zerokernel

HTTP-as-an-ABI

That's why high assurance systems (like L4/seL4) minimize privileged code to a tiny fraction of what you find in a regular system, which absolutely makes sense and provably improves security.

Apart from the obvious advantages, minimal privileged code also means that it becomes far more feasible to formally verify the privileged code, like it has been done for seL4, which in turn is an important cornerstone to ensure that isolation (or more generally, specification invariants) does not break in any reachable system state.

Panics can of course result in exploitable system behaviour.

I don't think cryptocurrencies are protecting anyone from any problem.

Honestly I don't quite know how or why engineers keep working in a "all of this is fundamentally broken always has been and never will be fixed" domain, on a motivational basis.

> Byte-by-byte parsing is a valid way to do parsing but not the only way. Byte-by-byte parsers tend to be slow and -- arguably, more importantly -- overly complex and rigid. It is, for example, usually very hard to do "random access" with a byte-by-byte parser, because allowing out-of-order parsing tends to blow the code complexity through the roof.

I have to agree here by experiences past. If the format in question has a chance of being performance sensitive, don't use FSM-based encodings [1]. It is inordinately difficult to optimize parsing these encodings even if you only have to handle tiny subsets, and it still won't be fast. A format like msgpack which prides itself on being very fast may be fast compared to JSON and other ways to express essentially arbitrary structures, but is DEAD SLOW compared to any direct encoding (be it a dedicated encoding you developed in literally a few hours or something like capnproto).

[1] Obviously, considering an encoding more complex than FSM means that you're an idiot and your application will almost certainly have security vulnerabilities related to the format in the future.

> but that's only because no one actually cares about these architectures.

This. Optimizing performance on BE is a waste of everyone's time and resources.

I'll just throw in here that faking contracts and certificates has been a huge business in the last ~1200 years or so in Europe. Many cities who claimed to have been founded a thousand years ago (or whatever) had to cede those claims since the historical papers were faked (usually hundreds of years ago).

option=value, option:value, option/value and even option\value (without dashes). Not joking.

> It would not be easy to do this in a technical manner

-> Homomorphic encryption is an active field of research. Legal is most likely the better solution. Probably.

We'll just outlaw that. Compare: Jaywalking, avenues.

I didn't expect anything interesting to come up as replies, but here we are - thanks for those insights.

A piece of well-built criticism can be a great tool in corporate politics. It can completely destroy the chances of some proposal/project/person to succeed. Ideally without appearing to be personally oppossed. As usual, most people are (luckily?) not very good at crafting criticism and end up with a blunt and obvious argument which backfires frequently.

Don't confuse arcane and complex. Although PGP is a 90s crypto standard, so it's more than likely a nightmare to implement.

C++ has a long and successful history of application development, regardless of project size (from 0 to >100 MLOC; from 1 guy sitting in his attic to thousands of engineers). Much like Java it isn't "hip". Instead people like to use "hip" languages with an underdeveloped ecosystem. Typical example: analysis tools, e.g. code analysers, performance and profiling tools.

Comments like "couldn't they have used $niche-lang.org instead of [C++/Java/...]" bore me, to be honest.

> The native Gmail? Then get a conversations view.

Thunderbird has had a ML/usenet-like conversations view forever.

> NUL is not a character

Somehow NUL is still an assigned character in the ASCII code table. Strange, hmmm?

And various undefined behaviours (signed overflow etc.) colluding against the programmer to the effect that compilers sometimes delete range-checking code.

Integer promotion rules are not simple, either. Integer width rules, far from simple.

I would claim that there is still a difference between P-strings and, say, ASN.1 DER (which, at heart, is still TLV).

> Both provided links are dead

HTTP works, HTTPS does not.

That's pretty much the "reader mode" available in some browsers, no?

> * Media query - So what, user agent gives this away mostly anyways

I was earnestly surprised how much data macOS and Android devices tend to put into the user agent. Not only the exact patch level of the browser, but also the OS patch level and Android devices even tend to broadcast the precise device model as well -- more accurately than just looking at the device!

Some examples:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 10_3_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.3.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14G60 Safari/602.1

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_2_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.4.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) iOS/16.0.7.121031 Mobile/15C153 Safari/9537.53

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; LG-H840 Build/NRD90U) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.111 Mobile Safari/537.36

A Linux in comparison:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:57.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/57.0

While it includes the version number, no patch level (57.0.X) is included.

Whether there is any click depends very much on the switch.

https://www.cherry.de/cid/corded_keyboards_CHERRY_STRAIT_30_... https://www.cherry.de/cid/corded_keyboards_STRAIT_Corded_Key... https://www.cherry.de/cid/corded_keyboards_STRAIT_BLACK_Cord...

These have been around for seven or eight years.

Military procurement seems to be something working very poorly in many places. Not sure if the German military is really much worse than others, when looking at things like the F-35.

Even dedicated supercomputer processors (e.g. A2, SW26010, VIIIfx) use virtual memory. In fact, most GPUs nowadays include an MMU as well, something they historically never had.

(SC applications tend to be huge fans of using enormous page sizes, like 2 GB, which mitigates page table walk costs)