News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals by akkartik on Thursday February 09, 2023 @04:42PM (#34731951)
Focusing on the non-scifi angle here, there's one other reason besides C that we end up constantly running data when we think we're parsing it: the depth of our computational stack.

https://www.sitepoint.com/anatomy-of-an-exploit-an-in-depth-...

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/371098

So I'd say we need 3 things:

* Stop using unsafe languages

* Use languages that separate parsing from execution. Just follow Lisp, have equivalents for `read` and `eval`. Lua is a notable offender here: https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.html#pdf-load There is no way to parse a table while guaranteeing no code execution.

* Use languages that forbid monkey-patching, because that's one vector for turning `read` into `eval` because someone had a bright idea.

Re:AI Joins Hunt for ET: Study Finds 8 Potential Alien Signals by rmckayfleming on Thursday February 09, 2023 @05:07PM (#34732288)
With the caveat that you don't literally follow Lisp by having a #. reader macro.