2015-11-23
PC laptop and desktop vendors are now clearly hostile parties
You may have heard of Lenovo's SuperFish incident, where Lenovo destroyed HTTPS security on a number of their laptops by pre-installing root certificates with known private keys. Well, now Dell's done it too, and not just on consumer laptops, and it turns out not just one bad certificate but several. One could rant about Dell here, but there's a broader issue that's now clear:
PC vendors have become hostile parties that you cannot trust.
Dell has a real brand. It sells to businesses, not just consumers. Yet Dell was either perfectly willing to destroy the security of business oriented desktops or sufficiently incompetent to not understand what they were doing, even after SuperFish. And this was not just a little compromise, where a certificate was accidentally included in the trust store, because a Dell program that runs on startup puts the certificate back in even when it's removed. This was deliberate. Dell decided that they were going to shove this certificate down the throat of everyone using their machines. The exact reasons are not relevant to people who have now had their security compromised.
If Dell can do this, anyone can, and they probably will if they haven't already done so. The direct consequence is that all preinstalled vendor Windows setups are now not trustworthy; they must be presumed to come from a hostile party, one that has actively compromised your security. If you can legally reinstall from known good Microsoft install media, you should do that. If you can't, well, you're screwed. And by that I mean that we're all screwed, because without trust in our hardware vendors we have nothing.
Given that Dell was willing to do this to business desktops, I expect that sooner or later someone will find similar vendor malware on preinstalled Windows images on server hardware (if they haven't already). Of course, IPMIs on server hardware are already an area of serious concern (and often security issues all on their own), even before vendors decide to start equipping them with features to 'manage' the host OS for you in the same way that the Dell startup program puts Dell's terrible certificate back even if you remove it.
(Don't assume that you're immune on servers just because you're running Linux instead of Windows. I look forward to the grim meathook future (tm jwz) where server vendors decide to auto-insert their binary kernel modules on boot to be helpful.)
Perhaps my gloomy cloud world future without generic stock servers is not so gloomy after all; if we can't trust generic stock servers anyways, their loss is clearly less significant. Smaller OEMs are probably much less likely to do things like this (for multiple reasons).
Why I care about how fast CPython is
Python is not really a fast language. People who use Python (me included) more or less accept this (or else it would be foolish to write things in the language), but still we'd often like our code to be faster. For a while the usual answer to this has been that you should look into PyPy in order to speed up Python. This is okay as far as it goes, and PyPy certainly can speed up some things, but there are reasons to still care about CPython's speed and wish for it to be faster.
The simple way of putting the big reason is to say that CPython is
the universal solvent of Python. To take one example, Apache's
mod_wsgi uses CPython; if you want to use it to deploy a WSGI
application in a relatively simple, hands-off way, you're stuck
with however fast CPython is. Another way that CPython is a universal
solvent is that CPython is more or less everywhere; most Unix systems
have a /usr/bin/python, for example, and it's going to be some
version of CPython. Finally, CPython is what most people develop
with, test against, write deployment documentation for, and so on;
this is both an issue of whether a package will work at all and an
issue of whether it's doing that defeats much of PyPy's speedups.
Thus, speeding up CPython speeds up 'all' Python in a way that improvements to PyPy seem unlikely to. Maybe in the future PyPy will be so pervasive (and so much a drop in replacement for CPython) that this changes, but that doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon (especially since PyPy doesn't yet support Python 3 and that's where the Python world is moving).
(Some people will say that speeding up things like Django web apps is unimportant, because web apps mostly don't use CPU anyways but instead wait for IO and so on. I disagree with this view on Python performance in general, but specifically for Django web apps it can be useful if your app uses less CPU in order to free up more of it for other things, and that's what 'going fast' translates to.)