> npm is not the only development community where this regularly happensThat is like people defending IIS in the early days by pointing out that Apache occasionally had security problems too. Or, back to the gun control analogy people saying “gun control didn't stop Bondi Beach, did it?” or pointing out [incorrectly]⁴ that everywhere that has gun control has knife crime⁴ instead.
> because there is a very clear and obvious reason why … . This doesn't apply for npm.
I disagree. There are a number of reasons that stack together, the four that spring to the top of my head being:
1. Numbers. There are a lot of potential targets you can exploit if you manage to get something into a ecosystem that large. This “being a big fat target” combined with being easy to exploit makes NPM a very juicy target, and encouraging people to use such a target without trying to implement countermeasures for this sort of attack is IMO reprehensible. Numbers isn't a problem in itself, like in the bad old days when IIS was a mess but Apache got (successfully) attacked far less, but they do exacerbate the security issue by multiplying the attack surface area.
1b. A lot of those using it are relatively untrained or just following recipes so do not know how to protect themselves, and may not even update after an attack like this and remain vulnerable for some further time. While this is not NPM's fault, being due to the popularity/commonality thing, it is something those in control of NPM should care about, if, as I believe is claimed, they care about their users⁰.
2. It is an environment where a ridiculous amount of dependencies, nested impressively deep, is practically encouraged, making audit very difficult even for those who try.
3. A number of good suggestions have been made that would mitigate, or at least vastly reduce, the risks. But action on these has, as far as we know, not happened. Sometimes for good reasons, or at least for reasons¹ rather than “just because”/“cost to implement”/“we don't wanna”, and sometimes, well, not. And no alternatives from within those running NPM are being suggested/worked-on, as far as we know² at least.
4. Those who would make most noise about any change, especially a breaking change that affects them in the smallest way, simply do not care about the risk the situation poses to the wider population.
While the gun control analogy might be a little stretched, I think it is relevant enough particularly because of points 3 & 4.
--------
[0] I refuse to use the word community here. This isn't a cosy little village where everyone knows your name and everyone looks out for everyone else.
[1] Them bringing significant breaking changes, or being too complex to implement piecemeal to give time for those breaks are dealt with or otherwise prepared for, for instance.
[2] If something was being looked into, I'd expect it to be announced³ as that would quieten criticisms like these, at least a little.
[3] Maybe not immediately, but this has been a known problem for so long that we are well past immediately.
[4] When it isn't the case that the US doesn't have knife crime, it just doesn't get reported because the gun issues are worse. Like car travel killing more in total then flights, but you don't hear about every car crash. The UK is often given as an example in these comparisons, but if you look at the stats our knife crime rates are lower than the US's - it isn't that other countries have knife problems instead, the US has worse knife problems as well as the guns problem.