Hm? I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft, but his stated opinion here is reflective of a broader trend in software design, one that's coming from both companies and the open source community. I don't see the brainwashing.

If you think memory-safe languages are some anti-jailbreaking/rooting conspiracy... well, have you heard of Java?

No. Rust saves countless hours of frustration by eliminating frustratingly-hard-to-debug mistakes that humans commonly make when writing programs. Rust is pedantic, so you don't have to be. Rust saves companies money because Rust software requires noticeably less maintenance. Try it sometime.

Don't worry, I guarantee that man will always be able to break what man can make. You don't need to demonize better software hygiene out of fear that companies will perfectly lock down their devices.

It's not just about jailbreaking or rooting. A lot of other user-hostilities can be defeated because something isn't quite as secure as it could be, and from that perspective, making things "more secure" is active hostility.

"We are not truly free if we do not have the freedom to make mistakes."

I guarantee that man will always be able to break what man can make

Not with the rise of strong crypto.

Java isn't used for OS-level stuff (and I'm glad that it isn't.)

Have you been paying attention? People are glitching chips now to read private keys out of hardware wallets and to bypass secure boot signature checks. And if that's not possible, then you chip the device and bypass its primary boot loader. Even with the rise of strong crypto people still find weaknesses. Your assertion about strong crypto defeating man's ability to break software simply isn't true. You must be from the thin period of history around 2008 for about 10 years where pwning your device had been predominately done in software.

Regardless, you certainly have a warped perception of security. My OS not behaving as it should because someone forgot to remove a pointer from a ring buffer after its data was freed thus allowing malware to compromise my hardware and my personal information--possibly my livelihood--just so you can jailbreak your phone easier is so insanely idiotic it's beyond me. The right solution, if you care about owning your hardware, is to buy a device where you're allowed to replace the secure-boot keys with your own so that you can participate in the advances in security that we've made over time. Or pass a law that requires companies that sell hardware to provide boot loader unlock keys similar to what we did with SIM cards.

Also, java has been used for embedded, real-time, and system level stuff. The Android system notably, ran Java when it was born. And likely so does your bank card.

There are ways to have secure programming languages and secure boot and also own your hardware without yelling at the clouds and wishing them rain 2008 back down on you...

> "We are not truly free if we do not have the freedom to make mistakes."

We don't build bridges that fall down and declare that we've done it out of the need to preserve freedom to experience gravity.

Software engineering is an engineering profession and building reliable software that works as intended is the goal. It's never been the goal to build breakable software... It's been a side effect of decades of engineering compromises to make a product buildable with the tools and resources available at the time. Tools and resources are better now, and it's high time we stopped building things that make it easy for an attacker to steal from your grandmother by compromising her bank's website.

I can assure you that systems will still be hackable and I can assure you that if they aren't, it will be of value to somebody to build a flexible at-your-own-risk system from first principles. The vast, vast majority of humanity is best served by having tools that do what they are designed to do.

I would think that someday I would stop getting shocked by things I see on Hacker News, but the "We need to keep using c++ because buffer overrun attacks are good actually" mentality is a new one on me.

I once thought like that. That was before I realised that corporate interests and those of the user increasingly don't align, and that any strength on their side equates to strength against you.

There needs to be a balance. Any extreme is dystopia. I'm just pushing back because I want to restore that balance.

It may equate to strength against someone; that someone isn't me.

Hackers are a non-protected minority. And they're generally smart enough to think their way out of the world being made harder to hack. For the rest of us, most changes making the world harder to hack are improvements. That's one of the reasons the marketplace keeps rewarding such changes.

the idea that "making things 'more secure' is active hostility", is some grade A trolling, congratulations on that.

I don't think Microsoft's interest in Rust boils down to preventing jailbreaking. It'd be far, far cheaper to lobby the US government to ban it.

(Jailbreaking has always been an arms race, and memory corruption exploits may eventually reach their natural end. But that'll probably be because of things like PAC, not Rust. When that happens, I expect jailbreakers to move onto the next low hanging fruit.)

bizarre. not even sure what that linked comment is supposed to do for your argument here. The idea that rust is some plot by "companies" to "prevent jailbreaking" is ..... rough, man.

They're not trying to burn the frog but boil it slowly.

This is just another one of a series of small steps.

its absurd, and you're slandering a bunch of free software devs who care quite deeply about security and user safety, in service of a total conspiracy theory that quite frankly comes across as trolling. Good luck with that. If by chance you are in fact sincere I have no idea what even to tell you, its just a batshit crazy notion. But odds are strong that you know exactly what you're doing, so, keep at it I guess, whatever winds your clock.

People thought Stallman was a crazy conspiracy theorist back then. Now you'd have to be quite strongly brainwashed to not see how prescient he was.

trolling, trolling, trolling, keep them doggies rolling, rawhide!

You're not crazy. The attacks that Microsoft (and others) are most worried about are attacks from their own customers.

Perhaps his years of experience in the space have given him some perspective that leads him to a position other than the one we might have inferred from his previous work.

I can tell you the way I felt about security and open architectures at 25 is very different from the way I feel about them now.

Years of being exposed to the corporate propaganda has had an effect on everyone.

I also feel very different now than I did 2-3 decades ago, because I realised the importance of freedom and how we are slowly losing it.

"We have to have to keep our systems unsafe so we can have rooting exploits for our devices" is an interesting viewpoint. I can understand why somebody would demand the ability to safely access root, but demanding unsafe code is just wild.