PeterLGummybear

The XNU networking stack is complete garbage in general. Have you ever seen all the crazy hard-coded stuff they have for different types of network mediums -- wifi vs cellular vs etc -- and in the kernel? It's bonkers. Plus a weird evolution of firewalls and ugh.

And indeed it's time to give up on the web being a document format only. The internet is about loading remote applications in your local sandbox. That's what it is. It sucks, but it is what it is. As part of loading remote applications, we now might be asked to compute whatever anti-abuse puzzles are required. So it goes.

The first comment in there is really gold. Get rid of sysvinit, but please do invest efforts in advancing init systems. The problem is clearly not "solved" and we need diversity.

I'm all for rewriting things into safe languages, but I do like the battle-tested nature of C things, like unbound. For example, I'm interested in replacing my smtpd daemon with something better. I'm most tempted to go with postfix, because it's very supported, does lots, is totally battle tested, and has a good security track record. However, the hip kid on the block is Haraka -- https://haraka.github.io/ . It's written by smart people with a long history in the problem space, and it does things in a new and modern way. I'm inclined to like it. But several things make me hesitant:

- Will a hipster javascript thing really be as reliable? Are these new runtimes really sufficient for totally essential things like email? What about filesystem stuff? I'd think a battletested thing like postfix will be much better off than this. - Do I really want to deal with javascript or whatever other hipster language for deployment? With most essential utilities, it's packaged in my distro with minimal dependencies. With hipster stuff, it's usually a fast pace of development, which doesn't lend itself to packaging, and uses something awful like npm. Is this something I really want to depend on?

So I'd wonder the same thing about sdns. The "rewrite it in ${safelang}" trend tends to produce immature and unreliably deployable software and that makes me worried. How's sdns fare?

The other day we saw an article about someone embedding a .zip in a jpeg that survived twitter's thumbnailing. What about doing similar things with the eicar string or other false positives that make antivirus freak out? This seems like it'd be an interesting DoS attack.