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Comment by sebosp | Hacker News Reader

What are the chances some sort of united nations institution pays workers to both audit and prevent/harden supply chain attacks? Wondering in light of potential job obsolescence with the progress of ChatGPT and the like, if maybe we can forward the human intellect surplus there... Also, could it be thought as a human right to have access to "safe" environment in the future, I certainly would love if my children do not have to worry about this constant threat at some point or at least the stress can be decreased... Sounds a bit like being paranoid is the only way to go, I wonder too what long term effects this has on mental health, do we as techs view our close ones as less trusted the closer to supply chain attacks we work?

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> What are the chances some sort of united nations institution pays workers to both audit and prevent/harden supply chain attacks?

Zero, essentially. State actors profit massively from such systemic weaknesses, so it is not in their interest to eliminate them for the population at large (they do of course want to eliminate them for themselves, but they already have extremely strict supply chain policies so that's mostly a solved problem).

Hell, we have state-sponsored institutions working hard to actively create vulnerabilities in software that previously didn't have them. Security vulnerabilities are a tool through which power is exercised. They're not going away as long as governments have any say in it.

I think it is a great idea. The problem is that institutions/decision makers have very little knowledge about open source software so it is really hard to convince them to do this. I can only speak about Germany, but I recently read a newspaper by some IT government official that only contained buzzwords, where it was clear that he did not know what he was talking about. There are exceptions, someone got the government to fund Curl and OpenSSH (both between 50k-500k). So that is great. But you also have a second fund where everyone can apply, and looking at the responsible team you see that out of 5 people, none has a STEM degree, but instead graduated in fields like cultural studies. I doubt that they know/care enough about the threat of supply chain attacks to direct funds there.

Why do you expect that from UN?

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