The secret he has forgotten for 25 years way back when he was a developer for BSD which is the forerunner of today’s open sourced programming languages. The length of time the said bug has remained in the system so to speak is so critical that he has warned people of the problem as it came to him. He investigates further and finds that all the derivatives of BSD still carried the same bug that he forgot to correct way back in the early days of the open source drive. Why is this so significant, the error though a quarter of a century old still exists in Operating systems like the Mac OSX which is a BSD derivative. From FreeBSD, NetBSD and Dragonfly BSD, they all carry the same old bug that Marc Balmer had to affect all of the changes immediately so no further problems arise.
Open sourced advocates claim that they are faster when it comes to fixing bugs which they do so when a member of the community reports one, the concession is reached and a subsequent patch is issued with mail sent to all those concerned. This incident highlights the need for better analysis of the tools used for our internet use. Imagine a vulnerability that has existed for 25 years and the solution was provided for by the original developer? If he had passed away then who would have realized such weaknesses? This may be the explanation for some of the biggest security threats we have been encountering all this time with malware. So the lesson would be not to totally rely on technology for it is still the man who makes the machine (computer) and tells it what and when to do it.