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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I want it to be never. Controversial opinion: as long as those who use "security" to oppress us have the upper hand, code written in "unsafe languages" will always leave a path to freedom from the authoritarian dystopia of corporations and governments who will seek to increase their control over our lives. We've already seen the battle start at DRM, jailbreaking/rooting, etc. IMHO the periodic but not-too-often occurrence of vulnerabilities like this, just like a nonzero amount of (cyber)crime, is a justifiable cost that we must continue to tolerate and pay for the sake of our freedom.

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What are you on about? Using a library written in memory-safe language won't oppress you.

Software inhibiting user freedom (like drm) often gets broken using buffer overflows, string parsing mistakes, ... (as seen on many game consoles). Broken (drm) software allows for more user-freedom.

If this software was using Rust, it would be much harder to break them than is currently the case.

And tbh, I have to concur (somewhat). I have lost little-to-nothing due to software exploits, but have gained significantly. For example, reading epubs with my kindle or loading homebrew on game consoles.

The idiom for this is “biting your nose off to spite your face.”

You should do good things consistently, not bad things to offset worse things. If DRM is a serious problem in your life, put your money and time where your opinions are and avoid hardware and software products that enforce it rather than mandating insecurity for everyone else.

It's impossible to get AAA games (and most AA games) without some form of DRM (with some notable exceptions), the same as high(er) budget media productions.

The Kindle was already 8 years old when I got it, isn't it better to re-use it with more current software? The same with router hardware that gets exploited to flash OpenWRT.

It's very hard to get a modern Smartphone (with acceptable cameras, battery life, performance and software availability) with manufacturer-intended root access.

While I agree that people should adopt Rust (and other approaches) for their security porperties, it's not hard to see how it may lead to exploits getting rarer and to more categories of devices & content that can't be reasonably used in a "free" way, even if not intended by the manufacturer. Thus making it much harder to have control over the devices you own (without becoming some kind of luddite).

I empathize with this position: there are a lot of people out there who are discovering that they don't really own the content they've paid for, because they're tied to electronic ecosystems they have no control over.

That being said: I don't think the world is necessarily a worse place if (1) everybody's devices are more secure, and (2) consumers are a whole are disincentivized from buying into ecosystems that fundamentally don't respect their rights. At the risk of sounding like the luddite you mentioned: maybe we really could use a little separation between technology and literally every other domain of our lives.

I see the same attitude from people insisting on using an "open" Android-based phone that Google uses to spy on them mercilessly, while eschewing Apple because they are so "authoritarian" and sneaky. The logic often stated is that Apple can't be trusted because they're considering the option of maybe starting an ad business.

Those who use them will, and have already been doing so even without memory-safe languages, one notable example being that company named after a fruit; but for a long time, there was always a way out.

The metaphor I like to use is "giving them better nooses to put around our necks."

...and I suppose you could argue that neither do guns kill people...?

Someone else using it might though.

The C folks used to call Algol linage of programming languages programming with straightjacket, while we called them cowboy programming.

Unfortunately for computer security this has been a wild west.

Security flaws can be exploited by governments and corporations, too.

And much more effectively, and at much larger scale.

The same security flaw that lets you jailbreak a phone could also allow a hostile entity to say "we don't need you to unlock your phone/laptop, we'll just seize it and break into it using known security vulnerabilities".

Buy devices that you control. Don't try to make other people's devices less secure because you want to break into your own.

I was gonna say - who's more likely to benefit from memory corruption bugs: the general populace, or the trillion-dollar military-intelligence complex?

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