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Comment by aceazzameen | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. There's suddenly so many decomps that run native (granted this post is about WebAssembly). Is there no concern about hidden malware? IMO it doesn't have the same level of trust and vetting that the emulator scene has. At least not yet.

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The emulator scene could have all the trust it wants and it was still ruined 99% of the time by people downloading ROMs from the first sketchy site that gave them a file download. At least here what is made quickly by an LLM can have its source reviewed even more quickly by an LLM for a decent assurance. Age always helps though.

Exploiting an emulator through a ROM is significantly harder than inserting some malicious code into a binary.

You're thinking too much like an engineer who reads code all day.

What's actually happening is a 13 year old downloading Pokemon.rom.exe and clicking on it.

Your example might be a couple of decades out-of-date.

They meant Pokemon2.rom.exe

play

Nah it's super easy for the most common game system emus, and especially easy for 'modern' emulators like dolphin and rpcs3.

How about, we just run all the games through the same emulator, instead of writing a custom half-assed emulator individually for each game? Then we could just audit that one point of failure and completely secure ALL roms, past present and future.

I am already running NSA enabled and Chinese malw... ai agents on my PC with full access. As if it will make difference.

This security nihilism is probably the most relatable sentiment I’ve seen on HN in a while.

Is it still nihilism if you ran a proper risk assessment first?

It’s nihilism if you didn’t run a risk assessment at all because you know you’re already pwned.

What if, as a result of a risk assessment, I've learned that I'm already pwned? Nihilism or rationalism?

That’s the rationalism to nihilism pipeline in action.

Sounds like not being nihilistic is irrational.

I would never claim such a thing, because that’s how you go from nihilism to antidepressants.

It does make a difference.

The price of carelssness is too high of an irreversible lesson.

I mean I’m kind of curious why you left this comment about WASM decomp, which is about as malware safe as one could possibly get!

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