petervuto

Switzerland has a very direct form of democracy thanks to its constitutional referendums. If Swiss representatives pass unpopular bullshit like the EU bottle cap rule, their work can be permanently undone by a citizen initiative writing a constitutional resolution overriding said bullshit. This means that the representatives are on a tight leash and would not even attempt to write the unpopular regulations that the EU gets away with.

One day you piss off the voters with your poorly conceived cookie law, couple years later there's a line in the constitution saying "no cookie laws" and your hands are tied forever.

There is a tradeoff to be considered between the utility gained from using the stuff, minus the risk severity/likelihood, plus available mitigations. As someone else posted, none of us are in a position to make that balanced post because we don't know if the guy has an airgapped backup or not etc.

In any case, GP's post was not such a balanced consideration; it was just parroting a beloved risk-aversion meme that can easily be deployed against building anything (what if the building falls on top of someone?) or even leaving home to go to work ("travelling in a hunk of steel at lethal speeds – let me assure you that absolutely nothing can go wrong here, mate.")

What I find tiresome about that meme is the presumption that "something can go wrong" is useful input on its own. It's not. Mistakes are made all the time, the only way to avoid that is to stop breathing. Even in the process of me standing up and going to the loo, something can go wrong.

If the guy wants to make a case that it's too dangerous for the expected benefits, he has to actually make that case. Saying "risk exists" with no elaboration is a waste of HTML. "something can go wrong" every time he swallows food, yet mysteriously he still does it.

(the suicide analogies may seem mean-spirited, but I kind of mean it. If you consider every action primarily from a standpoint of "what harm or irreversible change can result from this", the only permissible path is to do nothing. To be moral is to be as close as possible to a rock or another inanimate object.)

When you do things in life, sometimes things go wrong. Oh no!

This is such a ridiculous objection for how beloved it is. Wide swathes of the public can't cope with any adversity or risk.

Some of the exploits are suspected to be intentional govt backdoors. It is easy to see why Gitlab would ban the user, given that they can be secretly subpoenad as any other US or allied entity.

Contrary to popular belief, it is NOT anyone's obligation to do free work for megacorps. If anyone is testing MS products for free, or reporting bugs for free, that's a gracious favor, nothing more.