ex_amazon_sde

Please don't call it "paranoia": a whole lot of vulnerabilities have been found in CPUs together with plenty of undocumented functions that look just like backdoors.

On top of that, it is well known that governments research or buy 0-day hardware and software vulnerabilities and keep them secret to be used as weapons.

ME is just a fraction of the attack surface. When I read the title of the article I thought "trustworthy" was about mitigating hardware vulnerabilities.

At this stage it's practically impossible. :(

There are plenty of memory-safe languages equally suitable for similar CLI tools and, arguably, easier to write than Rust.

Vendor lock-in at rack level and custom servers? Sounds like blade servers.

A smart company would stay away from this kind of strong lock-in.

> This seems like further evidence that distro package managers aren't the way forward

On the contrary, distributions are here to stay and they are growing their adoption on many platforms including hi-end "IoT" and cars.

No sensible organization runs bleeding edge OSes on their airplanes, power plants, payment processors, industrial plants and so on...

This also applies to not pulling random packages from random github repos using some language-specific package manager hoping they don't contain backdoors.

Case in point: the CIP project https://www.cip-project.org/ aims to backport security fixes to Linux for 25 years after each CIP-approved release. This is because people expect to run the same kernel/OS for 30+ years.

It's a quadricycle, not a "clown car", and with an excellent price / quality ratio.

45 kph, range of 70 km, at 6000 euros.

https://europe.autonews.com/automakers/citroen-says-ami-ev-w...

The blog is called "Ingrid’s Space"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_(given_name)

I've done it and it worked. Without the €40/month.

To send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up.

The real advantage is to have control over your own infrastructure and ensure the privacy of your reader base.

The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation of your server IP address.

> GPL licenses forces some sort of non-monetary compensation in the form of contributions, and thus, the corp cannot extract and retain the full value of the software

No, this is false.

- You can use a GPL library without making changes and contributing anything upstream

- You can use a GPL library internally and make changes without contributing anything upstream

- You can use a GPL library, make changes and distribute it to 3rd parties and, only in that case, you simply have to share the changes with the 3rd parties. [Not with upstream]

Why "app"? These are services.

> there shouldn't be any dogma around this

Like everything in security, it's about tradeoffs.

> Also, maybe, this means you're not running a single app per vm?

This is an argument for unikernels.

Instead, on 99.9% of your services you want to run multiple independent processes, especially in a datacenter environment: your service, web server, sshd, logging forwarder, monitoring daemon, dhcp client, NTP client, backup service.

Often some additional "bigcorp" services like HIDS, credential provider, asset management, power management, deployment tools.

> if there's some kind of exploit in it allowing for random code to be run, said code already has access to everything it needs

On the same host there could be SSL certificates, credentials in a local MTA, credentials used to run backups and so on.

Or the application itself could be made of multiple components where the vulnerable one is sandboxed.

A backdoor/bugdoor is much more likely to be in the source code. Compiling the code by yourself does not help.

You have to rely on a distribution that has a many-eyes review policy and has security conscious users.

I found http://n-gate.com/ helpful.

> Big Corp, especially big tech Corp, has a giant target on it’s back and is very risk adverse to firing (justifiably so)

Ex-Amazon here. Most FAANGs are known for their aggressive stack-ranking and high attrition rate. Amazon has the highest attrition rate.

> software creates tremendous value

According to what metric? I suspect most of the stellar SV salaries come from the economic model.

> there doesn't appear to be the same emphasis on living in a "good area" as in other countries for personal security reasons

This is common mostry in the anglosphere. In many other countries there is no such difference.

JournalD is excellent. Indexing structured data like logs is the right thing to do. Log messages have a lot of useful metadata to do filtering on.

> Systemd could completely eliminate the need for stuff like docker by totally isolating a process.

It does: nspawn is much leaner than docker and it's available on all Linux systems with SystemD.

...also Cloudflare has been a disaster for Tor. It really harms Tor's usability.

SAT is more "how good AND MOTIVATED are you at cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain"

Spot on. Often it feels like a cult, but even more often is used as a micromanagement tool.

> Android is mature and secure, but it's not private

Nitpick: you cannot have security-but-not-privacy.

If a system does not protect the confidentiality of your data from the eyes of the manufacturer it is breaching security.

Security is much more than being protected from attacks. A torch application that reads your contact list and location fits squarely into the definition of trojan/spyware/malware.

Yes, that's my point.

> Is it? Just update everything regularly.

On stable production systems? Never.

The CIP project https://www.cip-project.org/ aims to backport security fixes to Linux for *25* years after each CIP release.

No sensible organization runs bleeding edge OSes on their airplanes, power plants, payment processors, industrial plants...

> If you can retest everything, you can rebuild everything

No, rebuilding is way heavier.

Even worse, some languages insist on building against fixed version of their dependencies.

It forces distributions to keep multiple version of the same library and this leads to a combinatorics explosion of packages to fix, backport, compile and test.

It's simply unsustainable and it's hurting distributions already.

AFAIK commercial dishwashers are very diverse: some are rugged equivalent of a consumer dishwasher, some can only sterilize pre-washed dishes, and some do the quick 40 seconds wash... but use really a ton of electricity.

> My point is the reduction of child labor hours was impossible before industrialization improved productivity.

Farmers worked less hours and with much less intensity than industrial workers.

The incredible drop in life expectancy of farmers turning industrial workers says everything.

There's plenty of historical records of farmers being forced to go into factories and hating it, to the point of risking their life doing strikes and fighting strike-breakers.

Industries desperately needed cheap labor and the mechanization of farming helped by generating widespread unemployment.

> Political polarization is older than social media

Yes, it was widely reported in debates in ancient Athens and the Roman empire.

But I wrote "Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.", which is different.

Humanity has never seen before a billion-dollar industry generating user engagement by fueling online altercation.

Instant gratification, dopamine cycle addiction and all of that.

Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.

But also decades of materialism and "me me me" culture: I think people learn to follow their desires no-matter-what when buying goods or services and the same emotional mechanism is transferred into "buying in" an idea.

Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to influence politics (see cambridge analytica).

> stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink

Yes, but with a caveat: an idea can be labeled "groupthink" and "too political" as a tactic to dismiss it easily.

> a lot of things are going to be hard for you

The FAANGs that gave me offers seem to think otherwise...

> I just hope we never work together

Guess I struck a sore spot here.