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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

The removal of C from Android and iOS is going to pay off massively. The current state of things where every government is sitting on an endless collection of exploits is not ideal.

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Considering that both Google and Apple are cardholding members of PRISM, it sounds like a bit of a frying pan vs fire situation to me.

Yes, but that's OUR surveillance and we're cool with that

Id rather be spied on by foreigners who couldn't do anything about my eccentricities even if they cared.

When you're own government's security services are spying on you, they own you.

The options weren't foreign government or local government, the current state is both, the future is local only. It's clearly an improvement.

These security exploits also get used by local police who wouldn't have access to the top government access used for terrorists.

They'll use the data to influence your next election. Just look at Moldova, who is infiltrated with Russian spies and dirty money. They've lost the last election but the country is paralysed by corruption.

Its still fewer backdoors and more controlled.

More controlled by who?

Apple. They now gatekeep access rather than it being open to anyone with the money to hack the platform.

So, we should feel safe knowing that Apple is protecting us from the wrong governments and working with the right ones? Considering how attached they are to the Chinese market, one would be forgiven for assuming Apple too is motivated by money over ethical responsibility.

Better just apple than apple + hackers. Not ideal but incremental progress is still progress.

It will never be ideal while Apple's ethics are so soft. Let's help them do the right thing.

Interesting. I didn't realize C was so easy to exploit (I am a novice). Very interesting implications for security. Thanks for the cool insight.

It's not necessarily _easy_ to exploit iOS, the problem is that world governments and hacker orgs have budgets in the millions to find these exploits. We have already gone as far as we can by just telling people to be more careful when using C so to solve this problem the only way forward is languages which make it harder or impossible to make the mistake that keep happening in C programs. Apple opting for Swift and Google using Rust in Android.

Ahh gotcha. Thanks for the background context.

While it's a very real advance, there will still be a nearly endless supply of 0 days, they just won't be memory exploits anymore.

Google has real world data on over 1M lines of Rust in Android and found that based on expected bug frequency they have astonishing few bugs due to Rust.

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