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Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it from my readings here on HN, the solution is to rewrite everything from scratch using Rust.

I find that not applying electricity to computers makes them perform with flawless reliability. I had an old, dorm refrigerator-sized server as an end table for many years. It never failed.

Edit: Nobody else ever gave it instructions that went counter to mine, either. Security vulnerabilities are 100% non-exploitable without power. I should probably start an anti-APT business with that knowledge.

Tomorrow on HN: "Powering air-gapped computers remotely using some spare copper wire and a bit of python..."

There's a reason the old go to for secure deletion was throwing your hard drive into a wood chipper... (though that's bad for the environment, please don't do that)

Curses! Defeated by your powers of induction!

I guess it's pretty bad for the wood chipper too.

We had mandatory registration at restaurants here when they were still open. Some had paper forms, especially initially, others used web forms.

People were worried that it would be easy to grab the filled out forms and get a restaurant's guests' phone numbers and addresses (and it probably was). Predictably, one of the rushed web forms had non-existant security, making it easy to get all restaurants guests' phone numbers and addresses.

I find persisting data to /dev/null is very effective for highly secure and consistent data storage requirements. It’s also very performant.

As I understand it from my readings here on HN, that will be a major undertaking, since the malicious software that Microsoft discovered in its systems is actually Windows 10.

I must be experiencing a real case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I hadn't noticed this attitude towards Rust until yesterday, and now I've seen it multiple times since then.

It is a bit of a meme, and I assume people are downvoting you due to its prevalence, but I suspect if you don’t spend a ton of time on cynical sites like HN and Reddit (at least the programming subreddits) you could very well miss this attitude. I haven’t seen the “rewrite it in Rust” attitude prevalently in most contexts.

I'd say it's a positive phenomenon. Many of us would like to see C/C++ replaced by something as fast but more modern. Each alternative has some problems, like being too slow (Python), or tied more to one platform (C#, Swift), or not being backed up by a big org (my favorites here are D and Nim), or having other issues (Java), or just too boring (Go). It looks like Rust finally got the momentum to become a language of choice for writing efficient apps, and with time the generated code might be on a par with C's. So I hope it succeeds, even though I wish it had happened with D.

It’s good if it’s grounded in reality. I don’t find Go being “too boring” to be a rational reason to not use it; it’s an accessible and convenient language that works well for applications without a lot of shared state among threads. Boring is good for security. Some would argue Go is not boring enough due to edges with CSP.

Rust is an accomplishment, but it’s also a very complicated language. It has a harsh learning curve and simply put, not all software written will benefit as much from the guarantees Rust provides. For a lot of software that will benefit the most, people are already experimenting with it.

seL4’s approach also seems interesting. It is doing C with proofs, which in theory should be able to offer stronger guarantees than even Rust if done correctly.

Then run on an airgapped computer with custom firmware in its hard drives.

I think I saw an article here that says that a few times per century, a star explodes in a distant galaxy and the resulting radiation can interact with a spinning hard drive in such a way as to allow Facebook to enhance their ad targeting profile on you. So no spinning hard drives, please.

And make sure to keep it in a sound-proof room to avoid side channel attacks.

Nope. You just exposed yourself to compromise by seismograph. The Geologists know what you're up to.

Just delete the network firmware and forget to rewrite it.

Airgapped? That's easy; get a Windows laptop and wait for the Wi-Fi to fuck up.

That actually made me laugh out loud because I can’t get the T495s I am trying to sell to talk to my wifi at the moment.

Inside a faraday cage to prevent RAM from emitting radio waves.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02700

That custom hard drive firmware is an NSA developed APT.

The solution is to rewrite everything from scratch following sane design principles instead of adding more layers of cruft.

The language could be C, C++, Rust, Zig. But the design is more important than the language.

Of course, no one with enough resources to do this cares enough to do it.

Ah yes, so that all the mistakes we've already solved can be re-made all over again.

The astronomical compile times would force Microsoft to either make Rust blisteringly fast, or develop affordable quantum computers.

I got a hearty chuckle out of this, thank you.

I always had a feeling the author of n-gate actively participates in some discussions here, and sometimes even provokes some threads.

You’re violating the prime directive.

That's wrong, though. You should first port Rust to the Amiga and then over there start to rewrite everything from scratch.

...and, after implementing the (wonderful) OS in rust, set about making a 'native' remote-accessible WebUI for it with Go and GraphQL.

There will be a top post on HN advocating this approach any second now.

The down votes come from those that feel personally attacked by your comment. :-)

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