It does evoke the brilliant:

"We're making the world a better place through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility."

It's a infrastructure piece, which is several abstraction layers below the things that do impact freedom and all the other abstract values that high school LD debaters love to talk about. That they continue to parrot the "just missed a security update" view of the Equifax hack is both sad and makes me highly doubt their security acumen. True security relies on layers, not an impenetrable outer shell. Equifax's blunder was a fundamental lack of security-conscious architecture, not a failure to install a security update. I'm guessing that CoreOS actually understand this, they're just trying to profit from an event that's going to have real negative consequences for a lot of people who's information was stockpiled without their consent, which is a pretty crappy thing to do.

You're not wrong - this is pretty cringeworthy.

It's no mystery what's wrong with Equifax to those who have accounts with all three bureaus. Two seconds inside the site will tip you off; hint, it's much higher level than choice of hosting platform. CoreOS is certainly trying to get on the radar here for when the other shoe drops and Equifax starts spending serious money on this stuff. The whole thing seems a bit tone deaf in timing though.

You wouldn't think that patching a Java web framework could protect the personal financial information of millions of Americans, but here we are. Security matters.

I used the work in the IT department at an environmental research agency here in the UK. I took enormous pride in the quality and importance of the research conducted by the people I worked with even though I just helped them work more easily with better tools.

Especially since it took another 80 years for the country that the 'freedom-loving' Founding Fathers created to actually get rid of slavery. Buggered if I know why some people get so religiose about the Founding Fathers when they missed such simple things like "hey, freedom for all means no slaves. And women get the vote as well."

They enacted tremendous social change for their time, but they weren't dictators. Even if they wanted to abolish slavery or enable women to vote, it would have never happened because those were very unpopular views at the time. Only a (benevolent?) dictatorial regime can act against the popular will of the people to enact changes faster than the people can accept them.

Societal change has a hull speed, and attempting to exceed that hull speed will result in massive push-back and ultimately failure even if the change in question is viewed as 'obvious' in historical hindsight.

We can see the exact same thing happening today with the legalization of gay marriage or drugs. Both will be viewed as obvious a generation from now, but today they face tremendous pushback. That's not the fault of governance, that's just governance imposing changes that approach the societal hull speed on those issues.

Also, it took a war to get rid of slavery.

I can understand why a new nation battling off a major world power for independence didn't have a civil war at the same time.

Sometimes, you have to pick your battles.

The entire essay reeks of PR; if they were so security conscious they'd pick SmartOS zones with their full isolation as the basic building block, or even OpenBSD and extended it. Instead, they picked an OS with a very wide attack surface and a history of vulnerabilities. If you were setting about to design a security minded product, would you pick a substrate like Linux or one like OpenBSD?