Europe is living under Microsoft's digital killswitch - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/eu/2017/05/10/europe-is-living-under-microsofts-digital-killswitch/ <comment><USER3> Although it's not said explicitly in the article, there's an interpretation of the subject that is both literal and true.

Microsoft distributes constant opaque silent updates to all modern Windows systems. With Windows 10, some editions cannot even postpone installing those updates for long. An update deliberately bricking Windows computers, targeted to all of Europe, a country, an organization, or an individual's home. That is, quite literally, a digital killswitch.

Of course Microsoft the company wouldn't do such a thing as long as it's following its own interests. But, being an non-EU entity, it could conceivably be forced by US authorities. Or, of course, the secure distribution channel could be hacked. It's far more likely that an attacker would distribute an update that merely backdoors all systems; but if done as an act of war (or terrorism), bricking is a somewhat plausible goal.

As the article correctly notes, the same problem affects most other software; it's just that Microsoft Windows is both so widely used and so infrastructure- critical (you can't replace it with a different OS and keep running your native Windows applications). OSX and iOS have minority market shares and you can buy competing products. Android phones and Linux distributions don't have a single update channel for all of them. Non-operating-system software generally isn't installed on most computers and has alternatives for most of its users. Windows is in a pretty unique position.

<comment><USER4> > Android phones and Linux distributions don't have a single update channel > for all of them

This is pretty much saying that, because an OS is open source, that means anyone can put it on almost anything and sell it, so the fact that the original developer can't control _all possible_ distributions of the software that said software is untenable.

In practice, that is not how it works. You don't approach broad deployments of Android or, say, RHEL while getting supplied by a half dozen different OEMs. You pick one and stick to it. In much the same way Windows shops work - <USER2> normally either go with just Dell or just HP.

Hell, you can't lump Linux and Android in the same boat either. Vendors never guarantee perpetual phone OS updates on Android, because they always abandon their devices. The exception might be Google, maybe, with one of their device series from the last 5 years _since_ the Nexus 4 which did get dropped, but you might be able to get a perpetual update contract with them for an extended support period. I have no idea.

But for something at Government scale, adopting Android is actually really trivial. At least it used to be - you could have just approached Cyanogen to support _all_ devices with a guaranteed support period. Now I'm not sure if there is a corporate entity to barter with backing Lineage, but the same principal applies. There _are_ ways around Android's horrible update model.

For desktop Linux, though, its no competition. You will always be going to one vendor, using that one vendor, and getting consistent updates from that singular vendor. Be it Dell or Red Hat or Canonical or whomever you plan to contract with. They aren't going to be throwing Gentoo randomly on a couple of your thousand Ubuntu boxes, and if you want they will certainly preconfigure the images to point the update servers to your own self hosted ones to control updates if you really want to.

<comment><USER5> True, but there's still a difference: One organization will homogenously use a single distributor/vendor/update channel within itself, sure. But different organizations might use different vendors, or even different sections of an organization if they're bureaucratically separated enough (e.g. not sharing budgets and IT staff).

If you're running Windows, you're getting it from Microsoft, end of story.

<comment><USER6> > If you're running Windows, you're getting it from Microsoft, end of story.

You talk as if nobody ever bootlegged Windows.

<comment><USER7> In the context of a large government agency that wants support and ongoing updates, yeah. Nobody bootlegs Windows.

<comment><USER6> That can change, once you've assumed that Microsoft can't legally deal with them.

<comment><USER8> So... the reason it's so trivial to locate Windows and Office, and the reason why KMSPico et exist... is so that the latest version of Windows - and updates - actually propagate, er, _fully_.

Presumably so that Microsoft doesn't get bad press, and maybe due to (shady but arguable) legal implications.

Oh _wow_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a poorly written article. Under the heading "What's the problem":

> IT systems of European governments mostly run on Microsoft software and OS > [...] that means that almost all of the data of European citizens — tax > information, health records, etc. — along with security related data, are in > proprietary file format...

> The problem with the proprietary file format is that Microsoft's software is > made to be incompatible with open source, which effectively forces all > communicating departments within a government to use the company's products, > in order to ensure compatibility of files and ease of communication.

The operating system that runs on a system has no bearing on how the data for various applications is stored. As far as I know, Microsoft isn't providing the applications that store "tax information, health records, etc.", unless the governments are using Excel and Word to keep all that information rather than a database.

Even so, if they are using Excel/Word, the Office Open XML file formats are ISO/IEC standards, not proprietary.

There may be some problem of vendor lock-in here, but this article seems to have no idea what the real problem is.

<comment><USER10> > This is a poorly written article.

This article seems to originate from the Netherlands, drumming up anti Microsoft rhetoric that was very prevalent a few years ago here.

It is important to understand with these types of articles, that Microsoft and their local partner companies (disclosure: such as the one I work for) has competitors who stand to benefit from stories like these. Other companies (like IBM, Oracle working with local ISV's and service companies) want to sell their, also propriety, but non-Microsoft based solutions. They promote independence from Microsoft as a feature of their software, and have budget to hire PR firms and run a lobby too, just like Microsoft.

But their solutions often come with a worse type of vendor lock-in. The Oracle type. In the Netherlands, most public backend administrative software is not based on Microsoft technology, and it is completely closed, unable to integrate with (Microsoft based) front end systems or web api's.

The article states that Microsoft makes 2 billion in the EU public sector, I don't know if that is true, but in the Netherlands spending on Microsoft software is somewhere around 1-2% of total public IT spending, and I'd say they provide relatively good value for that.

<comment><USER11> > unable to integrate with (Microsoft based) front end systems or web api's.

It's not 1992 - Oracle databases can integrate with all sorts of web APIs and front end systems. You may not like how its done or how much it costs, but it's a little over the top to claim that it can't be done.

<comment><USER12> " You may not like how its done or how much it costs, but it's a little over the top to claim that it can't be done."

It can't be done in a business if the vendor decides it costs too much or will be done in a way unsupported for good reasons. Whereas, with FOSS, they might pay someone to fix that or someone might do it themselves. The arbitrary costs and limitations the proprietary vendors can force on locked-in users is an important risk of their model for users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have used Linux as my primary desktop system for over ten years. Usability really sucks. I'm not talking about a new UX model, systemd vs sysv, or wayland vs xorg. I'm talking about not needing to know about unix-isms to run a desktop operating system. Gnome and KDE are okay-ish now.

Honestly the best desktop system for linux I've seen is Deepin [https://www.deepin.org/en/](https://www.deepin.org/en/) , which is produced by a Chinese based group and marketed mainly at Chinese audiences.

It installs updates on reboot, which removes many corner cases for desktop users. It has a nice dedicated admin panel that feels like a single interface rather than 20 different panels glued together. It focuses on efficient desktop use rather than some new hotness UI concept which Unity and Gnome3 both got infatuated with. The desktop interface is fast and gets out of your way, but providing useful quick tools to open, close, and switch apps.

Why do I think governments haven't used more open source? Because we care more about systemd vs sysv then a single good consistent UI. Because we think writing desktop components in javascript and python will give good (enough) performance that won't feel sluggish; hint, they won't. Because coders (often) care more about how their code looks, using the slow interpreted language they know, or "getting the job done" (as they define it), then they do about concrete performance evaluation, benchmarking, and end user use cases and long term person off the street testing.

Sorry, that was kinda a rant. But seriously, checkout the deepin desktop. New users can be really productive in it quickly and maintain it themselves.

<comment><USER14> I use OS X, Windows 10 and Gnome 3 pretty much every day. They're all okay. I like Gnome best, and Windows least. But they all do the job, and they're way more similar than they are different. In contrast, 10 to 15 years ago, the user experience was wildly different on each of them.

But it's moot anyway. Browser apps will continue to displace desktop apps, and they don't really care which operating system you're running. European governments would be well served to somehow supply their administrations (as well as the general public) with a first-class alternative to Google Docs. Extra requirements: self-hostable, (even more) extensible.

<comment><USER15> So, Collabora Online[1]

[1] [https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/)

<comment><USER16> Also, Open Xchange [https://www.open-xchange.com/](https://www.open- xchange.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Imo the thing with the public sector, is that it is so large that it probably could fund both an OS and a productivity suite easily and that would be a net gain, both from a freedom perspective and for the economy at large.

I am all for entrepreneurship and I do think that companies and competition create progress. But when one company reaches the level of Microsoft, where every year we learn how many billions Bill Gates' bank account increased —I do know that he helps with his money but still, his bank account does increase—, it just takes money off the market. Hoarding is bad.

<comment><USER17> > it just takes money off the market. Hoarding is bad.

Like anyone with significant wealth, Bill Gates's wealth is mostly in non-cash investments, whereby the capital is used for enterprise.

A more sensible argument might be that Microsoft is successful because of anti-competitive practises / exploiting a monopoly, rather than adding value.

<comment><USER18> Even if it was hoarded as cash, this shouldnt matter. Less meal tickets floating around means that the each ticket gets more food. If Bill Gates is using the money for consuming resources(say making a huge building), this affects the economy as there is an opportunity cost(the consumed resources could have been used elsewhere). One exception is monetary crises where hoarding has a negative impact, but thats not the usual situation.

There is a strong case for redistribution of wealth on its own terms and social good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [disclaimer, MS employee here]

Question: If governments could inspect and audit MS source code, would the concerns brought up in the article be addressed?

This is a clarifying question, not a loaded one. To avoid any surprises: governments, including the EU can and do audit MS source code (public source, for example: [https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/microsoft-lets-eu- gover...](https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/microsoft-lets-eu-governments- inspect-source-code-for-security-issues.2433915/))

<comment><USER20> The code review opportunities are joke. The only chance to review a mere million lines of codes thoroughly is to throw a million eyes on it and open communication about findings.

The way those are done now, they are Valium for politicians and a cash cow for those doing the "audits".

<comment><USER21> >a million eyes on it and open communication about findings

That's what the Chinese government does internally. Ba-dum-tssh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The thing people in technology forget is that the most expensive resource in government is the people who work there. Every person in my IT department is top of their game, everyone of them has been continually honing their skill sets and are following their interests.

This has put us a head of a lot of other municipalities and a lot of private companies. We've had to send ADFS and Azure consultants back because our crew was better, as an example.

Those people live and breathe Microsoft. Those people are the reason we didn't have to renew our server room, when we decided to go own-cloud in a major hosting center instead, and they are they reason we'll soon be able to move our cloud from rental to Azure.

Sure we could have used other technologies for it, but it would cost an unimaginable amount of money to replace the entire IT-workforce. I'm certain we could retrain our current staff, but a lot of them wouldn't want to, because the truth is, if they wanted to be working with non-Microsoft technologies then they would have been snatched up by our "competition" already.

I think open source should play an important role in government, and I think that role should increase steadily going forward, but I also think people and reason should come before an ideology.

With 370 different IT-systems of various magnitude we already have some that run on Linux. JBOSS and Wildfly are big in government, but out of our entire system portfolio only a fraction of the systems even have non-Microsoft alternatives. Other systems are on 8 year contracts, making it impossible to swap them out overnight even if we wanted to. Which we don't because we would need to replace every system, and get every employee on board with open source alternatives in order to save the insignificant Microsoft licensing fees which make up less than 1% of our IT budget.

Sure, Europe is bound to Microsoft and that can be problematic. What if Trump truly goes apeshit for instance? Then we would be royally fucked. The truth is that there is no viable alternative that won't be ridiculously exoensive and take up to 50 years to fully implement.

With everything heading for the cloud it might not even make sense. The only cloud options for a huge part of the European public sector are labeled with Google, Amazaon or Azure - and none of them would make the legislative challenges or licenses any less of an issue. At least with Microsoft, we have a company who has been really open to quickly and efficiently meeting European demands.

<comment><USER23> _> Sure we could have used other technologies for it, but it would cost an unimaginable amount of money to replace the entire IT-workforce._

It's worth doing it, to get rid of the sick MS lock-in. Breaking the catch 22 needs to start from somewhere.

<comment><USER22> Our tech guys are absolute wizards, most with a fair business understanding. Replacing just one of them is around $500000 with no guarantees that we could find someone suitable.

We're a medium sized municipality in Scandinavia sitting next to the largest one in the country, meaning that getting good tech staff is already extremely hard with the popular technologies.

The staff who work here now do so because of benefits or ideals, not the pay, where we will never be able to compete. On top of that it's taken more than 25 years and five different middle managers to build the right kind of culture.

I'm sorry, but why would we ever want break that? And why on earth would we do it to possible break free from the Microsoft lock-in 25 years from now, when Microsoft licenses are less than 1% of our IT spending?

And that's just the tech perspective. We'd also have to reschool 7000 employees on everyday software considering how integrated the office365 platform is here. And where is the open source alternative to 365?

(I'm sorry for the wall of text if you were being sarcastic)

<comment><USER24> > We'd also have to reschool 7000 employees on everyday software considering > how integrated the office365 platform is here.

I'm confused did you educate them in using office365, or even in using Office 2007 (which was a big change)? I.e. were there courses they all attended? Or did you just update them and them and they had to learn? Similar with the OS, did they go on Windows 8 and windows 8.1 and windows 10 courses or did they just get the update?

I agree that FLOSS lacks a great office suite alternative. I totally disagree with the concept that if there were your users would need to be re-schooled.

<comment><USER22> Yes we reschooled people from 2007 to modern office.

You can't imagine how many man hours teaching one drive for business cost us.

We did a comparrison of open office and google docs vs ms office when we did our business case of course. Open office lost by around 1400% with some employees never learning it.

We don't just use office365 though, we use addons. Like automatically sending electronic mail through APIs that integrate with the national platform while using a custom template and journalizing into our record system.

Hell, we've build two word adding ourselves allowing citizens to digitally sign documents with their public identification.

<comment><USER24> > Yes we reschooled people from 2007 to modern office.

As in actual classes? How did this work? This sounds like an epic waste of money and everyone's time.

> We did a comparrison of open office and google docs vs ms office when we did > our business case of course. Open office lost by around 1400% with some > employees never learning it.

Yeah we've all done reports like this. They are usually an epic waste of time as usually everyone knows the answer they want before they start... I'm surprised that you managed to get results that were that favorable for the desired answer though - openoffice.org and the more recent Libre Office kept a similar UI to MS office 2003.

> We don't just use office365 though, we use addons. Like automatically > sending electronic mail through APIs that integrate with the national > platform while using a custom template and journalizing into our record > system.

Sounds like 10-30 LOC each if you ran on FOSS systems (although obviously it is hard to tell without knowing what your exact requirements were) - I'm sure office365 saves you time/money in other ways though.

> Hell, we've build two word adding ourselves allowing citizens to digitally > sign documents with their public identification.

Did you build libreoffice extensions as well? Or do you expect citizens to subscribe to your software choices? I don't mind what you do for internal software but forcing everyone to use the same software as you is a bad use of tax money.

<comment><USER22> Every citizen who doesn't opt out of it, is a digitized citizen.

That means they have a two-factor identity and an secured electronic mailbox hosted by us in the cloud.

So what our addons do is it allows a caseworker to send a document as a PDF directly to a citizen, who can then follow a link to our document signing server and sign it online. They don't need any kind of software to do so, because everything is supplied by us.

If they don't have a computer they can use one at a library our at our town hall. (Which run ubuntu by the way)

I get that you think we wanted office to win in our business case. That's not true, we simply show the political level the facts and they act accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I tried to migrate to Ubuntu in 2011 and gave up because I was missing apps like Evernote or Visio. - I moved away from MS products in 2015, replaced my Thinkpad + Windows 7 with a Mac, replaced MS Visio with Omnigraffle, abandoned Visual Basic and migrated to web Apps (Django mainly). The only MS product I use is MS Office (via a subscription) on my Mac.

This article made me think: Do I really need MS Office? Occasionally I use Word for 1 to 10 page documents. Then there is MS Excel. I used to use it to do data analysis with it, used Pivot Tables extensively. But now I mostly use it for simple tables. Finally there's PowerPoint. I have created many businesses plans with it. (I used MS Access as well, to create quick line of business solutions, but I'm trying to do this in Python + Django now.)

Now I'm considering trying to move away from MS Office as well. Because actually all that keeps me using it is a vague feeling that I might miss something if I don't. Or others expecting me to send them Office documents (instead of Libre Office) - Germany is MS Office land.

<comment><USER26> Another German here. I have abandoned MS Office in favor of OpenOffice/LibreOffice years ago and when I have to send documents I just send .pdf's but if I REALLY had to send .doc, .xls etc. LibreOffice can im- and export those formats too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There is lots of truth in this. I've been saying all of this for years and am trying to raise awareness whenever I get the opportunity, while not trying to be pushy (that just doesn't work, people need to want to). Two highlights of the article:

> European children are educated in Microsoft Office, which is given to > schools and universities for free, which some call the "crack model" — > getting people hooked for free and then start charging them.

God this is so true. Every year emails go out "you can get office for free via $ourSchoolName!" What do you mean indoctrination and free advertisement? I wanted to reply to all with a message in a similar tone (about libreoffice being free and not a trial) but never found a good phrasing that would do anything beyond provoke a backlash (also when discussing it with like-minded friends).

> Security risk

All eggs (not just "all your eggs", no, _all_ eggs) in one basket is a terrible idea for obvious reasons.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm not overly sympathetic, governments should be doing more to support open source software. Public money should be used to make public software. The idea of using public money to support proprietary software and formats really bugs me. If you want to do this for your own personal or business reasons, fine. But public resources should be used to make existing public owned (effectively we all own free open source software) software better.

</comment><comment> amiga-workbench Government systems simply should not be running proprietary software.

<comment><USER29> I agree with you, but... There is a HUGE problem with this statement.

90% of the devices that are bought require windows. Every single microscope, ID reader, card reader, access system, detection system, defence devices, advanced cameras, radars, etc. provide drivers and/or software, that I know, offer drivers/apps only for windows.

Even they make a plan to move from windows, it will take years, in this time, every acquisition will be made for windows. A common use for these devices/pc's is more than 5 years. Heck i've seen tools that are used even after 15 years because they worked and no money/desire to replace them.

Of course you can negotiate, or request support for other operating systems, but that means extra money, training, etc. Even in the current state it's hard to get good IT people, programmers, sysadmins, etc. It will be harder to get linux admins. Also it will take years to teach people to use another OS.

And to end: have you seen custom software made for governments? 50% just slap a program that requires x version of .net, some c++ redistributable and requires to run only as admin or only xp, 40% just slap a java abomination or applet and call it a day, 9% make a nice piece of software but just like everyone else after they deliver the software they forget about the support or patch 1-2 things and they are gone. ALL OF THIS is happening mainly because the state doesn't have trained people and they don't know what to ask from devs & because they don't give a shi*t about they money they spend.

<comment> amiga-workbench I've often thought that the British government should have an in-house team of developers to work on services for local authorities and public facing institutions.

It seems every time a contractor gets involved the tax-payer gets a good fucking, think of all the accrued billable hours taken up by redundant layers of manglement pontificating, the endless reworks and finally the extortionate support contract to keep the end product limping along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I would much rather see governments embrace and contribute to Open Source software available to all, they could even pay 3rd parties to maintain and service.

<comment><USER9> Some have tried and have gone back to Windows[1]

[1] [https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/02/11/1930217/the-city- of-...](https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/02/11/1930217/the-city-of-munich- now-wants-to-abandon-linux-and-switch-back-to-windows)

<comment><USER31> But there are som hints, that the decision to "go back" might have been politicaly motivated. Like relocating the microsoft central in germany to munich ...

But on the other hand, there were many flaws in the system, but many in the OSS-community did not want to acknowledge, because it is easier to shift the blame to evil conspiring microsoft, than to admit, that linux and libre office is not perfect. Which is really, really stupid, because how can it be technically as good and polished as microsoft products, given there is so much more money behind them. And even though the linux kernel might be now even better than microsoft - that is not at all the case for Desktop, Drivers, Stability, Programms, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This shows just shows how stupid the guys who contract for (EU) government IT, and their political masters who are supposed to be directing them. Any software that not built from the ground up to be secure is unlikely to be, it is not something that can be bolted on. Various version of Windows needed to be heavenly hacked to meet even the most basic DoD-CETCS (RedBook) standard back in the 1990s. And I doubt it is any better now. That some public services dumped Microsoft years ago suggest this lock-in problem is almost as old as commercial computing.

<comment><USER33> I cannot believe they are stupid. On the contrary they are clever enough to side with MS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> When this news circulated around one month ago in Portugal it was put in more harsh terms as somewhat a form of digital colonialism.

</comment><comment><USER35> I watched Munich trying to change to Linux, they even created a LiMux, a special distribution.

In my opinion, the biggest problem was UI and design. LiMux and all its programs just look like something that has been thought up in the 90s. No modern UI, no sleek design.

In addition, the interoperability is horrible. Its just not fun to work with something like that, not when you come home to an iPad oder a Windows 10 machine.

If there was any chance to roll out something other than Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter), government bodies must invest into the UI. If people have to fight with the OS and its applications every step of the way, it will never be accepted.

</comment><comment><USER36> For other industries, roles may be reversed.

For example, another headline could be: the US is living under ASML's digital killswitch

</comment><comment><USER23> Time to ditch Windows for Linux.

<comment><USER37> Large Organizations like Microsoft, Oracle, and the like because they have support numbers to call when things go wrong. Oracle is the top offender I dislike integrating with their products but it's hard to get decision makers in IT to look elsewhere. No ones lost a job buying oracle as the saying goes.

I'm not familiar Linux support. Not sure what Red Hat has going on for desktop support.

<comment><USER38> _Not sure what Red Hat has going on for desktop support._

If you are a reasonably large government body with a budget, I am pretty sure that Red Hat will provide desktop support if you pay them.

Moreover, it is likely that desktop support will become more and more trivial as administrative applications will probably move towards web apps as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If I were a country that was not allied with the US, or otherwise feared potential power plays by the US against my nation, I would not use any closed source software originating from the US.

Same applies to China, to Russia, and any other nation with a well funded cybersecurity division.

A nation could order a software producer under their jurisdiction to write an automatic updater pushing malware to collect:

National secrets

Credentials

Access to critical systems

And who knows what else if we are being creative. We use our computers for everything. Coded source software, especially with automatic updates, is systemic risk and it's going to bite a lot of people really badly if a cyber- competent nation ever decides to initiate WW3

</comment><comment><USER40> Amusing that this article is going out as Europe is being hammered by ransomware on unpatched Windows computers.

If the US wanted to take out all EU computers, presumably they'd use an airburst nuke, and target all the electronics, not just the Windows boxes. Of course, if things got that bad, presumably the "logical" course of action would be to scour the continent, rather than let a pissed off high skilled population live to join Putin.

<comment><USER41> War is not about killing your enemy and breaking his things. That is the job of warriors, but not how you win a war.

It would immensely benefit the US in a war with Europe to silently snoop on all those systems and act like we couldn't. Use the information to perform lower cost higher gain military operations.

Killing the populace En masse makes nothing but enemies, but leveraging information can make you friends. Imagine if the US used is massive infiltration to find people sympathetic to its cause and gave them guns and bombs with Russian labeling. Those people do most of the damage in the country and we swoop in with targeted precision bombing and cost effective troop deployments to arrest huge amounts of heads of states and legislatures. We could defeat Europe in a year and at least some portions of Europeans would thank us. Then we move on to the part the US sucks at, occupying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Micro "It's not like we can just flip a switch" soft

(Though I guess it requires a broader umbrella of 'MS dickery with networks' as the Xbone debacle was you being forced to be online at MS' behest, and this is sort of the opposite)

</comment><comment><USER43> And most countries on Earth are living under Monsanto's food killswitch.

</comment><comment><USER44> I always wonder why the european countries don't work together to build their own software. Or at least a single country looking at germany, where each city seems to brew it's own stuff.

</comment><comment><USER45> Well, regarding today's massive ransomware attack based on a Microsoft security flaw, it's a little bit ironic

</comment><comment><USER46> Hm, what operating systems are used by governments outside of Europe? Doesn't everybody have to rely on Windows?

</comment><comment><USER47> Is there any possibility that China has a hardware backdoor in our iPhones? (and whatever other devices they make?)

</comment><comment><USER48> i went thru all the comments here and maybe it's a dumb question - but I'd assumed that the situation described applies to all/most governments? Is the situation vastly different e.g. in the U.S.?

</comment><comment><USER49> I think there is a bigger problem - using Microsoft Office means that an organisation is stuck in 1990's ways of working. The web should replace these tools that were developed for personal computers that came with floppy disk drives instead of ethernet connections.

Companies 'stuck' on old-fashioned Microsoft Office also have to present information to customers and internal stakeholders, so they hire a 'web department' that then becomes the new typing pool. Instead of dictated or hand-written things that get typed up on 'Wordperfect' (MS Office killed the typing pool for good), we now have Word documents or Excel spreadsheets that some 'web person' has to then copy onto some CMS or other system powered by a SQL database.

I did open a 'legacy spreadsheet' today so I appreciate that there is still some life in having data that way, however I cannot remember the last time I had a use case for a wordprocessor, Microsoft or otherwise.

I also know Microsoft do 'sharepoint' and a few other web things but not many 'real' websites have gone for the Redmond solution, 10% according to the survey I just Googled:

[https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2017/02/27/february-2017-...](https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2017/02/27/february-2017-web- server-survey.html)

Although 10% isn't quite into Windows Phone territory of pointlessness, I can't imagine setting out today with a new project and instantly thinking 'Microsoft'.

I think the Microsoft problem will cure itself much like how the old typing pool died - people get old, they retire, new people come along and learn how to do stuff with the new tools, the more efficient processes and the demands of the time.

<comment><USER50> I honestly can't imagine using any other tools to do my job than office. As a student I tried the Google suite/docs and years of usage has me relieved that I could leave them behind. Thinking back the only thing I remember about them is the instances of them not working or not working correctly. Printing was a mess. Left/right clicking to open more complex interfaces would often interfere with native browser/system functionality.

There are no true alternatives in my opinion. Everything else just does not cut it. Websites are slow and more often than not come with all kinds of garbage. Such as advertisements and the latest and greatest font or version 220.127.116.11 of whatever.js (that developers insist must not get cached because they use continuous integration! (note '&t=' parameters when GETting a script)).

No please, PLEASE, let me keep my efficient clean familiar office applications. They are everything I need, I think it's great not much has changed about the basics since they were introduced. I love the fact that I can sit down behind office 2016 and office 2000 and be just as productive when working with simple documents. I love the fact that my dad, whom I often support with computer related stuff, did not even notice the update from word 2003 to 2010.

<comment><USER41> I am surprised to hear that you say that the difference between office 2000 and 2016 is not so big.

I find that sharing files between them is huge pain and that the UI is totally different.

Have you considered LibreOffice, it is at least as fast as ms office, but can work with files from any version of ms office or other programs. It also doesn't cost money, which you didn't mention, but is a concern for most people.

As for letting "your software", as the article made clear it is not yours. You keep them at the pleasure of microsoft. If they ship an update that breaks them you are screwed. If they decide that your version of office is too old for your new version of windows they can ship an update that breaks it and they are financially incentivized to do so.</comment></comment></comment>


Google wins everything (part 1) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.launch.co/blog/googlewinseverything-part-1.html

<comment> google-serf Right now I'm pretty over google. I just learned today that they went back on their word that my cell phone number would only be used for account recovery; and against my wishes started using it so any android handsets could find my email and real name should they care to cross reference against my number. I watched as a blank android handset pull my personal information when I dialed it. Then they didn't give me an opportunity to opt out, because you can only opt out if you have a google plus account. The option to hide the number does not appear. No. Google doesn't win everything, they lost the battle when they got loose with our personal data. They were always an advertising company, rotten and corrupt to its core. I don't care if they have a million billion talented staff and all the money in the world. They are ethically bankrupt and their rein will end like all other great tyrants in the past. Screw you google.

<comment><USER2> This article is kind of dumb and your comment is irrelevant to it, _and_ this submission is already getting bombed off the front page, but:

a) they're pretty clear on how recovery numbers are used1[1], so honestly, I'm somewhat skeptical of your claim, but regardless:

b) you can easily change that setting, and no you don't need a g+ account. I found it in like 30 seconds. Just go to your account settings[2] and click the box with your phone number on it. The option is right there. In fact, the help page even explicitly mentions this is independent of any Google+ use of your phone number[3].

[1] [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/183728?hl=en&ref_...](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/183728?hl=en&ref_topic=2665222)

[2] [https://www.google.com/settings/](https://www.google.com/settings/)

[3] [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3113316](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3113316)

<comment> google-serf A) my claim is accurate. I was told it was used for account recovery. It is clearly been used to correlate with a google profile. This was opt-out and I didn't actually catch it in nov 2013 when the tech media had a cry about it. Their support article you gave mentioned is a lie, they are clearly using recovery numbers to populate their bullshit caller ID system.

B) the option is NOT there if you do not have a google plus account. Do you need me to screenshot it? If you see the word "hangout" near the mobile number you have google plus account. I had one option, remove recovery number. There was no opt-out "help others find me" tick. Didn't exist. I have no "hangout" settings. Somehow my google account must be in some kind of limbo where I'm not actually using other google services.

Your only option was to purge the number from account recovery, which I have done. My name and "YouTube" picture still appear on android handsets without an explicit contact. It's probably cached like that iPhone to android iMessage case recently.

<comment><USER3> On B, "Hangouts" and the opt out check box on that page only appears if you've previously opted in by saying yes to the "help my friends find me on google services/Confirm my number with a 1 time SMS" prompt either via Hangouts, or the Google Dialer in KitKat via a Nexus device. Otherwise it just shows Account Recovery, or nothing at all with no Phone number. The feature is opt- in, not opt-out.

As for your name and number showing up, to double check the obvious make sure the handset you tested on wasn't sync'd to Google allowing it to auto-populate the automated on-Device "Me" contact entry with your pic. If it was someone else's Google account synced phone, they have you in a Google Contacts entry w/ an email address, since that would pull in your pic and make it accessible to the dialer. That's their prerogative, not yours.

<comment> google-serf Ok, I've never opted in to has hangouts. Every example of the tick box i could find in images had a hangouts option. I understand if it is not related but it was worth mentioning.

It was not my phone, it was a friends who had started from a fresh android 4.4 install. There was no google contact sync. Even if the contact sync was in place, it would be unlikely that the other party would have used my 5 year old YouTube avatar and populated it with both my email and phone number and full name. If my contact on his google side was populated from my gmail; as I have emailed the other party before, it shouldn't contain my phone number either - unless google matched it and shared.

Something went wrong. I think my account is an edge case and I was opted into a service (you are dickheads. Opt out is always evil.) and because I had not consumed enough other services my account was not given the option to opt out. Point remains, google matched my recovery number with my profile, which they said they wouldn't. I can't see any other explanation.

<comment><USER3> > Even if the contact sync was in place, it would be unlikely that the other > party would have used my 5 year old YouTube avatar and populated it with > both my email and phone number and full name.If my contact on his google > side was populated from my gmail; as I have emailed the other party before, > it shouldn't contain my phone number either - unless google matched it and > shared.

I'll repeat my alternate explanation more concretely: the name and the Youtube pic was auto-synced via @GMail, and your friend just manually added your phone number to it. It's now permanently in his Gmail account as part of Google Contacts, independent of anything done on Google's part.

Get your friend to delete his contact of you from the address book ("People") and see if it occurs again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _1\. No company has as many smart people as Google._

Really? Because I'm less than impressed with what Google has done lately: Wave, G+, etc.

 _2\. No company is as ambitious as Google._ _3\. No company is working on as many hard problems as Google._ _4\. No company makes as many big bets as Google._ _10\. Only one CEO is more ambitious than Google's Larry Page._

There are hundreds of startups working on hard problems, making big bets and which are shamelessly ambitious. The company that will make Google irrelevant may not exist yet, but if it does, you haven't heard of it.

 _6\. No company has more data than Google._

That's a silly point. My startup works with big data and it's all about making it useful. Having lots of data _in-and-of-itself_ is not as huge a win as it seems. It's raining data right now.

 _9\. No company is as ruthlessly efficient as Google._

Except every two-person startup in existence, anywhere.

<comment><USER5> PR play by author..essay lacks certain depth to give validity to the points stated by the author

<comment><USER6> Jason Calacanis' #1 product is Jason Calacanis. This is the most relevant point of everything he says and does anywhere. Human clickbait.

<comment><USER7> He needs a better product manager, his product is all over the place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> More interesting discussion on Alex Schleber's G+ post:

[https://plus.google.com/+AlexSchleber/posts/boFYJq7yKDd](https://plus.google.com/+AlexSchleber/posts/boFYJq7yKDd)

Specifically:

Re point 1: But they are (self-)selected smart by Google's hiring processes to skew in a particular engineering direction that CAN make them "dumb" (=less smart) in more social, humanistic, and philosophical terms...

Gunther Sonnenfeld makes the point that I've been making for a year or so now: that Google's real competition is Amazon:

 _This isn 't really about digital rights fiefdoms and the ability to sell ads, but the distribution of products, services and data that keep customers realistically 'engaged'. Amazon has the entire ecosystem in play ... In short, Amazon doesn't need ads or impressions, and in fact, it will completely reinvent the standards for performance, reach and engagement by doing so._

Amazon itself is disruptable if someone can figure out how to get brick-and- mortar stores' inventories and order systems integrated. The last-mile / delivery problem is still Amazon's weak point, and if I can deal with merchandise issues _in person_ at a local storefront (with competent service), but handle ordering and information online, I'd do it (and in fact, often do).

I see security, privacy, tracking, and trust being Google's biggest weak points, along with hubris. The fact that I've all but abandoned it for Search (but Google Scholar and the Google Books Ngram viewer are awesome), and am starting to switch to OpenStreetMap, suggests that Google's foundations can be carved out from under it.

Remember, IBM, Xerox, and AT&T were unassailable behemoths in the 1970s / 1980s (well, prior to 1984 in the case of AT&T). Or Microsoft for the 1990s.

<comment><USER8> OP is talking about going to the moon, you are bringing the topic back to retail, which is ok but a bit cold-showerish.

I think on HN we could and should go further in the "no-limit" thoughts, even if as a simple exercise.

For example, I always wondered why would Google need to make money. In some weird views, we could think the maybe it already have enough money to be self- sustainable, in financial orbit. Maybe they could put all the money they have in some low risk investment and use the annuity to paid engineers and researchers. They sure could cut a lot of expenses on PR and office prettifying.

Then a Google that was not required to make money anymore would really become something. It could provide every human with free internet without relying on forced data mining. It could pay researcher to produce open whitepapers on topics of their own interests.

This would working be a little bit like Universities in the middle-age or renaissance: having some funds, hosting interesting people, being a center for innovation, etc.

I do not think this is pure utopy, or to say it otherwise: only a massive ship like Google could carry such an utopian experiment.

<comment><USER9> Google failed to make a big dent in cloud computing, e-reading, instant streaming, product search, on-line payments, and many other areas where they had huge ambitions, but it was Amazon that drove the market. Amazon even owns 10% of the tablet market, more than Samsung and Google combined. Google has become obsessed with turning itself into a social network, just when social networking reached its peak. Even Jeff Bezos' attempts at getting to the moon have so far been a lot more serious than that of Larry Page...

If anything will get us to the moon it's not piles of cash, it's a solid business strategy. I certainly hope Google will find one for glass, their self-driving cars, and other cool hardware projects, but a quick look around all the car manufacturers suggests that Google may once again miss the boat.

<comment><USER10> >I certainly hope Google will find one for glass, their self-driving cars, and other cool hardware projects, but a quick look around all the car manufacturers suggests that Google may once again miss the boat.

The car manufacturers are working on self-driving only on highways, which is nothing compared to general self-driving. I don't know for certain, but I think it's fairly safe to say that the car companies don't have the CS muscle to do proper general self driving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find it hilarious that the title is a hashtag that says google wins at everything...does the author not realize that the only reason he used a hashtag is because of twitter, a social media app that is resoundingly better than any of many attempts by google?

</comment><comment><USER12> Part 2: [http://blog.launch.co/blog/google-wins-everything-part- two-h...](http://blog.launch.co/blog/google-wins-everything-part-two-how-to- be-a-partner.html)

Unfortunately it doesn't discuss any of the follow-up topics mentioned at the end of part 1.

<comment><USER7> Part 2 is interesting though somewhat at odds with part 1.

In explaining how they're blowing it he's really talking about something which seems to me at least, is fundamental to Google's culture. They've never really done support, or consultation, or partners, they've never cared about other people's issues when they kill a popular service, in short they don't really care what others think.

That's given them a fantastic focus and means that theydon't get paralyzed by indecision or trying to keep everyone happy, but if that changes (and I really think it won't, I honestly think they don't care in that way) what else would changes with it and how would it impact them?

Part 2 is (a part of) the answer to his questions in part 1 - why Google will win everything. They'll be wildy successful, yes, but the way they operate will always leave areas where others will be able to be more appealing, at least for some consumers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ultimately they're not making as much profits as Apple, Microsoft or even Samsung - but they're doing a great job at attracting the best talent.

As long as they can make enough to retain their top talent, I can see them ultimately winning in the long-term, ending up with more reach and impact than anyone else.

I only see Apple as their biggest competition in the consumer market with massive resources and talent laser-focused on creating what many consumers want: beautifully simple and powerful UX's.

</comment><comment><USER14> They need the moonshots to be successful because their core business is done growing. The've run out of space on their results pages(14% organic) They've run out of small publishers to exploit. Cell phones don't work well for advertising. Social isn't growing very fast.

</comment><comment><USER15> #12 - No Company consistently fails to execute past Proof of Concept stage as much as google.

#13 - No Company consistently fails to monetize extremely popular services and instead shuts them down as much as Google.

</comment><comment><USER16> Eh, I scooped Google once. It was fun for a day, then depressing for a week, then fun for another day, then it was just something else that happened. A small amount of blood was spilled, but none of it was mine.

</comment><comment><USER17> Horrible extrapolation, and shyster prognostication. Would not read again.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually thought it was worth discussing more for 1) noting the sycophancy and 2) how Google could well fail to perform in the categories mentioned.

<comment><USER17> I won't argue with that. My dismissive comment was a personal reaction... I think this post is worthy of discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ugh. Publicising your pie in the sky ideas is not impressive.

Watch: FLYING BREAD MACHINES

Where's my kudos?

Anyone can 'work' on interesting, crowd leasers like life extension and internet for all, but until they do something they're essentially just jacking off. And we're footing the bill (well, advertisers are - silver lining...)

</comment><comment><USER19> Was it just me, or did the list at the beginning remind anyone else of [http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm](http://www.realultimatepower.net/index4.htm)?

</comment><comment><USER20> I consulted at Google last year and was initially surprised by the 10x requirement, but it makes sense given their resources and the cash assets to take long bets.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was at Google for six months in 2011 in a branch office (NYC) so take what I have to say with a grain of salt. I've been an ex-Googler (Xoogler) for more than 4 times longer than I was a Googler. It may have changed entirely since I was there.

I saw stack ranking, closed allocation, and mediocrity. There were some extremely smart people, but the corporate culture was a bit sleepy and resigned, and that was because of its closed-allocation regime. You get effective open allocation, quick promotions, and good management if Google decides you matter, but it's not likely to play that way unless you start in the right place.

Google is still very impressive for its size, and if it went for open allocation, it would probably reach a trillion-dollar market cap in 4-6 years. It _could_ win in a major way. Whether it will is unclear. It has the potential, for certain.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yet.</comment>


A voice in the dark (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/first-person/my-fear-of-the-dark-led-me-to-a-new-bedtime-ritualpodcasts/article37436045/ <comment><USER2> I settled on a similar way to keep the demons away.

For the past few years I've been falling asleep listening to an old iPhone 4 tucked under my pillow with the volume at it's lowest level. No earphones are necessary and my wife doesn't even realize I'm doing it.

I don't listen to podcasts but dialog-heavy movies that I've seen many times. I have a list of about 2 dozen movies that I go through depending on my mood, but they're all relatively quite without much action, just pleasant material. Since I've seen the movies it's easy to visualize along to the dialog and sleep comes (relatively) easy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think everyone can relate to falling asleep listening to a voice or background noise. I wonder if there any science about quality of sleep that results if you do this all night.

<comment><USER4> I am honestly completely opposite in this regard. Any sort of 'content' will keep me up for hours if it's playing near me. On vacations with friends and family, if others put on a movie to fall asleep to, I'll watch the entire thing. I've tried falling asleep to podcasts - but I have a compulsion to not allow my attention to be diverted from it. If I start dozing off and miss some - I'll go back a few clicks and make sure I'm aware.

That having been said, the white noise of a fan is always lovely to fall asleep to.

<comment><USER2> The key I found it so listen to something very familiar so that you can focus just enough to keep any anxiety at bay, but that doesn't demand too much attention. As I said in an earlier comment, I found listening to familiar movie dialog a reasonable solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I used to watch reruns of Law & Order. Hearing the beginning intro would remind me of a time when life was less complicated, and the plot was engaging enough to distract and lull me into sleep. Sadly, Netflix removed it, so I now rely on podcasts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sync keys you track in Keybase to GPG - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/samuelcouch/kbsync/blob/master/kbsync <comment><USER2> Can someone tell me why Keybase still doesn't offer a GPG Key server?

Oh right, because then people would realise that you can get 90% of the day to day value from plain old GPG and a regular key server.</comment>


Crowdtesting digital products – all you need to know - <AUTHOR> https://usersnap.com/blog/crowdtesting-all-you-need-to-know/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this article! Maybe a real-life example would be great.</comment>


Would Rust have prevented Heartbleed? Another look - <AUTHOR> http://tonyarcieri.com/would-rust-have-prevented-heartbleed-another-look <comment><USER2> Ted's post was a reaction to my overconfident assertion that even with a custom allocator, Rust would prohibit code from compiling that could lead to Heartbleed-like conditions. Furthermore, he was pointing out that random dorks like me talking great about Rust don't seem to actually know what was going on. I was under the impression that Heartbleed was _purely_ out-of-bounds access, and it's not quite just that. (Still, I find it highly unlikely any memory safe language would end up with a real world program reusing the same buffers for SSL keys _and_ user buffers, but it's possible.)

Had I been a bit more careful in my claim then there'd have been no question. Ted was technically accurate (the best kind), but a lot of the resulting discussion was of the form "bad coders can always write security holes, therefore a language isn't the fix, so C's OK". Even when major products, like everything MS ships, have critical CVEs almost exclusively due to memory safety, not arbitrary bad logic. Further tptacek likes to point out that memory safety is just one class of sec bugs, and that there's frillions of other bugs in other classes. My suspicion is that this is more of a bias towards app-level stuff (ie command injection in a billion web apps), not systems. I suppose if you get pwnd it doesn't matter how, but a world free of all those MS memsafety RCEs seems like a qualitatively different one.

But hey, I'm just some arbitrary weakling, and I find it hard to challenge people that are both smarter and drastically more experienced than I.

<comment><USER3> Writing widely-deployed infrastructure (web browsers, networking stacks, device drivers, openssl libraries) in C will be less and less justifiable over time. Rust is far from optimized right now. Rust is probably not going to be a language that you will script in. But it is a language that will possibly give Mozilla the world's most secure web browser by a significant margin if they succeed in writing the most bug prone components in Rust.

It takes more thought to write Rust programs. If you want to write safer widely-deployed infrastructure, you should learn about it. It may not be your best option right now, but its ideals are those that we absolutely need to strive for. Acting macho about C and the ability to write it safely does not lead to fewer RCE's in the world. It leads to more, because newcomers may see such people who can do so as examples to be emulated, far before they are capable.

Note that there are no familiar critics who say that Rust will not prevent some bugs. Note that there are no familiar proponents who claim that Rust will prevent all bugs. It is an implementation that strives to make progress in an area that we can all agree with - the safety of our programs with minimal performance degradation.

<comment><USER4> > But it is a language that will possibly give Mozilla the world's most secure > web browser by a significant margin if they succeed in writing the most bug > prone components in Rust.

A memory safe language alone isn't enough. Look at Java. Isn't that supposed to be a memory safe language? And yet it's constantly got security issues.

<comment><USER5> I would suggest that the security issues in Java are due to bugs in the various JVM implementations, which are likely written in C, right?

Not to say that Java is going to eliminate all bugs. However, it should eliminate all bugs to do with, e.g., reading/writing out of the bounds of an array and resulting in RCE due to bugs introduced in the application code. Reading/writing out of the bounds of an array will still be a bug, but not one that allows arbitrary code execution (at least not in the same way as it may for a language like C.

<comment><USER2> And many of them, from a quick glance, are actually due to complicated sandboxing policies. That is, RCE was an explicit feature, but they found it hard to get right.

In fact, one of the first real security holes I've ever found was in 1.0 version of the CLR. You could load a function pointer to an un-JIT'd function, then later on use that to safely jump to other code. This is technically a RCE, but the user has to be executing your code first anyways. That is, if the CLR and Java didn't set out to run "partially trusted" code with no help from the OS, these wouldn't have been problems at all.

Other languages like C, Ruby, etc. simply don't have this "partially trusted" concept so there's nothing to attack. (Well I guess things like Native Client or VMware qualify, but they're at a better abstraction later than JVM or CLR permissions.)

<comment><USER6> When I was an undergrad at UW, I engineered a vacuum bug that took advantage of a JDK1.1 bug in constant pool verification to suck out the user's in memory environment configuration (so like PATH variables and such).

[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/kimera/flaws/vacuum/](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/egs/kimera/flaws/vacuum/)

But most security holes these days are not flaws in the JVM/CLR, but logical errors made in the application; e.g. allocate a buffer and reuse it, this says nothing about memory safety at the VM level at all!

And at that, no one really trusts JVM security anymore, preferring to sandbox the entire operating environment in a heavyweight or lightweight VM.

<comment><USER7> > But most security holes these days are not flaws in the JVM/CLR, but logical > errors made in the application; e.g. allocate a buffer and reuse it, this > says nothing about memory safety at the VM level at all!

But most applications are written in memory-safe languages, so it's not surprising that most vulnerabilities are found in non-memory-safety related areas. The more interesting statistic is the number of critical security bugs that are memory-safety related in non-memory-safe languages.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't address what I said in the sentence you quoted at all. We were discussing Java and vulnerabilities that arise given flaws in the JVM. You are talking about something else that is completely different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hi. Rust core here.

I like to say that of course Rust prevented Heartbleed, because we don't currently support wrapping malloc ;). That's of course a bit glib.

While it's true that Rust gives you a lot of assistance with writing safe code, given that unsafe exists, and that we, as a systems language, need to give you underlying access to the machine, Rust will allow you to do all kinds of stupid things if you vouch to the compiler that you're going to handle the safety aspect. This means that ultimately, you can do any kind of stupid thing in Rust that you can do in any other language.

An example: a common problem in C code is buffer overflows, which happens when some code thinks that an array has more elements in it than it does. Because C's arrays don't have a length as part of the type, it can be error prone to keep track of the length of the array. Rust's arrays, vectors, and slices all have a length as a part of the type, and so it's more difficult to have this data be out of sync. But Rust will let you be stupid if you want to:

        fn bad_stuff(v: Vec<i32>) -> i32 {
            unsafe {
                *(v.get_unchecked(v.len() + 1))
            }
        }

        fn main() {
            let vec = vec![1, 2, 3];

            let val = bad_stuff(vec);

            println!("{}", val);
        }

The `bad_stuff` function here uses `get_unchecked()`, which skips the array bounds check, to grab some memory past the length of the end of the vector. Rust will happily compile this code, your `unsafe` block tells the compiler to trust that you're using `get_unchecked()` in a safe way, even though it can't verify it.

Now, there's a decent discussion that can be had on this topic: 'usual' Rust code will of course be significantly safer than 'usual' C code, since you have the compiler's assistance. Unfortunately, security is often about the edge cases. While it's true that not wrapping malloc would have prevented Heartbleed from happening, and most C projects don't wrap malloc... it did happen. Once Rust starts getting used in the wild, we'll see Rust with security problems, I'm sure of it. That doesn't mean that Rust has no value, just that we need to be realistic about the tradeoffs that any of our technologies make. Rust is not a panacea, even if it does cure some of your aches and pains.

<comment><USER9> Oh but it _DOES_ mean that Rust has no value, at least regarding security. Once you give them the rope, they _WILL_ use it. Let's see if time will prove me right.

<comment><USER10> Every language has a C FFI that users can use as rope to hang themselves with. `unsafe` code in Rust is just a reified FFI that actually manages to make Rust code _safer_ because it means fewer things need to be written in C, and even unsafe Rust code is safer than C. Furthermore, the strict demarcation of `unsafe` blocks greatly alleviates the burden upon code auditors, allowing them to focus their efforts. Even if an extraordinarily high percentage of your code is contained within unsafe blocks, say 10%, that's ten times less code to audit than an equivalently-sized C codebase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I disagree about Ted being wrong.

A key phrase in Ted's article is _Hopefully the simulacrum retains the essence of the problem._

What Tedbleed, as your article calls it, demonstrates is a bug similar to Heartbleed: reuse of a buffer in a memory-safe language is susceptible to leakage of secrets.

While I might answer the question _are Rust's memory safety features being oversold by uninformed zealots?_ , no I don't think so, but I would suggest that thinking that memory safety ends all security issues is a not good plan.

The key is _Unless you venture into the (explicitly demarcated) unsafe portion of Rust, you will not see memory exposure vulnerabilities like Heartbleed_ : the language does not prevent this. Perhaps your post will stimulate Ted to go further with his example and write an erroneous complete TLS stack in Rust, showing how it too can do Heartbleed. Perhaps you agree that this can be done.

Among the scariest mass vulnerabilities relating to total information disclosure, the Padding Oracle Attack, the BEAST attack, the compression flaw CRIME, none have to do with memory safety of languages. Rust there would not have helped one whit.

Memory safety is just one issue in writing secure code.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER12> To my knowledge, _no one_ in the Rust or greater memory-safe programming language community would claim:

 _Using <$LANG> prevents leakage of secrets!_

When put like that, it sounds like a straw-man argument. In my own words, the narrower and stronger claim being made is that _the specific and important avenue by which Heartbleed leaked secrets_ is _not possible_ without unsafe code in Rust.

So if you're going to claim that Ted "isn't wrong", but on terms that no one was originally arguing... I don't even know what to say.

<comment><USER13> I would claim that using Scala (and presumably Haskell) gives you the tools to make it impossible to leak secrets, if you want to. You could use a path- dependent container type to ensure that content was associated with a particular connection and never passed off to a different connection; if you tried to do something like reusing a buffer, it would be a compile failure.

There would be costs to this - both in runtime performance (presumably you wanted to reuse buffers for a reason) and in program complexity. And of course it's possible to make an error in your type definitions (though you have to make two errors to be exploitable - one in the types and one in the values - and the types are shorter and much easier to audit than the full program code). But it absolutely is possible, and I think that pretty soon we'll reach the point where it becomes worthwhile for security-critical code.

<comment><USER8> Yeah but even Haskell (and I'm assuming Scala has something similar) has unsafePerformIO...

<comment><USER14> As far as I understand, unsafePerformIO is not unsafe in relation to memory safety issues. It is just unsafe in that it circumvents the IO monad, which means order of execution is not guaranteed.

<comment><USER8> It's a different kind of unsafe, but my point is that it violates the normal guarantees of the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see any value in arguing over whether a hypothetical program written in Rust would have had one specific bug.

What is more important is whether using a language like Rust will prevent _some_ severe security holes, and the answer is quite obviously that it will. Sure, it's possible to create bugs in any language, but it's much harder to prevent bugs in C than in most languages.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ted's original point about Heartbleed not being a violation of memory safety is bogus, because there is a configuration of OpenSSL (achievable with flags passed to ./config) where extended-sized Payload values cause the OpenSSL server to segfault with an out of bounds read. It takes a special kind of bravery to look at that kind of crash and say that it is not the result of a violation of memory safety.

<comment><USER17> I'll be the last person to claim there aren't memory safety violations in OpenSSL.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but you specifically said that Heartbleed wasn't a memory safety violation, when in fact OpenSSL-vulnerable-to-Heartbleed can segfault on over- read. So what is it?

<comment><USER2> But Heartbleed still existed even without out-of-bound reads, right? That's the critical distinction I got wrong and why Ted made his rather fine point. In Ted post, IIRC, he's clear that Rust will unlikely have such needed up code written. But that if people like me boast how Rust would have flat-out refused to compile such code, then we don't know the details and probably aren't in a position to be spouting off on security. A one or two word edit of my original comment would have avoided this whole discussion while retaining the essence that Rust would, in practice, almost certainly eliminate these bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As soon as we have a full port of OpenSSL in Rust, this will be interesting. Talk is cheap; who's going to step up and do the hard work?

I do believe that the right developers, using the right practices, could make a more-secure OpenSSL. But it would be expensive in terms of developer time. Maybe a group with the right experience could crowdfund it?

<comment><USER19> Another interesting tack is happening in Mirage with a TLS stack written in OCaml.

[https://tls.openmirage.org/](https://tls.openmirage.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a question: How do Rust and Go compare in terms of security? Or are they both very similar in terms of mitigating certain classic C vulnerability classes.

<comment><USER21> Background: I have been developing in Go for ~5 years, and Rust for probably less than 2 months.

\- Both Go and Rust use bounds checking on arrays/slices (which means out-of- bounds accesses are not allowed).

\- Go is garbage collected, so memory leaks cannot occur.

\- Rust encourages an ownership/lifetime model, so memory leaks cannot occur.

\- Go can still have data races between multiple concurrent threads. To catch them, you must use the race detector _at run time_. Note however that Go encourages communicating information over channels, and if idiomatic code is being written the chance of data races is next to none.

\- Rust cannot have data races in most cases, as it's ownership/lifetime model allows for catching them _at compile-time_.

\- Both of these assumptions are based on no external C or unsafe code being in the picture.

TL;DR: Very similar.

EDIT: I used the wrong terminology -- sorry. Instead of _memory leak_ I should have said _dangling pointers_ (memory leaks can occur in _any_ language, Go/Rust/Java/JS/etc).

<comment><USER22> > Go is garbage collected, so memory leaks cannot occur.

Well it depends on how you define memory leaks. Memory leaks can of course occur logically. Like say you create objects in a cache and never remove them. It is still a memory leak.

But at the level that you define the memory leak, it seems Rust can be just as good as Go because memory ownership is tracked by the compiler. One can say it is even better because of compile time checks and no need to have a GC @ runtime present.

<comment><USER23> If you're worried about memory leaks, an obvious downside of Rust is that it encourages reference counting over GC (more accurately: has no GC, but that might change in the future), and reference counting can leak via cycles.

However, in practice most values can be neither Rc nor Gc but single-owner, like unique_ptr in C++, which is easier to reason about than either.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it's important to note that Rust isn't 'refcounting but not GC,' but single ownership + borrowing over all else, and then using refcounting if you find yourself in a situation where you need multiple ownership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A side question to HN:

For the security topic, most of the power of Rust come from a strong typing, safety checks (boundaries), ownership checks... Well, a lot of checks at compile time.

As far as I know of Rust by glancing at the doc frequently, C++11/14 also contains these "safe tools": ownership can be dealt with smart pointers (unique, shared), value semantics, move semantics (rvalues) and the rest. Boundaries checks with the correct containers (std::vector, std::array...). Mutability with "const". Atomicity with std::atomic... Type safety by using explicit conversions, templates instead of macros, variadic args...

Heck, all the drama from C++ seems to come from a misusage or some legacy parts from another age (up to C). In order to avoid people to shot themselves in their feets, why couldn't we just introduce a strict compilation mode a la JavaScript to let say Clang: # pragma strict

# pragma unsafe # pragma safe

Nowadays, good C++11 compilers can even deal with such a things like constexpr. This seems a reachable goal.

What are the true drawbacks of a fully modern C++ code compared to a Rust? Is there any true feature that can't be done in C++ due to a deep problem of conception? Don't le me wrong, I do not seek to diminished the amazing work of Mozilla. I am not talking neither about the other cool features from functional languages, switch cases... that Rust has and C++ don't.

<comment><USER25> You're mistaken if you think that anything in C++11/14 makes it memory-safe like Rust guarantees.

C++11/14 lets you assign a std::unique_ptr to another variable then re-use the original variable, causing a null dereference. You can also have a reference to the same std::unique_ptr from two different threads causing a race- condition on the underlying pointer.

There is no bounds checking on std::vector by default. You _can_ bounds check a std::vector (using "at" or various configuration/compiler settings which change the semantics of the standard library) but by default, it is not checked.

Fundamentally, the issue is that C++ lets you have null pointers and references (yes, references can be null). It lets you use before initializing. It lets you run out of bounds. It lets you access the same variable from multiple threads without any safety. Yes, idiomatically, none of these should be an issue but it's not possible to be a perfect programmer.

Rust forces idiomatic memory management and eliminates all these issues. If you make a memory safety mistake, the compiler will force you to fix it.

<comment><USER24> Your points are clearly valids. But wouldn't some of them corrected by a strict mode?

\- For instance, the reuse of the original variable could be deduced by the compiler. \- The bound checking for std::vector can effectively be enable. One could imagine an std::strict_vector that do so.

What I am wondering is: does the same idiomatic memory management applied to C++ would require some huge tweaks to the language, some bad tricks, new keywords, or can it be done without changing its design but enforcing some rules?

I, for instance, have no clues how to deal with your "one unique_ptr two threads" problem. Could it be done in an elegant way in C++?

<comment><USER26> Linear types (as in Rust) can prevent (at compile time) some of the more trivial use-after-free issues e.g. for unique_ptr, but I think the main reasons you won't see undefined behavior eliminated from C++ wholesale is that it a) often requires extensive support at runtime (see ASAN, UBSAN, etc.) and b) presents a huge barrier to optimization in certain cases and c) (thus) is going to be waaay too slow for production use. (I.e. if C++ were to go in this direction someone would basically either "fork" C++ or a new (similar) language would supplant it.)

Unfortunately, currently no "sufficiently smart compiler" exists, so that high-level code can be optimized sufficiently to beat what a good micro- optimizing C++ compiler (which can assume that no undefined behavior can occur at runtime) can achieve.

<comment><USER10> Undefined behavior does permit optimizations, yes, but I think you're overselling its benefit. Rust doesn't have undefined behavior and there are many instances where its strict semantics mean that it is far more optimizable and runtime-efficient than C++ (though some of those optimizations are yet to be implemented).

<comment><USER26> Perhaps, these days you're right -- assuming you want to only support mainstream architectures. These days you can mostly rely on all mainstream architectures to do something sensible with e.g. signed integer overflow[1] or excessive shifting, but that wasn't necessarily the case when most of C++ was standardized. As an example of a similar nature -- as I'm sure you know -- Rust has chosen to _not_ abort/panic on signed overflow although almost all instances of such are most probably plain logic errors and could lead to security problems[2]. As far as I could understand, this was for performance reasons. Granted, this is not quite as disastrous for general program correctness as UB, but it can lead to security bugs.

Point being: Underspecification can give you a _lot_ of leeway in how you do something -- and that can be hugely valuable in practice.

Just as an aside: Personally I tend to prefer safety over performance, but I was persuaded that UB is valuable by comments that Chandler Carruth of Clang (and now ISO C++ committee) fame made about UB actually being essential to optimization in C++. Sorry, can't remember where, exactly, those comments were made.

[1] Everybody's probably using two's-complement (for good reasons).

[2] Not nearly as easily as plain buffer overflows, but there have been a fair few of these that have been exploitable.

<comment><USER27> Rust will actually now panic when not in release mode when an integer overflow happens, as opposed to how things used to be before, where it would just accept the overflow silently with wrapping semantics. Here is the discussion from when this change was announced: [http://internals.rust-lang.org/t/a-tale- of-twos-complement/1...](http://internals.rust-lang.org/t/a-tale-of-twos- complement/1062)

<comment><USER26> Oh, that's good news!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Remember: Heartbleed was a consequence of the OpenSSL implementors avoiding using glibc for allocations. A "fair" comparison is with unsafe rust code, which of course can have the problem.

<comment><USER2> Was it? I thought that only exacerbated the issue. malloc is free to return previously used memory, is it not? Various systems might provide some last- chance efforts against this kinda thing, but the bug would still exist and be exploitable in some configurations, right?

<comment><USER28> Free by the standard, yes. In the average stdlib, not any more. In particular, Linux web servers would be safe, which would have rendered Heartbleed more of a "edge case platforms" kind of bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can you use a Rust library easily from all the current C code?

<comment><USER8> As long as you declare the functions to use a C ABI, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Heartbleed = 100,000 brokenhearted nerds

</comment><comment><USER31> Can real projects like Servo brag "0 unsafe code"? If not, then this safety is not so practical as it sounds in theory.

<comment><USER8> Cargo only has unsafe code in its FFI binding. (Funny enough, its binding to OpenSSL.)

<comment><USER31> Some shiny badges "unsafe lines: 0" will encourage people to create products without unsafe code. Like badge "build: passing" do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ok, maybe, and definitely cool. But Java was supposed to prevent memory leaks but it's still possible :)

<comment><USER33> There is a whole class of memory leaks that is possible in C but not in Java. You can leak memory by forgetting to deallocate it. This class is not possible in typical Java code, because the garbage collector collects it.

Then you have memory leaks that happens because the application has data structures that grow unbounded. The latter one is not really preventable by automatic means, because the memory is still referenced from elsewhere in the application, and a garbage collector can't know that this memory won't be accessed again.

It does help that the most common source of memory leaks is eliminated however. That many Java applications are memory hogs is more a result of typical Java programming style than anything else.

<comment><USER34> > It does help that the most common source of memory leaks is eliminated > however. That many Java applications are memory hogs is more a result of > typical Java programming style than anything else.

This may be part of it, but typically, the JVM will happily reclaim large chunks of memory from the OS, without necessarily allocating anything internally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The code that led to the Heartbleed vulnerability was checked in in December 2011. The first _pre-Alpha_ release of Rust was in January 2012 (source: Wikipaedia for both). Would _technology from the future_ have prevented it, is the actual question, and the answer should be obvious...

<comment><USER36> Rust isn't technology from the future, for the most part. It's _engineering_ from the future -- everything is in one language with a native ABI -- but with very few exceptions, each _technology_ in Rust has been around for a while.

Memory-safe arrays, which is what's at issue here, is precedented in tons of languages. Even GW-BASIC got this right.

It should be an embarrassment to the entire systems programming community that it's 2015 and we're only starting to think of replacing C.

<comment><USER8> It's been an explicit goal of Rust to not use cutting edge PLT. For an industry language, Rust's stuff is pretty new, but that's because industry languages lag so far behind PLT as a field.</comment></comment></comment>


Spinlaunch: Who Needs Rockets When You Can Use Space Catapults? - <AUTHOR> https://interestingengineering.com/spinlaunch-who-needs-rockets-when-you-can-use-space-catapults <comment><USER2> Anyone with cargo that cannot withstand prolonged 10+ g at launch? Previous: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16439835](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16439835)</comment>


Edward Snowden Is a Fucking Idiot - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/edward-snowden-is-a-fucking-idiot-1789039598 <comment><USER2> Perhaps Ed Snowden has reason to not piss off the political flavor of the month, for extrajudicial rendition and the death penalty for treason exist. Maybe he's ok with promoting technology because it gets the job done with less political fall out for him.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      "And I've come to the conclusion that he's promoting an idiotic worldview that's completely devoid of answers for how to effectively combat the threat that Donald Trump and his neo-fascist goons pose to our democracy."

k den

</comment><comment><USER4> Not much in the article. I ended up reading other articles on the site like 10 ways to lead a hhappy life and how to make your own chipotle.

<comment><AUTHOR> :-) I'm sure they were a better read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was an annoying read. His thought process and lack of content was concerning..

<comment><AUTHOR> Not the best text, no.</comment></comment>


Fox News still makes awesome charts - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2011/12/12/fox-news-still-makes-awesome-charts/

<comment><USER2> Best. Pie. Chart. Ever. Period!</comment>


Scale of the Universe - <AUTHOR> http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/

<comment><USER2> As pointed out by others, the largest scales on this animation are completely wrong. The figure given for the Observable Universe, 14 billion light years, is actually only half of the distance between us and the HUDF.YD3 galaxy. The figure given for the total size of the Universe is actually the estimated size of the Observable Universe: 93 billion light years. The size of the Universe itself is not known with any certainty.

If you're wondering to yourself how anything can be further away than (age of Universe) * (speed of light), read up on comoving distance and the metric expansion of spacetime. I wrote a fairly lengthy series of comments on this six months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1317907>

<comment><USER3> I'm wondering what you think about Wun-Yi Shu Universe (<http://byrev.org/tech/wun-yi-shu-universe/>). I saw a post about his paper here on HN a while ago.

<comment><USER2> Without looking too hard at it, this seems to be nonsense. Shu pulls parameters out of the air all over the place and makes wild philosophical claims about the nature of time without explanation. He selectively ignores basic physics, and makes up nonstandard formulas for various quantities whenever they're needed.

Further, he repeatedly draws conclusions that, if proven, would win him a Nobel Prize. The biggest is that black holes can't exist. Others include having solved both the flatness problem and the horizon problem and ruling out the only known explanation of the CMBR without replacing it with anything else.

But, rather than take my word for it, you should just apply the Baez Index: <http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula--for that was his name--was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty- eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex--just to show her.

And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion._

<comment><USER5> I really hope no HN reader misses the reference, but:

      -- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_

<comment><USER6> I think he'd have appreciated this site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time this toy shows up, I try to remind people that it doesn't have the grandest scale right.

First, the observable universe. From WP:

 _The comoving distance from Earth to the edge of the observable universe is about 14 billion parsecs (46.5 billion light-years) in any direction. The visible universe is thus a sphere with a diameter of about 28 billion parsecs (about 93 billion light-years). Assuming that space is roughly flat, this size corresponds to a comoving volume of about 3×10^80 cubic meters. This is equivalent to a volume of about 41 decillion cubic light-years short scale (4.1 × 10^34 cubic light years)._

Now for the whole universe:

 _According to the theory of cosmic inflation and its founder, Alan Guth, if it is assumed that inflation began about 10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang, then with the plausible assumption that the size of the Universe at this time was approximately equal to the speed of light times its age, that would suggest that at present the entire Universe's size is at least 10^23 times larger than the size of the observable Universe._

<comment><USER8> Ah, but in the earliest part of the big bang, time didn't exist. Now what?

<comment><USER9> You are incorrect. There is no concept of time or space "before" the Big Bang; I say "before" in quotes because there is no "before" the Big Bang.

In the earliest part of the Big Bang time did exist. The Big Bang created time.

<comment><USER8> Simple question here, when did I ever say before?

Edit:

In the early universe, before the plank epoch when we had particles of plank length or less, you know, things with a schwarzschild radius? The entire universe made of things that are black holes, nothing but black holes? Those time-ending particles that disappeared in their own hawking radiation? The first early 10^−43 seconds, where time didn't actually exist? Those were the good old days.

<comment><USER4> _The first early 10^−43 seconds, where time didn't actually exist?_

If time didn't exist, then how did the universe know when those 10^-43 seconds were up?

Seriously, I think this discussion is proceeding at a level which probably shouldn't be attempted by non-cosmologists. We all probably have a bunch of misconceptions we've picked up from popularizations about the Big Bang, and would only embarrass ourselves if any cosmologists happen to show up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Darn American measuring system. I wish I wasn't metric system handicapped... After slowly and sensibly dragging from small to large, it's cool to whip rapidly too! :)

Edit: Uh oh, I seem to have angered the downvote police. Sorry, uh... yay fractions?

<comment><USER11> At these scales, the difference between meters and feet (or really, between cm and miles) is insignificant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting that we seem to fall about in the middle.

Or perhaps that suggests we've only been able to observe so far in either direction.

<comment><USER13> Because humans can only observe the universe from Earth's point of view, our perception is that we are in the middle of the cosmos. Yet we are only in the middle of what we can observe from our point of view at any angle. As you said, we can only observe so far in either direction or any direction as it were.

<comment><USER12> I was referring to the middle of the scale, rather than the middle of the universe.

<comment><USER13> Ah, thank you for clarity. The concept still applies I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _We're probably not in the center of the universe._

From having listened to Dr Pamela Gay on Astronomy Cast for the last few years, I thought the general line of thinking now was that there is no center (or if there is, it's "everywhere") due to way it loops around on itself.

<comment><USER15> There is no "general thinking" because no one's measured the edge of the universe to see what it's like. And certainly no one has seen the universe "wrap" around itself. In the absence of evidence, everyone just picks the model that looks best to them on paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previously submitted as <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1084700>

</comment><comment><USER16> At the smallest scale it claims: _Plank's length -- any length shorter makes no physical sense_

Is this actually true? According to wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_length>): _The physical significance of the Planck length, if any, is not yet known._

</comment><comment><USER17> A video which gives perspective of distance, in appreciable way. The powers of ten [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0&feature=player_embedded)

</comment><comment><USER18> I found it incredibly annoying that the numbers are formatted with the power of ten magnitude first, and the actual measurement last.

So, 3 cm is formatted as 10^-2 * 3 m, rather than the (in my opinion, correct) 3 * 10^-2 m. The power of ten is what is given a shorthand as "centi" in "cm", so it just disrupts it totally when they're swapped.

I realize the point is probably to make the order of magnitude more important than the actual value ("cm" is more interesting than "3 cm"), to get a sense of scale. Still, I found it ugly and hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER19> Another one with much limited scope:

<http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Fascinating how large the gap is from Neutrinos to Quantum Foam/Strings. I can't help but wonder if it's filled with stuff we don't yet know about.

Also, a Giant Earthworm that's the length of a small car? What what what?

Really great data viz, thanks for posting it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Absolutely fantastic and soothing. My thoughts are made of such things, this example helps to sooth my mind.

A technical question: How was relative scale so efficiently kept between all those objects?

</comment><comment><USER21> Isn't it odd that there is _no_ physical structure between 10^-35 (Planck length) and 10^-24 (neutrino)?

That's a massive gap compared to scales larger than the neutrino. Is there are reason?

<comment><USER22> They may not have been discovered yet. Things on this scale would be incredibly difficult to detect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I want to know what's hiding between 0.1 yoctometers and Planck length, it seems like a big blank according to the Flash app thing...

<comment><USER24> Yeah, we have no instruments to really get to that scale. Probably won't for some time, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well done! Edutainment at its finest. You should publish that for physics teachers.

</comment><comment><USER26> there might be entire civilizations of life forms billions of years ahead of us technology wise inside the atoms that make up the particles in the air we breath. Our entire universe may be an atom that makes up a single blob unit of a cell inside an entity that is larger than our known universe.

It would make an interesting sci-fi movie, to finally make contact with an advanced race that lives inside an electron.

<comment><USER27> Men In Black? (although I guess contact wasn't actually made, unless you count a game of marbles)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> too good..i've added it to my favorites.

</comment><comment><USER29> We are so small yet think so big. We are interesting creatures...a bit mad though.

<comment><USER6> Only /a bit/ mad?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The only way this could've been better is if a large, screaming face appeared at the smallest scale.</comment>


Malware is not only about viruses – companies preinstall it all the time - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/22/malware-viruses-companies-preinstall <comment><USER2> I am constantly surprised at how well Stallman manages to cut through to to the issues, in a way approachable to the layperson, given that he himself is an arch-nerd with famously low empathy. I think it must stem from clarity of thought.

</comment><comment><USER3> Written by Richard Stallman.

He makes many good points, but also says:

       I developed the GNU operating system,
       which is often called Linux

Wow. He just can't let that go, can he?</comment>


The problem with HTML - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/the-problem-with-html <comment><USER2> Sometimes it's not about which software is better. Sometimes it's about who gets out there first.

<comment><AUTHOR> And 30 years later? At some point it is necessary to rethink how a technology works. There are reasons why the world eventually gave up on freon and moved on to chemicals that were safer. There is a reason why telephone systems eventually went digital, even though the old systems worked.

<comment><USER2> You're talking of physical properties.

In terms of software, a perfect example is Microsoft.

I'm not saying it's unwise to upgrade technology, but things tend to stick around for a long time. Because it works.

The amount of time and resources it takes for the skill gap to close when you're talking about a core techongoly that almost any IT person is knowledgeable in. It's insane. We're talking generations.

It's going to take a long time for that to change.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are inventing "just so" stories whose only point is to justify stagnation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>