I do about a monthly update of my Debian machines. Today I did the usual monthly update and noticed loads of packages uploading from the “security” branch. I’ve had the impression (just an impression) that more and more packages are being updated from security over the past many months. Trixie has been out for a while now and I would have thought that less and less updates should be coming from security. Has anyone had this sensation and if so has anyone linked this to AI finding more holes in OSS that would have normally been found by human scrutiny? Has there been any official research into this? And if this is true, does it mean that we have been running insecure software all along? Or is there is there a risk that AI start filing patches that actually make it less secure because software maintainers are not being rigorous in verifying who is submitting the patch? AI must be changing the paradigm of software development more than any other area of our lives and I can’t still work out if in a better way or not.

  • ISO@lemmy.zip
    101·
    10 hours ago

    Let me do the humble action of quoting myself 🙂 from 5 months ago:

    There has been murmurings, mainly from non-technical people, about how “AI” will render advancements in safer type systems nearly useless, because the magic (mushroom) AI will just find all the issues in code written in older languages. What they don’t realize is that the effect will be reversed. Many established projects that come with a high reputation, and a veneer of maturity, indestructibility, and meticulousness, will simply, and perhaps unfairly, lose that perception under the continuous barrage of potentially high impact bugs and vulnerabilities surfaced by these tools, with not enough human bandwidth to keep up with them, and with new code susceptible to the same problems repeating over and over. This will effectively lead to an even harder push for adopting technologies that prevent a good chunk of these bugs from ever happening at any point, not the other way around.