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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

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mikewarot

Anyone who pitches a "safer" computer language, or methodology. Rust, for example.

People who sell memory that they know is unreliable, otherwise RowHammer[1] wouldn't work

Most of the "CyberSecurity" industry... the Operating System should be doing their job, but isn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

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It's wildly insulting, defamatory, and detached from all reality on several levels, to classify Rust as snake oil.

Not a memory development guy, but I am a rust programmer and have managed cybersecurity teams. Rust is amazing for memory safety and good programing practice. And cyber… is a lot more than the OS.

I would be more worried about the opposite: future software and devices will use memory-safe programming languages like Rust, with C and assembly limited as much as possible, so things like the iPhone and the successors to the Nintendo Switch won't be able to be hacked or jailbroken to run software that wasn't approved by the hardware vendor, because there will be no buffer overflow exploits or dangling pointer vulnerabilities in them.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

It's a mixed thing. Good for reducing piracy and increasing revenue, probably. It does mean that people who want to be able to install whatever they want on their devices, or write software for themselves to use on their own devices, will have to start buying ones explicitly marketed with those features, because you won't be able to just jailbreak it anymore.

Why can’t a manufacturer just decide that they don’t want people jailbreaking their devices? It’s a black hole of a use case to support, especially when there are plenty of open Linux-based platforms for power-users to hack away on

Why are you arguing? I don't have any control over what manufacturers do. I'm glad there are open platform equivalents, like the PinePhone and Steam Deck. I just hope businesses like that keep existing, or else there'll be no way for you to control your devices without building them yourself. It empowers manufacturers and disempowers the individual user, even though the law hasn't changed. That's why I said it's mixed, not unilaterally good or bad. Maybe it'll be good in the long run by making people buy from platforms like that if they want control, promoting legitimate business.

Oh idk just wanted to get the ppl going

Imagine an idea more detached from reality than yours. Wow.

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