I think the type of users it attracts (techies, crypto ppl, etc) makes it worth more too.
Ben Surtees (Bartender’s original developer) burned all the good will accumulated over years in one moment. Never again can anyone trust software under that name.
There were no targets involved. There were no nation-states involved. There were no attacks involved. You might not like the new developer, but this whole discussion of a nation-state and 9 figure payoff is totally ridiculous.
What I didn’t like was the secrecy, that was a breach of user trust. Why wasn’t it announced is the problem.
No, this by itself doesn't make Little Snitch or any business worth $50M. You're dreaming. That's a crazy valuation.
Little Snitch is not a working exploit for iPhone or Android.
> I think that they would be fine with paying 50M for a userbase that has a high population of devs, admins, etc. Being able to backdoor someone like this in the right organization down the line is probably worth 50M.
No, sorry, this is absurd. A ton of products have a high population of devs, admins, etc. These are not getting acquired by intelligence agencies. Give me one example. There's nothing inherently valuable about this population.
Who is a Little Snitch customer worth 50M to attack? Name them.
If you know of someone specific you want to target who uses it, the investment could pay off.
For example, we know from your blog posts that you use LittleSnitch. Someone who wanted to target you might do a lot to spy on you by buying LittleSnitch, probably.
Think of your own apps, too. I don’t think you’d do the same that Ben Surtees did and sell everything in secret, but then again I don’t personally know you. You may have a price that I’m not aware of. For that reason alone, even as I trust the current code is not nefarious, I can never give StopTheMadness access to every website and can only use it selectively, which is inconvenient.
As I said in another comment, Bartender had no target! It was not an attack. An app was sold by one developer to another developer. End of story.
> If you know of someone specific you want to target who uses it
But you don't. And you don't in the case of Little Snitch either.
You can dream up a bunch of absurd hypothetical scenarios, but they are not the reality.
> Someone who wanted to target you
Nobody wants to target me. Nobody cares about me. I am insignificant.
The point is that it shows it can happen. You’re a browser extension developer, surely you know how often it happens that developers of popular extensions are approached by shady businesses and sometimes do even sell.
> You can dream up a bunch of absurd hypothetical scenarios, but they are not the reality.
As someone else has pointed out to you, not hypothetical.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699068
> Nobody wants to target me. Nobody cares about me. I am insignificant.
You give yourself too little credit. I know of several developers and other people with influence who use your extensions with complete trust. Compromising you means compromising them, which means compromising even more people. Jia Tan has aptly demonstrated you don’t need to directly attack your final target, only a link in the chain, even if it looks insignificant.
Yes, developers of free extensions who sell for a pittance.
I don't have a popular extension. My extension is relatively expensive and thus unpopular. I don't have enough users to be interesting to shady businesses. My extension is more valuable to me than to anyone else, because I, one person, can make a living from it.
> As someone else has pointed out to you, not hypothetical.
That link seems a bit silly. There's a screenshot with no explanatory context whatsoever. There's a list of items, many of which look quite mundane and uninteresting. Certainly it is not suggesting acquiring the company for millions of dollars. It sounds like someone—could even be an intern for all we know—is interested in attacking the app from the outside.
I agree with tptacek: "This is clownish" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813828
> You give yourself too little credit.
No, I give myself too much credit. ;-)
> I know of several developers and other people with influence who use your extensions with complete trust. Compromising you means compromising them, which means compromising even more people.
What is the value of compromising these people? Oh noes, the CIA can now write Daring Fireball articles!
> Jia Tan has aptly demonstrated you don’t need to directly attack your final target, only a link in the chain, even if it looks insignificant.
What chain? I have no third-party dependencies. If someone can compromise Apple's operating systems, then my software or Little Snitch is the least of our worries.
I do specifically and intentionally avoid using NPM, because of frequent compromises. Little Snitch is not even JavaScript, so no worries there.
I believe you, and as a fellow indie developer trust you and your intentions and that you’re careful to not be compromised. But if I’m being honest with myself I don’t have concrete proof of any of those. So I trust but also try to limit the blast radius if anything goes wrong. Does that make sense? I think you might agree there.
Your blog helps with that trust and with understanding the human behind it.
> Certainly it is not suggesting acquiring the company for millions of dollars.
Alright, yeah, I see we’re talking a bit past each other in that regard. You’re right that’s how the conversation started (before I joined in) but I don’t care for that angle fully either. I agree there are more plausible ways to achieve the objective.
> Oh noes, the CIA can now write Daring Fireball articles!
Not sure that’d be a downgrade. Maybe they could fix the Markdown perl script, too. Joking aside, I think there would be better targets, like someone on Apple’s Passwords team.
> What chain? I have no third-party dependencies. If someone can compromise Apple's operating systems
I don’t mean it in the sense of software dependencies, but in the sense that some app you use would compromise you. You know macOS’ permissions are mostly security theatre. We know people inside Apple use third-party apps. I can imagine ways of exploiting that, given a bit more knowledge of people from inside (which could be gathered from working there for a while, trawling social media, maybe reading Gruber’s emails, …).
> I do specifically and intentionally avoid using NPM, because of frequent compromises.
Same, no argument from me there.
You seem to be waffling here between targeted and untargeted attacks.
There's a world of difference between compromising me or an Apple employee and compromising my software or Apple's software. You don't magically get the latter from the former.
Untargeted attacks are just looking for the usual stuff, e.g., money. They don't care about who the victims are or what else they have.
It would require a targeted attack to insert mallicious code into my software or into Apple's software. You claim, "I can imagine ways of exploiting that," but I don't actually believe you. If you can imagine it, then explain exactly how.
There's no evidence that anyone is targeting my software or that anyone has any reason to target my software. Even if I downloaded a typical malware app from the web, that wouldn't result in malicious code getting shipped in my software.
I'm not aware of anyone on the Apple Passwords team using my software, so if someone were trying to attack me to get to them, that's seems a bit fruitless, to use a pun. In any case, the chain from compromising me, to compromising my software releases, to compromising an Apple engineer, to compromising Apple software releases, is convoluted to the extreme and would require much more specifics than anyone has given here (or is capable of giving).
In any case, I'm quite careful—though not tin foil hat paranoid—about which software I download and run on my Mac, and I've never downloaded malware in more than 20 years as a Mac user. Obviously I'm careful about my own privacy and security, since I use Little Snitch too!
Why do you think it matters? Little Snitch is used by enough people that it would be completely worthwhile as just an asset. With an infinite budget you don't look for the exploits once you have the target; you accumulate the exploits, and use them as you get targets.
I don't know how you think these apps are useful for small-time criminals to exploit, but governments somehow wouldn't be able to figure out a use for them. It reeks of "I have nothing to hide."
Maybe they use Little Snitch just to figure out what you're running, use another exploit to get into that, get blackmail material on one of your family members through connections made from files on your computer, and offer not to release it and to donate $500K to your project (that they'll set up for you, and will come from some obscure European foundation's fund), or "invest" (with no expectation or even mechanism for getting a return) into your LLC if you insert code into your software. Or even simply accept a pull request, which will be totally deniable if the code gets caught, and the pull request eventually traced to a Chinese/Russian/Iranian/North Korean IP.
I have no idea what evidence you expect people to leave. The goal is not to leave evidence. Why would someone announce that they were interested in you or targeting you?
(Taking this reply as an excuse to write a concurring rant...)
Also, once you've compromised somebody's integrity and got them on the payroll, why not use them for other things? They can join other projects, they can sit on foundation boards, they can become tech media personalities, etc., etc....
There's nothing tinfoil about this. It's cheap and easy. You could subvert every open source project in the world for less than the cost of one fancy plane, or a few fancy missiles. The CIA went in on a crypto company, got it to weaken everyone's crypto, and likely killed the son who inherited it from the previous owner. "Nation-state buying Little Snitch" is not some crazy fantasy, it's a mundane scenario (I'm sounding like LLM today, I think.) Even though OpenSnitch could be compromised even more cheaply, they show all their code.
Also, aggressors don't just use carrots, they use sticks. The Altman sister stuff for example (true or not, works even better if it's true) certainly seems like a stick. Top of the world, then suddenly a jury (easily subverted by a state) puts you in prison or takes away control of your company, and now you're killed (or "kill yourself") in prison or otherwise. Now your widower and your sister own the company, and they say yes to everything. If my multi-billionaire brother molested me, you'd never hear about it because he would have trivially given me enough money to forget about it and him. I wouldn't be filing any lawsuit. Makes me suspect that he's being resistant to something.
You're missing the most important part of the motivation here: why in the world would a nation-state give a damn about Little Snitch, especially to the tune of $XXX million dollars?
A nation-state could pay $XXX million to your significant other to spy on you. But again, a nation-state doesn't give a damn about you.
Per user hacked, it can be very cheap¹ compared to bribing anyone. And give data/access that SO can't get.
State is not interested in you until it does. Being Jewish, Polish, Gypsy, Gay. Or just WrongThinking. Or maybe it becomes super cheap and easy to process all information?
1: it can even be free. You either give us backdoor to all your users or you rot in jail. Here's a complementary beating up or pictures of your kids, to argument our position further.
It is already a thing, at least in UK and AU [1]:
> Both countries now claim the right to secretly compel tech companies and individual technologists, including network administrators, sysadmins, and open source developers – to re-engineer software and hardware under their control, so that it can be used to spy on their users. Engineers can be penalized for refusing to comply with fines and prison; in Australia, even counseling a technologist to oppose these orders is a crime.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/new-fight-online-priva...
2) They are interested in software will billions of users. They are not interested in software with thousands of users.
How many users do you think Little Snitch has?
"This is clownish" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13813828