I don't think the NSA is behind this. The NSA would have delivered backdoors that are very hard or impossible to find. These seem to be within reach of an ordinary in-detail security review of the system by anybody competent. A known backdoor is worthless.
My money is on incompetence, as this was obviously something people could find by just looking. IMO incompetence is worse because while intent can be fixed pretty fast if needed, incompetence cannot.
It is also a pretty good indicator for the sad state of practical IT when a security element (!) does not even manage to get something as basic as certificate verification right.
Indeed. The first check when I do when I buy computing hardware something is whether I can install an OS of my choosing on it. For example, I will not even look at a phone that is hard or impossible to root, or a tablet or mainboard that does not allow me to switch "secure" boot off. When I buy it, it is _mine_ afterwards and a vendor that does not understand this is not going to make a sale to me, ever.
That is bullshit which has long since been discredited. In the real world, the only thing a locked-down boot-loader like this accomplishes is to restrict what the user can do, it does not protect against malware as there are numerous other vectors.
Indeed. The one thing we may eventually have is some manufacturing and mining capability in space, maybe even something like a permanent moon-base, but humans will play a small role in that, if any. Humans are mostly useless in space or on the moon (but it is a big problem to keep them alive and healthy), while robots are becoming more and more useful there every day.
It is _politicians_ that want this. As in "people that tried to learn something useful, but failed". Nobody that has any connection to reality left would ever want to be a politician.
Indeed. The majority of people are morons. The problem is however morons with lust for power and disregards for their fellow human beings, because they usually find ways to make the average moron cheer for them, vote for them, etc.
With a large extra serving of stupid on top, as this is not doable in the first place. Nobody can "remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data", unless they have the key. So they will probably make modern crypto illegal to use in the first place, pushing Britain back into the stone-age where it apparently belongs.
Indeed. There is basically no human-based "space exploration", except for a few brief visits to the moon a long time ago. No, there is nothing to explore in low earth orbit, so the ISS does not count as "space exploration". All I see in the non-robotic space is grand and usually stupid and unworkable plans, while in the robotic space I see mars rovers going strong long after they were expected to, deep space probes still being useful after decades and so on.
Anybody that thinks the notion of robots being the way to go in space exploration is "discredited" is a moron.
In fact, when I look for any successes in space exploration (and no, low earth orbit does not count as "exploration"), all I see is robots and what I see is that many of them are wildly successful.
Roger is doing what is called "being diplomatic". That is probably one of the main reasons the project still exists. For example, most law enforcement realizes after talking to Roger that Tor actually benefits them more than it is a problem for them and that going after exit-nodes is pointless. So Roger need to be careful to accuse people, because Tor really is something that benefits society as a whole and he must not piss off people that could kill the project while not understanding what it offers. Tor is not a l33t haxor underground project and it cannot be as it needs size to work in practice. As to "pointed issues", I asked him personally about the financing of the project more than a decade ago and got a detailed and honest explanation that danced around nothing.
Also note that there are no known attacks against Tor that even hint at an intentionally inserted vulnerability as long as you look at the actual details. People being de-anonymized were either stupid (logging into Facebook over Tor after doing something that got somebodies attention without restarting the client first and the like) or the attack target was not the Tor Network, but the Tor-browser with a vulnerability it shares with regular Firefox. In the latter case, it was at least in some instances also people ignoring the start-up warning and using a non-current version of the Tor browser bundle. The Tor website warns against all that. The Tor network verification screen warns you right there that staying anonymous is not trivial and points you at documentation that (at least to me) is clear and well-written. The tor developers cannot fix stupid. In fact, no technology can fix stupid, even if many stupid users demand that these days.
You are missing one critical effect here that happens to basically all technologies: At some point they have realized their full practical potential and any more "evolution" makes them less beneficial. Examples: Flying cars, tablets as replacement for pen&paper, video-telephony, the hypeloop, electronic locks, etc. The list is really endless and the proponents of these things always display the same amount of fanaticism, faulty thinking and lack of insight into the problem being targeted.
But really, that you do not even begin to understand what I am saying is no surprise. From your SlashID you should be old enough to have seen a number of "magic" new languages, tools and coding techniques only to have them all fall flat on their faces. Some people learn from that, others stay suckers their entire life.
My guess is that all the other proofs showing Rusts superiority are of similar quality: Simple, elegant and wrong. Reality is messy, and ignoring that will not make the messiness go away.
While I agree that JavaScript is a horrible abomination, so much "enterprise" code these days depends on it that it will take a very long time to go away.
In my experience, a better language can help competent people produce good code more easily, but it can never make incompetent people produce reasonable code in the first place. And for competent people, "better" here typically means "stands in my way less often".
Their "safe space" approach reminds me of a thing most religions do: They give you a more-or-less arbitrary set of rules, and if you just follow them to the letter, you suddenly become a "good" person. (In actual reality, that does not work, of course.) Come to think of it, this fallacy may be at the core of the design of Rust. And it would also explain the toxic community that cannot deal with any kind of criticism rationally, and is so dead set on pushing their thing as the only one true thing.
For security and safety purposes, a runtime system is everything that was not directly coded by the programmer. Bootstrap code, function dispatch, libraries, etc. all are part of the runtime system.
But I am not surprised that the Rust-fanatics try to define the runtime system away: They actually have nothing to suggest that the Rust runtime is so massively better than others, so Rust must obviously not have a runtime.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the NSA is behind this. The NSA would have delivered backdoors that are very hard or impossible to find. These seem to be within reach of an ordinary in-detail security review of the system by anybody competent. A known backdoor is worthless.
My money is on incompetence, as this was obviously something people could find by just looking. IMO incompetence is worse because while intent can be fixed pretty fast if needed, incompetence cannot.
It is also a pretty good indicator for the sad state of practical IT when a security element (!) does not even manage to get something as basic as certificate verification right.
Indeed. The first check when I do when I buy computing hardware something is whether I can install an OS of my choosing on it. For example, I will not even look at a phone that is hard or impossible to root, or a tablet or mainboard that does not allow me to switch "secure" boot off. When I buy it, it is _mine_ afterwards and a vendor that does not understand this is not going to make a sale to me, ever.
That is bullshit which has long since been discredited. In the real world, the only thing a locked-down boot-loader like this accomplishes is to restrict what the user can do, it does not protect against malware as there are numerous other vectors.
It seems these people continue to be decades behind the times...
And why do you think this explanation is necessary? Have you missed the satiric character of the posting entirely?
Indeed. The one thing we may eventually have is some manufacturing and mining capability in space, maybe even something like a permanent moon-base, but humans will play a small role in that, if any. Humans are mostly useless in space or on the moon (but it is a big problem to keep them alive and healthy), while robots are becoming more and more useful there every day.
Indeed. You could even do space exploration!
It is _politicians_ that want this. As in "people that tried to learn something useful, but failed". Nobody that has any connection to reality left would ever want to be a politician.
Nice. Makes perfect sense as it is fully consistent with the observable facts.
Indeed. The majority of people are morons. The problem is however morons with lust for power and disregards for their fellow human beings, because they usually find ways to make the average moron cheer for them, vote for them, etc.
It would also mean the end of DRM, so the US will probably have to nuke Britain.
With a large extra serving of stupid on top, as this is not doable in the first place. Nobody can "remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data", unless they have the key. So they will probably make modern crypto illegal to use in the first place, pushing Britain back into the stone-age where it apparently belongs.
Definitely one thing where being goal-oriented is not an advantage ^^
This one is funny. Apparently, the universe has a sense of humor...
Indeed. There is basically no human-based "space exploration", except for a few brief visits to the moon a long time ago. No, there is nothing to explore in low earth orbit, so the ISS does not count as "space exploration". All I see in the non-robotic space is grand and usually stupid and unworkable plans, while in the robotic space I see mars rovers going strong long after they were expected to, deep space probes still being useful after decades and so on.
Anybody that thinks the notion of robots being the way to go in space exploration is "discredited" is a moron.
In fact, when I look for any successes in space exploration (and no, low earth orbit does not count as "exploration"), all I see is robots and what I see is that many of them are wildly successful.
It seems the story writer is an idiot.
It is just another case of SJW's hijacking existing stuff that works well and then breaking it. The only thing these people care about is themselves.
Roger is doing what is called "being diplomatic". That is probably one of the main reasons the project still exists. For example, most law enforcement realizes after talking to Roger that Tor actually benefits them more than it is a problem for them and that going after exit-nodes is pointless. So Roger need to be careful to accuse people, because Tor really is something that benefits society as a whole and he must not piss off people that could kill the project while not understanding what it offers. Tor is not a l33t haxor underground project and it cannot be as it needs size to work in practice. As to "pointed issues", I asked him personally about the financing of the project more than a decade ago and got a detailed and honest explanation that danced around nothing.
Also note that there are no known attacks against Tor that even hint at an intentionally inserted vulnerability as long as you look at the actual details. People being de-anonymized were either stupid (logging into Facebook over Tor after doing something that got somebodies attention without restarting the client first and the like) or the attack target was not the Tor Network, but the Tor-browser with a vulnerability it shares with regular Firefox. In the latter case, it was at least in some instances also people ignoring the start-up warning and using a non-current version of the Tor browser bundle. The Tor website warns against all that. The Tor network verification screen warns you right there that staying anonymous is not trivial and points you at documentation that (at least to me) is clear and well-written. The tor developers cannot fix stupid. In fact, no technology can fix stupid, even if many stupid users demand that these days.
You are missing one critical effect here that happens to basically all technologies: At some point they have realized their full practical potential and any more "evolution" makes them less beneficial. Examples: Flying cars, tablets as replacement for pen&paper, video-telephony, the hypeloop, electronic locks, etc. The list is really endless and the proponents of these things always display the same amount of fanaticism, faulty thinking and lack of insight into the problem being targeted.
But really, that you do not even begin to understand what I am saying is no surprise. From your SlashID you should be old enough to have seen a number of "magic" new languages, tools and coding techniques only to have them all fall flat on their faces. Some people learn from that, others stay suckers their entire life.
My guess is that all the other proofs showing Rusts superiority are of similar quality: Simple, elegant and wrong. Reality is messy, and ignoring that will not make the messiness go away.
While I agree that JavaScript is a horrible abomination, so much "enterprise" code these days depends on it that it will take a very long time to go away.
To actual language experts, Ada counts as a failure.
Well said.
In my experience, a better language can help competent people produce good code more easily, but it can never make incompetent people produce reasonable code in the first place. And for competent people, "better" here typically means "stands in my way less often".
Their "safe space" approach reminds me of a thing most religions do: They give you a more-or-less arbitrary set of rules, and if you just follow them to the letter, you suddenly become a "good" person. (In actual reality, that does not work, of course.) Come to think of it, this fallacy may be at the core of the design of Rust. And it would also explain the toxic community that cannot deal with any kind of criticism rationally, and is so dead set on pushing their thing as the only one true thing.
For security and safety purposes, a runtime system is everything that was not directly coded by the programmer. Bootstrap code, function dispatch, libraries, etc. all are part of the runtime system.
But I am not surprised that the Rust-fanatics try to define the runtime system away: They actually have nothing to suggest that the Rust runtime is so massively better than others, so Rust must obviously not have a runtime.