black hat There's a rot at the heart of modern software development that's destroying innovation, and infosec legend Moxie Marlinspike thinks he knows exactly what's to blame: Agile development.

Marlinspike kicked off the second day of Black Hat with a talk that was ostensibly meant to be a brass chat with Black Hat founder Jeff Moss, but the Signal founder stole the show with an opening chat that presented a case for recapturing the "magic" of software development gone lost after 20 years. That loss, he argued, was due to developers being stuck in "black box abstraction layers" that rob them of the freedom needed to be innovative.

"Anyone who leads an engineering organization is going to have some kind of management philosophy that is somehow downstream, derived from, in the zone of, or somehow related to agile," Marlinspike said.

Moxie Marlinspike (left) at Black Hat with event founder Jeff Moss (right) – Click to enlarge