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brunoborges | on: Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs
I joined Oracle in 2012, and I myself complained that the user experience was horrible: get an Oracle DB installed was a nightmare, starting with so many questions. I heard complaints from other users about it requiring, during installation, that an admin password must be set.

I myself had preferred to use MySQL because it was so simple and easy to get started and using it.

Until I learned how many MySQL databases were configured without user/password and many instances were reachable over the internet.

Then, eventually products started to move towards "don't even ask the user to set a password, otherwise they will set a stupid password" and just generate the password during installation. This made the user think more before saving that password or changing the password to something less stupid. But better than all that, liability was no longer with the software maker.

dwedge | parent | next
Maybe it's distro specific but I'm fairly sure mysql by default installed with skip networking around 2012, and with bind-address set to localhost since then. Also the root user is only configured from local by default but I'm not sure if that was true 14 years ago.

If the defaults are more secure than your examples, it's not fair to blame the database or the defaults.

And personally I hate it when software forces security requirements on me. Maybe I don't need an admin password. It's one reason I gave up on selfhosted gitlab - there was no option to reduce password complexity for my users, and those users were only connecting from the local network. The other reason being that it spammed 100GB of logs in a month and was using 11GB of RAM before I'd even gotten around to setting up the first repo.

danudey | root | parent | next
MySQL installed with skip-networking was very common, but as soon as you need to access it over the network (e.g. when you move from one box with MySQL and PHP to one for each) then you have to enable networking and everything falls apart.

Also, the number of times in my career that I've googled a problem and seen some forum post saying "Oh, just run chmod -R 777 /var/www/wordpress/uploads/ and it'll fix that" "Great it worked thanks!" tells me that it's the blind leading the blind out there and I'm sure there's tons of forum posts telling people how to disable authentication on their MySQL and disable iptables on their server so that their PHP app can connect to the DB without a password.

tredre3 | root | parent | next
> selfhosted gitlab - there was no option to reduce password complexity for my users

Gitlab's default requirements aren't that intense, but you can make them more stringent if you want.

https://docs.gitlab.com/user/profile/user_passwords/#passwor...

I guess your goal was to allow users to have 4 character passwords, i.e. "love." which afaik you can't do.

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dylan604 | root | parent | next
Most software matures to the point that sane defaults get set. In the early days, one could be forgiven for making MVP as the security and attack vectors were still growing. Now that attacks have matured, and new software that is released without mitigation of these mature risks is just dumb and lazy and deserve no forgiveness for being released that way.
z3t4 | root | parent | next
You should use a user directory (AD) and then use single sign on (SSO) or or the like. It feels kinda stupid at first, but when you have many users and many apps the AD will make life easier and with SSO users can sign in with one click of a button.
brendoelfrendo | root | parent
I guess I'm confused; why would you, as an admin, want to allow your users to use less secure passwords? I get that your argument is that all traffic is local and so complex passwords are unnecessary (debatable, I would hold that a strong password policy would still be desirable for defense-in-depth, depending on the network and risk profile), but that doesn't make them undesirable.
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com2kid | parent | next
I got bit by this with redis a couple years ago. The default install on my VPS's distro had it open to the world by default, and it even configured UFW for me (gee thanks!)

No password, owned within seconds of install. :/

OroPla | parent | next
Maybe that is why so many things live in Excel instead of a proper database. Security at the expense of convenience does come at the expense of security, after all.

Not sure why passwords still exist conceptually. I was hoping we'd move past this annoyance, but instead security has become even more annoying. And all that security with two factor hoops to jump through only for someone to steal your session cookie.

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