Portrait of a Failed Security Dashboard
The Department of Homeland Security announced that it was discontinuing its color-coded security advisory system today. In the software security world we often try to have big dashboards with red, yellow, and green indicating important things about our software. This is a great example of where such dashboards fail.
Case sensitive filesystems: The bane of Mac OS X
I now have a variety of applications that are incompatible with Mac OS X because I chose to install a case-sensitive filesystem 3 years ago when I got my Mac. Yes. THREE YEARS AGO. It has been possible to have a case sensitive filesystem (i.e., where files named READme, ReAdMe, and readme are all different files) for many years. Several major software vendors have been completely caught by this and failed to (a) account for it during development, (b) account for it in testing, or (c) provide any kind of solution.
The vendors that give me grief right now are:
- Logitech (Harmony Remote manager)
- Red Marble Games (Democracy 2)
- Adobe (Acrobat 9)
Now what really burns me up is that I just upgraded to Acrobat 9 from Acrobat 7 on Mac OS, and Acrobat 7 WORKED on a case-sensitive filesystem. It's a regression!