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My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.

Wietse Venema

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Wietse Venema
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: January 1
Computer Scientist
Physicist
Holland
Wietse Zweitze Venema
Updated
Reply
Bugs
Software
Therefore
Known

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Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.
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Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.
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The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.
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For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.
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As of today, the Postfix mail transport agent has almost 50,000 lines of code, comments not included.
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Sure, but competition is good for the user.
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The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid.
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One bug in an SMTP server can open up the whole machine for intrusion.
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I don't expect an overnight change of all desktops to what the US Military used to call B3 level security. And even that would not stop users from shooting themselves into the foot.
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I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise.
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However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.
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Coming back to the topic of computer security, the TCP Wrapper is an example of such a safety net. I wrote it when my systems were under attack by someone who appeared to walk through walls.
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I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.
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At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for two successive years.
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This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.
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Windows favors multi-threading, which means that a service is implemented by one single process.
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