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0 pointspyre14y ago0 comments

Relevant:

  What I want you to see in that thread I mentioned is the
  way the core team perceives this. You are not discovering
  anything unknown, we already know this stuff and we like
  attr protection to work the way it is.

Looks like this guy got really frustrated with the Rails devs basically saying that he didn't know what he was talking about. This reminds me of all of the unsafe defaults that PHP used to have. Same justification too, "it's a config setting, so it's up to the developer/sysadmin to read the docs and set them right."

0 comments

mokus14y ago

This justification seems especially odd to me since Rails did so much in the first place to popularize the idea that the default behavior should be the one most likely to be "right". Don't they (or didn't they at one time) have a mantra "convention over configuration"?

I guess that doesn't apply to security.

vidarh14y ago

This also makes it all the more serious. As the PHP developers found out the hard way:

When you make it really easy to get started, a lot of people won't learn the system in depth enough to understand all the issues because they don't need to in order to make it work "well enough" for most cases.

By making Rails so easy to get started, they pretty much guarantee that there's going to be a ton of developers that don't pick up on, or forget, that they need to deal with issues like this.

That even a site like Github was vulnerable to this demonstrates just how seriously wrong it is to pick a default like this..

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