already demanded that Russia stop being treated as a cybersecurity threat in other areas of the government, this is a way to ensure that systems are vulnerable to attack.
Exactly. The Trump admin is well on its way tanking the USD with tariffs and getting every country (including the penguins) mad at us. The rationalization given by the admin for tariffs (trade imbalance) make zero sense, and they haven't offered anything else.
It’s a reckless move to cut funding so abruptly, but taking a step back from the short-term chaos, it probably is an anomaly that this was government funded. All of private tech relies on it, and private tech is big enough to pay for it. I hope that the trillion dollar babies consider this an opportunity to pool together to form a foundation that funds this, and a bunch of other open source projects run by one random person in Nebraska.
Ah yes the old “well can’t concerned citizens band together, form a committee, collect revenue and fund things that are in the common interest” answer you hear from small government types that makes me think you lot don’t really understand what government actually is.
> it probably is an anomaly that this was government funded. All of private tech relies on it, and private tech is big enough to pay for it.
I mean doesn't big tech and the people they give salary money to pay taxes? Ground transportation companies rely on public roads and but we fund it because having the infrastructure is an economic multiplier.
I'm not arguing in favor of funding the CVE program, I just don't think that's a good reason.
Opinions vary on what the purpose of government is, but if you take the view that the government's priorities should be providing services that are impossible, inefficient, or unethical to provide privately, then I don't see the CVE program making the cut, when the tech industry is collectively flush with resources and has every incentive to form an industry consortium to take it over.
The latest contract[1] (I hope this is the right one) for MITRE's involvement with CVE and CWE programs was USD$29.1m for the period 2024-04-17 to 2025-04-16 with optional extension of expenditure up to USD$57.8m and to an end date of 2026-04-16.
Seemingly MITRE hasn't been advised yet whether the option to extend the contract from 2025-04-16 to 2026-04-16 will be executed. And there doesn't appear to be any other publicly listed approach to market for a replacement contract.
I can't figure out why the hue and cry wasn't raised until the very last minute. Did they not know a month ago that they were running out of time? Is it standard practice for the government not to say they're going to extend the contract until the day beforehand or something?
Right now, yes. You can pretty easily have a scenario where you’re talking to the agency you’re working with and they’re saying “we want to renew this, but we don’t know if they’ll give us the money in the end”.
So you’ll get a bunch of “hopefully this week” up until it expires.
This is a chance for the EU to step up and take over. If the US government won't pay for the CVE program, the EU surely could. Many EU countries already run a program like this to server their own interests, and I believe the EU does as well.
If the US is willing to give up influence and control over the cybersecurity sector, we should accept that gift and use it to our advantage.
> Hearing a bit more on this. Apparently it's up to the CVE board to decide what to do, but for now no new CVEs will be added after tomorrow. the CVE website will still be up.
Basically when any software/library/whatever has a vulnerability, they have to communicate that out themselves, in some format.
If I'm developing a product built on 20 libraries, it won't just be a matter of scanning CVEs for major vulnerabilities any more, so I'm more likely to miss one.
"always update" doesn't always work, when to manage a product you realistically have to version pin.
So, while arguably true, there wont be a single source of truth of new cve's. It doesn't however mean there wont be.
I would imagine the only SANE option would be some kind of git repository where CNA's can collaborate. Probably run some code across to make the website that people can easily access.
This is deliberate. I just want to figure out the avenues of communication and coordination between trump admin and moscow so we can pin them down better.
Is MITRE's CVE program redundant with NIST's National Vulnerability Database? I'm having a hard time telling how the two are related, or if NVD is simply performing the same service as MITRE.
NIST NVE relies on the CVE program. (vulnerabilities get reported, MITRE assigns CVEs and publishes them, NIST then copies that list and adds their own scoring etc to it)
FWIW, I've never understood why this sort of thing wasn't just directly handled by the NSA --- aren't they the group which should be tasked with cybersecurity?
I always suspected that "Department of Homeland Security" would lead to Banana-republic-like shenanigans --- could we defund them?
"National Security" doesn't mean you personally. It's the government only. There's a conflict of interest that immediately arises if a part of the DoD (who owns cyberwarafe, which uses vulns) maintains a public vuln database.
Because, contrary to popular views, there is no "government of the world".
So, since the US government needed that (it provides security to US businesses), they organised and funded it (as everything else, with US taxpayers money, and savings from investors in US and abroad.)
Now, the US government decided to commit temporary-seppuku, so a number of things will happen:
* state-level government will use their local-taxpayer money to fund similar efforts (with duplication of effort), or share it with everyone
* another country or block of country will do it, and decide whether they want to "share". (I suppose Russia and China have more of an incentive to keep their CVE DB private, given their level of dis-integration with US economy ? EU maybe ?)
* an international, ad-hoc organisation is created to share the funding (something like NATO.) Multi-latteralism is not exactly in fashion this days, but if EU does it, it will be "international" by design since we're not really a federation ; so, states in "Southern Canada" are welcome to join.
* or none of that happens, the CVE db rots for a while, until a sufficiently embarrassing cybersecurity problem occurs, and the CVE db is deemed worthy of the "10% you need to bring back" by President Elon.
Pray your company, families and friends are never on the wrong side of the "reverse-Chersteron's fence".
The US has made at least hundreds of billions of dollars from it's tech companies and has had a dominance over global tech for a long time. The tech industry has brought a crazy amount of money and power to the US so it makes sense the US puts extra effort to support it.
The US isn't supporting it out of charity, it's good for US businesses to have someone coordinating this for everyone. Why would we want to rely on other countries to be supporting our tech sector? At least now we are subject to only the capricious whims of our own government, as little comfort as that is right now (if another country was funding it we would be relying on the whims of a foreign government, which isn't ideal when tech is the golden goose of your modern economy).
The CVE program was started over 25 years ago. It is very reputable (until yesterday) and it was very much in the interest of the US to be seen as the stewards of this.
The funding requirements can't be that high and I'm willing to bet that other countries and entities would have happily stepped up if they had the chance.
Up until recently CVE was very centralized and only in the last few years have there been steps in more decentralization with CNAs taking more responsibility, Red Hat as a CNA of last-resort etc.
So, the cost of doing all of this work has already been shifted partially (!) away from the US but I have not seen any movement towards e.g. moving the program to a foundation which could have been done.
Personally I would conclude that it was the responsibility of the US to pay for this because they wanted to and it was in their best interest to control this program.
They have the chance to step up now. Every Comercial company that is supposedly so reliant on this for their very existence has the opportunity today. They can fund it.
What commercial company is going to "fund" this? It's such a strange idea, disconnected from the real world. You may as well say "companies can start doing road maintenance, as they are so reliant on them for their very existence."
And perhaps if there had been more than a days notice, some consortium could be pulled together, but who's going to pay? Why would private companies do this, how do they profit? CVE program was the roads that everybody could drive on.
The basic lack of understanding of how the world works is killing the US. Why do people think we have such a massive GDP? Where do people think that comes from? We've given control of everything in society over to our dumbest and greediest members that have no clue about how anything works.
The EU. They can have all the massive advantages that funding MITRE will give them. Why won't they step up to the plate? It's killing the EU and they have absolutely no idea how anything works. It's why they're a dying empire.
I will bet money that removing the cap from a bottle will be a hate crime in Europe before they start funding a institution like MITRE that actually functions.
I mention this in another comment. The infrastructure for an alternative is already partially in place.
In my opinion it's mostly the industry needing to adapt to a new setup that needs to happen. It was just "easy" to rely on what's already there. A lot of company policies need to be adapted etc.
It's a program the US government spun up to serve America's interests. Why would someone else pay for American interests?
Other countries have their own programs, some cooperating with the US, others separate. China has the CNNVD if you're interested in helping Chinese society safe. My government operates https://advisories.ncsc.nl/advisories to serve my country's interests.
Of course, the US is free to abandon their programme and rely on Chinese, Russian, and European vulnerability databases to keep their country safe. It does save them a couple of million after all!
Because USA was a superpower that can afford it easily. Taking the leadership in everything is quite cheap price to pay when the other end of the bargain is everyone else has to follow you.
Now of course USA is ceasing (voluntarily, by stripping down every international soft power effector in government) to be a superpower, to the great glee of dictators all around the world.
The "we can't afford being great" is a direct admission that USA is no longer a superpower. And is not going to become great again, just another nation again (at whims of China).
The nazis don't think that though, uh I mean conservatives. After they've burned down everything, they expect still to be a superpower somehow. Do they think they can just start a war with everyone who doesn't play ball? It's hard to comprehend what their rational is, if there is one.
Don't worry, that will also end soon. Regimes that require political subservience from universities, like the current US administration, inevitably result in poor research capabilities in the long run.
It's a near certitude that Russia and China each have databases of exploitable software errors and prize zero days.
It was to the advantage of the US and allies to coordinate and lead in tracking and fixing such errors.
Multiple countries, companies, and individuals contributed finding and fixing bugs.
The administrative task of keeping track was one part of a greater picture, a part that came with first to be advised and other perks.
It's not that the US had a responsibility to take on the lead admin task, more that in past times the US saw an advantage to being at the centre of global action.
This is just another part of increasing US isolationism.
Almost every other western country does fund their own databases, CVE was just significant because its the one central source of truth. its like a standard. Instead of having to coordinate with dozens of different registries every time you publish a vulnerability you just communicate with one instead.
Researchers also don't directly talk with MITRE they go through one of the intermediaries that assigns the number.
In public spaces like this, though on the face of it the argument might appear to be with the toddler, it's also about batting down the idiocy and not letting it swamp out basic common sense and reason.
Bluesky has a different tact that also works: block and hide and don't engage. However in forums like HN, where earnestness and questions are so prevalent, leaving these baiting questions and statements unanswered instead leaves them as bastions of the mind rot. Because these toddler-level arguments are being repeated daily through propaganda channels all over the internet, and if they are never answered, the constant swarm of propaganda takes in even more people.
I do sometimes wonder how different HN would be if it had "block". Mind you I think few people are getting their propaganda from here, it's more likely to be downstream of other well-poisoners.
Who is still stunned by these things? They want you to be stunned; they want you to tell everyone else that you're stunned to spread feelings of terror and powerlessness. If you actually are stunned, you are stunningly ignorant. If you are not and still saying it, perhaps to emphasize your unhappiness, you are a 'useful idiot'. Either way, if you are saying it, you are a useful idiot.
You should have known decades ago: The GOP impeached a President for lying about sex; they fabricated intelligence to invade another country (killing thousands of Americans and 100,000+ Iraqis) - and that was all before 2004. They've voted almost unanimously, multiple times, to bankrupt the country (by refusing to authorize debt for existing obligations). Nobody (i.e., the Dems failed to) stopped them or made them pay a price, so why wouldn't they keep doing those things. (Edit: And if you object because the analysis criticizes one side and therefore you reject it as partisan, that's a big part of the reason nothing was done.)
This time they published Project 2025, telling you what they were going to do.
Project 2025 literally calls for dismantling the DHS. Seems pretty unsurprising that the CVE database wouldn’t be in the list of things they’d care to maintain in that process.
I see this as the perfect moment to get into consulting - either development, or security. People were not sure what jobs AI will create: "GenAI babysitting" is one of them.
The private sector zero day market collapsed last year with Zerodium - corporate bug bounties, nation states in-housing offensive security operations, and the democratization of knowhow destroyed the Zero Day market.
Am I missing something or was this literally announced with less than 24 hours of warning that one of the critical components to the cyber security landscape was disappearing.
What the fuck are you supposed to do about this. This is something that should have had multiple MONTHS of warning in order to allow those who depend on the CVE infrastructure to plan what to do next with their security posture.
Consider this part of the attack on the American infrastructure, economy, and society. Attacks do not abide by laws, official procedures, or come with warnings.
There are quite a few threads on hackernews that were cautiously optimistic about doge with, frankly, pretty naive libertarian takes about how the government works.
The government is not particular (in the sense of particularism) and cannot be easily tuned to fix particular problems; rather, its best solutions come through institutional procedure and design, such as the tension between the FAA and the NTSB that, at a first glance, would seem like obviously needless duplication and waste.
It is a broad, blunt, wasteful instrument to solve broad, blunt problems in a way that may not be the best but that work far, far better than alternatives that have been tried.
That the effort to treat government like a personal budget has ended up destroying important things is a sad inevitability of such efforts. I hope it goes remembered.
It won't be. Willful ignorance is a cornerstone of the movement. You can't lie about what you don't know. You can't have a bad take if you don't know. Upton Sinclaire said in the 1930's: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Now add to "salary" "identity", "relationships", "sense of belonging to the group". This is why critical, independent thinking, speaking truth to power, must be separately honored and encouraged by a healthy culture, because these attributes are by default mercilessly punished. (Physical courage and heroism are honored by a healthy culture for similar reasons.)
It’s astounding that the users here watched all the horrendous things going on and ignored them. But now the CVE numbers are gone it’s shocking and too far.
Come again? This is Hacker News, a heavily moderated forum with a narrow focus. We don't discuss Israel or El Salvador here (unless it's tech related.)
I would hope the folks that frequent HN would not be so insular as to only read what happens on HN and not read any other news source.
If you’ve somehow missed Trump’s systematic dismantling of academic freedom or his disappearing of folks he doesn’t like, then we have a far bigger problem than the limits of what is discussed on HN.
Please, this place has permeated with Trump rage since before he took office. The only way you could think he was ignored is to not have read any comments.
Oh! It will be even more fun when the entire infotech and infosec industry starts seething soon. Then the rest of the world will just make alternative arrangements and move on, leaving the US behind because they can't be trusted anymore. HN's reaction is just a small taste of things to come.
Reminds me of Trump's first term where he said if we stopped testing for Covid, we'd stop catching new cases and case numbers would go down. If you stop testing for vulnerabilities then vulnerabilities go down. Easy stuff.
No, more seriously, just like with shutting down NOAA services, it seems the goal is to:
1. cut services (we saved taxpayer money!!)
2. at some point later: oh, we actually need those services
3. pay <insert your favorite vendor here, preferably one connected to Musk> to provide the service (see! we don't need to pay gov employees!!) (fine print: the vendor costs 2-3x the original cost). But by then no one is looking at the spending numbers anymore.
And here lies the problem. Even from a libertarian perspective DOGE is counterproductive because maintaining a system is much more cost effective than starting it anew.
Especially when you cut something recklessly, figure out in month that you need back that capability right now and have very little leverage to negotiate with private providers.
When you look at the last cutting effort in the Clinton administration the difference in jarring.
Combine that with the fact that with a few exceptions DOGE has been cutting the most cost effective programs (i can’t think of a better bang for buck science program than NOAA) it’s saved very little vs the amount of pain it has caused.
> This sounds like looking for lemonade in a genocide.
It really doesn't. This level of catastrophising has no point. It would be nice if CVE continued to exist, but it wasn't close to perfect, and perhaps it can continue in another form. There's no particular reason the US taxpayer has to sponsor global security threat tracking any more than any other taxpayer or customer.
This is also a myopic argument against funding standards bodies that support the internet.
The point of having a global, shared database is a single, authoritative (more-or-less), semi-vetted repository that can hold vendor accountable externally without digital amnesia or downplaying issues, and global unique identifiers. If that takes an international nonprofit funded by bits of the free world who are okay with investing in commonwealth infrastructure, so be it. Those who don't understand what they're destroying so casually are ignorant, and possibly evil if they do understand.
> This is also a myopic argument against funding standards bodies that support the internet.
No, it's the opposite. Things like this shouldn't be in the hands of a single government. They should be independent and funded by many parties. The part of your message that isn't catastrophisation is agreeing with exactly what I'm saying.
Some companies are already clueless when it comes to CVE management. Probably won’t see the effects immediately but give it a few more years for new generation of vulns to be created/found and we will be back to early 2000s level security.
Open season on American corporations for domestic and foreign hackers.
If program isn’t brought back then CVE database likely to be fragmented amongst the “private” CVE databases.
Sec Corp A has 700 well documented CVEs but Sec Corp B has 702 CVEs in their database since NIST funding pulled. What do corps do? Maybe some of them with massive budgets setup contracts with both to get “full spectrum coverage”. Maybe other non-technical companies that think of IT as strictly a cost will go with the cheapest or forego it all together.
Who knows maybe we get ~~~free labor~~~ open source community to pick up the slack?
This country with the orange man administration is quickly going to shit. Not in a “I dislike {opposing party} way” either. In a “I dislike authoritarian regimes” way.
It's more likely to boost the zero day black market. I don't know if I want to attribute this to idiocy (indiscriminate cost cutting), greed (contracts for their crony pals) or malice (hoarding and trading 0 days).
- What improvement did the NHTSA ever bring to full self driving?
- What improvement in airline safety did the FAA bring?
- What good did FEMA do in any disasters?
I don't want to quip about how their achievements are invisible because they prevented the disasters that would have brought the spotlight on them, even when they were too underfunded to properly do their jobs. But I sure would like to see the people making these smart comments to give it a try and see how that goes. Then again, I have no complaints - at this rate, we'll get that chance soon.
It seems phrasing it in the form of a joke was too much.
I was trying to convey (with levity/humor) WHY it should continue to be funded as well as the argument that should be made to the one currently in control of the spineless US Congress.
Yes, fixing the vulnerabilities is important. However what the government probably does gain from it is an inside advantage in the lead time for vulnerabilities to protect against, as well as to exploit on adversaries.
For those reading, a fair few of my recent posts were downvoted after this comment, and it was initially flagged.
If I violated some rule so be it, and I could care less about internet points, but it certainly feels like suppression of individuals based on individual posts which is a behaviour that could end up being the death of hn.
I find it a little incredible people are still talking about "four years".
They tried to reject the election result and do a coup, and were rewarded for it by getting back into power. They are refusing to follow the law or the courts. They are sending people to gulags in foreign countries. All the checks and balances were destroyed last time. The party has been stripped of anyone who would fight the admin or reject this illegality. They have set up a power grab over elections.
There will not be free and fair elections in four years unless they are simply too incompetent to rig it, the rubicon was crossed long ago. Without mass protest that makes it impossible for them to hold power, American democracy is dead.
They have tried to do it, they say they want to do it, they have the ability to do it, they are actively doing it, and no one is stopping them. How are people still acting like in four years they are going to neatly hand over power to be prosecuted for their crimes?
I understand you have elections in two years, don't you ? I don't know if a complete reversal congress is possible.
That would be a good litmus test. "They" have not prevented special elections so far ; if "They" need to prevent the next one, whatever they try will happen then, I suppose ?
Organizing mass protests isn't something you do instead of organizing electoral opposition. Even in countries that haven't had fair elections for a while, people generally still organize opposition and talk about how they're going to vote. The best way to ensure your opponents retain power is to go around telling people it's too late and they've already won.
I'm not saying people should not organise to vote, I'm objecting to the framing of "in four years this will be over" or "in four years we can fight this", if you are waiting for elections to solve this alone, that's a mistake. Elections alone won't be enough. It's not too late to do anything, it is too late for just voting against it to be enough.
Yes, as it would be a public good to everyone to be able to know where the potholes(that aren't profitable to fix for these private companies apparently) are so they can avoid them.
They might take a step back and realize that it would be more cost-effective to just own the roads, in which case your thought experiment ends where we are, because where we are was a place reasoned to(to an extent).
Doesn't the government use those software (private and open source) to handle private information of citizens and other sensitive information? And what about their contractors? That alone justifies maintaining such a database.
I'm sure that a hundred other countries will step up to fund it. But have you given any thought about why the US was so willing to sponsor it alone in the past?
I don't see why this should be publicly funded, so I don't really see an issue with this. The industry benefits from having a CVE database, so the industry should fund it.
The insane number of downvotes you’re getting for saying basic common sense stuff, it’s why we should push for stricter political rules here in HN.
You didn’t say something wrong or controversial, just an opinion.
Some ideologies love to pay things with other people’s wallets, and they’ll do whatever they can to pursue this.
No, "the industry" is all of us alive in the 21st century who depend on software to make material decisions and to be resilient to attacks and tampering. We were all funding it, and now surely we will see some big tech company now assume responsibility from the federal government (please god don't let it be Oracle...)
As a newly minted cynic, this seems like a cynical play to save someone's budget.
Step 1: Post discreetly to a forum with minimal information and an absurdly short deadline
Step 2: Phone your friend, the former board member, to make your case on LinkedIn
Step 3: Ring up a friendly journalist and give them a tip
Step 4: Reference the insuing chaos as justification for keeping your project funded
Note that the article carefully avoids pinning the blame on DOGE or the Whitehouse while heavily implying it. MITRE is technically a private entity, albeit a non-profit. And the very last paragraph of the article states:
> A CISA spokesperson told CSO, “CISA is the primary sponsor for the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) program… Although CISA’s contract with the MITRE Corporation will lapse after April 16, we are urgently working to mitigate impact and to maintain CVE services on which global stakeholders rely.”
To be clear, the point isn't to say that the CVE program isn't valuable, nor is it to say that it's good for a shenanigan like this to be necessary.
The point is that, unless you're directly involved in this subject (not impacted—involved), it's probably best to maintain a "wait and see" attitude rather than succumb to catastrophizing this news.
Have you seen proof that this is what has been happening? Your explanation is much more convoluted than "DHS cut funding, like the administration has said it is going to do".
Currently hosting costs are unclear, but it should be doable if we offer API access for like 5 bucks / month for private and 100 / month for corporate or similar.
Already did a backup of the NVD in the last couple hours, currently backing up the security trackers and OVAL feeds.
Gonna need some sleep now, it's morning again.
My project criteria:
- hosting within the EU
- must have a copyleft license (AGPL)
- must have open source backend and frontend
- dataset size is around 90-148 GB (compressed vs uncompressed)
- ideally an e.V. for managing funds and costs, so it can survive me
- already built my vulnerability scraper in Go, would contribute it under AGPL
- already built all schema parsers, would contribute them also under AGPL
- backend and frontend needs to be built
- would make it prerendered, so that cves can be static HTML files that can be hosted on a CDN
- needs submission/PoC/advisory web forms and database/workflow for it
- data is accumulated into a JSON format (sources are mixed non standard formats for each security tracker. Enterprise distros use odata or oval for the most parts)
If you are interested, write me on linkedin.com/in/cookiengineer or here.
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