>The program terminates, which may be highly undesirable, or even unacceptable, creating other safety issues if the software is vital for operating critical infrastructure
I'm no rust evangelist but I don't understand this point. In what scenario would you rather have an out of bounds read go through and let Jesus take the wheel rather than print a stacktrace and have a clean-ish exit?
You wouldn't. You cut off the rest of that sentence in your quote, the full sentence is
> The program terminates, which may be highly undesirable, or even unacceptable, creating other safety issues if the software is vital for operating critical infrastructure, but the run-time checks ensure the program will never execute unsafe code that would result in undefined behaviour.
That said, this whole sentence here just feels kind of out of place, like it was written just for the sake of having something to say about a panic.
In those kinds of scenarios I think you'd typically want to go for formal verification or similar methods because you want liveness guarantees in addition to memory safety guarantees.
Formal verification doesn't mean shit when a cosmic ray bitflips your program counter.
Safety critical systems need to fail safely, because they will fail. Detecting unexpected execution should halt the system and revert it back to a known state (e.g. cycle power).
Depends on the "threat model" I suppose, for lack of a better phrase. I'd imagine hardware faults and the response(s) can be modeled if you decide to do so as well.
Force the program to be written in a way to handle them? There ought to be a lint that says, no unwraps. Unfortunately, the stdlib is designed for "common use", not "highly critical infrastructure".
I don’t know Rust, but I would think/hope you could wrap those control flow calls in some way, so those particular null pointer accesses do what you want, but other accidental ones are caught and safely handled (e.g. resetting the system to a safe state.)
Personal one: Cloudflare is a US intelligence gathering operation and the largest wiretap in the world. Their extremely generous free tier combined with their tendency to host sites that no other company would serve (but are of special interest of 3 letter agencies) like 4chan, daily stormer, pirate sites, script kiddie webforums etc makes me think they are not stripping TLS because they are pro free speech or whatever.
>that is why we are talking to you right now, instead of beating the shit out of you
How can you think you the righteous and morally correct one in this conversation after writing something like this. owning nigge.rs might be distasteful to say the least but there is no domain name you could possibly rank above threats of physical violence.
I suppose this is what is happening. What bothers me is that it’s not ought to be this way. Would be trivially easy to put a stop to this if we weren’t being rotten from the inside.
The man has weird views on non tech issues. Some are thought provoking, some are plain bad hills to die on. But I don't see how this is something I should be getting up in arms over.
The FSF has largely failed to garner political/public influence to prevent the enshittification of the digital world. What is there to be gained from a putsch like this? If these people truly cared about the mission RMS set out to achieve they would realize that further dividing the minuscule libre software community (which is already co-opted by corporate interests to a large degree) will only get us further away from making a difference in the areas that actually matter.
Like damn, we only narrowly avoided a future where I can't even browse the internet without a TPM attested bootchain deemed "trustworthy" by corporations, and somehow a 71 year old cancer patient is the hottest issue in the tech world right now? Get a fucking grip.
This all just seems like a toxic power grab by people who are blinded by their narcissistic self righteousness.
If you look at the history of the NAACP trying to fight legal discrimination, one of the things they were quite focused on was ensuring that the cases involved people who are as clean as possible. The messenger matters as much as the message does; the more imperfect the messenger it is, the more it allows those against the message to turn the conversation from the message to the messenger.
Stallman, even without the stuff mentioned here, was already a pretty poor choice for messenger. His tendency to focus on semantic nitpicking gave his arguments a kind of tedious quality to them (GNU/Linux, anyone?). The outspoken political views can turn off people who are not politically aligned. And he's always given off this sort of skeevy vibe to me personally--and that sentiment has seemed to be shared by lots of other people. Long before any of the stuff being complained about here happened!
The negative influence of Stallman isn't purely theoretical anymore. We now have a couple of stories of people saying that he made them personally uncomfortable with unwanted seemingly sexual advances. Apparently, these have continued after being explicitly told by several people to knock it off. Several organizations have suspended their funding and involvement with the FSF over his reinstatement. Whatever you think of the accuracy of the accusations against him, the general perception of him is clearly negative, and to be frank, it doesn't seem like he brings any positive qualities that would make letting him go be a tough call (consider Elon Musk, who is obviously a pretty effective salesman for the future and props up Tesla's share price even as his outspoken political views are causing real problems for his companies).
What is the goal: to promote free software or to stand for people's rights to have sexual relations with fourteen-year-olds?
If the former, having the movement spearheaded by someone who has pretty controversial views on the latter isn't really doing the movement any good. If FSF clings stubbornly to a thought-leader who people can't take seriously, they're canceling themselves.
I've seen the accusation leveraged in this topic that this anonymous piece could be FUD by Microsoft or a similar big-name software giant. I'd actually suggest the opposite: if I wanted to throw sand in the gears of free software, keeping Stallman in the leadership chair so that his opponents can point to him and say "You really want to listen to the guy who wants to sleep with your teenage daughter?" is the way I'd discredit the movement.
"""
The law [UK sexual offences bill] would also prohibit encouraging a (so-called) child to take part in sexual activity. I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.) It is unnatural for humans to abstain from sex past puberty, and while I wouldn't try to pressure anyone to participate, I certainly encourage everyone to do so.
"""
There are more charitable interpretations, but "Stallman wants to sleep with your teenage daughter" is the less-charitable one that political opponents can continue to levy against the entire movement because the FSF won't let him go.
Without knowing more context, I interpret the quote to mean that 14-year-olds should be open to having sex with their peers (other 14-year-olds, give or take one year). Which seems like a position that is not bad enough to punish. It's a very weird thing for him to say, given that everyone knows him for being the president of the Free Software Foundation and not the Sexual Openness Foundation. He should stop commenting on this topic and focus on Free Software instead.
What is there to be gained you ask? Well, there is currently a creep in a position of power at FSF who is actively making women and other people feel unwelcome, effectively pushing them out of the community. By removing him from this position, making it clear that such behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, a much broader participation could be achieved. And then these "much bigger" issues you seem to care about have a better chance of being solved.
Unless of course your whole point was using whataboutism to defend your hero, because you think that past achievements always outweigh any harm he may be doing.
>Unless of course your whole point was using whataboutism to defend your hero,
No. My point is that replacing him with people who prioritize political grandstanding over fighting for the cause at hand are just as worse if not more.
The people who gave their signature on the previous failed deplatforming attempt were numerous enough to easily fund their own FSF that is not encumbered by the influence by rms. But they didn't. They didn't because that takes actual work unlike spewing vitriol like they do here. They can only destroy but not create.
Accept that wherever you live has transformed from a high trust area to a low trust one.
Where I live, just leaving a package outside the fence (postman can't even get to the door) would be bonkers. And this isn't an area with a lot of crime. People just don't trust eachother much to begin with.
tldw: he experienced significant packet latency while the motors were spinning, making the drone uncontrollable.
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