The current model of libraries and open-source development (topics which Randall has addressed extensively in the past) relies heavily on the free and continued dedication of unpaid hobbyists. Randall provided a concise, helpful explanation of the bug in 1354: Heartbleed Explanation. The aforementioned Steves were overworked, underfunded, and largely unknown volunteers whose efforts nevertheless underpinned the security of major websites throughout the world. One headline at the time demonstrated this comic in real life: "The Internet is Being Protected by Two Guys Named Steve".
In 2014, the Heartbleed bug revealed a significant portion of the internet was vulnerable to attack due to a bug in OpenSSL, a free and open-source library facilitating secure communication.
#RANDOMISH MEME COMICS CODE#
A disgruntled developer unpublishing 11 lines of code was able to break everybody's build, because everyone was using it. For example, the famous left-pad incident in the NPM package manager left many major and minor web services which depended on it unable to build.
While in theory, such a system may sound good for developers who would need to write and maintain fewer lines of code, systems which are highly optimized are also highly susceptible to rapid changes. JavaScript was designed to be an easy to use front end scripting language, not a basic and core backend language as users of node.js's NPM package manager have made it be. Node.js (a platform for JavaScript) and Python are two modern ecosystems providing huge stashes of centralized libraries where developers of the world can come together to stand on the shoulders of all the small useful libraries they make for each other, to make new ones that are more and more powerful, and also more and more prone to sudden new unexpected bugs somewhere in the dependency chain. This was especially true in Unix and Linux, where an entire program is commonly used for one small task, and programs exist to tie others together into powerful shell scripts. By outsourcing what would seem like basic functions, such as string manipulation, to other libraries, developers waste less time reinventing the wheel, so the philosophy goes (or as Beret Guy's business practices literally: 2140: Reinvent the Wheel), and thus many tiny packages, many of which contained only one function, became popular dependencies.
Once systems became small, fast, and able to hold a lot of data, the ability to provide higher and higher degrees of automation made reusable libraries a huge engine behind the development of technology. Taking code re-usability and modularization to its logical extreme has been a long-time tenet for programmers programming began as a slow task on very memory-constrained systems, utilizing punch cards and days of delay waiting to discover a bug, so that reuse made things possible that otherwise wouldn't be. They therefore depend on ImageMagick, and would break if ImageMagick were to disappear. While there are also numerous libraries and APIs for performing these tasks within larger programs, ImageMagick is so popular and easy to use that many programs use its API or just find it easier to shell out to ImageMagick to perform a necessary transformation. ImageMagick, mentioned in the title text, is a popular, standalone utility released in 1990 that is used for performing transformations between various graphics file formats, and various other transformations. The concept of balance is not intended to be communicated by a stack diagram, making this a humorously absurd extension of a well-known diagram style. The stack in this cartoon bears a striking resemblance to a physical block tower, suggesting the danger that the tower will lose its balance when a critical piece is removed, in this case a piece near the bottom, labeled as being maintained by a single semi-anonymous person located somewhere relatively unimportant doing it for their own unknown reasons without fame or acknowledgement. This is analogous to a physical tower of blocks, in which higher blocks rest on lower blocks. Technology architecture is often illustrated by a stack diagram, in which higher levels of rectangles indicate components that are dependent on components in lower levels. Title text: Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.
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